Twitter Adds Ability to Follow Yourself (Satire)

In response to Facebook adding the ability to like your own comments, Twitter has done the unthinkable: they’ve added the ability to follow yourself. This was done to attract more Facebook users into the vast Twitterverse by increasing the amount of useless things users can do to give the user some feeling of “interactivity”. This came as a shock to many Twitter users (or “Tweeps”), who’ve seen rapidly increasing fail whale sightings while surfing the world wide web.

Onlookers of the ongoing feud between Facebook and Twitter have speculated that soon enough, Facebook will implement the much clamored for idea to add yourself as a friend, opening up a virtual world of what “could be” in social media.

</satire>

Facebook adds the ability to “like” your own comments on your own statuses? What purpose does this serve, exactly? I think some people will argue that this advances something-or-other regarding social media, but I believe the opposite – it’s a blatant, further degeneration of Facebook.

Facebook is a sinking ship! All aboard the fail whale into the Twitterverse!

That’s another thing I hate – the term “Twitterverse”. Another term I hate even more? “Tweeps”. Stop using it. I don’t want to be your “Tweep”… I’m not even sure if I fully grasp what that means.

As for now, I’m weaning off Facebook – gonna keep ridin’ the fail whale.

Thanks to Austin Hutchison for the idea for this post – make sure to visit his blog @ http://blog.austinhutchison.com

3 Ways World of Warcraft Can Help Social Media & Business Understanding

For roughly 3 years between my sophomore and senior years of high school, World of Warcraft (WoW for short) wasn’t simply a game – it was my life. To help hit this point home, when I quit, my level 70 Dwarf Hunter had about 50 days played on it. That’s 1200 hours of me physically being at the computer (at least I didn’t make myself seem like a total loser </sarcasm>). But, much like Twitter, WoW required some pretty simple, yet demanding things in order to truly succeed.

1. Relationship Building & Networking

Towards the latter end of your leveling days, 70 was the max level at the time, you almost HAD to find a decent group of individuals that you could tolerate, but more importantly could tolerate you. If no one on your server liked you (you were pompous, ridiculous, etc), the ability for you to find this group of individuals (a guild) was slim to none. You needed this group to foster in the ability to raid in the end-game, or basically continue playing after you’ve hit the maximum level. If you weren’t good at networking, you were effectively dust in the wind – even more so if you weren’t good at your role. World of Warcraft has several networking features, including but not limited to:

• Friends Lists – ability to add people you like to a list and see if they are online or offline.
• Groups – ability to get in a small group in order to tackle obstacles you can’t do solo.
• Raids – ability to get in a large group (of up to 40) in order to overcome more difficult obstacles.
• Guilds – ability to be included in a group of individuals that shares a specific chat channel (guild chat), where you can talk, network, plan raids, etc.

Just like in social media, networking is the lifeblood. If you can’t connect, you will fail (or, in the case of WoW, become bored and quit).

2. 7 P’s and Strategy

In the end-game, WoW is very strategy intensive on the occasional raid boss. Some of them require very specific strategy and timing, or else the rate of failure is high. For instance, one boss, Chromaggus in the Molten Core raid instance, required to be tranquilized (or tranq’d) by a hunter, or he would enrage and go into a frenzy, greatly increasing his damage output and putting your chance of survival very low.

This is similar to the social media/business spheres – without strategy, your likelihood of failure is great. This is very much like the 7 P’s – Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. You prepare piss poor, your results are piss poor. It’s as simple as that. If you do plan properly, your guild or business could see success against a raid boss, like these guys:

3. Recruiting & Maintaining Guild Members (or Employees)

In end-game raid situations, the guild/raid leader is effectively the employer, whereas all the guild/raid members are employees. If you do what the raid leader says (assuming they’re not a complete moron), you will achieve GREAT SUCCESS! If not, prepare to do pretty awful. Anyways, in order to constantly see raid progression without significant time sinks and road blocks, a constant flow of new blood is necessary. Employers must look for the next, best, and greatest talent in order to achieve success. If people couldn’t perform their duties well in raids and refused to fix it, they would be replaced by someone more willing to do the work. If you were willing to do the work, you would consistently raid and be rewarded in rare armor, weapons, etc. It’s really a difference between looking like a total bum or looking like you’re the shit (virtually, of course).

Do you want to be a badass, or do you want to be a bum? The choice is yours.

Listen (Better Business by Creeping)

Keep an ear to the ground.

This is of course an idiom meaning “pay attention to what’s happening around you/pay attention to rumors“. Your greatest enemy in social media can also be your greatest ally – the open forum (Facebook, Twitter, etc). If you’re not doing well in social media spheres, it’s easy as hell to figure out why. All you have to do is creep. Creeping consists of following updates on groups (and individuals, but that’s a bit stalker-esque), not interacting with it/them, and taking note of what they say. For all intents and purposes, it’s like producing a poll about your products; however, you don’t have to goad people into answering. They’ve already answered without you even producing the question. Of course, you must at some point supplement these with polls to truly get a grasp on the direction your market is heading. The search boxes on Twitter and Facebook are officially your best friend and companion.

Happy creeping.

(image obtained via scientificamerican.com)

To foursquare or not to foursquare – that is the question

This is something I’ve been internally wrestling with for a couple weeks after my recent introduction to foursquare. For those of you who don’t know what foursquare is, it’s a location-based social media service where users “check-in” at venues and can earn badges and become the “mayor” of venues with enough check-ins. I’ve tried to tell friends about it, but the only reaction I’ve gotten is, “Dude, telling people where you are over the internet? That sounds really creepy.”

At first, broadcasting where you are over the internet does sound creepy to me. However, with the increased emergence of social networking tools like foursquare – Google Latitude, for example – is this type of behavior becoming more and more popular? Being constantly plugged-in? To quote a recent tweet Nate Riggs left me about this subject, “@adambudd – no, you are right [about 'creepiness']. But there’s a lot of people that think twitter is creepy. I’ll bet people thought email was creepy too…”

I guess it’s kind of like when the TV was first invented, there were those who were against it, saying it would never catch on. But, look at the TV now – it’s where nearly all of the population gets all of its information and entertainment. In this sense, is foursquare the new TV? Will it truly catch on, or is it a passing trend? Only time will tell, but for now, let me know what you think of foursquare. Do you use it? Why do you use it (or not)? Will it catch on (or has it already caught on)?

Social Media + Traditional Marketing = Misguidance

It’s a simple equation. You try to apply traditional marketing techniques to social media, you get a misguided and ineffective attempt at increasing your brand reach, visibility, and ROI (return on investment). This is investment isn’t necessarily money – it’s something far more important: time. The current of new media is gonna keep on flowin’, and if you don’t learn to swim with the current, you’re going to be swept away.

You can’t think of social media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) in the same manner as traditional business/marketing/advertising/etc. If you try to apply these to your personal/professional accounts on Twitter, for example, you’re going to end up looking like this guy, scratching your head thinking, “This ‘social media’ I’ve been hearin’ about seems pretty useless.”

(obtained from icis.com)

How can we prevent ourselves from looking like this (not just from a wardrobe perspective, that’s another story)? Contribute content, and not just any filler crap content – meaningful content. Talk about things that pertain to the audience you are trying to reach. Get your audience interested. Engage your audience.

If you can’t get your audience interested, you can’t even begin to engage them. If you can’t accomplish that, then why even participate in social media practices? It will all be in vain, a misguided attempt. Social media is not like ‘traditional marketing’ and media where you simply put a up sign, billboard, or run a TV ad and hope for the best. It’s quickly becoming a two way street – a marketing highway, if you will. This is a chance to improve yourself personally and professionally, to obtain feedback and then react to that feedback in real time.

Don’t do it because you feel you have to just to stay up to date – get involved with communities and contribute. Go to friends blogs – post feedback, get your name out there. If people retweet your posts or mention you on Twitter, show that love back. People appreciate all things genuine. Finally, the more readily available your “brand” is (from posting blogs, commenting on blogs, tweeting, etc), the greater your return on investment from a time standpoint will be. You can’t simply make a blog and say, “Hey, we have a blog, we have a Twitter – here it is.”

Why should I read it? Give me a reason to visit it once and cause me to be a repeat offender.

One Way v. the Highway

In years past, advertising and marketing has been extremely vertical in the sense that companies sent out messages, like TV commercials and ads in the paper, but there was no real way to give feedback. This communication was almost strictly a one way street.

(obtained via freefotos.com)

However, with the advent of social media (which may not be a category much longer as it assimilates into “new media”, as said by Brian Solis), the exchange of information has rapidly shifted from this one way street to a highway. If companies try to stick to their old ways with this massive influx of new users and ways to communicate, their once “effective” (and I use that term loosely) one way street will not be able to handle the traffic of the highway. Thus, the previous users of that one way street will seek faster and more efficient modes of communication – this is where the highway shows it’s true value.

So, what companies are one way streets and causing stagnation of sales and marketing processes? What companies are becoming highways and causing change and innovation?

Do you want your company to be left behind and see no traffic at all, or be bustling with activity? True change starts from the outside-in and bottom-up.

(obtained via michaelcorey.ntirety.com)

What’s the real value of Twitter anyways?

Alright, here’s a short entry before I get to bed. Lately I’ve been talking to a couple of my friends about how I’ve started tweeting more and posting a few blogs here and there. The first question I get is always this: what’s the point of Twitter? Then, the question is immediately followed by: Twitter seems like such a waste of time. It’s just a bunch of status updates, I can already do that on Facebook.

Sure, you can do all those status updates on Facebook. Sure, Twitter at first glance looks like a bunch of status updates of some crazed person trying to justify their existence on the internet. But, after using it pretty in-depth for the last three or so weeks, I can succinctly say it’s a bit more than that, with more potential and reach than Facebook. However, I suppose if you’re not trying to reach out to a broader audience of people, then Facebook will continue working just fine for you (except when you get knee deep in the privacy issues of Facebook which they are scrambling to fix).

I secretly enjoy it because it’s like instant messaging ten people and not being obligated to respond, posting thoughts and ideas and having them reach followers of my followers. Let me give you an example. When I posted my first blog entry on Twitter I had around 20 followers, and on that first day I had 65 views (which I’m well aware is chump change in terms of blog views) on said entry. So how did my blog get three times the views of people I notified about it in my immediate circle of influence? Twitter networks you with people even when you’re not actively networking. It increases the visibility of your brand. It maximizes your influence. Well, all those reasons and the fact that I think Twitter can appear to be a bit more professional than Facebook (you know what kind of ridiculous status updates I’m talking about).

That’s the real value of Twitter.

Face to Face

“Humans are now driving the interaction… now the people are the gas that goes in the engine [of vehicles on the information superhighway].” – Nate Riggs

The quote above is the key takeaway I had from the Schey Sales Symposium on May 20. This triggered an immense amount of thought regarding my feelings on the mechanization of several processes that were previously considered something regarded as face to face interaction.

Example: I’m taking a calculus class online. Let’s say the instructor’s name is Rob Roberts. For the duration of the class, it’s hard to discern if the instructor is a machine or human (for all intents and purposes) because one doesn’t see them face to face on a daily basis, if at all. I do not know Mr. Roberts at all and the context is not necessarily what one would call ideal.

Sadly, over the years with a dramatic increase in technology, some of the human element is lost along the way. With the loss of the human element, direction in said class can at most times be lost.

It is important to stay grounded and maintain face to face interaction and re-humanize the increase of mechanization. It’s important to remember that processes, although done through technology, are still being presented to human beings. On the flip side of this, with an increase in technology face to face interaction becomes exponentially more possible over long distances, and done correctly will yield greater results than downloading a simple powerpoint.

Rise of the Mobile Application (More Commonly Referred to as the ‘App’)

June 29, 2007. That’s when it all started. To many people, this seems to be just an arbitrary date. But to me, it marks the start in a mobile application revolution, the start of a revolutionary idea of what could be in marketing and selling through technology. What I’m referring to is the launch of the original iPhone. Again, many may respond with, “So what? How could a phone revolutionize marketing, sales, and brand recognition?”. Well, in this blog entry I’ll tell you how the iPhone (Apple) and it’s primary competitor, Android 2.0 (Google) have and will continue to inspire ideas of what could be in technologically driven marketing and sales.

In 2007, the iPhone introduced the term that has been popularized as the “App” (short for Application) through their App Store. This ‘App’ grew from a simple concept to an explosive new way to deliver content to customers and increase consumer interactions at a scale that was previously unheard of. Below is a simple graph of the explosive growth of the App Store over the last 3 years (June 2007 – March 2010).

(obtained via tech.fortune.cnn.com)

Sure, in the very beginning, companies weren’t willing to jump on board the “App train” so to speak because of fears that the App was “just hype”. Surely now the numbers can’t be denied – the App Store increases visibility to potential customers and increases brand loyalty should companies choose to create an App to diversify their services. In the mix of these 30,000+ Apps available, there a quite a few companies who have chosen to take advantage of the brand recognition creating an App can create, some whose services are already online (Amazon, Google, etc) and some who are not thought of as traditional online sources (Target, The Gap, etc).

Here’s a hint to a lot of companies out there: if someone has created a 3rd party App for your services, chances are there’s a large, untapped market for you to exploit (UPS was one of these but has since wisened up and created its own, UPS Mobile). Here’s another hint: if your competitor has created an App, chances are you are losing business because of your failure to adapt to changing market conditions. News organizations have also followed suit, especially those hit hard by continuously falling newspaper subscriptions (AP News, New York Times, etc). Banks have also dove in to the App pool (Bank of America) in order to increase usability and make people like me jealous (Chase, where is your Android application?!). Although the reception of a chosen few Apps could be considered lukewarm at best, the potential is there to continually revolutionize the way the market works, and should a few companies fail to follow suit, they could see themselves left in the technological dust.

Even more exciting for me (as a Droid user), the Android App Market is seeing even more explosive growth than the iPhone App Store is experiencing currently, with their App Market growing by more than 100+ Apps per day (and that’s a number from December ’09 in which they experienced a 22% market growth!). How much longer can the world’s largest companies continue to ignore the brand recognition and loyalty they can gain from creating a simple App that can increase customer retention and usability? If anything, the creation of an App proves that companies can be innovative and really listen to what their consumer base wants. If large companies don’t watch out, smaller companies who take advantage of Apps and the potential it brings (equal playing field?) could really be the David to the large company’s Goliath.

To the reader – what do you think about iPhone and Android Apps and how do you think companies could be positively affected by making an App? Should they create Apps, or am I crazy and spewing irrational hype over a passing trend?

3 Ways Social Networking Can Help You

For a long time I had failed to see the usefulness that Twitter and Facebook presented to companies and most of all, myself. I always thought it was for people that wanted to pretend what they were posting about actually mattered to someone other than themselves, when in reality it hadn’t. But, as the economic belt tightened, I noticed how many companies had discarded traditional forms of marketing and advertisement. Below are 3 ways social networking sites can help you and, potentially, your company.

1. Twitter and Facebook can help companies succeed in recession. Getting involved in social media has been a growing way to get in touch with your consumer base at a much more basic level. Not only can you test out ideas, but you can do so with little or no budget, without sticking your neck out monetarily. In this way, Twitter has the potential to dramatically increase the effectiveness of marketing techniques without investing large amounts of money into advertising.

2. Job recruiters are now looking to Twitter as a way to hire new talent. Many companies are looking for technologically savvy new hires that can assist in bringing their company into the digital age of social media. By making your Twitter employer-friendly, linking your resumé on your profile, and utilizing #TweetMyJobs, you can potentially find a job – all thanks to Twitter.

3. Going digital and embracing social media can let you keep an ear to the ground. Through going digital, you or your company has the potential to tap into the consumer base that you spend thousands of dollars trying to capture. With social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, you can keep an ear to the ground and really feel the pulse of the consumer’s desires in order to reach your customers more effectively, provide much better service, and increase your visibility.

After the Schey Sales Symposium on May 20th at Ohio University, I will likely post a follow-up to this post noting more ways that social networking sites can help you or your company succeed. Speakers include Nate Riggs and Roger Courville.