I have been working online in a public facing role for longer than most people have had an Internet connection. When I was younger, I could always use my age as a get out of jail free card when I made a fool of myself or crossed a major line in a way that was unforgivable. In fact I lost my first gig as columnist for a prominent resource website for exhibiting unabashed prejudice against another website that I was jealous of. Some of my early antics made Paul Christoforo look like Edward Bernays, and the only reason I can still look at myself in the mirror is because the category of my business was fantasy wrestling, and 95 percent of participants were still a couple years from being legally able to drive.

Even though I’ve shifted my online consulting business to include public relations to accommodate social media and customer service, I still find myself guilty of ignoring what I preach from time to time. These faux pas may seem innocuous, but they can be the difference in being taken seriously and deemed a nitwit.

Confusing the author and site owner

I read tons of social media articles every day. Some come from bloggers who I’m associated with on Triberr, and a lot are recommended by friends on various social media channels. Two separate times in the past month I’ve come across blogs that I thought were amazing, and after running up on them two or three times I left a comment saying so. Both times I complimented the owner’s writing ability…. Both times the comments ended up on guest posts that were written by others.

Not only is this offensive to the blog owner who thinks that you are going through the paces or simply don’t pay attention to details, it’s extremely rude to the person who actually penned the content. I wouldn’t go to Chris Brogan’s page and gush about how good of a writer Jeff Bullas is, but I did just that on a guest post on Jeff’s blog. I realized my faux pas shortly after, and my comments were actually based on the previous two articles that Jeff did actually write as much as it was on the one that I posted on. I thought that it may be more offensive to the actual writer if I went back and explained myself, so now I just try and pay more attention to the byline.

Automated Content Distribution

I have lots of ideas and work interests. Some of my online income comes from articles I’ve written several months ago that are often penalized by Google for being on competitor’s websites (so I need alternate methods of promotion). I also have a day job that doesn’t include Facebook and Twitter, so I rely on a couple of tools to share content from a few of my blogs at intervals throughout the day. A lot of people automate or schedule posts, but it’s something I have always considered a gray area.

Imagine that I had written an article joking about the severity of the east coast earthquake that occurred in the fall of 2011. It is a perfectly pertinent article in November 2011, but it loses all of its relevance as we move toward 2013. Since it comes from a WordPress plugin called “Tweet Old Posts”, it won’t even be included in the tweets until it’s out of date. It becomes a catastrophe when on the day a massive Earthquake kills a hundred thousand people and my first tweet of that day is titled “Why Earthquake Survivors Need to Get Over Themselves”. Whoa, who does this guy think he is? Wait, he sounds like he’s semi famous, we better alert Reddit! Now I’m the subject of social media blogs in the “what not to do posts” as opposed to the writer. Maybe it’s time to question the value of the “Tweet Old Posts” plugin.

Dirty Jokes and Offensive Humor

If you’re a friend on my personal Facebook, you know that I share a lot of memes and humor content, mostly in the form of images. I’ve shared Internet humor since Joe Cartoon invented the “Frog in a Blender”, and it’s impossible to offend the people I went to high school and college with. My friends list has grown significantly over the last year, and it covers people from a broad range of backgrounds and tolerance thresholds.

A month ago I came across a funny sign posted in an apartment hallway that was directed at someone who found graffiti, particularly the phallic type, very humorous. It read something like “Dear person who draws penises everywhere in the apartment building. No one besides you finds this amusing, and we’d appreciate if you would stop. It ruins my day when I go to press and elevator button and realize I touched the tip of a depiction of an oversized penis. Thank You, your neighbor”. Now I find this situation disgusting, and would personally have hunted down the neighbor who was offending everyone, and resolved this matter once and for all. The funny part was the penis that wound up drawn on the note. It’s grade school humor, but there is still something clever about answering someone’s complaint about phallic drawings with a phallic drawing.

A couple of weeks later, my grandma called me into her kitchen. I didn’t know what she wanted, but she was serious and didn’t want my great grandma to hear it, so I feared the worse. When I made it into the kitchen, she looked me in the eye, and asked me why there was a penis on my Facebook page. At first I denied it, and was dumbfounded at the accusation. I figured I may have been hacked or worse yet somehow had taken an R rated picture on accident while dressing and it had accidentally found its way into one of my albums. After I realized it was the teenager’s drawing (that wasn’t anatomically correct at all) and not a real photo, I almost started laughing. It really became funny to me when she told me how she had asked a friend at work to look at my Facebook profile to see if they could find some articles I had written, and came across a picture of a penis. I removed it as soon as I got home, and since they never read the note and realized that the drawing was a joke, I never, ever, post anything adorned with phallic sketch on it anymore.

Everyone messes up from time to time, but as we become more prominent, we find that we have much more to lose, and it takes less and less to cross the same lines. Just consider the President, and how much George W. Bush was scrutinized for just giving vacant looks and mispronouncing words. What kind of faux pas have you committed lately? Are there any habits that you have trouble breaking, or things that you consider part of your personality even though it is taboo to many people?

It is common for artists to draw inspiration from pop culture in design. I recently re-designed my Facebook Fan Page; can anyone pinpoint the inspiration for that one?

Besides aesthetics, social media campaigns will often try and parody pop culture to syphon off a little virulence for themselves. Last week I was tagged in a tweet reply for a friend. In response to his tweet “Are You Pinterested in More Social Media?” the Golden Union fish and chips stand replied “no, we’re more interested in this viral for national chip week”. In that, they broke one of the first rules of creating viral content: never call it viral content.

When people know you are trying to generate viral marketing, it never gets shared by the right people in the right places. There are thousands of failed memes that failed mostly because they were formatted like other memes; meaning that the author had viral ambitions. You don’t even have to say it, the people of the Internet know.

I responded to the tweet and told Golden Union “The best way to make sure something doesn’t go viral is to call it viral”. They thanked me for the advice, and since they were nice I decided to re-tweet them and check out the ad. It was kind of terrible to begin with. In trying to spoof the David Beckham H&M body wear Super bowl commercial (the one where he is spinning around in his underwear) they cut in a few scenes of the original commercial with a few scenes of their own actor eating French fries and holding it near his groin.

It Has to Trend Organically 

I get what they were trying to do. It’s a little funny because fish and chips aren’t sexy, but that is mostly lost in the cultural exchange. Aside from the commercial that I didn’t like, the Golden Union social media team did a horrendous job framing their content. In the YouTube description they tried to explain their thoughts and reasoning behind producing the commercial. This included everything from “It’s London Fashion Week, and we want to compete with National Chip Week” to “Beckham supporters tweeted their support with the hash tag #BeckhamForHM so we’d like you to support us with the tag #BeckhamForGU”. Did you catch that? A tried and true method for getting support from celebrities is to trend their name, or blow up their connect panel on Twitter with tweets relating to your website. Of course, you need to get the massive response required to do one of those first.

One of the primary tenants of Social Media Marketing is that networkers don’t want to be coaxed into anything. Spelling it out is a good way to get your best friends to follow through, but it’s a way to guarantee that the masses won’t feel the control it takes to get exponential growth. People want to feel like they discovered something great, that they decided their own reaction, and that they’re part of an inside joke.

Looking at the Big Picture with the Golden Union Advertisement

I can’t access their Facebook page (probably a regional block) and their Twitter follower count is relatively small. The 11,000 views that the video has now are likely from appearing in the related videos for the David Beckham video. On most accounts I’ve saw, the fish and chips are good. There are some other facets of this campaign that I don’t get, like Oxford Street (where the chippy is located). It is mentioned in several reviews, and is obviously a crowded thoroughfare for some reason or another. Still, I can’t imagine people who are about to eat fish want to see a half-naked man gobbling down English French fries and spinning around like a fairy in briefs.

That’s neither here nor there however, the campaign itself is all I’m qualified to speak on. It is also unclear whether the shop outsourced the production, but that is likely the case. It appears to be the case of a hack social media manager with an idea that everyone thought was brilliant, decent video production skills, but terrible acumen when it comes to Social Media itself. There were so many small mistakes that this campaign was destined to fail before the video was even posted, and would have failed even if the video was amazing.

What Would I Do Differently?

I have successfully produced some viral content. It is completely possible given the right budget (although still reliant on luck). I don’t want to make you think I’m behind the scumbag Steve meme, because I’m not, but the success I’ve had with viral content has been higher than related content, and much higher than the success of my peers. As a testament to the luck involved, I’ve also had general content that has landed more conversions, and even page views, than content that I have engineered viral campaigns behind. Success is in the eye of the beholder as well, but in the case of a video spoof of a Superbowl commercial for a metropolitan eatery, I would expect to draw 10 percent of the original content’s views if the parody was produced within a month of the original. Here are some tricks and tips I have successfully used to spark interest in a piece of content.

• Always remove all ties to the production company, actors (unless more famous than the brand), and the targeted company itself except the bare minimum for conversion. If you want credit, create a meme that gets 100 million views and people will research you.
• Use your Social Channels to spread the word, but you’re looking for a spark, not to burn the fire yourself.
• To get a video viral on YouTube, you need to get into the popular video stream. If you manage to make it, the inherent humor or quality of your content will do the rest.
• Memes are made at Reddit and 4chan. Pay a popular member to submit your content. They have a much better shot at getting past the gate (the unwritten rules that keep outsiders from getting shared).
• Stumbleupon is an alternative to Reddit, but you’ll need an ambassador if your Stumbleupon account isn’t popular itself.
• If your first attempts fail, re-purpose the content and try again with the new content referring back to your original.
• Monitor Google trends. I would say a Beckham spoof was a week too late, however if Beckham was scheduled to do an interview for GQ this week, search results would rise, and a lot more people would be looking for the original video.

In the end, you need to ask yourself “Is this the best thing I’ve saw on the Internet this year?” If it isn’t, go back to the drawing board. If it is, don’t ruin your viral campaign by committing obvious faux-pas and overly directing the masses. You must rely on organic conductivity, and there’s only so much you can do before you’re interfering with the process itself. Then again, on a world stage, do you really want English food? This joke sums up a problem with going viral with English fish and chips.

Heaven: where the police are British, the cooks French, the mechanics
German, the lovers Italian, and it is all organized and run by the Swiss.

Hell: where the police are German, the cooks British, the mechanics
French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized and run by the Italians

Ok, if you read as many articles as I do (or at least see as many headlines) you’ve surely noticed Pinterest fever among bloggers lately. What’s Pinterest you say? Well, it’s a simple Social Media platform called a Pin Board that lets you share your user generated content in a way that is markedly more visual than Facebook or Google+. It’s also a runaway train, reaching the 10 million member mark a few weeks ago after an explosion of publicity in early 2012.

If you think you’re reporting news or breaking a big story to your readers by directing them toward Pinterest, sadly you aren’t. I have been directing friends and clients in feminine businesses to get into Pinterest since last fall, and most other tech savvy consultants have been doing so as well. For example my friend Jason Ramsey runs an online wig store, and given the target demographic (then and now) I felt that Pinterest would be a good place to target consumers for him. He even mentioned it in a LinkedIn recommendation he did for me.

I wasn’t the one who realized Pinterest was going to be big; I heard it from someone else. I wasn’t the only one who knew, several friends (Kevin Henney being one, go follow him on Twitter right now if you don’t do so yet. I bet he’ll have a line on the next big network before it goes viral next time as well. He also has a very high level of quality in his Twitter shares.) had come to the same conclusions as me independently. Other jewelers, makeup salesman, and photographers jumped on the bandwagon too. I would actually be ashamed to write about Pinterest being the next great Social Network in January 2012; it’s already here, and you’re about 4 months too late to get the benefit of early adoption. Even I was probably late to the reception, but if you’re breaking the news as Pinterest being the next big thing in February 2012, you’re saying that the couple with kids in college just got married.

Some people are starting to get a handle on it. I would say that the most important thing to do starting out is get in on the ground floor, produce high quality content and lots of it. You can’t build one of the massive followings that make these virgin networks pay off if you don’t go viral. If you’re just starting on Pinterest, it’s probably too late (I’ve gotten 200 followers on my blank Pin board because my Facebook friends automatically added me when they set up their account. 120 of those people will never follow anyone again). The only marketing advice I’m hearing however is things like “You can link pictures back to your blog”. You’d think people had never seen a hyperlink before.

 Even without diving deep into the Pinterest pool, I can give you a few things to think about. They may or may not help your Pinterest campaign, but for those who put thought into social media, you’ll find this list extremely helpful.

Facebook made Pinterest

Even though Pinterest was a burgeoning social platform several months ago, no one was calling it the new Twitter. So what had made Pinterest explode in popularity so abruptly? If you haven’t noticed, Pinterest is now integrated with Facebook. You can get invites through Facebook, you can sign up through Facebook, and you can import an invite list from your Facebook friends. Without this connection, Pinterest wouldn’t be nearly as viral as it is today. Being part of the Facebook stable of premiere applications gives a level of trust and community that a startup social network wouldn’t otherwise have. Let’s not confuse the success of Pinterest with the popularity of Facebook. It’s really not fair to Zuckerberg to give them ALL of the credit.

 Don’t Discount the Demographic

I mentioned earlier that I recommended everyone with a female target end user to pick up a Pinterest account. Something like 84 percent of active Pinterest users are female, so there really is nothing genius there. However, I am not naïve or stupid enough to discount the value for other products in this arena. In the last 50 years advertisers routinely keep the fairer sex in mind when pitching everything from men’s deodorant and jockstraps to my little pony and Nerf guns. I know what you’re thinking; what would a woman do with a Nerf gun and a jock strap? Nothing, but they are just as likely as a man to buy them.

Women still do most of the shopping in America, and it is a power not lost on people who are truly hip to advertising. If your ads do something to turn Mrs. Butterworth off, you better believe that Mr. Butterworth will not be eating your pancakes. On the other hand, you can keep the Pillsbury Dough boy in Hanes knit t-shirts if you come across as appealing to the Pillsbury Dough girl in your marketing campaign.

Remember that this gate swings both ways. You aren’t really selling lingerie to women; you’re selling it to their partners. If I don’t like it, she won’t wear it. If she won’t wear it, she won’t buy it. Even though women wear those shiny engagement rings, I don’t think many women actually buy them. Consider the point of sale, the end user, and everything in between. You may find that your brand could garner a lot more use out of a female social network than your first thought.

It’s a Visual Campaign

Why do chefs and photographers do so well on Instagram? Because their products are insanely visual, and easy on the eyes. Certain niches are made for photo sharing, and it’s almost mandatory for networkers in those areas to explore networks that allow them to shine. You only get one shot to make an impression with a photo, so stage everything as perfectly as possible. The first thing I noticed about Pinterest is that the most popular boards look like a home decorating magazine. These women are creative and have an eye for color. You know what the good thing about this setup is though? Only one person has to re-pin a picture to make it go viral. Odds are that person only re-pins photos that are as attractive as the other top photos.

Learn some photography techniques and ways to get the most out of available light. If you have the opportunity to set a scene, take it. If you’re working candidly, research other photographers who get good results. Like everything worth doing, Pinterest is only worth doing well. Believe me when I say that taking a one hour photography class is worth 100x more than reading 6 articles about how great Pinterest is and how many users it has lured in the last two months.

A lot of people will never use it

We can all agree that Facebook and Twitter are great investments for business. The reach is global, massive, targeted and free. Even though Pinterest is the hottest thing since touch screen smart phones, yours truly will likely never be heavily involved with it. The number of men who share that opinion is higher than you might think. Women say that we don’t understand the concept, or that it just isn’t for us, but I’ll let you in on a secret: we don’t like the crowd it draws. Don’t get me wrong, I love women. What I don’t like is the pushy stay at home soccer mom who argues on the Internet for 4 hours every day. When I lived in Michigan, a poll showed that soccer moms were more hated than burglars, auditors, traffic cops, lawyers, and even telemarketers. When I started writing for Yahoo!, I tried to help out new writers and people with less experience in technology matters on their forums (They even commended me for trying when I was awarded the Rising Star Award), but the nastiness of the middle aged ‘momprenuers’ who either thought that I was moving in on their roles, or have some sort of inferiority complex they can’t overcome made sure that I didn’t hang around long (that community will never grow because of it).

I like everyone I meet online with very few exceptions, and I am proud to say that in my online circles people are welcoming, nice, and help each other. There is more than enough business for people who want to work, and it has never made me feel better about myself putting down others. I do however avoid a certain sect of women that give all liberal mothers a bad name.

I know so many great mothers that run businesses online and do so without stepping on other people’s toes that it makes me especially dislike the ones who are basically trolls. I know that Pinterest has had a good reputation so far, but I’ve also heard some horror stories. It is this group that can keep Pinterest from truly going mainstream. The reason I believe this is because the female freelancers I know who are happy, well-adjusted and not intimidated by new talent aren’t currently using Pinterest heavily. I hope you remember to treat every person as an individual, and not stereotype. There’s no person in the world nicer than a good mother, and that’s why I feel so sorry for the children of a woman who feels the need to watch others like a hawk on forums, and never chimes in until they get a chance to try and discredit someone. That personality is toxic in any environment.

Let’s sum up today’s lesson:

• Facebook affiliation = Good Thing
• Women make a lot of purchasing decisions. Pinterest may be the best place to sell men’s hair gel.
• Pinterest is run on captivating visuals. Improved photography = improved Pinterest Campaign.
• Pinterest has kept the community stable because the topics haven’t trended into territory that brings out the pretentious conceited assholes that are lurking in their midst.  It’s a ticking time bomb, but as long as Pinterest doesn’t tackle certain subjects, they may slay that dragon.

Bloggers who Blogged about Pinterest in the Last 2 weeks

I’ve given you a few things to consider, but I want you to know that you made the right move. Even if you didn’t know about Pinterest before three weeks ago, or you’ve known for some time but never wrote about it, last week was a great time to chime in. Pinterest is the hot topic, and you couldn’t be more relevant. Tips on how to network there, lists of the top users, features that are important but hardly ever used, all these are things that make a good blog post today, and good search engine fodder a year from now. I may have spent the last 1600 words (a long winded post, even by my standards) ragging on it, but it’s the right idea. I sincerely hope you got to this part before you raged all over the comments .

You spent your time well if you wrote about Pinterest last week, and even though I didn’t read your post (remember -not because I am prejudice against Pinterest or because I don’t see potential for business, but because I don’t care lol) doesn’t mean that average people didn’t read it either. With all the usual suspects in blogging though, some facts get overlooked, and I felt like the best way to spend my blogging hour this week was to address the ignored, and let everyone else worry about the obvious. What do you think about Pinterest? Do you have ideas about a Pinterest marketing campaign that includes more than “linking your blog through pictures”? If so….. I have a job for you haha!

There are just too many blogs out there. Blogging began as a way for experts to share some of their knowledge with the world, and as it became easier and easier to publish online they’ve degraded into a sounding off point for anyone with a WordPress or Blogger account. If you don’t proofread, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online. If you learned everything you know about a subject from other bloggers, you probably shouldn’t be publishing online and if you find yourself repeating the same things over and over again, you either need to publish less or you probably shouldn’t be publishing online. I mean literally, it is a massive waste of your time, as well as your readers.

Websites are 10x more efficient when you cover a different topic every week. It’s another target for long-tailed search you didn’t have before, and that’s what grows into success in web publishing. How often do you think someone searches for “Why is Social Media Important?” How about “Tips to optimize a LinkedIn profile?” If you write three posts this week on either of those subjects, and I write “How to optimize on LinkedIn”, “How to Optimize on Twitter”, and “How to optimize on Facebook”, which blog will get more hits from search? Ok, this was my tangent, back to the Pyramid.

Writing should come from an area of substance, but I begin to think more and more that most writers just decide they want to write about something before they have any experience, and expert bloggers are partly to blame. How many times have you read that a good way to improve your profile is to “Write a book or publish a blog”?

Think of blogging like the capstone on a pyramid. The base of your pyramid should be learning. Learning should be broad, a strong foundation for everything you do. I have studied everything from psychology to typography to improve my skills as a web developer. I don’t always use everything I’ve learned, but it gives me a good perspective on my deficiencies and strengths.

The middle part of your pyramid should be doing. Practice makes perfect, and if you’ve never ran a marketing campaign, what in the world made you think of starting a marketing blog? There are a hundred skills you’ve exercised in your life; a hundred possible starting points for a blog were you can add real world value. Blog about a sport you played in high school, the work you do as an adult, but never about a job you’d like to have or something you want to get into. At least provide that context to the readers if you do. However, that’s a case study (something just as valuable) and not really a blog in the general sense.

Finally the capstone of your pyramid should be writing about it. So you’re a martial arts expert eh? You’ve studied all styles of martial training; you decided to become a shaolin practitioner and practiced your skills for over a decade. You wear your black belt with pride, and can break bricks like twigs. You have become a true expert, but the  most valuable book you can publish isn’t on your martial training as a whole, but on a single form or practice that you’ve mastered above all else. “The Iron Shirt: Qigong and Meditation Techniques”.

I know that this type of advice is paramount to speaking to a brick wall, and is just as likely to alienate a beginner as it is to teach them (after all, who wants to put in the time and hard work to truly become an expert?). It’s also counter intuitive to the lesson of adopting early, which is a primary mainstay of becoming successful online (someone mentioned a lady who had developed a following of over 500,000 on Pinterest in the last few months). The truth is that the pundits who really shine in blogging arrange a trinity when it comes to this; practiced knowledge, early adoption and good writing. It has a lot to do with luck and timing, but you can adopt early as often as you want and you’ll still not become synonymous with success in your niche without practiced experience.

It is often interpreted as a sign of both expertise and outstanding time management techniques when you’ve optimized your work flow to the point that you see steady exponential gains in return while seeing a steady decrease in input. In any industry this is one of the primary objectives of every division; complete more with less.

Part of the work flow magic is having good filtering mechanisms and character judgment. If I see three links cross my Twitter feed I can tell if they are scheduled, generated, or genuinely broadcast. Over time you come to disregard things such as the paper.ly mentions and tweets that are obviously fed from an RSS feed. You learn to pass judgment quickly for the sake of efficiency, and you gradually take on a power networker’s mindset.

Earlier today I caught a mention from my friend Bonnie Sayers, who also does some heavy online networking. She was replying to someone on Twitter who had sent a simple message asking us “Have you saw Digital Learning Daily?” They didn’t provide a link, and their account was showing an egg instead of an avatar. Bonnie replied, “I have no idea what that is, or who you are”. I went on to accuse the person of being a spam bot, in fact I was under the impression that I checked the account and saw several hundred similar tweets, but Bonnie noticed that this was the only tweet that ever originated from that account.

I looked once again and saw an organic following of several popular accounts, and several accounts dealing with autism and diabetes (Bonnie is involved in Autism awareness). Even though @LiveWell_2 only has 1 follower, they’re following 42 accounts that have clearly been selected carefully. None of us know for sure how long this person has been using Twitter as a news feed, or how closely they’ve followed Bonnie’s tweets, but after I take everything into account I’d say that this person has a special affinity for Bonnie. After all, what does it take to coax a silent user to send out their first tweet? @LiveWell_2 is like the majority of social media users, a normal person who spends more time doing other things.

Looking back I thought Bonnie’s response to them made her sound abrasive, and my response made me sound pretentious. We, the social media authority, failed at connecting in this instance. I believe that Digital Learning Daily is probably a paper.ly document that @LiveWell_2 stumbled across and thought was important. When Bonnie re-tweeted an article I wrote pertaining to business, Live Well wanted to spark a conversation and believed that we (Bonnie in Particular, the one he follows) would be familiar with an established daily online newspaper (we know paper.ly is an annoying app, but Live Well doesn’t).

The longer you use social media on the level of a power networker, the farther you are removed from an average user. Close connections seem to become a smaller part of your overall output as curation and self-published content invades your feed more and more.  Since Bonnie shares several articles a day without giving it a second thought and I am speeding through my routine as efficiently as possible, we begin to become disconnected with a huge community of tweeters who are talking about their favorite TV shows, restaurants and music. We do talk about these things, but with other power networkers. Power networkers understand each other’s actions, and it pays to become acquainted with other influential people to expand your reach. Those networkers suffer from the same disconnect as you though, so before long you are effectively networking with a bunch of salesmen and pundits.

The conundrum is this: there are far fewer power networkers than there are regular people. If you’re selling a book about power networking, it’s a great network to have, but ultimately you’d have more opportunity by selling a product that average people use and marketing it to everyone. Seth Godin has surely made lots of money from selling books, but it would be safe to say that Apple makes more selling iPhones.

One of the best examples of average users creating colossal connectivity is the Beliebers faction on Twitter. Through one common interest there are some teenagers who have followings numbering in the hundreds of thousands. They have normal and general interests, they don’t use tools, and they influence thought like a hypnotist. The only routine thing they do is log into Twitter; the rest of their day is as unpredictable as it is unstructured. These are the same type of people who get millions of views on YouTube, and draw an above average number of likes because they’re real and relatable.

Using a strategy like asking a question every day and responding to the responses makes you seem even more artificial, so don’t try and strategize your way out of this one. It takes organic engagement, and it’s the epitome of a popularity contest. I am not advising you to stop being a power networker, but try and mix in some average communication that isn’t directed at furthering your agenda. By relating to others like an average social media user, you’ll begin to understand the average social media user.

The whole premise of me running this blog is to help YOU, my readers, be more successful in your online interactions. Unless you’re expanding your social presence just for fun or in anticipation of something you plan on doing in the future, part of that interaction is going to be what web developers call “The Money Site”. Your money site is where all your interaction should lead back to. It’s the place where you convert your followers into leads, and converts your leads into sales.

Landing Pages and Middle School Marketing

I know that some online personalities will tell you to link back to social media profiles, but that is a self-destructive practice. You don’t control what happens on your social network profiles, but if you are smart about your design and strategy, you can exert quite a bit of control with a design of your own creation. I’ve also heard others suggest linking to a site like Xeeme instead of your own blog. The thinking behind this is that instead of doing one action on your blog, they will add two of your social media profiles.

If you have a mild understanding of the different social media sites that are popular right now, you’ll know that they aren’t very effective for communication with strangers, and even if you send an update your followers are far more likely to miss it than to get it. Are you trying to inflate the numbers on your social media account, or create directed leads? I’m not saying you can’t turn someone into a lead through social media, you definitely can, but even the best online networker will not be able to maintain a relationship of any real value with more than 200 contacts at any one time. The science behind a landing page isn’t anything new, but it still works in a highly technical online setting. Limit their choices, grab their attention, drive the conversion.

What Trees do Profits grow on?

Online business has become increasingly popular since the economy fell this last time. The tech bubble in 2001 drove entrepreneurs from of the Internet, and the real estate bubble later in decade has brought them back. A lot of online businesses run their course the same way an offline business does; they fail after the profits and success doesn’t come to fruition.

If it was really easy, everyone would be making money online. In reality you’ll need to have a plan, and your plan needs to first of all be possible. A common formula for website profit generation looks like: Website + ????? = Profit!!! Now how stupid is that? Your plan needs to be more detailed than that. You need to know how you plan on deriving profit from your traffic, how you plan on generating traffic, what kind of numbers you need to make it all work, and a timeline for when your plan should be a reality. It isn’t going to happen overnight, online business is the tortise’s race. Your websites won’t even register on Google properly for at least 9 months, and sometimes longer. I have heard bloggers brag about getting a dramatic increase in traffic during this period and attributing it to their popularity. Once your articles start registering in SERPs, you’re just beginning.

Take Lessons from Real Business in the Real World

I learned all I needed to know about connecting the dots of a business plan from my region’s most important industry, coal mining. When you get into the coal mining business, you make profit by selling coal that is generated at the face of the mine to a buyer who buys the coal if it’s sitting in their parking lot. If you start at the face with your planning, you will go bankrupt before you get halfway to the buyer. The correct order of planning is from your buyer to the coal itself. First you examine your product (core holes, exploration, projections and mine planning). After you know what you have, it is time to plan from the outside in.

• Find a buyer who is looking for your specific product. Agree on a price and contract.
• Hire a firm to truck the coal from your wash plant to the buyer.
• Contract a preparation plant to wash and sort your product to make it suitable for market.
• Put in an order for the appropriate amount of train cars to ship the coal from the mine to the wash plant.
• Construct a belt from the train-car loading hopper to the stockpile
• Build or repair the roads used for workers and equipment to access the mine
• Plan in full detail the method you will use to transport coal from the face to the stockpile
• Now you are ready to cut the coal

If you started mining coal before putting all of the links in this chain, your whole operation will fail. The railway from your mine to the wash plant may not support the weight of modern cars. What do you do then? You can always hire a trucking company to do the job of the train, but they will cost more, and it’s possible that the added cost will render your mine unprofitable. It is important to understand that product cycle can be broken by one weak link, and you should start your planning from the outside in. Your idea could be sparked by any step along the way (the core drilling and reserve study is the spark in mining), but once you realize you know what yu’re going to be mining, it is important to make sure that there is an adequate market, and that you’re using the right sales, marketing and conduit to service that market.

Most entrepreneurs leave out links of the chain when it comes to online business, and they never complete the product cycle. They may produce content and have a buyer for their traffic (ad sense), but they never figure out how to get the traffic to their blog, or create click throughs. Others have lots of traffic being generated, but don’t know how to retain users or how to drive them to conversion. Most how-to blogging articles try and teach you how to implement or improve a link in your chain, but it has sometimes has the negative effect of making people who are trying to develop a blog lose sight of the big picture.

Do you have a comprehensive plan for how your online property will pay off in the end? Is profit or value important to you? Or is the driving force behind your networking vanity? I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing (it may be a waste of time from a business point of view), but if you know that you don’t have any plans to monetize your online presence, there are ways to optimize your other goals that may not mesh with someone who is trying to maximize profits. Filter the sources you use to educate yourself so you spend your research time wisely, and you don’t pick up habits that aren’t right for your goals. If your plans are working marvelously, let us know in the comments. If you thought planning was something you did in a garden, put your plea for assistance in the ccomments!

Everyone has their own opinion of Klout, and even though they’ve taken some hard hits along the way their brand has proven to be relatively resilient. After all, you don’t have to like Klout for their service to be a worthwhile success; you have to like the brands they connect you with.

I personally love Klout as a service. I know many people that don’t, but in my mind that means they take the score too seriously. If you go to Klout and all you see is your score, you aren’t looking very hard. My favorite part of Klout (and arguably the most relevant feature for me, as an influencer) is the perks page. I never understood picking apart every detail of a platform or application. I am a drafter by profession, and was told in school that even the best AutoCAD technicians will only use 30 percent of its capabilities. I’ve always used the parts of a platform that I found value in and understood, and simply ignored the parts that didn’t offer me anything, or the parts I didn’t care to learn about.

Klout doesn’t require me to like their brand to be eligible for perks either. They match me with the perks that are related to the topics I influence, so I’m usually eligible for technology perks, design perks, etc. So which Perks were my favorites, and which ones got the businesses more bang for their buck?

Valuable Perks – Wow, what a gift!

 So far the most relevant and probably the most valuable perk I’ve received is a free full copy of Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X4. It’s a little underpowered for the kind of design and re-touching work I do, but it has proved to be a valuable time saver when I am looking for easier ways to do complex edits. Even though the Paint Shop program was the most valuable in dollars and cents, I have only tweeted about it once and the actual product I received was a product key (a digital item). I will likely try to support Paint Shop more in the future if they cross the news because I appreciate the swag. Like the Red Bull perk, I feel like I’m sponsored by Corel now. Like a Nascar driver or something, I wear the red bull hat when I’m doing interviews in the winner’s circle.

Useful Perks – Who wouldn’t want this?

My favorite Perk as far as social media goes was the 25$ gift card I received from Shop Small. The gift cards were pretty much American Express pre-loaded debit cards with 25$, but Shop Small asked that you spend them at local small businesses. I was ecstatic about getting a chance to support businesses here in Eastern KY, and started a small campaign to find a local small business owner to advertise during the holidays. Even though I have a decent level of regional influence, the small amount of small business in the area made it hard to find someone to work with. I ended up using my gift card at Readmore Bookstore on some magazines. I was disappointed that Eastern Kentucky businesses have so little Social Media in place that none of them took advantage of my campaign.

Cheap but cool, the sweet spot for advertisers

These perks were great for me, but I can imagine that the cost is prohibitive for lots of businesses. The latest two perks however are made for Klout in my opinion. The first was two pencils, the Blackwing Palomino and the Blackwing 602. They’re premium pencils, costing about 50 cents apiece when you buy them, but writers were paying $20 for the 602 a few years ago on eBay. I wasn’t terribly excited about the perk until I received it. The pencils were packaged in a nice packaging that included a wax stamp, a vintage tag, velour baggy, a gold stamp, and a fancy box. The merchandise included the two pencils, a pack of replacement erasers, and a special sharpener that sharpens the wood and the lead separately.

It is relatively cheap merchandise, but I truly got the feeling of receiving an upscale item of importance. It was all in the packaging, the legend of the Blackwing, and the limited 602 release. The pencils are pretty cool and designed well, but ultimately they are just pencils. 50 cents is within my price range for writing instruments though, so Blackwing has likely made a lifelong customer of me, a civil engineering technician who numbers among the small percentage of people still using pencils everyday on the job. I kept the 602 for myself, and gave the Palomino to the other project manager.

The last perk I received was the “Person of Interest Screen Wipe”. I expected a small rag like is included with iPhones and cameras, but instead this had a sticky surface on one side (it doesn’t leave any residue in case you’re wondering) so you could attach it to a device. The other side was micro fiber, and did an acceptable job of cleaning the prints off of my iPod screen. The screen wipe is designed to be used about 10 times, until the sticky surface doesn’t stick anymore, and then disposed of. This is a very cheap item, probably costing just a few cents when made in bulk.

Do you ever notice how your friends ask about your phone case or your phone when they see you take a call or pull it out to check the time? Well, this little thing arouses even more interest than your average accessory, and I’ve had to explain the story of how I got it in detail at least 10 times (my iPod rarely gets saw by anyone else, so it has been pretty much every time it has been pulled out of my pocket in the last 3 weeks). I may not ever watch the show on CBS, but I’d have never even heard of it if it hadn’t been for Klout. I can’t say if any of the people who were exposed to my screen wipe will watch, but it will no doubt cause some déjà vu when they see a commercial or are tuned it at the beginning of the show.

Future Perks – For Better or Worse?

As companies get data from their Klout campaigns, we will likely see more of these massive campaigns delivering smaller items. Hopefully there will still be some nicer, more expensive items for me to claim as well! Either way I have never been turned down by a girl or employer because of a low Klout score, and I don’t care too much about yours either. Since your tirade about how Klout invades people’s privacy didn’t create a mass exodus, you might as well reactivate your account and get some free pencils and screen wipes (and Moo business cards. That was another Perk that will likely lead to continued business on my part).

Keep in mind, Klout is still in Beta. Companies are still trying to figure out the best way to market through their list of influencers, and Klout is still trying to figure out how to best score users. Remember that the average user score is approximately 25 and your score of 50 says you’re pretty darn influential. If your score is lower than you think it should be, ask yourself why that is. A possible reason is because you aren’t as influential on Twitter as you are in your own mind. Another possible reason is because Klout is just a number that represents the data that is available.

We all know people who are much more influential than their Klout score would indicate. There are forums where the most popular users rival the influence of social media addicts I know with Klout scores of 80. There are even some tech pundits who are super influential, but somehow fall behind users who are extremely active (but exert little influence). When asked about what they think about that, most of those people will tell you “It’s just a number; I’m not going to lose sleep over something that has no bearing on anything besides my ego”. Maybe it’s that ecclesiastical wisdom that made them influential in the first place?

I’ve been developing websites for a relatively long time. There are several misconceptions about the use of the term web developer, and even those hobbyist website designers don’t understand the multitude of skills it takes to be a full service web developer in today’s market. The tools of the trade, the need to know programming languages, the resource websites and the premiere communities change yearly, so even if you were a grade A developer last year, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be among the best next year. A good developer constantly learns and improves.

Even though I’ve been pretty good about staying up with mainstream evolutions, there are always tools you miss. Here are a few of the best resources available, bar none. No matter what your level of involvement with web development, marketing or design, you need to know about these tools if you wish to be considered in the know.

Domain Name Search

I use a wide variety of applications to hunt for open domain names. I use the domain name checker on both the Go Daddy and Yahoo! small business websites for their unique advantages, and a few other proprietary tools that help me get the best domains on the market. One of the most valuable tools is the Lean Domain Search, which finds available domains with the keywords you’re targeting. It’s almost impossible to find relevant domains that aren’t a mile long or are made up of alternate spellings (a terrible waste of money unless you’re branding that alternate spelling), but the Lean Domain Search engine finds an available domain that will fit your needs in almost every instance.

Firebug

When I first started designing websites the biggest part of my learning came from reverse engineering the source code of other websites. All websites were coded in HTML and most were coded by hand so the HTML was neatly formatted. Soon designers were using tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver that made the coding a jumbled mess, and later moved on to CSS and PHP, which made the regular source code pretty much useless when it came to learning from design. Enter the FireBug add on for Firefox and Chrome. Firebug allows you to select objects on a website and it collates all the CSS, required PHP and JavaScript files, and gives you the relevant coding to help make edits to the page. I was ignorant to this tool until recently when Tim Brand recommended it to me, and this one tool has increased my productivity over 1,000% and made edits that formerly took me a couple days take just a couple hours, or minutes in some cases. If you aren’t very skilled at editing the CSS on your WordPress blog, Firebug is the first step in learning, much like the view source command allowed me to learn HTML back in the day.

Mail Chimp

I know you guys are hip to social media, but the truth is that it’s very much a fad. Technology experts agree that the current social media scene will change drastically in the next couple of years, and the stationary you printed with a link to your Twitter feed may become obsolete. The safest bet for a medium that will allow you to contact your followers 10 years from now is e-mail. It has the type of staying power that other communication just don’t have (think ICQ, MySpace or AOL). If you think that your favorite social networks, even Facebook, are impervious to the same fate that ICQ or MySpace suffered, you’re what the pundits call naïve. Safeguard your hard work in online marketing by developing a mailing list.

Aweber is a popular option and is widely held as one of the best list management services, but it costs nearly 20$ per month (over 10 years you’re looking at $2,500). Mail chimp offers a free alternative that meets the needs of most online marketers, and is by far the best free list management service. Your free account can accumulate up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 e-mails per month before you’re forced to upgrade. You can always export your entire list and take it with you if you decide to use another service, but I think you’ll be plenty satisfied with the chimp if you can get your widget’s appearance edited to suit you.  Use this link and you’ll get $30 in Monkey Rewards which can be  used for purchases above and beyond the free account if you ever decide you need more.

Gimp

Gimp is a Freeware image editing program whose development is crowd sourced like Wikipedia or the Linux platform.  The Gimp application is capable of meeting most basic image editing needs, and has been adopted by a number of graphic designers already. I recently had a discussion with a computer science professor and he was under the impression that the only reason Gimp hasn’t become the industry standard is because teenagers can easily get pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop. I haven’t used Gimp much, but I don’t use Photoshop much either. I have been managing to make due with an obsolete version of Macromedia Fireworks for years, just to show you that you don’t need Photoshop to make visually stunning graphics or re-touch photos. Gimp is available for free download here. Since you have nothing to lose, I highly suggest checking it out.

WP Greet Box

As I write this blog post, I realize the primary use of it is to educate the readers, and provide content that potential readers may find valuable.  The quality of the content will dictate whether or not you take any further action, so I try to offer sharing buttons and subscribe features to meet every need you would have as a reader. I don’t know where my next readers will come from, but WP Greet Box does. At the top of this post it welcomes you from the social network you came from (Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), offers you the opportunity to share back to that network or reminds you to subscribe via RSS.

If you found my post on Twitter, then you will be asked by the plugin to tweet it to your friends. If you came from Stumbleupon, it will ask you to give this post a thumbs up. This is effective because if you found my blog post on a certain network, you are more likely to share it on that specific network. As for those who visit directly or through a link not associated with a social network, my RSS subscribers have increased 30 percent since I got the plugin installed. It isn’t as intrusive as a pop-up, so I consider WP Greet Box the best of both worlds! The plugin has 32 default greetings for referrers programmed, but you can easily program your own greetings if you’d like.

BONUS: Comment Luv

If you run a self hosted wordpress Blog, I would recommend a supplemental commenting plugin. In my experience, Comment Luv Premium has increased the comments on my blog by several hundred percent, and it draws me in to commenting on blogs where I see it. For commenting on this blog you get to link back to a recent post on your WordPress blog, and if you share this post on a Social Network through the Comment Luv plugin, you can unlock extra features. So not only does the plugin drive engagement, it promotes sharing by allowing users to choose from a wider variety of posts. You can set it up so it only allows commenters that tweet your post to have the Do Follow link if you’d like, or any other combination of incentives for engagement.

Full Disclosure: I am a paid affiliate of Comment Luv and Aweber, both being tools that I highly recommend and would endorse regardless of affiliation. I am a partner with Mail Chimp, and while I do not get paid for referrals directly, I get a credit for any future purchases. Since I use the free version, I am unlikely to ever use the credit. I am in no way affiliated with Lean Domain Search, WP Greet Box, Firebug or Gimp, I just find their applications to be very valuable and hope you do too! I support Freeware.

Since there are several ways to add value to your business in the long run by creating personal connections with customers and building a strong online presence to increase your brand awareness, it can be difficult to measure your overall results. Here are some ways to increase the accuracy and relevance of your analytics, and find ways to improve what you’re doing online.

Overall Presence vs. Single Campaign

It is easier to track progress if you separate your measurements into individual campaigns as well as tracking your overall gains. For instance record the number of followers you had on Facebook before you start a contest, and track the results for a month. If you had grown your Likes count by 120 since you started the page a year ago, and gained 26 followers in the month you ran the contest, you know that you practically doubled your conversion rate.

The more statistics you can track, the more you can deduce from analysis. For instance if in your Facebook contest you gave away a $50 gift card for Best Buy and increased your followers by 26 in a month, your cost per conversion is roughly $2.00. If you buy $50 worth of advertising and generate 35 likes in that month, your cost per conversion is roughly $1.43. It’s also important to consider who the Likes are, the quality of your audience.

Keep your control as stable as possible when conducting measurements

One of the best times to make precise measurements is in the beginning. If your Twitter account has 0 followers and you use a method to grow that number, it’s safe to say that most of your followers will be a result of that method. If you are trying to get exact measurements on a specific method and one of your Tweets goes viral, your results will look better than they actually are. It’s always smart to finish one campaign before you move on to the next. You’ll never know if the ads you run in next Sunday’s newspaper helped any if you are also running a commercial on the Super bowl the same day.

Use the Stock Analytics Programs

I have used hundreds of programs to measure and analyze web traffic, and in my opinion the current Google Analytics application and Facebook Page Insights are two of the best measurement programs I have ever used. The most important stats are the simplest ones. While both platforms include the simple stats in abundance, they also include metrics that are surprisingly telling when it comes to the question “Is What I’m Doing Working?”

One of my favorite tools is Google’s In Page Analytics. Social media bloggers went crazy when the first firms published heat map studies that showed where users looked when given 10 seconds to view a web page. Most webmasters don’t have the budget to afford a heat map study, but Google’s In-Page analytics gives you a “click-heat map” for free. Access in-page analytics from your site’s dashboard under the content menu.

Through extensive analysis across a number of websites I have come to find that category links are practically worthless on niche blogs where most of the content is related. However on content sites that cover a wide range of topics, category links are often some of the most used. Many marketers have been denouncing the “About me” pages recently, which is an example of blogger egos leading them to believe their own opinions as fact. The About me pages rank in the top 10% of links above the fold in all cases I’ve recently studied except for one, and often rank as the most visited link. In response to the most recent in-page analytics for this blog, I will be removing category links all-together soon in favor of site-specific pages.

Solicit Feedback from Users

You can’t always get good measurements if your success doesn’t rest solely on a sales or conversion metric. The most beneficial aspects of social media marketing are often considered to be public relations, product perception and product awareness. Even with all these high powered analytics, simple customer feedback is still one of the most valuable measurements you can get.

I would recommend getting feedback from readers as opposed to other bloggers or consultants. The best feedback will be the feedback that comes from your targeted customer. Tone and response rates are often as telling as the feedback itself (irate customers who reply in droves signal a major problem with your strategy, but so does apathetic customers who don’t even care to respond).

It’s easy to ignore measurement and analytics when you dedicate so much time to production and maintenance, but it is an essential process if you want to improve. Take as many measurements as possible, and try to keep everything in context. Be sure to record time frames and dates, to add chronology to that context. What types of measurements do you use? What types of measurements are you interested in, and why?

One of the primary reasons that people have taken to the Internet as a form of entertainment is the need to be creative. 15 years ago writers were limited to print media, which made getting pieces published relatively competitive. At the very least an editor would need to approve your article, which meant that they vouched for your skill as a writer and the facts that you stated in the piece.

Now it’s possible for anyone to publish online, with very little oversight. With the advent of social media, you don’t even need a website to create and publish content for the world to see. We have become our own editors, and whether you rant on Facebook or publish a blog on Tumblr, you are now a writer of sorts.

I have been writing for niche websites since I was young. At that time you had to know HTML to publish content on the Internet, and that made webmasters reluctant to publish material written poorly or material that stated inaccurate facts. The advent of Google changed the game because volume overtook quality as the primary means for websites to reach more readers, and the advent of social media lowered the quality standard on the Internet as a whole.

Today at work a friend was telling a story about her child watching Sesame Street. It got the small group of employees on the subject of children’s shows, to which one replied “Did you know Mr. Rogers was an assassin?” I was struck with the idea that the soft spoken and gentile kids TV host had been a Marine sniper in Vietnam, but ultimately didn’t believe it. “It’s true, I read it. Look it up on the Internet when you get a chance”. So… I did. It turns out that this rumor has been circulating since the mid-1990s, and that Mr. Rogers was never a member of the military, and has been a preacher of TV host his entire adult life. I won’t even tell the coworker the truth because they’ll want to argue about it, and want proof of my allegations. How in the world did the burden of proof get put on me?

Yesterday a graphic showing the last five Presidents along with their contributions to the public debt came across Facebook. It struck me as odd that it showed Barack Obama with a much smaller contribution to the national debt than any of the previous four Presidents, so I decided to take a closer look. It turns out that the graph, while technically accurate, displayed a worthless measure and passed it off as proof that Barack Obama was the most fiscally responsible leader of my lifetime.

The graph essentially showed the amount of debt that each President had accumulated as a percentage of the total debt. Since Obama had started his first term with a 10 trillion dollar deficit, the 3.5 trillion that he racked up made his figure 34 percent. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan had contributed 1.8 trillion to a 4 trillion dollar debt, making his figure over 200 percent. Any economist will tell you that this is a worthless measure, but the average person figured that the use of percentages was important to adjust for inflation. Not to mention Obama had only been in office two years when the graphic was made. He is in fact on track to create 732 percent more national debt than Ronald Reagan.

This is remarkable to us because the graphic had several thousand shares and had prompted Facebook users to discuss how much more debt we had in 1985. When I pointed out the inaccuracies of the graphic, there were some users who even wanted to argue that I was wrong (obviously conditioned by years of political squabbling) in my observations. I was the one who checked the facts though, and in reality I couldn’t care less about which President won on the Facebook graphic. Hell, I wish it was Obama because that would mean we would have an improving economy. I was more concerned with everyone taking the graphic at face value, and propagating inaccurate information.  (Note: Gross-Public-Debt as a percentage of the GDP is a much better statistic to use when comparing the economic success of successive Presidents’ administrations.)

I can’t be there to fact check every post made by my friends on social media. It is entirely up to you, the editor, to make sure that you only post accurate information. One of the best resources ever conceived on the World Wide Web is Snopes.com, a website run by a husband and wife team dedicated to chronicling and dispelling the stories that circulate online. They started when incredible stories started appearing in chain letters, and have continued as social media became the primary means to make bullshit go viral. I didn’t have to go to the White House website and pour over decades of facts and figures to learn that the Obama graphic was rubbish. All it took was a two minute visit to Snopes to search for and then read the commentary.

False reports of missing children and “Mr. Rogers was an assassin” are more prevalent than ever. They are always going to make a good story, after all things that are mundane don’t go viral. There will be lots of your friends comment in outrage and disbelief, but you’re hurting your reputation as an honest source with the readers who shake their head and move on to another post. It’s not a crime to be gullible, but passing on an outrageous story as the truth without confirming it only hurts your credibility.

It isn’t often that the whole Internet agrees on a single topic. Knowing how rare this occasion actually is makes yesterday’s mass blackout in response to the Stop Online Piracy Act all the more special. The unprecedented strike ledthousands of websites to replace their main page with a redirect to one of the many online petitions and applications coded to allow user to quickly send a response to officials in regards to SOPA. I thought it was too gimmicky at first, but was a believer by the time Wikipedia reported higher than average page hits and 12 of the congressman who had been backing the legislation withdrew their support.

Some analysts downplayed the significance saying that most of the active respondents were merely jumping on the bandwagon. I think all that yesterday did was cause people to get proactive in their response. It’s clear that the Internet community at large is wholly against the SOPA bill and any variation thereof. Instead of writing about it in an article or on Facebook yesterday, they wrote about it in a letter, to a congressman. Technology flexed its muscles in the application developed that not only looked up the contact information of your congressman for you, but also generated a contact form for an e-mail (though they suggested you use a phone call).

What is SOPA Really?

Basically SOPA will give more power to owners of intellectual property when pursuing legal action against websites that infringe on the creator’s copyright without adhering to “Fair Use” (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act). In its current form the creators of an IP will not be able to pursue remuneration, but will be able to request that the material in question to be removed until there is a hearing. SOPA also penalizes websites for linking to sites that infringe on copyrighted material, and it holds websites accountable for content posted by users. Fair use is vague as is, so many people are misunderstanding the scope of the actual law (it will not shut down the Internet as we know it).

The significant problem with SOPA and bills like it is that it leaves much of the future of the Internet in the hands of the courts. Judges may interpret the legislation different in the future, and the interpretation is by in large subjective to the viewpoints of law enforcement agencies, the judicial system, and even individuals who will have the ability to file for a court order. The only significant piracy that would be stopped is from torrent sites, but pirates would adapt and be affected very little in the grand scheme of things.

 Who Supports SOPA? We All Seem to Hate it!

If you are like many people and get your news from a computer you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in support of SOPA other than a few holdouts in congress. In a popular vote SOPA wouldn’t stand the slightest chance, and would surprise me if it garnered more than 5 percent of the total vote. There are supporters however, and while it took a special widget that did the work for us to get messages out to our representatives, the recording industry and Hollywood studios are showing their support in person and with monetary donations on a daily basis.

I’m a writer, and the majority of online content consists of articles. All of my writer friends are against SOPA even though it would give us more power to collect damages in a case of plagiarism. The current method of sending a DMCA notice to offending websites is adequate, and the majority of online content creators do not have the money to pursue a website over a single violation of Copyright law. SOPA is fueled by the people who had the FBI notice and $25,000 fine put on VHS tapes, the executives and Metallica members who lobbied against Napster, and large software corporations who actually depend largely on the pirated versions of their software to keep their position as an industry standard.

 Is it Over? Did We Win?

As an active participant in the ongoing technology discussion I get a chance to see the various online responses, and the way you win SOPA in the long run might just be the same way that Anonymous runs denial of service attacks. By using technology to easily crowd source the proper actions America overwhelmed their Representatives and Senators yesterday. Keep in mind that yesterday was just a short battle in what is determined to be an ongoing war. It’s a war that the Internet is destined to lose unless we learn how to strike first to prevent special interests from buying their way out from under public opinion. They’ll just keep refining the bill until something passes, and then subjective authorities will finish the rest.

The major victory yesterday was in the technology. By using redirects voluntarily placed on popular websites, the opposition to SOPA was heard loud and clear. One of the primary answers to SOPA is that a new law will not stop online piracy, but we may be able to use technology itself to do it without creating casualties out of legitimate enterprise. If we can work together and beat congress, we can work together and defeat the type of piracy that is a problem. Even if we are fighting a losing battle against a U.S. government that is set on bringing the rule of law to the Internet, we may be able to call it a win by minimizing the damage done to the websites we love.

Facebook, Twitter and exploratory social media campaigns have become ubiquitous in the marketing departments of the service industry, as well as most retailers and their vertically integrated partners. There is a Facebook icon on every bag of Lays potato chips. You will rarely interact with a company without getting reminded to visit them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. All the news agencies, all restaurants, the majority of celebrity professionals and hoards of others have already embraced social media. When I hear someone insinuate that there are lots of hold outs, I can’t help but think they missed the boat themselves.

Marketing firms who worked on JC Penny print ads in the 1980s embraced technology just as much as every other industry in the 1990s. Some social media bloggers aren’t even aware of what the larger firms are doing, or even the strategies of mid-sized firms who will begin bombarding them with offers and blogger outreach programs once their blogs reach decent levels of traffic and engagement.  I was ecstatic last week after receiving a pair of offers to place small marketing devices on this blog. I didn’t expect to be tapped for that type of opportunity so early on, but it told me that I’m doing something right. (I declined both offers sadly, but usually where there is smoke there’s fire, and I expect to receive more in the months to come.)

In the early 2000s boutique marketing firms that specialized in online communications started to pop up, and full service marketing firms were quick to copy and expand on their ideas. Before the bottom fell out of the economy there was an explosion of investment and research in the ways companies could better serve their customers through technology. As the economy started to slide, smaller business started to look to the World Wide Web for expansion and a means to keep their businesses from going under.

One segment of the corporate world that has baffled online marketing researchers has been the Fortune 500.  In 2008, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth compiled the first study regarding the use of Social Media by Fortune 500 companies that year. There are several factors that made the results difficult to interpret, and have allowed some journalists to spin the evidence in whichever way they feel like social media adoption rates should be trending.

The problems with the Fortune 500 as a control group are numerous. The most obvious being that not all Fortune 500 companies deal directly with the public, and therefor do not have an imminent need to invest in the space. Given the fact that much of the Fortune 500 is composed of conglomerates that own subsidiary companies, a study focusing on the primary corporations miss heavy social media use in sectors where there is a need for a high level of public interaction. Finally, there is evidence of many Fortune 500 companies who use blogging and other social media internally as a means to engage employees. Since the students researching this study could not get access to internal systems, only public facing social media was included.

Nevertheless, the numbers produced by the U-Mass study were relatively low, especially when compared to other institutions like Higher Education, Non-Profits, and other indices. In 2011 there were three companies in the top five without public facing blogs; Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Fannie Mae. All of these companies have a buffer between themselves and the public at large when doing business. They are also similar in the fact that they represent special interests and the government’s interference in private enterprise, both of which make negative perceptions hard to combat. Just as I wouldn’t recommend Casey Anthony to start a public relations campaign driven by social media, keeping a low profile is often the best course of action for entities that face an insurmountable negative perception. There will be organic turning points that their PR can take advantage of over time, so it pays to have an infrastructure in place to reach social media channels.

An intranet style network is a valuable means of making sure employees have a common reference for customer inquiries, and promotes the sharing of ideas. It makes sense for a company like Boeing, who isn’t going to sell 747s on the mass market anytime soon to use this technology as a means to benefit their employees. While an adequate public social media infrastructure would take little investment for a household name like Boeing, campaigns directed at consumers are not befitting their business model. The stagnant growth rates are isolated to certain industries. Industries that are by no means shy of technology, and may be using networking or other social media tools in an internal capacity.

While some analysts report that the U-Mass study shows the Fortune 500 lacking in social media, others say it shows tremendous growth and an already stable investment in social media networks and tools. Forbes says corporations are giving up on social media while reporters for the Social Times say the study shows that social media use is exploding. Trying to reconcile these conclusions is pointless. Forbes was focused on growth and paid particular attention to public-facing blogs as an indicator of social media presence. The Social Times focused on overall saturation and was more concerned with Facebook pages and Twitter profiles. In 2010 44 percent of Fortune 500 businesses thought that Facebook was the singular most important social media tool. 71 percent of companies have a Facebook Fan Page, and 59 percent had a corporate Twitter account. I strongly suggest looking at the study yourself and drawing your own conclusions.

The stat that tells me a lot about the stagnation and unimpressive integration among the Fortune 500 is that only 34 percent of companies have drawn up policies to govern blogging by their employees. Fortune 500 companies have the resources to institute widespread education and strategies like the Social Swarm. The employees should be brand ambassadors, and the social media channels should be more than another contact form nobody hardly cares about; they should be a hub for discussion related to the brand and a portal for customers to get more information about the products they already own, products they may buy, and the people who become the face of the brand in a social media setting.

Since November I have been getting between 20 and 40 new followers every day on a startup Social Network called Chime.in. I was one of the first prolific users of the Chime.in platform, and as the newness faded I was one of the few early adopters who continued my activity. Now I am listed as a recommended user when someone new joins, and it has given me the opportunity to grow my following on that network organically even though I’m not a Social Media superheavyweight like Robert Scoble or Gary Vaynerchuk.

The small following that I’m building on Chime.in is by no means monumental, but it’s organically generated within the Chime.in network. Chime.in is also popular among its users. The interface is great, but more importantly the community Chime.in has created is an extremely rare one; the users are genuinely nice and don’t let their opinions lead them around. I also know that Chime.in expects to allow their users to start generating a profit from the advertising that will be placed on their profiles. I would suspect that Chime.in already has relatively good usage rates for a Social startup that isn’t Google+, but I expect the number of active users to skyrocket once this feature goes public.

Chime.in has been a decent victory for me, and it’s mostly because I got in early and keep my stream at a high level of quality. I chose to dedicate a small amount of time to that network because I believe that it will ultimately succeed, and that I will benefit from a decent return on my time investment over the life of the network.

I’ve also embraced Google+, although I was a little late to the party, and my activity level didn’t compare to the users who replaced their other social presences with Google+.  Amanda Blain, the creator of Girlfriend Social has been noted several times as the standout success story from Google+. She had an average following on other social networks, but decided to take advantage of the rare opportunity that was the Google+ beta. She now has over 290,000 followers on Google+ and has been covered in several articles (like this one) that list her as a model for success. Other users who were a little more popular before the Google + Beta like Robert Scoble have garnered even more influence on the network, though with slightly smaller numbers.

The reason that becoming an active early adopter works so well is because of the algorithms these social networks use to list recommended connections. Since the algorithm for recommending people to follow relies on people your contacts follow, someone with a large following in the beginning will get significantly more exposure as the network grows.

I first noticed the benefits of getting in on the ground floor while playing online video games. You can be highly skilled, but someone who has had the advantage of time will ultimately be hard to replace on a leaderboard. After I had cracked the method of ranking on the popular Mobsters game for MySpace I was at the top of the weekly leaderboards every week. Even with stats that doubled the next closest player, I was going to have to play for eight more months to overtake the all-time leaders. The algorithms that are set up to award early adopters make the disadvantage even more significant on a network like Twitter or Google+.

The benefits transcend platforms, technologies, and even technology as a whole. Think about the early adopters of Microsoft or Apple stock. They’ve become millionaires many times over because they saw something of value in the beginning before the masses flocked to the products in droves.

There is a formula to organically growing your network on a budding network. You need to interact in the places that are most visible, especially to new users. You also need to keep your stream clear of low quality or offensive content. It isn’t the best time to share your friends’ content, not unless it’s really good. Visual content is also important; it has become the go to media to create viral posts on Google+. You need to follow others quickly and build your base of followers as soon as possible.

There is also a great deal of luck required. If your followers share your content and end up becoming heavily followed users themselves it will only add to your exposure. Not all platforms are going to be the next Facebook, but one common denominator between Google+ and Twitter is that tech pundits TOLD YOU SO (and capital). Everyone knew that both of those platforms were going to thrive long before they reach 50 million users. There is no reason that someone who follows social media couldn’t have been on each platform during their first days of beta testing. Here are the most important things to do next time you feel that a network is going to go viral:

• Get in Early. Networks don’t build on top of the ground floor; they raise it and build under it.
• Focus your development on that network. At least until you overtake contemporaries.
• Curate only the choicest content. Is there a meaning? Is it new? Is it something that will resonate with your followers?
• Learn all the rules, and measure your efforts. Hangouts were a big part of Google+ networking, but games were not.
• Bring your friends from Facebook and other networks. The best place to start is on familiar ground.
• Premiere your best content there. Make your followers on the new network feel like they have a front row seat.
• Be personable. The keyword in Social Networking is Social. People actually do care about what you’re doing this weekend.

I mentioned earlier that I missed out on the beginning of Google plus. Two years ago I was laid off from my job and was forced to work low wage jobs just to pay the rent and buy groceries. I couldn’t afford to pay an Internet bill, but even I was aware of Google’s new social network. I knew I missed out on an opportunity, but by June when I started back to work I had set up a Google+ account (even though I still didn’t have a home Internet connection). I was subjected to a similar form of bad luck when Twitter opened to new users. In the run up to the beta I even applied for an Intern position with the fledgling network. I did manage to set up a Twitter account shortly after they launched, but never got the chance to take advantage of the early days when there were few limits and the early adopters were the most prolific users.

Many Social Media coaches advise against using a platform in its infancy. I always hear that no one knows what a platform is capable of, or if it will be a worthwhile investment of your time. This could be true with a platform like Chime.in or Pinterest (both are doing quite well now), but when it came to Google+ it was a no brainer. What do you have to lose anyway? These networks are free to use and it takes a minimal amount of time to establish a presence. If you’re networking on Facebook anyway, your friends will still be there when you get back, believe me. You won’t need to be a prophet to see the next big opportunity. The writing will be on the wall (Facebook walls, Twitter profiles, blogs, and news websites).

Still wanting to increase your following? My new E-book “How to Get More Facebook Likes: The Comprehensive Facebook Master’s Edition” recounts a case study I made during my early days of developing my Facebook page, and touches on every single viable method to increase your Likes count. Let me tell you what works, what doesn’t, and what could potentially cost you. It’s available through the Store. For a limited time you can also get a Free Copy by joining my Monthly Newsletter mailing list. The form is at the top of the page on the right.

I see plenty of articles about how to act when using social media and what the correct etiquette is for online networkers. A lot of those articles are re-purposed from other articles, which is a big DON’T if you want to be successful. Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to learn web etiquette and the author of the article breaks a primary rule? I learned the hard way how to be effective at community management, and I sometimes cross the line when it comes to graphic or stupid content (I made a new rule, I aim to alienate <3 people everyday…. and no that is not an emoticon heart, it’s less than 3!), but in the end of the day I have enough self awareness to recognize my mistakes.

I would like to start by recommending anyone who wants to write a blog to go and try writing for an established news agency. Forbes, Technorati, Mashable, The Huffington Post and Yahoo! all take content submissions, and most editors have standard guidelines. I noticed the other day that 80 percent of blogs I’ve come across do not have the required writing skills to make their content sound credible. Simple steps like proofreading are essential in web development and if you’re going to spend a massive amount of time developing a blog then you should dedicate a negligible amount of time for proofreading. Of course I’m committing a DON’T here; I’m saying that something I’ve done is a required act to be considered viable (kinda like you aren’t on my level if you haven’t done it). Some people are naturally gifted at writing, but even those people could benefit tremendously from being accountable to a superior who has experience in online publishing. Writing for a full time editor will teach you more about writing for the Internet than reading a hundred articles or theorizing it all yourself.

(Just in the last paragraph I used numerals for 80, a number over 10. I spelled out percent, I capitalized Internet and I used adequate punctuation. These are all rules in the AP style guide. God willing there were no spelling errors.)

DO: Create a Facebook Page and Twitter Account

Don’t: Invite everyone on your friends list to a group or send group e-mails

DO: Emphasize traits people are attracted to in real life social settings.

Don’t: Duck Face or take pictures shirtless.

DO: Focus on building trust and credibility.

Don’t: Spend a lot of time discrediting rivals and colleagues.

DO: Ignore online behavior you dislike.

Don’t: Comment on anything you can opine on.

DO: Express Gratitude where it is deserved.

Don’t: Keep a thank you message on your COPY command.

DO: Express your expertise in editorial and Blog settings.

Don’t: Repurpose a tired message every day and call it a blog entry.

DO: Study trends and reactions.

Don’t: Expect to alter them with your opinions.

DO: Discuss topics with qualified pundits and contacts.

Don’t: Base decisions on advice from people who agree with you every time.

DO: Experiment with new platforms and applications.

Don’t: Try to maintain a presence on 42 social networks.

DO: Tweet interesting articles that would interest your followers.

Don’t: Tweet Mashable or other websites your followers have already read today.

DO: Offer assistance to people who are in need of your skillset.

Don’t: Promise to help everyone when you don’t have the time.

DO: Use management tools to maximize your presence, efficiency and effectiveness.

Don’t: Replace yourself with bots and RSS feeds.

DO: Have confidence in yourself and your proven strengths

Don’t: Assume you’re good at something because you’ve been around it for a year.

DO: Create the highest quality content you are capable of creating.

Don’t: Tell everyone how great your content is.

DO: Display a photo taken by a professional on your social media profiles.

Don’t: Forget to clean the spots off the mirror when you take a pic with your iPhone.

DO: Write a Blog about Pets if you were a Veterinarian for 12 years.

Don’t: Write a blog about Web Development and Marketing if you were a veterinarian for 12 years.

DO: Proofread anything you write (Blog Posts, comments, web pages, status updates)

Don’t: Expect others to “know what you meant”

DO: Find platforms that you like to use and join in on the existing conversation.

Don’t: Expect others will enjoy the platform just because you do.

DO: Tweet about trending topics and celebrities that entertain you.

Don’t: Blow up Snookie’s Twitter feed because she lost a few pounds and you need a date.

DO: Temper your actions with good advice from others

Don’t: Refuse to change because it is opposite of the behavior you recommend in your book.

BONUS

Don’t: Forget to join our mailing list for a free E-book!

DO: Stumble this post!

No one knew thiit at the time, but the musician in their midst was Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin that is valued at 3.5 million dollars. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston with an average seat of $100. The impromptu concert was a social experiment sent up by the Washington Post.

To Continue Reading “Is Your Content Joshua Bell on a Subway“, visit the complete article by Adam Justice on Social Media Sun.

Shortly after the beginning of the year every blog on the Internet is offering up their predictions for what 2012 will bring. I prefer top 10 and best of the year posts myself, but it is interesting to hear what people who are avid followers of subjects like technology and social media think will happen over the next year. After all, doesn’t prophetic ability make someone a fairly valuable pundit on just about any subject?

It wouldn’t do for me to try and predict what will transpire over the next year for a couple of reasons. The first is because I try to offer up various predictions throughout the year, like in my blog post “The Future According to Google”. The main reason however is pretty clear; most businesses file plans in one year and five year format. Since we’re dealing with businesses, their plans pertaining to what they want to happen are practically public knowledge. The pieces of the puzzle that aren’t spelled out in a prospectus or mission statement come from measurements, surveys, world news and trending human behavior. The real news comes from insider knowledge.

I usually try to give readers insight into Social Media and Business in my blog posts. I realize that a lot of my readers probably run blogs of their own, and many of them are technology or social media based. To rise above your average propaganda posts and articles that state little more than the obvious, it takes some research and inspiration. In case you’re convinced otherwise, that type of inspiration CAN NOT come from reading other blogs. You need to hone your writing and reporting skills as much as you need to concentrate on

To really blow readers minds with predictions I would try and get some insider information from a high ranking official at one of the bigger online startups. Secret strategies and private discussions shed light on the true state of affairs, and employees at tech giants Google and Facebook are relatively well connected online.  I often use LinkedIn to connect with lower level employees at the tech giants, and Twitter to connect with the head honchos at the smaller online startups. Google + is where most of the tech elite has migrated recently, and offers the best opportunity to connect with someone who might know more than the average pencil pusher.

True insight into a business’s strategy is on a need to know basis, and employees who have that type of clearance aren’t going to volunteer it to you just because you’ve had a few conversations on a social network. You are basically going to have to outsmart your target. Luckily you have the advantage of surprise, and time to make a strategy if a chance meeting comes up. Rehearse what you’d say if you happened upon Larry Page in a Google hangout. This is what you’d say to the chief engineer of forward looking projects, or whichever prime target crosses your web.

1. It’s easier to cause a slip up in a voice chat than in text response.
2. Don’t make it obvious you’re farming their data. You will need to exploit their trust.
3. Don’t ask direct questions, but get the answers that leave only 1 solution to logic you’ve worked out in regards to published news.

You’re basically going to write the possible story in your mind, and allow your target to confirm your suspicions.

A good example would be Facebook’s advertising program. With all the user data they’ve collected, a direct competitor to Google’s Ad Sense could theoretically charge more and would be more effective, so many tech pundits believe that a program like Ad Sense is in the cards for the giant social network.

I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that Facebook will expand past their website, but considering Zuckerberg’s mode of operation when he slowly added more schools to the scope of Facebook before finally allowing the general public in, I think he sees value in building his house 1 brick at a time. He is essentially saving this wild card for the day when he goes all in, at least in my opinion.

To confirm whether Facebook will introduce an Ad Sense type program for webmasters in 2012, you’d first need to form a relationship with one of the programmers in Facebook’s ad department. Using the recent trend of Facebook head hunting Google’s employees, you could spark a conversation about the state of the job market in Silicon Valley. After touching on mundane aspects, ask your contact about how experts on a search engine can possibly have much expertise with something like Facebook. Your friend may volunteer information along the lines of “They don’t work on the social networking side, the work on the ads and search functions” or even something as straightforward as “we’re going to make our advertising platform more like Google’s”.

If you were serious about wanting to get good stories and you lived near some of these developers, a face to face meeting is much more likely to yield valuable insight than anything you can do online. Most humans have the need to brag about their work, and will volunteer information without you even prying. If they aren’t very talkative, you can always grease the wheels with a few drinks.

Being a tech blogger isn’t all about the technology, there is also a great deal of reporting and writing involved. Some people would say that tricking someone who thinks they are your friend is unscrupulous, but the key is to stay at a comfortable level for you. Just getting to know the right people may be enough to get some key information leaked to you ahead of the press.

At the very least try and develop professional relationships with some mid-level employees at the most important social networks. If the only people you consult and network with are other social media users, you won’t come off as original no matter how hard you try. To use Facebook like an expert, all you need to do is become an expert on social media. To write a social media blog like an expert, you need to be an expert on social media, but you also need to have above average writing and reporting skills.

I’m sure that by now most of the people who read this have heard about Ocean Marketing’s Paul Christoforo’s social media disaster involving some extremely rude e-mail replies he made to a customer. The replies went from rude to comical as Christoforo began dropping names in the video game industry, misspelling words, acting like a big shot, and claiming to know the Mayor of Boston. Throw in misspellings in the e-mails and even on 2 of Christoforo’s Twitter accounts, steroid allegations and an overwhelmingly douchebag attitude and you can see how the target couldn’t get much better. The customer, Dave, copied the editor of Penny Arcade Mike Krahulik in one of the replies, and after Christoforo had a brief exchange with Mike, who owns the Pax East trade show, Mike let Paul know he was soon to be a celebrity.

If we want to be there we will be there with industry badges or with a booth you think I can’t team up with turtle beach , Callibur or Koy Christmas , I can’t get Kevin Kelly to pull some strings or G4 , Paul Eibler Ex CEO of take 2 ,  Rich Larocco Konami , Cliff Blizinski Epic who were working with on a gears version , Activision who were working with on a MW3 and Spider man Bundle , The Convention Center Owners themselves , Mayor of Boston come on Bud you run a show that’s all you do and lease a center in Cities you have no pull in. – Paul Christoforo dropping names of people he doesn’t know to Mike Krahulik, Owner of Pax East

The next day Krahulik ran an article with a transcript of the e-mails and Christoforo done something he had wanted to do for years being an online marketer, he went viral. To give you some context, the original dispute was over a video game controller add on that was shipped late and the customer just wanted to know if he’d get it before Christmas.

I’ve heard it said that on the Internet men are men, women are fake, and children are the FBI. I remember being online when I was 14, you don’t want to mess with every 14 year old with a computer. Kids don’t need incentive to put in the work, they grew up on technology, they are anonymous and 4chan. While Christoforo spewed threats of how important he was and who he knew he obviously didn’t expect to get the ire of the editor of Penny Arcade, but his real screw up was the gamer demographic that began a smear and harassment campaign of Godzilla proportions. Customers boycotted the controller and actually dropped the score on Amazon to 1 star. It has effectively de-railed a product that was due to sell a million or more.

Mike Krahulik: I do run Pax, but I also run a website called penny arcade. It’s kinda popular.

Paul Christoforo: Love penny Arcade !!

Mike Krahulik: I’m glad you like it! You will be on it tomorrow:)

Christoforo had a bad evening, he had to change Twitter IDs and cancel his Google voice account. By the next morning he sent a groveling e-mail begging Krahulik to “Make it stop”, but even Krahulik knew that it was too late, the faucet was on and the knob is broke. Paul Christoforo really sounded like he was sorry he got punked, the fact he was a douchebag still comes across even in his online responses.

He tried to salvage some of his reputation by doing some interviews with other websites, including MSNBC, but ultimately a guy who is unlikeable to begin with can only make it worse. He said he didn’t lose any clients yet and that he had gained hundreds of Twitter followers, and he actually thinks that this will eventually die down and those followers will forget and end up loving him. Paul, go ahead and sale your computers because you’ve bought and paid for this reputation… its forever.

“You have the power Mike Please make it stop” -Paul Christoforo’s plea early the next day

The incident reminded me of a little online fiasco called “The Cook’s Source”. You see in 2010 a woman named Judith Griggs was ousted for violating the copyright of an article written by Monica Gaudio. This is a routine occurrence online, but in reality Griggs’ print publication “The Cook’s Source” had been plagiarizing most of its content for years. Initially Gaudio asked for an apology and a 130$ donation to the Columbia school of journalism, but instead she got some ridiculously obnoxious e-mails from Griggs who said Gaudio should pay her for editing her horrible article. Griggs clearly didn’t understand copyright law and anything she said that wasn’t aggressive was passive aggressive: enter the Internet.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free! – Judith Griggs’ original response to Monica Gaudio

Several bloggers and online celebrities took up the cause and within 2 weeks Cook Source was out of business. After Griggs realized that she was in the wrong and began to receive an enormous amount of harassment she posted an apology to Gaudio on her web page. The apology tried to antagonize Gaudio and further verified Judith Griggs’ personality. Linda Holmes of NPR said “[the apology] actually sounds a lot like the e-mail Gaudio got in the first place: defiant, sure of its correctness, and, in the end, kind of baffling.” John Scalzi’s response was “This is the apology of someone who is sorry she got caught, not the apology of someone who feels she has done wrong.” Scalzi was one of the writers who originally broke the story, and the personification of Judith Griggs as “Someone who is sorry they got caught” is remarkably similar to Krahulik’s characterization of Paul Christoforo.

Hi Folks!

Well, here I am with egg on my face! I did apologise to Monica via email, but aparently it wasnt enough for her. To all of you, thank you for your interest in Cooks Source and Again, to Monica, I am sorry — my bad!
You did find a way to get your “pound of flesh…” we used to have 110 “friends,” we now have 1,870… wow!

Best to all, Judith

-Judith Griggs’ half hearted apology posted to The Cook’s Source page

I believe the Internet brings out the aggressive side of people who are passively aggressive douchebags in real life. What we have in both instances are conceited villains who snap at innocent bystanders and in doing so display both arrogance and ignorance. Judith Griggs surely thought she was one of the most gifted editors in print media, and Paul Christoforo knew was dropping names faster than his Twitter account the next day. By belittling the victims who were in the end representative of average Internet users it was impossible not to dislike these two. They both go on to further mark themselves as ignorant bad guys who still think they’re superior by offering half-hearted apologies and never really backing off of their characterizations of the victims as the cause of their problems.

Christoforo thinks he can still be a marketer and that this will blow over. Since the similarities with the Cook’s Source is so striking, I’m thinking he’ll suffer trolling and harassment for a long time to come. Judith Griggs still runs a Facebook fan page with 294 fans called “I Love to Cook”. She even tried branding it as a page for religion and Christianity first and cooking second to try and lessen any blowback from the fiasco she faced more than a year ago. Still with no identifying labels every single post is answered with reminders that she was an editor who didn’t know copyright law and that she is one of the worst business minds in the history of the world.

Paul Christoforo seems to be enjoying his 15 minutes of viral fame. Besides giving several interviews, the Escapist Magazine reports he has also tried to extort money out of N-Control through their new head of PR. Christoforo is trying to paint the whole fiasco as a win, even going so far as to call it “the best thing that could have happened to N-Control”. His actions once again conjure up deja-vu from Griggs’ humble brag about her 1,000 new Facebook friends, but as we saw they just “Liked” her because they hate her, and the 15 minutes of fame turn into an excruciatingly slow IV drip of a constant reminder from the new “Friends” of just how bad you are at dealing with the public.

The reality is that once I had posted the emails I didn’t have the power anymore. The Internet had it now and nothing I said or did was going to change that. -Mike Krahulik regarding Christoforo’s request that he do something

Social Media has caused this type of customer relations mistake as well as other types to happen more often, become much larger, spread quicker, and cause much more damage. In the last week both Bill Maher and Kasey Kahne of NASCAR fame both posted Tweets that were quite damaging putting them on the defensive. If in December of 2012 I’m writing an article about another little known prick e-mail composer, there is absolutely no reason they shouldn’t have their face rubbed in this article for not learning from viral mistakes of others. Do you still want to be the viral virus?

The Cook’s Source on Knowyourmeme

On an added note from me, here is the e-mail Dave sent Mike and Paul after Mike got involved.

Hey thanks Mike.  It’s truly a shame because I think this device is great for gamers with disabilities and problems.  I think of Child’s Play and if anyone’s gonna need greater accessibility when using complicated gamepads…it’s sick kids!  Shit man, I’m really gonna feel bad if I think that sick children may somewhere down the line have fewer avenger controllers because I got into a pissing match with a sad old man.  Please don’t cancel their booth on my account.  As much as I hate this asshole, I still WANT his product and think it should be out there.  -Dave

Just like Monica Gaudio, Dave was not a very difficult customer. He was actually very nice in the first e-mails. He was trying to curb the backlash before it even happened. It could be because online detectives have discovered connections between an e-mail Christoforo lists and posts on a steroid users forum, and he just lost his job on account of him, has his address name and credit info, and may be disgruntled. Dave truly seems like a good kid, much like Gaudio asking for a donation instead of direct compensation. These cases are both the perfect storm of characters, events and an anonymous online mob that is always listening, always vigilant.

 EDIT: Apparently I was correct about this whole fiasco being a direct result of Paul’s personality. He has had a handful of prior incidents in which customers of the N-Control Avenger have publicly complained after being the victim of bad customer service. Here is one documented by Nathan Stansell.

This year I expanded further into Social Media and spent more time working on that than any other aspect of online marketing and web development. I developed branding pages for myself as a writer to test out new techniques and applications so I could better serve people who paid for my web development services and before long the successes I had with different platforms and techniques made my networks a relatively valuable asset themselves.

I have always thought that the basis for growing and succeeding online as well as the best ways to navigate the rest of the Internet is through online community involvement. You can read articles all day long, but unless you know exactly what you’re looking for it’s hard to find an earth shattering discovery that ends up changing the way you use the Internet. Communities however are two-way, and they leverage the wealth of knowledge of their members so you get the benefit of crowd sourced information, which usually lets the better techniques and resources surface and then gain approval by the majority of community members.

I’ve become a true master of web development by being part of an online fantasy wrestling community, a community for web designers, a community for video game enthusiasts, a technology based community, communities developed around online games, a writing community, a political forum and most recently a social media community. I’ve learned tricks that proved to be more useful than anything I had in my arsenal from kids playing MySpace mobsters, so it’s important to judge a community by its members and not a façade.

A friend from the writing community I’m a part of suggested that I join a social networking game called Empire Avenue toward the end of the year. I had been blogging about social media in addition to the tech articles I write, Empire Avenue was similar to the stock market which I invest heavily in and it was a game (I like games!). Needless to say Empire Avenue was a perfect fit for me. My stock did fairly well, I met a lot of new people and decided to launch a new blog (this one) because of common interests I had with those particular community members.

Empire Avenue is head and shoulders above other online communities, and I’ll tell you why. Being a community of social networkers, most of the members are familiar with how you should act online to increase response and create a welcome feeling. In the writing community I frequented prior to Empire Avenue the members were horribly ill mannered, opinionated, suffered from a lack of self-awareness. The community managers had proper attitudes and were extremely forgiving which exacerbated the discourse.

In addition to being more bearable to exchange ideas with, it improves communication immensely. If you would have told me 5 years ago that you knew of an online community that genuinely welcomes newcomers and was void of trolls and people who generally enjoy discourse, I would have told you to stop smoking drugs.

I like playing the game, and there is some benefit to be gained by missions as well as some of the analytical tools available within the application. The real value of Empire Avenue is the community it fostered which is basically social media enthusiasts that like to try new things and understand the value of tempering their online actions. Most of the players are actively growing their social networks so it has also become a network of users who will be popular pundits and authors in 5 years. Don’t be fooled by niceties, there is serious discussion and exchange of ideas that goes on within our community (Check out the #eAvchat on Twitter or one of the several Facebook groups if you’ve missed it), but when you avoid having an overtly offensive tone and passive aggressive responses it keeps the discussion constructive, and social media enthusiasts understand that better than any other niche on the Internet. It may be that social media draws users that are predisposed to playing nice and generating positive attitudes.

If you haven’t tried Empire Avenue yet I strongly suggest you do it now. I have made more long term friends and business contacts from this one network than any other network I’ve ever been a part of. If you need a more literal reason, the mission feature lets you generate engagement and drive traffic to any web address you choose in exchange for the currency you generate playing the game.

It isn’t a game for everybody, and not everybody needs more traffic, but if you haven’t tried it you don’t know what you’re missing. If you are already a member you should join one of the Facebook groups of Empire Avenue shareholders or attend one of the Twitter chats hosted by @mqtodd that draws many of the players and focuses on Empire Avenue, other online tools and lessons we have all learned throughout our time using web 2.0 applications. As I always say “Eaves are worthless, but the type of players that an application like Empire Avenue was made for are priceless.”

Empire Avenue

Team Zen on Facebook

Chris Voss’ eAv Winners on Facebook

[X] Bar on Facebook

Social XP on Facebook

The lifeblood of the Internet is Pay per Click advertising that is dominated by companies like Google’s Ad Words. Google exploited the data it collected for years spurring a new type of practice called Search Engine Marketing. On a per click basis you could get your ad to show up in the SERPs of relevant searches.

As the Facebook network became larger, eventually becoming the largest social network on the Internet, it became apparent that the information collected from users became a valuable targeted method for advertisers. For instance if your company sells aftermarket parts for hot rods you can target Facebook users who are interested in Racing, are Male, between the ages of 22 and 52, and make over $50,000 per year. The targeting itself makes Facebook ads an interesting proposition.

I have overseen a couple of marketing campaigns that utilized both Ad Words and Facebook’s advertising campaigns. It’s a good idea to dedicate as much time as possible to one of these campaigns because having better click through percentages will actually get you a lower rate on advertising. During my latest campaign for my Facebook page I measured my success in Likes per $, and ended up with over 500 likes for 50$. The campaign was a major success because the users who ended up liking my page usually shared some of the content and got another friend or two to like it as well.

I started out offering .50$ per click through and targeted the categories I wrote for at Yahoo! By the end of the campaign I was only paying a fraction of that per click through and was generating several more conversions by offering targeted content that ended up being shared.

The problems with Facebook advertising became apparent later when Facebook itself altered their algorithm and my 500+ likes that were generating nearly 500 unique impressions with each message dropped to a rate of generating only 120 unique impressions per message (probably related to individual user settings and the amount of interaction they had with my page).

You see, Facebook urges you to use your Fan Page as the target for their ads. Until recently anyone who was a fan or liked your page would see your updates just as they see the updates from their friends. As users started liking more and more pages it became necessary to limit the exposure each message would get. It would have been a much better idea to use an independent web page that allowed me to attempt to get e-mail addresses for future contact than to use my Facebook page where future messages would not be heard.

Facebook themselves don’t want brands to get immeasurable value from fan pages. If you could reach all interested users with a status update, there is really no reason to buy Facebook ads other than to generate new likes.

The aspects of Facebook advertising that need to be looked into is whether a user on Facebook who was targeted by me through various demographics will actually break away from Facebook long enough after they click my ad for me to make an impact or generate a sale. It isn’t good business to buy ad space on a platform that you end up competing with, and that is essentially what Facebook is. Their user numbers are inflated by dummy accounts, and their ads don’t deliver in quite the way you’d expect. One of the most astonishing aspects is that Facebook’s control over their users is so overreaching that after I develop a page with useful content, Facebook generates an income from the ads displayed on that page. It takes balls to be able to get a billion users to generate content for your profit, but that’s basically what has happened.

Since the trend is to make brand pages less effective to elicit further advertisement, I only see the problem getting worse as Facebook’s programming becomes more sophisticated. As more and more 3^rd party developers include the Facebook API in their programs and applications, Facebook will continue to collect more and more data on each of their users. So while Facebook uses my data to market me to other companies, my content to generate page views for their advertisements, and take my money while planning on how to render the results of my campaign ineffective, I just let them because they’re Facebook and if I want to reach EVERYONE, I have to play ball. What do you think about the monster we’ve created?

Authority- Make sure you are one of the most obvious sources for the information you’re relying on for content. All messages should be confident, but not disparaging.

Gratitude- Be grateful for your successes, and even the chance to participate. Thank everyone you speak with, and believe in that gratitude.

Empathy- Understand where your customers are coming from. Never doubt a comment, and make sure you don’t answer a peasant as a king.

It is becoming an increasingly regular occurrence to hear about mass outrage in response to corporate policy and statements made as part of or in response to social media marketing campaigns. A primary reason for building your online presence through social networks is to improve your image or the image of your company. Negative perceptions and hurt feelings may increase your audience, but it can sometimes create a pre-disposition towards hating your brand that is impossible to overcome.

So if the whole goal of social media marketing is to improve customer relations and perception through engagement, why are the results negative so often?

Practices

Social startup Allthis.com became a hot topic earlier this week when the blogosphere picked up on their practice of creating profiles from public data available from Twitter for influential and popular people without their consent. The profiles insinuated that through Allthis.com you could purchase 10 minutes of Mark Zuckerberg’s, or Seth Godin’s time in exchange for the site’s online currency that can be bought with real money. Of course the outrage wasn’t coming from people like Mark Zuckerberg; it was coming from otherwise inconsequential bloggers who are anxious to lead a bloodthirsty mob that mobilizes against a cause their blog sparked, for publicity and self-realization of course.

The response from Allthis.com was one of confusion which is probably at least partly genuine. Their website has been online and selling time for a few months now, and mining public profile data from social networks as well as from other mediums is a widespread practice that has ushered the current era of Internet startup prosperity. Google takes some flak from violating user privacy, but for the most part they fly under the radar. Startups battle the fact that their applications have little applicable utility that is heavily relied on, and websites such as Klout and Allthis.com also made the mistake of using people who had not signed up as a reason for others to sign up. Allthis.com eventually conceded the creation of profiles for people who hadn’t signed up, but their response was relatively slow, and even a pleasant demeanor comes off as conceited and pompous when you lack empathy.

Other social media disasters have come in response to changes that occur in the physical world, but by companies that have close ties to the Internet. Outrage over the Netflix price hike earlier this year was unparalleled in damage done mostly because of the viral spread of discontent across social platforms and in news story comments. Sometimes social media campaigns run smoothly, but are derailed by a single detail that not only costs any gains the campaign made, but also costs the trust of customers the company has been building since before the Internet was used for social media. Nissan suffered extensive backlash earlier this year when the Australian division held a competition on Facebook and awarded a $20,000 car to a friend of one of the staffers who was managing the competition. Trust is a prerequisite in social media, and any violation of trust is irreparable.

Where you stand

The latest ongoing mass outrage is the result on the popular domain registrar Go Daddy’s public stance in favor of the SOPA bill. The Stop Online Piracy Act is heavily polarizing, and even though the specific terms are still being negotiated and the possible effects it will have on domestic webmasters is unclear, the nature of any measure that gives the Federal Government jurisdiction in cyberspace is at odds with the sentiment of the majority of citizens. A public boycott post on Reddit reach 2500 comments, leading hundreds to pledge to transfer their domain to another provider on December 29, which has become known as “move your domain from Go Daddy Day”.

Go Daddy touts the SOPA act as a bill that will protect the intellectual property of millions of hardworking Americans, but popular opinion considers it an infringement on basic freedoms that have evolved organically and naturally. In reality popular opinion and condemnation is extremely effective at policing the Internet in instances when people agree an injustice has been committed. Go Daddy is in a unique position, being the largest domain name registrar with over 50 million domain names, where it has become practical to have several full time lobbyists on staff to lobby for legislation that is beneficial to their business. In instances such as the SOPA bill’s passage through congress, they have little choice but to take a public stance. When you do business on the Internet it is important to keep a strict code of morals and ethics, and to side with overwhelming majorities or keep your opinions to yourself in times of crisis. There is a perfect storm of hyper-sensitivity among the public coupled with various routes of information propagation that delivers and spreads news faster than ever before.

Responses

The simple fact is that social media requires near perfection to do right. Responses to positive reviews and comments need to be gracious, unique and personal. Responses to complaints and negative comments must be tactful, empathetic, apologetic and express the desire to remedy the situation. Ignoring a neutral comment can create a negative perception if the customer is expecting a response, regardless of the priority or importance.

When Klout responded to the initial outcry that was due to a change in their scoring algorithm with rhetoric such as “transparency” that wasn’t backed up with concrete actions, it only served to amplify the discord. If Allthis.com had taken the first negative blog posts seriously and not played dumb to inquiries, regardless of the facts, they could have salvaged popular opinion and became known as a proactive startup that listens to people.

Even with widespread failure in social media, there are lots of successful campaigns, and even more successful representatives. There are even winners in these disasters, including bloggers who broke the stories, competitors that were on the brink of bankruptcy but are now thriving, and it’s yet to be seen whether all of the bad press generated from social media disasters is all bad.

Base all of your online interaction on these four principles and there is little room for an irreversible PR debacle that will be covered in hundreds of blog posts just like this one.

Trust- The basis for any engagement or exchange over social channels is a prerequisite for engagement on any meaningful level.

Authority- Make sure you are one of the most obvious sources for the information you’re relying on for content. All messages should be confident, but not disparaging.

Gratitude- Be grateful for your successes, and even the chance to participate. Thank everyone you speak with, and believe in that gratitude.

Empathy- Understand where your customers are coming from. Never doubt a comment, and make sure you don’t answer a peasant as a king.