Since I wrote a post on the topic of social media and ROI, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problems associated with social media marketing in general. Some might have thought that I covered it with my post this past Saturday talking about the dangers of social media, but I didn’t. Matter of fact, that was geared more towards individuals; now it’s time to talk about the problems businesses have.

by Phillie Casablanca via Flickr

I believe there are two major problems with social media marketing; those are:

1) getting the message wrong

2) being ignored

For any other issue that one might come up with, these are the two biggest problems to date. I never touched upon the second one when I did the outline for my social media marketing seminar back in 2010, and barely touched upon the first one. That’s because I’m usually concentrating on educating people as to what social media is in the first place, not getting much into the details of it. I like to think I know something about social media marketing, but every once in awhile I have an epiphany and realize that I’ve just scratched the surface.

Let’s get into it. We’ll start with the first premise, that being getting the message wrong. Man, is it easy to mess up. Just ask McDonald’s, which tried to have a Twitter media campaign asking people to use a certain hashtag telling the world why they love McDonald’s. The problem is that not everyone likes McDonald’s, or wants to own up to it, and thus there were a lot of negative responses that hijacked the hashtag and brought a modicum of embarrassment. A representative said the negative comments only amounted to 2% of comments overall but no one believes that. And even if it’s true, then McDonald’s still lost because the media has already spread the word; bad publicity isn’t always better than no publicity at all.

from Huffington Post

The problem sometimes comes from thinking you know your market when you don’t. I don’t hate McDonald’s, but I hear a lot of people putting down their food, although many of those same people will scarf down a box of fries if they got one; those things are tasty. Setting it up as a Twitter campaign to promote your company when you know there’s a lot of negative press about you from time to time (who hasn’t read this story nor seen the picture next to this paragraph about their chicken?) probably isn’t one of the smartest moves in the world. And they paid someone to create this campaign for them; they should have known better.

Late last year there was a campaign from the makers of Ragu (my favorite spaghetti sauce by the way) that seemed to make fun of the cooking skills of fathers and faced a major backlash about it. Truthfully, I thought it was a lot of fuss about nothing, but it was a fuss and the company ended up having to apologize to fathers for it.

This kind of thing happens all the time, and it doesn’t have to be this big. There was a woman whose book got a bad review on Amazon and she went after the person who wrote that review, only angering a constituency that hadn’t reviewed her book online because they’d thought it was horribly written and edited and just didn’t want to make a fuss, and once they mobilized and wrote all the negative reviews you can imagine the woman pretty much disappeared, with her book eventually averaging just barely over 1 star. Yes, social media can be deadly indeed.

If getting the message wrong is a major problem, a problem just as bad is being ignored. Some time ago I wrote a post saying that social media marketing is just marketing. As true as that is, I didn’t expand it further at the time, mainly because I hadn’t thought about it.

When you watch your favorite programs on TV, what do you notice during the commercials? You notice that you see the same commercial over and over. During most sporting events on TV, you’ll often see the same commercial at every break. This year the big commercials seem to be from Papa John’s, who’s sponsoring the Super Bowl. The point isn’t that they’re paying millions to do that; the point is that they’re making sure their message gets across by popping it up there every 3 or 4 minutes on multiple channels to make sure we all get the message.

Let’s think about our social media marketing processes. I wrote about our reluctance to market ourselves, and it probably needs to be modified to say our reluctance to over-market ourselves. Indeed, if you read the comments on that post, you’ll see people admitting that they hate marketing themselves, instead spending a lot of time promoting others with the expectation that doing it helps to promote themselves. It does, but if one really wanted to earn a significant income, just how much marketing and self promotion via social media would we have to do?

The short answer; a lot. During my recent short period of pitching my request for a Shorty Award nomination I started retweeting that request every couple of hours. I did that for maybe 4 days before I started feeling self conscious about it; I even had it up here as a sticky post for that time period before putting it back into regular circulation.

That campaign only got me 26 overall votes, and what’s funny about it is how people said they never saw it; are you kidding me? I put it on Twitter, I put it on Facebook, I wrote about it on two other blogs. Yet that’s all I got; with a lot of people saying they never saw it, and I bet there are people right now who will say they never saw it.

The same thing happened when I was marketing my 2010 live presentation locally. I thought I was putting my message out there often, over many weeks, yet not only was the turnout not what I expected it to be, but when I mentioned it to people less than a month after it ended they said “I didn’t know you were doing that”. How often can one legitimately put their message out there?

One of the biggest complaints many of us have about some of the people we see marketing through social media is that they’re always promoting themselves over and over, to the extent that we’re sick of them and we stop following them. I’m one of those people, yet I’m starting to realize that if I ever really want to make money via social media marketing, or get better known so that I will get more consulting gigs or requests to speak at paid gigs that putting out the occasional marketing post probably isn’t going to get it done. And that doesn’t bode well for someone, whether it’s me or someone following me. People will do what people need to do to make money, and whether you or I like it or not if those people make money by those means, who are we to say they don’t have the right to make a living?

Those of us hoping for positive things out of our social media presence and social media marketing have to decide what it is we really want to do to reach our goals. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m still leaning towards not being too much of a pest. But maybe I can be slightly pesty, if that’s a word; I’m not sure. An interesting question is whether I’d do it for a client that asked for it. I’d have to answer that with an affirmative, which means we’re back to an old Redd Foxx joke, where the punch line is “we’re just arguing over the price”. One of these days, if prodded enough, I might tell the rest of that joke.

Meanwhile, think about it; what would it take for you to decide to put yourself out there more in social media, and just what would that mean?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

As the world is getting more connected and more people are getting into social media, one is seeing just how powerful a medium it can be. Last year alone social media was credited with bringing down the governments of a few countries, forcing bank reform, raising millions of dollars for charity, saving lots of lives, finding children and killers, and a host of other things. It’s amazing what can happen when people get mentally engaged in something, even if it’s not in their area or might not personally affect them, and decide to do something.

via Flickr

But there’s also a major danger in social media. Obviously the biggest issues are that free speech isn’t free and privacy is a myth. Let’s talk about each of these for a few minutes.

We saw some interesting things happen in just the last week. The president of UFC, Ultimate Fighting Champions, decided not only to go live in giving his approval for a stance against SOPA (that wasn’t going to be popular), saying that content from his company is regularly stolen and costs him and his performers a lot of money, but then he decided to personally take on Anonymous (y’all have to have heard of these people), a group that’s shut down federal government websites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sony… well, let’s just say that they’ve flexed their muscle in ways that prove that, for now, they’re probably the most dangerous online group of people in the world.

There are times when “being a man”, which means you believe you can engage someone in a fair fight to teach them a lesson, needs to be modified when you have no idea what you’re talking about. This guy, Dana White, called these folks all kinds of names, then dared them to come after him. I believe he thought someone would show up at his office one day and challenge him to a fight; nope, that wasn’t happening. Instead, Anonymous shut down his site. But that wasn’t all. They then posted all his personal information online, including his social security number, his private phone numbers (not so private anymore), and other private information. The next day Mr. White held a press conference to talk about upcoming fights; he never mentioned his verbal battle and when questioned ignored it. Yeah, learned that lesson just a little bit late.

From my perspective we should both be happy and scared of what social media has become.

We should be elated because, by participating, we never know when one day we might be “discovered” for our words or our videos or our pictures and become a big deal. We never know if our cause will touch someone or many someones or the right someone and get them to take action on our behalf.

We should be scared for exactly the same reason. People can turn against us for the very same things mentioned above if we’re stupid or make a mistake and the “wrong” people see it and decide to use it against us. Or the right people, especially when people are being stupid on topics concerning things such as race. If you don’t think you’ll get called out for taking a stance, serious or not, against a group of people, without justification, you’re not thinking straight.

Of course, I can’t go without mentioning the new Google privacy policy, if one can call it that, which goes into effect March 1st. I’ve often said that sites have the right to do whatever they want to do and that we all have the right to participate or not. That’s Google’s stance; they get to merge all the information they have on you and if you don’t like it, leave. Facebook will probably be doing the same thing soon as well. This comes about because of government complaints that their privacy policy was too confusing; nothing confusing about the new policy, that’s for sure. The new Search Plus Your World process on Google was an indication that privacy is all over, and it’s Google’s belief that it’s for our “benefit”. No matter what you think about this, you can’t dismiss the reality that privacy is dead, and there really isn’t any getting out of it, no matter what Google or Facebook may try to make you believe. Here’s Google’s video about it:

Social media can be one of your best friends. I’ve met many people I’d have never had the opportunity to talk to because of social media. It allows me to blog and get my opinions off my mind and into the open. It allows me to experience things that I’ll never experience in person, both good and bad. I’m one of those people that would be lost without social media; thanks for being around.

Social media can be your worst enemy as well. You can be bullied and made fun of. Your “private” information can get out there; heck, it’s already out there for the right price. You can be made fun of, you can be outed, you can be castigated, you can be introduced to things you probably didn’t want to know (who remembers the 2 Girls & a Cup thing a couple of years ago; ugh), and you can be scared to ever get on a computer again.

Here’s the thing; social media, in the long run, it just like everything else. There are always two sides to something, and depending on who you are, they’ll have the ability to affect you differently. Kind of like peanuts; some people can eat them without worry, others have allergies that can kill them. Which side of the peanut fence are you on? By the way, how many times have you ever seen the phrase “peanut fence”?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

I belong to a consultant’s group where monthly we have a presentation on something that most consultant’s probably need to know for their business.

A few months ago I was the presenter, and I gave a shortened presentation of the one I did back in 2010 on social media, which was a 5 hour presentation. I had to strip it down to 50 minutes, which wasn’t all that hard since I concentrated only on certain things for these folks, most of whom are older than me.

It’s that “older than me” part that makes it interesting because I always get the same question from the same guy: “Have you gotten any business from it?” When I say I have the next question is “what’s your ROI?”

That, for the uninitiated, stands for “return on investment”, and for many businesses it’s a critical question that has to be addressed. For instance, if you spent $25,000 on a print campaign that involved paying someone to create flyers, going to the printers, mailing everything out, and it resulted in an overall loss or a profit of less than $5,000, you’d probably have to say that your ROI was pretty bad.

When it comes to social media, evaluating ROI is much different. If you’re going to base everything on costs, they could end up being minimal or costly; it’s up to you. For instance, you could start a campaign of Twitter posts and if you do it yourself there is no cost, assuming you’ve already got everything else in place if you’re sending traffic somewhere. The same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or anywhere else, even if you own a brick and mortar business.

Or is it cost free? See, with social media, even if you do it all yourself there’s an inherent cost; it’s just how you decide to evaluate it. The cost is in time and what your time is worth.

Let’s look at this in two ways. One, do you count the time if it’s outside of 40 hours, which is the American standard for working hours? Some might, since many of us (yeah, even me) work more than 40 hours if we own our own businesses. Some might not if they stick with traditional times and consider anything else as free time.

For someone like me, based on which business I’m doing at the time, I get paid anywhere between $50 and $250 an hour; yeah, I’m like that. Anyway, this means that if I’m putting in a 10-hour day and 2 hours of that happens to be writing my blog posts, which you might not think about like this but at least 4 of them I consider as business related in some fashion, then it’s costing anywhere from $12.50 to $62.50 each time I write a blog post (I average 10 to 15 minutes per post most of the time). If we look at one of my business blogs, where I try to write a post every 3 days, that averages out to around 120 posts a year, and if I use the lower figure it means it costs me about $1,500 a year of an investment towards writing that blog; that’s not counting responding to comments (I don’t have a lot yet so y’all need to go check it out).

Since posting a link to these social media platforms takes almost no time whatsoever, this pretty much means that I need to generate at least $1,500 a year from that business to break even. Of course I just started that blog in August, but already I’ve made that much, though it wasn’t from blogging, but it doesn’t matter. The thing is that as a marketing campaign, one isn’t always sure where they’re getting their business from, but even if it was related to the blog I could still say that, based on time, I’ve about tripled my initial investment.

Here comes the next stage though. What if you want to pay someone else to handle certain social media aspects of your business? For instance, say you hired someone like me to write your blog posts for you. I’m not saying this is necessarily my fee, but say it costs you $400 a month for a certain number of blog posts, and those posts automatically go out to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (although I know Facebook just shut down one program and I’m not sure if there are others still working right now)? The approximate cost to your business is $4,800 a year; do you have the kind of business to overcome that amount of outlay? Is there the possibility that your business will generate that kind of money online, or will it come from offline sources?

That’s just it; you don’t know. Do you consider it offline if someone found you on Google and called you up, as opposed to contacting you via email? I don’t, and we all know that more content on one’s site helps them gain more prominence on the search engines. If you’re someone like a Marcus Sheridan, whose business is swimming pools, how many sales would he have to make because someone called him because they found him on Google to have made back all of his money if he paid someone to write his posts (which he doesn’t)? For that matter what’s his ROI now from blogging and obtaining business? I’m thinking it’s probably pretty good.

Every person has to evaluate for themselves whether they think they’re getting out of social media what they’re putting into it. However, you can’t make an evaluation if you don’t try. So, what are you waiting for?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell

Do you have too many Facebook friends? Rather, do you have so many that there are people you’re not sure why you’re following anymore, whether they’re updating or not?

I ask this because I’m often reading where people have said that they’re about to start whittling down their Facebook connections because of whatever reason they decide to pick on. It got me to thinking that maybe I should take a look at some of the more than 550 people I’m connected to there to see if I should be paring my list.

First, why would one want to pare their list? Lots of reasons; I’ll name some here. One, just too many people, such that you miss the stream of people you really care about. Two, you might not like some of the updates you see from certain people. Three, you may never even talk to or hear from someone you’re connected to. Four, they might not even be active on Facebook anymore; what’s the point? Five, you have some folks still connected you that you have now decided you don’t want seeing any of your updates anymore. I think that’s enough for my purposes right now.

I decided I was going to pare my list down as well; I certainly know there’s a lot of people on there that I added for some reason or another that maybe I don’t need to be connected to anymore. I went looking for something like what Twitter has to help me out; you know, Friend or Follow or maybe Twit Cleaner, but I couldn’t find a single thing. This meant that I would have to do it manually, looking at names, looking at their accounts, and decide that way instead.

You know what? That turns out to be way harder than I could have imagined. I didn’t want to just drop someone whose name I didn’t recognize because they might be subscribed to my Facebook business page (by the way, why aren’t YOU subscribed to my Facebook business page?) and that would be insulting to them. That and they might have connected with me because they’re friends of someone else I know better, and I don’t want to insult them either.

I looked up some names I didn’t know and saw that they were current on the site, and they weren’t putting out anything that was irritating me. I decided to leave them, just in case. I saw people whose pictures I recognized for some reason, even if I couldn’t ever remember seeing them saying anything in my stream or to me. And I actually found a few people who fit my criteria for deleting; nothing new on the site, few friends, etc.

That was kind of the problem; after almost 45 minutes (I’m surprised I stayed that long) I’d found only 3 people that I decided I no longer needed to be connected to. I think I’d only looked at 15 accounts; at more than 550 people, throwing out the at least 100 people I know very well, I realized that would be 30 hours worth of time that I’d never get back; no thank you.

I’m a lot more judgmental these days in who I’ll add to my Facebook account, but that won’t help me for my past connections. Actually, I have to admit that I was surprised that I didn’t see the names of a few people I know I’d connected with; did they up and drop me first or leave Facebook without saying anything? One of those people was supposed to be my college roommate my junior year, then he ended up not coming back. He reached out to be first, then totally disappeared; his name no longer even appears on Facebook, which I’d thought people had said was hard to do.

No matter. I’m sticking with the people I’m connected to, whether they care or not. However, if anyone finds a program that works like the two I mentioned works with Twitter, please let me know and I might revisit it. Right now, too much work.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Early this past year I did my first video and popped it up on YouTube, then onto this blog. It was very short and just an introduction, and I knew I had to get better at it. To date I think I’ve done 9 videos, and I think my last one wasn’t all that bad, even if it wasn’t totally for the masses.

However, I have to say that I was kind of shocked when I looked at the numbers of people YouTube said had seen it. Actually, for the longest while it showed only one person had seen it, and I was surprised by that because a number of people had told me they had looked at it. Today it’s up to 4 views, which is still way down. Then I looked at the numbers for my other videos and only one of them seems to have kind of popped. What’s strange is that another video of mine only shows 4 views, yet I know more people than that viewed it because I put it up on Facebook and it was probably one of the most commented on posts I’ve ever had, if not number one.

Then I started to realize something. If you post your video anywhere else YouTube can’t count it. I started doing some research about it and it seems to be true based on a number of people writing about it. Even Google, in its own subversive way, indicates that those numbers won’t show.

Well what the hey? How are we supposed to know how effective our videos are if we can’t get an accurate count? Are we supposed to drive everyone to YouTube instead of our own sites just so we can find out how many people are really viewing our submissions?

Although I’d already been thinking about this for a couple of weeks, it was a post on Adrienne Smith’s site titled How To Get More Views On Your YouTube Videos that got me to think about writing on the topic. I asked a question about the post, where she’s promoting a guy named Paul Wolfe that’s put together something telling us how to get more visitors to our YouTube site. Her response to me was that getting people to your YouTube page could help get more visitors to your blog or website.

Love Adrienne but frankly, seeing the numbers I do, I’m not sure that’s going to occur any time soon. To date I have 13 subscribers to my page, and to be truthful I didn’t learn until the beginning of November that one could subscribe to a YouTube page; shows how little I’ve paid attention to the video aspects of social media other than one’s webpage. I’m not sure how many of those people have turned around and visited any of my blogs, and to be truthful I’m not realizing that I’ve missed out because I’ve never given the URL on any of my videos to this point, and seeing I’ve done videos for 3 different sites that’s a major thing to overlook.

Now that makes 2 questions I have no answers to; how many people have visited my site(s) because they’ve seen a video and how many people are watching my videos when I post them elsewhere. Man, I hate not knowing stuff like this, but there seems to be no way around it.

Do I decide to stop doing videos then? No, that’s not the answer. Do I stop posting videos on my blogs? No, I don’t think that’s the answer either. I think if one wishes to get some kind of idea on how a video might have performed one has to look at other analytics. In this case I went to Google Analytics to take a look at this post on my business blog celebrating Post #900 there.

I only wrote 2 paragraphs on that post and then popped in the video. According to Analytics, people have spent an average of 4 minutes and 54 seconds on that page. I know almost no one needs that long to read 2 paragraphs, so this tells me that there had to be a good number of people watching the video, based on the number of people that actually visited based on those same analytics. The video is just over twice as long as the time on that post; no, I’m not about to dig deeper. lol

This is one of those times where the numbers one gets aren’t even close to accurate, but you have to be prepared to push past it. If I didn’t have other ways of checking my statistics, I’d think no one cares about my videos and would stop making them. Course, it’s not like I’m getting Bieber numbers, but maybe one day…

And I wish I could figure out how to get YouTube to stop on a picture without my having that goofy expression on my face all the time!
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

I’ve been thinking about this one a lot lately. I tend to have certain criteria that I employ when I’m deciding who I’m going to follow on Twitter or on Facebook. I wrote a little bit about it when I posted an article titled Why I Don’t Want To Follow Some Twitter Folks some time ago. I didn’t address some other things, though I easily could, and I may mention them as I write this post.

by Ben Jordan via Flickr

See, what I recognize is that I refuse to follow anyone whose views I pretty much know I’m not going to support. So, being liberal, I don’t follow anyone I already know is conservative or Republican because they’ve put it in their profile. I also go back through a bunch of messages before I add anyone on both Twitter or Facebook, and if I see that they support a different political view than mine, I won’t even bother.

The same kind of thing goes for religion for the most part. If I see someone always quoting Bible verses or other religious quotes, or talking about their religion in some way all the time, I’m not following. I just don’t want to hear it. In this case I do have some friends who consider religion an important part of their lives, so that’s somewhat different. I can say that because I think I only have one friend that’s a Republican (I have 2 others who’s registered as Republicans, but they’re really not).

There’s always this 800-pound gorilla in the room that says if we can’t talk about our differences then we’ll never come together to get things done. I believe that can be true in many circumstances, but I think the past almost 3 years have proven that it’s not going to work anymore when it comes to politics. Let’s face it; the Republicans have shot down everything President Obama has put forward with the only intention to get him out of office in 2012. They would rather hurt everyone in America so they can call him a failed president; this isn’t just my opinion, as I could find quotes from some prominent Republican leaders to prove the point.

Government has always been about negotiation; almost no one got entirely what they wanted, but we got things passed without this much animosity. Now, with all the animosity, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are just some things people can’t talk about, and if that’s the case then I’m not the one who’s going to get into a shouting match with anyone. I’m the guy who wrote a post on de-stressing one’s life after all. There’s civil debate, and then there’s ranting and ignorance that I’m just not going to deal with. Yeah, I’m going to share some ignorance, stunned that this is in, of all places, Boston:

I’ve reached this point in my life where I believe in two separate things, and I’m not necessarily happy about it. Those two separate things, which actually blends into one, are that there are communications that are important enough to have, even if it breeds controversy, in a working environment, while in one’s personal life they should decide what level of peace they’d like in their life.

As someone who does leadership training I tend to believe that people need to learn how to communicate with each other at work, even having opposing views, because work is about the company and not individuals. That and I do have that book to the left side on leadership that I wrote after all.

But when it comes to your own time and your own peace of mind… well, let’s just say that I avoid people like in that video at all costs because there will never be a civil discussion with anyone who can’t accept any real facts. It’s kind of like the debate between favorite music, only much more vicious.

Still, I’m going to put it out here as a question or two. Do you find yourself hanging more with people you agree with? Do you try to bring peace into your life or find yourself always arguing with people because you enjoy it or feel it’s necessary? And are your criteria lax or tight when it comes to who you’ll follow in social media?
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

I found this interesting. I was reading a blog post by someone I interviewed for my business blog back in September, Angelique. Her post is titled Angelique Suspended from Google Plus. She was suspended because she doesn’t like to use her last name, feels it doesn’t support her brand, and of course Google+ expects people to use real names; they didn’t appreciate her last name being “Creativity”.

I found it interesting, as well as her follow-up post, for a few reasons (and I didn’t comment there because it’s a Disqus blog, which y’all know I hate).

One, I had the same discussion with her when I did the interview on my blog. I had found her last name and added it to the post, and she was deeply shocked and implored me to remove it. I hesitated at first because I have a set format for doing interviews on that blog, as opposed to interviews I do on this blog, and I felt it would throw off the continuity in some fashion. In the end I relented because I felt I might have been making too big a deal of continuity for the blog, just because it’s a business blog. It didn’t hurt anything.

Two, I had this conversation on someone else’s blog earlier this year as that person was also complaining about it. Since it wasn’t a Disqus blog, I responded that I understood the issue because how would they determine to list people with names that everyone knows that aren’t real, such as Lady Gaga or Will.I.Am? If they came onto G+ and used their real names, no one would know who they were, and if they put up their real pictures G+ might think they were perpetrating a fraud in some fashion and ban those accounts anyway, if you know what I mean. To date I don’t know if that issue has been addressed.

Three, I thought about my own blog. I have a policy where I won’t accept keywords as a true name of a comment poster. I need a first name of some type, and it can even be a nickname (cue Sire), but I need something to call you if I’m expected to possibly respond to your comment. If I don’t have that then I delete the comment, no matter how good it might be; the policy is just above the comment box and if you miss it, then it’s on you.

And finally four, as soon as you start to gripe about it in some fashion you almost have to catch yourself and say “it’s their playpen, so it’s their rules“. This doesn’t mean you can’t complain to yourself, or in your blog, but if you decide to complain to someone else you’re wasting your time and energy.

I’ll go personal on this one. I don’t think it surprises anyone when I complain about a Facebook change that I don’t understand, when suddenly I can’t find something. I do that for two reasons. One, I know that if I’m complaining someone else is complaining as well. Two, I hope that someone can provide a fix or idea of how to get around in some fashion. For instance, I griped when they seemed to get rid of a way to get to pages that I had subscribed to, which meant people weren’t going to find my page either. Someone finally gave me some guidance in finding it, and it’s still in a ridiculous place, and I moved on, knowing that there wasn’t anything I could do to change it.

Last year Google decided this blog doesn’t qualify as an Adsense purveyor based on a post I wrote almost 2 years ago on the topic of cleavage, a very tongue in cheek post with no nudity and what I thought was a very interesting point, and one where even if I’d agreed to remove it they weren’t going to reinstate this blog. I didn’t bother with it, just as I didn’t bother responding to them when I lost my page rank on this blog (I did get it back earlier this year). Google never responds to anyone other than possibly sending an automated message, so what would have been the point?

In other words, we all have choices to make when it comes to dealing with someone else’s rules. We either follow them or we don’t. This means we either participate or we don’t. You don’t get freedom of choice when someone else is paying for it; you don’t get freedom of speech in someone else’s space. At least you don’t get either unlimited.

What Angelique is fighting is the same thing some Egyptian students tried to fight Facebook with when they were protesting the government and were worried that their names would get them in trouble. The rules are the rules; no exceptions. If Facebook wasn’t going to change for students whose lives were in potential danger, Google’s not going to change for her, even if she’d written lots of positive things about them. Goodness, Facebook banned Salman Rushdie for awhile (you might need to have a NY Times password to view this one) and he’s well known.

You want them to change? Work on your website and blog, get it ranked really high, participate a lot in social media so a lot of powerful people know who you are, then take your shot. Now there’s a goal worth reaching for.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Mitch Mitchell

Talk about a very neat concept. How many people have ever thought how cool their life would be if they had theme music that popped up at different times of their lives? Have you ever thought about how a soundtrack of your life would sound and make you and others feel?

A local friend of mine, Jared Brickman, through a website he calls One Hello World, has set out to help people do this exact thing, although not without looking for a reward in the end. He calls the project Voicemails From Around The World Set to Music, and what he’s basically done is put out a call to action, if you will, to people from all around the world to call a certain phone number and leave a message with a story that meant something in their lives. The story is supposed to be 3 minutes or less, but some people will call more than once to get their entire story told. What he then does is see how the story touches him and puts it to music.

I did mention that there was a secondary part to all of this. This project’s goal is to also raise money to get 20 of these missives recorded onto an album he plans on called “The Listener” by using live musicians, since all the songs are initially played by him on one instrument, although electronically he’s able to add other sounds into the mix. He’s hoping to raise $5,000 by December 31st, and if he doesn’t get there then the project goes away and any money’s pledged will be returned. Right now he’s at $1,394, so there’s a long way to go.

I listened to the sample he put up on one of the pages and it was pretty neat. It was a motivational story the person told and the music, melancholy and beautiful at the same time, was just perfect for the subject. If you follow the link I gave you above you’ll be able to watch and listen to a video example.

I decided to ask Jared some questions regarding the project, and in my mind it became a defacto short interview, so let’s share that with you here:

1. How are people finding out about this?

At first, people randomly started following along through Tumblr. Also, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been contacted by some wonderful people in the press who have kindly given the project coverage. But most importantly, there’s a social element to One Hello World: when people relate to a message or find a track to be particularly striking, they’ve been reblogging it to their own tumblogs, tweeting a link to it or sharing with their Facebook friends. It’s fascinating to read the commentary that listeners add along with their share, especially when they’ve had a similar experience. In this way, One Hello World is more a dialogue than a collection of monologues.

2. How long is their message allowed to be?

My voicemail cuts callers off at three minutes. But I’ve had several callers leave multiple messages to get it all in.

3. What are the rules for the message they leave?

None. Callers have left poems, stories, memoirs, rants, “drunk dials” etc. I welcome callers to speak their mind.

4. Was this your idea, multiple people’s idea, or did someone else do it first?

I was initially inspired by similar projects in other mediums, such as PostSecret. The idea came to me as I was composing a track one night: I wanted to capture voices over the top of the track. I posted a phone number to my Facebook and asked friends to call in and tell me how they defined happiness. I was thrilled to receive lots of material to work with.

5. Is all the instrumentation I heard in the sample from you?

I through-compose everything down to the last note. Each track is written specifically to the narrative.

6. How long does it take you to come up with the music you use?

An important characteristic of the project is that I limit myself to my initial musical reaction. I record my first improvisations and then rapidly build a track out from there. I’ve never spent more than four hours on a single track.

7. Why is the deadline date 12/31? I’m not even sure when you started the project.

The deadline for funding is Kickstarter‘s limit. They only allow you to raise funds for up to 60 days. If you can’t reach your goal by then, you don’t get any of the funding (pledges never get drawn from would-be contributors).

Jared’s also gotten a bit of press from this from Paste Magazine, which called the project “PostSecret for the ears” (I linked to PostSecret above if you’ve forgotten). I think it’s an interesting social media experiment and I’ll be giving a financial pledge to the project as well because I think this would be really cool. The minimum dollar amount accepted is $1, and of course you can always give more. I don’t often ask for help like this but whether you can contribute or not, please help get the word out on this. You can reach Jared by email here: hello@onehelloworld.com. And if you want to participate in the project by leaving a voicemail, here’s the number, U.S. of course: (316) 247-0421.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

For me, another experiment has ended; I’ve given up Klout. I haven’t gone the route that many have and totally deleted my account, but I’ve done pretty much everything else. Now let’s see what happens.

Klout, as you know, is a ranking system that supposedly tells people how influential you are online. I’ve written about it a few times and have to say that I haven’t always been a big fan; actually I never was a true fan of the site. I felt that its rankings were pretty arbitrary and somewhat hard to figure out.

It expected activity, yet it penalized certain types of activity. It expected you to engage with others and yet it would penalize you if you engaged with people whom it had ranked lower than you. And if you stepped away for even a few days, your ranking would fall; I mean, what the heck is that?

Anyway, I talked about this concept of influence versus wasting time and I mentioned them in that post. Subsequently I read two posts by other people on the idea of killing your Klout account. The first was by a guy named Rohn Jay Miller, who was pretty adamant about deleting your Klout account. I thought it was a bit extreme and harsh, though I understood his point. The one that pretty much convinced me was an article by a lady named Sharon Hayes titled 10 Reasons Why I Opted-Out of Klout. Of course I had problems commenting on both blogs because of their comment systems, which is why I wrote this post instead.

As I said, I’ve decided to check out, but I didn’t delete my account, mainly because both of these articles gave ways to do it but I never saw the links they talked about. Instead, I did it my way. I stopped allowing them access to my Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook accounts. Since they don’t do blogs I didn’t have to bother with that. Now they can’t track me “effectively” anymore; I’m not playing the game. I guess my name will still be on the site but without getting any help from me, their score will be even more capricious than before. If it drops 20 points in a day or rises 20 points in a day, I could care less. I’m giving up Klout for “clout“.

I also got rid of the Firefox plugin I was using that tracked Klout scores. I added it when I wrote my post on 21 Black Social Media Influencers, as I needed a tool to help me create this list and my second list. What will I use now? No clue; I’ll have to cross that bridge when I get to it.

I’ve shed another heavy cloak that’s been holding me down just a little bit; I wonder what’s next?

Update – If you look at the comments, you’ll see that Vernessa figured out how I could kill my account, so I did; now I’m totally out of it.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

Last night I was at the top grocery store in my area and ran into someone that was at the conference I got to present at last week. We talked a little bit about some of the programs that were put on, and then we talked about his general opinion of the event.

by Tiffa Day via Flickr

He mentioned that there was so much going on that he knew he’d be skipping some things here and there, like my presentation, because he wanted to take in as much as possible about things he didn’t know much about. He said that he talked to a lot of people who seemed confused at the end of the day, which I knew would happen because if you don’t know a lot about something going in and get inundated with lots of information there’s no way you can retain it all.

What he also said was that as he listened to a lot of the presentations he came to this conclusion; social media marketing shouldn’t be all that much different than traditional marketing, as it’s only a new platform and not a new way of marketing. His point was that the idea of marketing is to attract someone’s interest, get them to at least look at everything you have to offer, and then hopefully buy something before leaving. This takes research to figure out just what you have to offer a potential buyer and then figuring out how to make your message stand out to encourage that buyer to become a customer.

I couldn’t disagree with his general premise, yet I felt he was possibly missing the bigger picture. The reality is that social media marketing gives one the opportunity to branch out beyond their local area and reach a much larger audience in a lot shorter time. With the proper connections, I can talk about my latest project (which, by the way, is my editing a book of early newsletters from my primary business at the moment) and if I get the right audience to notice it the message can be seen by thousands is less than a day. Other than buying a commercial to show during a prime time TV event how many other ways are there to reach that many people? And the costs… forget about it!

Social media marketing also doesn’t have to be that direct to work. In the past I’ve mentioned that any major business not following their name or industry on Twitter is doing themselves a disservice because it’s not giving them the opportunity to either thank people that say nice things about them or correct something that a customer has complained about. These days it’s incumbent to address issues sooner than later because, though one can recover from bad press, it can be harder to do so. Just the other day I had someone comment on an old post of mine complaining about a particular affiliate that didn’t pay me; even when someone might think an issue is gone, online it’s never gone, especially if the company didn’t fix the issue (weasels; still never paid me).

Overall he’s correct; social media marketing is just marketing. But it’s also so much more, and anyone that doesn’t believe this will eventually run into the wall. On that day I hope they call me or someone else to help them get out of it, and then hope it’s not too late.
 

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell