Have you used AOL, Lycos, Excite, MSN, or Yahoo! recently?
It seems we are entering Portal 2.0 as the major social sites have been jockeying for position this past week to win the minds of consumers much like the portals did more than a decade ago. These companies appear to be creating islands by erecting the same sorts of barriers as the portals did in the late 1990s.
At that time, the portals fought with each other and consumers were left out of the discussion. So while the analysts talked up the merits of this portal vs. that as if that’s all there was, a little search engine called Google figured out a better way to organize information on the Web.
As I was playing around with Google+ this weekend, I noticed much discussion about Google+ vs. Facebook. People were talking about which is better and which they would use more. That's exactly the talk that played out in 1998 regarding portals.
This weekend the social services responded with a round of blocking access to their services from each other. Google discontinued its excellent real-time search feature - powered mainly by Twitter - that had been active since December 2009.
And Facebook blocked a contact-exporting tool used to let people save the email addresses and other information of their Facebook friends as a file or to import them into Gmail.
Ugh. Not again! It's Portal 2.0
I worked in the portal world in the late 1990s. I was with NewsEdge, a real-time news provider that sold information feeds to the portals. It was an exciting time. But as the portals fought with each other by spending their investors money, information users were increasingly bewildered by choice. Where to find quality content? Enter the Google search engine.
Sure, I understand that Google, Facebook, and Twitter need to make money. Their investors are counting on that. But in their scramble to erect moats around their services and as they try to keep users, are they potentially driving them to consider a more nimble way to communicate?
I'm sure there is a smart company waiting in the wings ready to swoop in with a better way to organize social contacts that doesn't rely on a Portal 2.0 mentality. I have no doubt there is a company out there solving this problem just like Google solved search a decade ago. I look forward to the day when my social services and personal contacts are not housed in separate islands dotting the ocean of the social Web.
Until recently, I've admired his PR-savvy approach to the media. He was great on camera and he’d appear on cable news stations like CNN and MSNBC frequently, getting out in front of stories and telling it like he sees it. (Note this is a PR comment, not a political one).
He also took to Twitter via @RepWeiner and, until recently, I thought he did a good job on social networks.
But about a week ago, a website posted a photo that was claimed to be Rep. Weiner in his underwear that was sent to a young woman via a social network.
For days, Rep. Weiner denied that he sent the photo and in media interviews said that his Twitter account had been “hacked.”
This afternoon, in a tearful apology, he said the photo sent through his @RepWeiner Twitter account was, indeed, his wiener.
Ugh.
Please, people!
Social networks are never private.
Don't use social networks to send inappropriate things!
If your mother would say it is wrong, it probably is. Never send anything that doesn't pass your mother test.
There are so many ways to get found out.
You risk the company IT people snooping, your spouse seeing, or a receiving party ratting.
Don't even joke about inappropriate things because your stupidity could end up with hitting the "send" button by accident.
Just don't do it. It's just not worth the risk to your career and your personal relationships.
But if you do make a ridiculous mistake, DEFINITELY come clean right away!
It's a real-time world.
You get points for admitting a mistake quickly.
Don't compound stupidity with a lie and a cover-up.
You need to do 5,000 things and each thing you do, on average, needs to gain you ten new followers.
(Unless you are already famous like Howard Stern who got 200,000 followers within a few weeks after he jumped on Twitter).
I started my @dmscott Twitter feed with zero followers in early 2008 and I just passed the 50,000 mark (thank you to everyone who follows me).
There is no secret to building a following.
You need to build a fan base one effort at a time over the long haul. This idea came to me during the Q&A session of a panel discussion I was on at the San Francisco Music Tech Summit late last year.
Michael Brandvold, a music industry marketing maestro, said my answer to a question on how musicians can build a fan base using social media was the best quote he heard about music marketing in all of 2010. So I had to take what was a throwaway line more seriously! (Thanks Michael). Michael has worked on marketing efforts for bands including U2, Rod Stewart, Madonna, Ozzy Osbourne, and Britney Spears and has worked closely with Universal Music Group, BMG/Sanctuary Records, Rhino Records, and Playboy. Read Michael's 2000 Things to Generate 20,000 Fans Challenge.
The secret to generating 50,000 followers on Twitter
So many people are looking for a secret. They want a formula. Or they want to buy followers somehow. Or trade people for followers.
There's no secret. Get out there and, as Seth Godin says in his new book Poke the Box start stuff. Do new things. Experiment. Take risks.
Here is what I've done to drive followers since March 2008 when I started on Twitter with zero followers.
Actually, if you add all these up its well over 5,000 things I've done since I started Twitter, so I am below average in generating 10 new followers for each thing I’ve done.
Last week, I delivered a full day New Rules of Marketing Masterclass for a group of 200 veterinarians brought together by Veterinary Study Groups.
I enjoyed this gig because many in the audience are both practitioners and practice owners. So they understand both the content creation side of new marketing as well as the business benefits. The enthusiasm was amazing.
Here's the punch line. McKee Pownall Equine Services is growing quickly because people find them online. This in a down market when other vets at the conference told me they were struggling in the current economy.
Here's a short video where Mike talks about how he uses social media, especially Twitter to reach horse owners in Toronto which leads directly to business growth.
I forgot to take a look at the background before I filmed Mike. Stupid. You'll see at the beginning of the video there is a distracting light fixture over Mike's head. I realized that as I was filming and shifted over a bit to get the great black background. This reminds me once again to take a moment to set up a shot!
A few weeks ago I spoke at the San Francisco MusicTech Summit, an event that brings together smart people at the intersection of music and technology.
I spoke on a panel called Engaging Your Community. And later in the day I sat in the Artists Panel to see what they had to say.
I was amazed at how utterly different the discussions about social media were at these two panels. The artists were so resistant. In fact, I asked a question of the artists, which began: "With respect, the vibe here is of a bunch of big babies..."
It seemed to me that the artists pined for the good old days where radio, Billboard Magazine, major labels, and CDs were the rule and "stealing music" on the Web wasn't yet a pain in the ass.
I got news for artists. We're not going back to the good old days.
But why complain in the first place? My gosh, for the first time in history it is easy to reach fans. My sense is that artists are okay with that. But many of the artists I spoke with with were so damned egotistical. The fact that fans can reach them is an issue!
I was amazed that many on the artist panel advocated ghost written social media entries. Well, okay. They must lip-synch at their live shows.
As I looked around the standing-room and sitting-on-the floor only audience, my sense was that many were not agreeing with these artists.
In a stunning twist, the entire Summit is available for free audio download on Archive.org. It's amazing to me that what so many artists hate (free downloads) are exactly what they want in an event like this! Kudos to Brian Zisk, Summit Executive Producer, for making the content available.
Here is a video I did with Meredith Chin about how artists can use Facebook to build a fan base. Meredith works with many artists. She cites Joe Purdy and Javier Dunn as two non-superstar artists who have done a good job on Facebook.
Joe and Javier are not big fat lip-synching social media babies.
See? Artists like Joe Purdy and Javier Dunn engage with fans.
The tone was set for the panel by the moderator, Tamara Conniff, who was formerly the chief editor of Billboard. Her first question was: "What's too much? The artist used to be shrouded in mystery. But some of that has been lost with too much engagement in social media. How do you keep the artist to fan romance alive."
I reject the entire question! But I wasn't on the panel, so I couldn't say that.
This is the sort of big media "woe is us" kind of question that people who worked at a place like Billboard ask about social media. All this pesky interaction! All those bloggers who are not real journalists! All the time it takes to be on Twitter!
The recurring theme on the panel was: "Who cares what I had for breakfast." This lament came up so often from the big babies.
Most of the artists seemed to miss the point that social media is much more than Twitter and breakfast. Now you can reach your fans directly without your label babysitting you!! Facebook, YouTube, and blogs and other forms of media are good, aren’t they?
Lip-synching your way into social media
I was disappointed that many on the panel advocate that artists use third party people and companies to handle social media. Ugh.
Isn't ghost writing your Twitter feed the same as lip-synching at your live show?
Here are some choice (paraphrased) comments I wrote down:
Dan Lebowitz (Lebo) - Animal Liberation Orchestra (ALO)
I want to focus on writing music. I could spend my entire week on social media.
Raul Malo – solo artist.
Social media has opened up some negatives. There should be a certain mystery. I don’t want to know everything that my wife does. There should be a fine line. An artist should communicate through the music and the live show. We need to maintain a balance.
Del The Funky Homosapien
You need other people to handle things like Twitter.
Evan Lowenstein - Evan and Jaron / StageIt
We need to pull back like Colonel Tom Parker did with Elvis and help the artist leave the audience wanting more. There is a romance that needs to be between fans and the artist. Getting too close can make the romance sour. Artists should not be talking about the weather. We create experiences for fans.
I ask my question at 48:20 – With respect, the vibe here is a bunch of big babies. Since 1995 we have the Web to communicate. There are three billion people on the Web and a half a billion on Facebook alone. Do you listen to people?
Got a few whoops from the audience. The answers were interesting.
Special commentary for any artists reading this
I had some side conversations with artists who said: "You don’t understand!"
Oh, but I do.
We're in the same fundamental business, you music artists and me. We make our living in the exact same way. You create content and do live gigs for a living. I create content and do live gigs for a living.
You create music content and choose to self-publish or publish with indie or major labels. I create text content and choose to self-publish or publish with indie or major publishers.
You can choose to open your music up and make it free (or clamp down and say "no"). I can choose to open my content up and make it free (or clamp down and say "no").
You can tour and play your music live. I can tour and give live speeches.
You can choose to engage your fans in social media (or not). I can choose to engage in social media (or not).
Amanda Palmer is not a big fat lip-synching social media baby.
We're lucky to be able to engage. Why does it seem such a problem?
Bonus for Grateful Dead fans
At the Summit, I connected with my friend Jay Blakesberg who did the photos for my book with Brian Halligan Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.
I also met Betty Cantor, the Dead's live recording engineer for many years (of "Betty Board" fame). It was a particular thrill to meet John Meyer, CEO of Meyer Sound Laboratories, who worked on the Dead's stunning live sound system during the band's heyday. Here I am with John (who is holding our book).
PS > If you are an artist, you must read Bob Lefsetz, the best music writer on the planet.
My first job was on a bond trading desk in the mid-1980s. I was mesmerized by the real-time "scrolling" news feeds from Dow Jones and Reuters (most recent story auto-magically appears at the top of the list of headlines).
"Wow," I thought, I am seeing the news as it is being reported with no delay at all!
In fact I thought this was so insanely cool that I worked at Knight-Ridder Financial in the late 1980s and early 1990s. KRF was a pioneer in real-time news for the commodity and financial markets. I was based in Tokyo and then Hong Kong. I managed the effort to grow the news and data feeds in the Asia markets.
As an aside, I am back in Asia for a few days and I am writing this post from this awesome work pod in the Cathay Pacific lounge in Hong Kong.
In the mid 1990s I joined NewsEdge, a company that pioneered real-time news on corporate desktops (prior to the public Web).
I guess you can say I am a real-time junkie.
Today, when I woke up in Port Dickson Malaysia (I spoke at the Text 100 #DigitalRising meeting) and logged into TweetDeck, my twitter desktop client, I noticed a message that a new version is available which I downloaded. How cool – now TweetDeck is true real-time.
Prior to this version, TweetDeck would update every minute or so or when you manually refreshed. (This older approach is essentially a continuously refreshing snapshot.)
Now, true real-time at TweetDeck means the most recent update in a TweetDeck column automatically appears at the top and continuously updates.
I found for my @ replies, my direct messages, and for the hashtags I follow real-time is great. However, for my follow stream it was way too fast to make sense of.
I'd like to suggest to TweetDeck that they consider making it an option to turn on or off real-time by column. At the moment, you can only do that with a setting that controls the entire app. This forces me to choose between real-time for the columns I use (and no column for the full feed) or no real-time at all and all columns.
The great headline of this blog post is how you would translate the title of my wife's new book. Stress Free Twitter comes out this week in the Japanese language.
Yes, both Yukari and I write about marketing strategy and real-time online media and we both have new books coming out within several days of each other.
Yukari Watanabe Scott @YukariWatanabe has written three books, contributed to several others, and has written hundreds of magazine articles and countless posts on her several blogs.
"WILL YOU GUYS STOP TALKING ABOUT TWITTER!"
Imagine life for our teenaged daughter. Whenever the subject of Twitter comes up at mealtime, she rolls her eyes. Sometimes she leaves the room. Sometimes she tries to change the subject. But it's tough for us because Yukari and I have been spending the past year researching and writing books about real-time communications. We talk about the similarities (and differences) in the real-time mindsets of people in different parts of the world.
Our daughter would prefer to talk about Neuroscience or music or, well, anything but Twitter.
Yukari's book talks about how Twitter should be fun. Nobody should feel compelled to tweet. And, perhaps more importantly, there are no hard and fast rules about the "right" way to use Twitter.
Incidentally, a huge difference that those who use Twitter in Japan enjoy is they can say more in a single tweet. Due to Kanji characters expressing more meaning per character than a letter, a single 140-character tweet in Japanese is nearly a paragraph in English. That alone may mean less stress!
Yukari interviewed people all over the world to find stories for the book. For example, she shares how Rebecca Corliss - @repcor – used Twitter to help connect her to HubSpot where she now works in marketing. (Just an aside, could you imagine being in the marketing department of HubSpot, a company that sells products to marketing people, and where everyone is a marketing expert? I imagine Rebecca's job is like working in the accounting department of an accounting firm. But I digress.)
Yukari learned through her research that those who obsessed to “tweet by the rules” didn’t enjoy Twitter as much as those who just had fun with it and figured out their own style.
One more aside: According to Yukari's Twitter profile, she has tweeted 16,082 times as of this writing. Yikes!
If you have Japanese colleagues who are struggling with Twitter, please consider passing this on to them.
I've been using the new Twitter client for a few weeks. While I normally use Tweetdeck for every day Twitter activity on my notebook computer, I do go to the Twitter client to see people’s profiles.
Today on my Twitter profile I noticed a "Similar to You" feature on the right.
It creeped me out.
What got my attention is that the people that Twitter picked as similar to me really are all amazingly similar to me.
How did Twitter select some of my closest business associates and friends as similar to me?
It's kinda freaky.
I pushed "refresh" and it happened again!
I've recently shared lunch with each of these people.
Whatever algorithm is at use is so good as to be human-like in its selection.
BTW -- I'm not quite sure why each of the people Twitter selected have a "follow" button next to their names, because I already follow all of these fine folks.
(If you are not already doing so, you should be following all of these people.)
Here are the similarities:
Chris Brogan is a fellow Bostonian, Wiley author, and frequent speaker on the conference circuit that I travel. I hung out with Chris at the Inbound Marketing Summit two weeks ago (which included lunch) where we both spoke and we are both on a panel next week at the SAS sponsored PBLS conference in Las Vegas.
Todd Defren and I have talked about the transitions going on in the PR world many times. Two days ago I was in San Francisco speaking at Eloqua Experience and had an opportunity to huddle with Todd for a half hour. Our last lunch was at a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco in August.
John Jantsch has great shoes. Every time I see him, he seems to have a different color Converse Chuck Taylor’s on. Two weeks ago when we chatted over lunch at IMS they were black. Last week we recorded a podcast which will be released soon.
Ann Handley has a new book Content Rules (written with C.C. Chapman) coming out in a few weeks. I wrote the foreword to the book. Ann, Chris Brogan and I were on a panel together a few weeks at the HubSpot User Conference and I enjoyed Indian food with Ann in September.
Brian Solis is a tireless proponent of putting the public back into public relations. Like me, he is also an author and speaker. We both delivered keynotes at the Vocus User Conference this summer and while we didn’t sit together, I saw him at lunch.
Mike Volpe, the VP Marketing at HubSpot has shared my obsession with new marketing since we first met for lunch in 2007. We last met for lunch just a few weeks ago.
Josh Bernoff, another multi-book author chronicling new ways to influence people also lives in the Boston area. We had a great lunch at his favorite Chinese restaurant and talked books.
Lee Odden was also at the Vocus User Conference and after scarfing some amazing sushi, we went into the hotel’s garden to film a YouTube video.
What happens when an employee goes rogue on a social networking site? It happened at H&R Block, a company actively communicating on social networks since 2007. The tax-preparation specialist has a Social-Media Policy in place and launched a social-media outreach team in the 2009 tax season.
The morning after Tax Day in the U.S. - April 15, 2010 – a call center employee who is active in social media using the name Kid Fury decided to have a bit of fun. He went on Twitter and "told all you wonderful people who follow me to call in and ask for Kid Fury." As Kid Fury explains in his amazing video, "It pretty much went all downhill from there. It was not a good idea."
Watch the video, Kid Fury does an amazing job explaining the situation.
The H&R Block side of the situation
"Our Client Services organization, with guidance from our Social Media Team, are actively responding to customer service questions, issues, and comments via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites," Zena Weist, director, social media at H&R Block told me.
"What Kid Fury didn't realize was the impact of his tweets. People searching online for H&R Block help came across his 'just for fun' tweets in their search results."
Because Weist and her social-media team actively monitor tax-related comments online, they knew the moment he began posting. "We had a team monitoring and responding to customer-service inquiries on social networks," she says. "Within 10 minutes, our social-media outreach team had identified and contacted him and his manager. About an hour later, he had deleted his tweets."
That afternoon Weist quickly sent an email to all H&R Block associates. It explained that the social-media team was actively listening online; how the client-service outreach team was handling online inquiries; and how all this affected the associates.
When One of the Flock Strays
An important aspect of having real-time communications guidelines in place is making certain that employees know about the guidelines, understand them, and follow them.
When somebody strays, like Kid Fury at H&R Block, it is critical to follow up immediately like Weist did.
In this case, it was a mistake with no malice involved. Kid Fury apologized and important lessons were learned by all involved. However, in more severe cases, your HR people may need to get involved and disciplinary action taken as required.
I'm in Tokyo doing a few speaking gigs, getting caught up with old friends (I lived in Tokyo from 1987 to 1993) and meeting interesting people.
Today I connected with Masaki Ishitani author of Twitter: 140 characters changed the world the most popular book about Twitter in Japanese. Twitter is very popular in Japan - even the Prime Minister tweets.
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