TinyURL and Others’ Activities Are Bigger Than We Know

So I’ve been using TinyURL quite a bit and I’ve seen all the other long URL reducing services out there. There may have already been articles written on this concept but I realized that these services aren’t just offering something extremely useful, they’re using their service (or should be!) to monitor what domains are being embedded the most, posted by the masses of us out here socializing all over the web. If these types of companies/services are smart, their focus is more importantly  monitoring net user behavior when it comes to embedding/sharing links/content. They could easily sell this data to companies for various purposes. I’d be really interested to see some stats as far as top 10 embedded domains (and their respective URL’s). You could really pull some useful data/reporting out of there to make some decisions about how you run certain types of social marketing campaigns and initiatives, see what types are currently most viral, etc.

I guess my point is how for the longest time we’ve all thought McDonald’s was in the business of fast food but what most don’t know is that they’re more in the business of real estate (thousands of McD’s all over the world making them money on lot equity, etc.). I think this is referenced in the “Fast Food Nation” book.

Cool stuff…ok I’m done dorking out now.

Social Media Portal Apps, Ideas, and More…

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. I’ve been on FriendFeed now for awhile and have been a Senior Manager, Social Media for a large company for awhile now.

Recently I was following a thread on FriendFeed about Fuser. Robert Scoble was checking it out and streaming a demo, etc. Basically Fuser is an online portal app that allows you to set up your Twitter/MySpace/Facebook accounts so you can check all your msgs for those account in one Outlook-esque environment. I have some complaints about this but I’ll get to those in a minute.

Another application I had tried for awhile was Flock, the Mozilla Firefox based browser that was wrapped in a bunch of pretty social media/site plugins, etc. It was basically cool for quickly accessing your social sites, retrieving some of the general data like whose logged in at Facebook, blah blah blah…but still I had some complaints.

Here’s the thing folks, as someone who has to manage massive amounts of content across multiple sites, pushing new videos, blog posts, photos, tweets, links, status updates, etc. I need to have a portal that allows me to interact with and access at the very least the fundamental list of ’stuff’ that you do on these sites – photos, videos, status changes, messaging, news/blog posting – all in one spot, or it’s useless to me. For example, the concept of Fuser is great if all I cared about was my messaging inbox on these sites. Flock would’ve been great if I could update my status, push photos to my Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook accounts from one interface, control the photo album/sets, etc. 

Now my approach is coming from a corporate marketer standpoint and not so much your everyday consumer, but we all know that Social Media Marketing specialists that get paid to hype and blow stuff up need to be able to push compelling content a certain way on certain sites at certain times with some different yet sometimes overlapping angles. For instance, I may want to push some photos out to Flickr and Facebook but not to MySpace because the content may not be relevant for our MySpace audience at that time. Then next time it could be different.

I would like to see a solution that gracefully accommodates Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace, where I can control any of the following: photos, videos, status changes, messaging, news/blog posting and be able to do various batch operations across the sites. If you delivered that to me today, not only would you save me hours of re-pushing and re-publishing content, but I could get a lot more out to my consumers quicker, more effectively and without jumping all over 35 different Firefox browser tabs.

Social Media Marketing: The best answer (currently) for marketing with no budget.

A marketers we’ve all been in the in a situation where we are expected to do more with less or more with pretty much nothing. There are a several reasons that marketers are in this precarious situation whether it’s politics, bad economy, company direction changing, re-orgs, round of funding for a startup hasn’t arrived yet but new product or service needs to be promoted, etc.

I’m in an interesting quagmire, which is basically that my company embraces what I do, supports it 100%, but has no idea what success means in social media so they’re a little gun-shy about pouring money into it outside of my normal salary. The issue that herein lies is that social media is all about content. You can’t get content unless you go to events, interview people, take photos, write/blog articles about your experiences and how they are tied/relevant to the company you work for. All that costs money. So how does a social media guy survive with no budget and make him/herself more useful?

Currently we have minimal budget so I’m having to get creative. Fortunately the times we are in, the amount of tools available to market the few events I’m actually attending and collecting content from are free and are all intertwined pretty nicely. Between FriendFeed, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Upcoming and our own blog, I’m able to re purpose my content pretty extensively to various audiences making a small amount of content look like a medium to large size marketing effort. As long as everything is tagged and cross-linked to each other appropriately, you can start building your opt-in social audience. Just keep in mind that if your content sucks, even if you have a lot of it, people will ‘turn you off’ by unsubscribing to your whole schtick and you may never get them back again.

Keep everything you post meaningful and high quality and learn how to use all these tools so that when you do post something it’s worth it.

Every Company Needs A Rockstar With A Face

So recently on FriendFeed someone had asked: “Will Twitter ever be able to truly monetize?”.

I don’t believe that sites/offerings like Twitter themselves will be the ones who monetize. I think it’s the people using these tools that create the monetization on their own terms. For example….my current company works closely with Robert Scoble. If you are even remotely into tech or blogs you know who he is and what he does. Scoble has created his own monetization within Twitter and FriendFeed. Where Twitter benefits is that Scoble’s use of Twitter for tech blogging, has brought on more sign-ups to Twitter and contributed to a heavier use of it, making it more valuable and well known. Scoble has several thousand people following his every tweet, FriendFeed share, etc. He is now a marketable face with an intelligent, tech savvy, following/audience that is huge in size. There is a dollar value associated with that that appeals to companies for marketing purposes.

My point with the above is that I think companies that are now heading into the blogosphere for the first time, heading into social media for the first time, etc…need to understand that really good marketing in this new landscape can be perpetuated effectively by having a “rock star” blogger/social media person for every vertical market they want to target.

If companies want to effectively market online I think that they need to stop clinging to the protective bubble of anonymity that they’ve clung to like a baby blanket for so long. It’s time to lift up the kilts and show the C2C and the Social Media world what is under the hood. Show them your strengths and flaws. Show them your fuck-ups and triumphs. Show them that even if your company is global with 50k+ employees, that you are still just a bunch of human beings trying to do cool shit and work towards a common goal so that you can be the best in your market or industry.

After having some intense conversations at my current company, I’ve been able to convince them to let me push the strategy above and to let me take the risks with this and go full force with blogs/social media, to expose the company for what they are: the leader in their industry with ups and downs like everyone else. My plan is to bring on several bloggers (including myself) from within the company to speak to various vertical topics and have them write about them.

In the action sports industry they got the rock star thing down because it’s all about rock stars and faces and hype and people. In tech….ummmm..not so much. But the cool thing with my current company is that while we are a tech company, what we make is part of everyone’s life in this day and age inside their home. So we do actually appeal to just about everyone once they know what we do.

The next step is to assign a face to a specific blog to a specific vertical/market. I hope more companies start thinking this way but the funny thing is, if they do, shitty companies with shitty products and shitty services will have to expose themselves. Maybe my ideas are bad ideas then.

Onward….

Mashables, Sociables, Feedables….

It has been such a long time since I’ve posted on this blog and I’m sorry.

So I’ve recently become a Senior Manager of Social Media for a huge company that is a world leader in the digital storage space. I’ve set us up on blogs, on FriendFeed, on Del.icio.us, on Digg, on Facebook, on MySpace, on Twitter…etc…

Now then….

The evolution of connecting C2C started with creating the best social network technology or platform. Then once the best most popular platforms were established, micro blogging came out. Then we got to the point where people had an account on multiple sites social/networking/bookmarking/micro-blogging, etc. Now it seems like everyone has these standard accounts on places and we’re kind of stumped at the FriendFeed level. FriendFreed is awesome, conceptually and for the most part the actual current offering but I still see the challenge existing for people who are trying to figure out how to tie all their marketing and social efforts, personal and/or business, to one easy-to-use, centralized location. FriendFeed is the closest that it has come but I don’t think it’s the end all.

Personally I’ve been using Flock for a browser at work so that I have a Firefox based browser with emphasis on Social/Feeds/Blogs and it’s the best thing I can have right now for what it is I do. I guess I’m just wondering when and at what point the one and only true portal will arrive for everything that is nice, fast, easy-to-use, customizable, etc. to integrate our entire online lives so that we never have to look again. We need a Google or Microsoft of Social portals to come lay the land for this and set it in stone and continue to develop for it and improve on it.

With all the widgets and platforms and accounts and audiences and generations of 13 year olds that are essentially penetrating, and will permanently be a part of, the tech C2C audience as a lifestyle and way of humanity…..how will we consolidate and fully harness all of it for online business?

The Cancer Of The Silo: Big Company Fun

It’s exhausting…

Over the last six months I’ve been working at a very large global company, 50,000+ employees, and either I can’t believe it or I just plain forgot how divided business units and departments can be for the lamest childish reasons.

If the wrong person gets hired into a senior manager (or above) role in their respective organization, look out. That where the slow drip of poison begins. Soon, they hire dysfunctional personality counterparts as their employees whose insecurities are almost worse than their own. The gossiping starts. They don’t play by anyone’s rules. If their agenda cannot be executed on by the current system, instead of working to improve the current system, they go off and do their own thing, causing waves of friction and confusion across the whole company.

When a company gets huge and people get political and power hungry, how do you stop it from creating huge fissures in the potential unity across organizations and departments and business units? How do you kick the pedestal out from under the Napoleon middle manager that is fucking with everyone, plugging up everyone’s schedules with meetings and projects that have no ROI plan attached to them if you can’t pull rank to make it happen?

I don’t have the answers to these questions but I am trying to do the right thing on the diplomacy front and am feeling the pain right now of the silo effect.

Social Network Overdose: Is there a solution?

The Issue:

The sweet smell of social napalm in the morning. Gotta love it…or hate it…or just have a headache from checking all 95 social network accounts that you created for various niches you’re interested in. I have a Facebook account. I have a MySpace account. I have accounts at skateboards.com, surfboards.com, and snowboards.com. All these I use to connect with others but for various reasons. The maintenance is overwhelming if I want to be active on all these. When I say active I don’t mean like the 14 year old kids talking non-sense all day on MySpace. I mean like the professional collective I’m part of on these sites to discuss art, photography, politics, education, parenting (I have 3 sons), social psychology issues, etc.

I do want to continue to be a part of the communities/collectives that I’m part of but I wish I didn’t have to work so hard to update them.

Possible Solution?

Companies have already created widgets and badges for MySpace, Facebook, etc. to put on their various sites but I’d like to see a couple things take it a step further. A standard social networking API that uses a core simple standard dataset for photos and their info, interests, hobbies, avatar, etc. that you could manage from a NetVibes-esque portal, serving as your admin console to manage all your pages at once from one place. One might think companies would avoid that so that they could continue to “stand out” from other social sites but my argument is everyone has a social network now using various 3rd party out of the box social networks. The criteria on most of these is generally the same as far as the data set goes so why not standardize again the dataset/vars for the base information on all these sites, similar to what was done for ecommerce and passing variables to companies like verisign, authorize.net, etc.

If someone could just do this for me by tomorrow morning that would be great, then I wouldn’t have to upload photos 8 times, update my avatar 8 times, update my status 8 times, etc. It’s already nice that text’ing Twitter updates my status on my own blogs and Facebook. Too bad I can’t roll that concept across all social network sites.

</SocialNetworkingRant>

Love And Rockets

Recently at my job I got to deal with one of those manager/employee types who LOVE to assume who is responsible for an issue on our corporate web properties, the FIRST thing they do is fire rockets up as high as they can. They do this with no consideration for others, the people working on the web team, the project managers, what else is going on outside of their current gripe, etc.

There’s a term for people like this but I can’t think of it at the moment.

Instead of investigating an issue further, they immediately report it to the top of the mgmt. food chain so that they look like they’re go-getters, the ones who appear to be ‘cards on the table’. The reality is that if you have an issue with another team, etc. It’s always best to get together with that team/employee and talk about your frustrations, the issues that have come up, and then work together to fix them. Otherwise, you just look like a whiny bitch…..

</bitching>

How Long Until All Homepages Are Widgets?

I’m just wondering how long it’s going to take for everyone to widgetize EVERYTHING on their web page the point where we can have a full customizable version of the netvibes.com pages…where we can access netvibes.com funcationality and web 2.0 widget options but point our netvibes page automatically to our own domain and then we edit the layout/css the same way we can with our wordpress blogs.

I mean there are flickr, facebook, digg, wordpress, blogger type widgets and we’re all getting to the point where our personal site really needs to just be a portal showing all of our feeds/blogs, account info for all our social crap, LinkedIn account/resume info, etc.

If we get to the point where everyone’s homepage is a widgetized layout/look and eventually Google let’s our widgets get fully indexed, then what is next? If we get to the point of full realization of the personalization utopia, where non web people can drag and drop the content they care about all over their personal homepage and then it’s done, what else is there to do? If someone would just tell me, I could start investing my money.

-Rich

B2B? B2C? How about C2C baby!

This was a response to a user on my Seth Godin post but I thought it would be good to give it it’s own spot here.

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I currently work for a HUGE company that has never had to care about the consumer until now. Trying to convince these operational thinkers at the top to start embracing the fact that we need to think less B2B and more B2C, but more importantly C2C.

Companies nowadays needs to provide better products/services and work on ways to faciliate relationships between their own consumers/customers. This is the new way to invest in customer retention. Every customer wants to feel important and validated but the nature of that is changing. It’s no longer based on a great customer service experience when they call in to talk to the company. It’s now based on the fact that many others are using your product/service, are sharing their good and bad experiences with your other customers, and then most importantly seeing that your company is out there taking tabs on what they say. They need to see that you care about the good the bad and the ugly and that if there is a problem, you’re out there to take it in and fix it and listen to them.

Removing the corporate wedge between consumers and businesses by appointing people in the company to be out there blogging, mixing it up, engaging forums/communities/bloggers to compliment and criticize what your business is doing so that they feel like their hard earned money and time is well spent and valued by you. Customers need to feel like your reasons for investing in your own company exist for the sole purpose of investing in them.