Last week I attended the “Detroit” (read: Auburn Hills) stop of the Martina McBride & Trace Adkins Shine All Night Tour, which was, as any country fan can imagine, a helluva show, to say the least. Of course, it wouldn’t be a show in the Metro Detroit area without a special appearance by everyone’s favorite local concert crasher, Kid Rock, who did a duet of “Picture” with Martina in her encore and then a song of his own.

This is not a review of the show. (I’ll write one of those later if you want.)

This is a post about a cool service that I signed up for a few weeks ago that I finally got to see in full action at the concert. It’s called Mozes, and it’s a mobile marketing powerhouse of awesome.

When I first discovered it a few weeks ago, I signed up as a fan to receive mobile marketing content from some of my favorite country artists, like Brad Paisley, Sugarland, Lee Ann Womack, and yes, Martina McBride. When you sign up, you join a “mob,” which is short for mobile list. It’s totally opt-in and since I signed up for all those things it was never once spammy. From the Mozes site:

When you sign up for a mob, you receive exclusive announcements, offers and content from your favorite band, brand, team, event or organization via the mobile phone. You can communicate back using either text or voice messages and can opt out of a mob at any time.

When I signed up for Lady Antebellum’s mob, I received a wallpaper for my phone and the option to hear a special voice message from the band. I thought that was pretty nifty, but I didn’t think much beyond Mozes until the Martina McBride show last week.

That’s when I saw the true power of Mozes. There were screens on either side of the stage that you could text messages to, using the Mozes service. If you texted the word “shine” plus your message to 66937 (that spells “Mozes”), as long as it got by the invisible moderator, your message would appear on the screen. Every text you sent also entered you in a drawing to win front row seats or something else. (I didn’t win anything but my date won a free 3 month subscription to Martina McBride’s fan club — which he’s giving to me.)

As you can imagine, people had a lot of fun with this. Aside from a lot of “pick me! pick me!” texts, there were a lot of cute messages like “Our kids got us these tickets for our anniversary … and we’re in the nosebleeds!” and “Hi Mom!” type things. (Unsurprisingly, my own message: “how about that $15 parking fee? Now I can’t afford a t-shirt!!” didn’t make it up to the screen.) There were also a lot of marriage proposals, such as “Kristie, will you marry me?” which got me wondering how many Kristies were there that night with their boyfriends who were not the intended recipient of the proposal and accidentally said yes, thus creating a lot of awkward moments.

But I digress.

Mozes is not just for music.

Yes, musicians seem to be the ones embracing it most, but there are endless possibilities for this service. On their site, they list a few ideas on how it could be used with sports, such as sending text updates with game stats; for brands and agencies, such as running in-store promotions such as text-for-info providing consumers with additional product specs; for causes and non-profits, such as integrating data captured, including issue and opinion data or extended contact information, into your supporter database; and my favorite, live events, where you could connect with attendees via pre-event announcements, poll the audience and see live voting results on-screen in real-time, and even send post-event thank you messages, coupons or links to images and videos … really, the possibilities are endless.

Of course, like everything these days, Mozes is integrated into all the major social networks and sharing options, and what I think is the coolest about it is the ability to target your messages very specifically by age, location, gender, likes and dislikes, and more, PLUS you get instant analytics on engagement/ROI.  Above the standard level, which is free for a month and then only $10 a month after that, all pricing is custom depending on your needs.

Example of real-world application for non-real rock stars

Most people are not real rock stars (or country stars, for that matter). So let’s say you were a person in charge of marketing the conference du jour, and you were aiming for people from all over the region to attend. You’d go with the Group Edition, which allows up to 25,000 messages and many more features and options than the basic. Once people signed up for your mob, you could send them a text or voice thank you, custom ringtone, and/or wallpaper of the conference’s brand.

Then, closer to the conference, you look at your stats and realize you’d really like more people from Ohio over 30 to attend. You could narrowcast to everyone in your mob over 30 about a promotion that if they referred two colleagues to buy tickets, they’d be entered to win something special – a conference package upgrade, hotel discount, whatever.

And then, at the event (which would have plenty of people over 30 from Ohio, thanks to your previous efforts), say you had a Q&A session with your keynote speaker. Attendees could text questions that could appear on a screen (or not) and there wouldn’t be any need to pass the mic, or have them stand in line, nor would there be any loose cannons that end up on CNN spazzing out and getting tased.

Or maybe you wanted to have a poll. Instant results could appear on your screen.

Or maybe lots of people at your conference were taking pictures with their phones. You could have them send those pictures to your screen at the event instantly.

My point is that this service is absolutely, amazingly flexible and the possibilities are endless. Have you used Mozes before, as a fan or as a business? What were your experiences like? I’m curious to see what kind of creative ways people are using it!

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17

I’ve been noticing something on Facebook lately that absolutely irks me – regular people who are neither celebrities, nor an otherwise public figure, are deciding they need fan pages. I don’t understand why, and I finally tweeted about it last night after I had had enough.

I got a lot of interesting conversation out of it, mainly with Juanita Chronowski, who maintains a fan page for her writing as a way to separate the personal from the professional. OK, that I can understand. Ari Herzog does the same thing. But people who are NOT public figures in any way, shape, or form? Unless somebody else made the page out of appreciation or as a joke – my friend Jen had it right when she said, “that’s flippin’ weird.

Facebook allows personal profiles up to 5,000 friends, and if you actually have more than 5,000 friends then perhaps you do need one. Perhaps you are somewhat of a public figure, and if that is the case, then go ahead and make yourself one.

Call me a purist, folks, but if you are not famous except in your own mind, YOU DO NOT NEED A FAN PAGE. Regular people having a fan page for themselves screams of an ego problem and “look how self-important I am!” — and frankly, makes me question why I would be friends with that person in the first place.

I’m tired of regular people thinking they’re special, unique snowflakes and deserve their own fan page just to boost their own egos. Non-public figure fan pages cheapens the value of fan pages for those who actually are public figures. Don’t believe me? Fan my cat. She’s more of a celebrity than most of these conceited people.

What do you think? Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? Is there a reason regular people who have not exceeded the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook and are NOT public figures should have their own fan pages? This is such a turnoff!

While doing some recent housekeeping in the back end of this site I uncovered some posts in my archives that many (read: most) of you missed, and I thought they were worthy of having the dust bunnies brushed off them.

I realize that the majority of you are newer readers and/or haven’t known me as long, so here are a few of that damn redhead you’ve likely never read:

• What my small town dentist can teach us about social media
• The internet is one big expo – what is your booth like?
• The high school notebook – social media casualty?
• How I accidentally started #ThankYouThursday
• Social media lessons from water skiing (and vice versa)
• Social media is like plastic baggies
• Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter are NOT the Holy Trinity

You can’t see it yet but I’ll be doing some restructuring of the direction of this blog in the near future. Everybody’s blog evolves over time, and this one is no exception. For details, visit my new “About” page.

Enjoy and thanks for reading. Stay tuned.

Something happened earlier that made me almost feel bad for somebody. Almost.

By now we know that “unfriend” was the official word of 2009. (I’m going to just set my Grammar Goddess cringing aside and go with it for this post.)

I’m in the process of (re)developing a brand for a client of mine, and while I know a lot of people in various disciplines of web design, graphic design, or any other kind of design in between, I had a certain former colleague in mind whom I knew would be able to conceptualize the perfect new logo for said client. I had worked with her in the past, had been impressed with her work, and she had expressed interest in working with me after the start of the new year.

I kept that in mind, and decided to take her up on it. I went to Facebook and tried to search for her in my friends, but to no avail. I remembered that she recently got married and her last name was different, so I searched again. No dice. So I searched one of our real-life mutual friends’ friends, and sure enough, she was in there.

Former colleague had unfriended me. To my knowledge I did nothing to offend her, and I’m left a little confuzzled.

No matter, I’ve got myriad contacts that would gladly take this referral, as it has the potential to be pretty lucrative and would be a great addition to any portfolio. But I can’t help but wonder why the heck this former colleague “unfriended” me. No, we don’t see each other every day, and no, we were never BFFs by any measure, but she was the perfect person for this assignment, and now … well, as my dad likes to say, “You snooze, you lose.”

The lesson to be learned from this?

Be careful whom you unfriend — it could cost you!

Image by robotclaw.

[If you know me in person, chances are you've heard this before, but I'm at the point now where I feel it just needs to be written down.]

I hate the term “social media.” Really, I do. Why? Because it’s too hard to define. I’m definitely not the first person to blog about this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. But here’s the truth:

All media is social media.

Media, at its very ethos, is social. Cavemen didn’t paint cave paintings and not talk about them. Egyptians didn’t carve hieroglyphics just because they were pretty pictures — they told stories. Radio never really was one-way — it encouraged interaction with people calling in. TV may seem one-way but do people not sit around the TV and watch it together? Do people not talk about their favorite shows with each other?

All media always has, and always will, encourage social interaction. Whether it’s immediate as what we understand “social media” to be nowadays or not is a different story.

The only difference between “traditional” media and “social” media is that “social media” makes two-way (or one-to-many, or many-to-many) communication a helluva lot faster. And let’s just face it – this is simply the way the world communicates now.

However, like those folks I linked above, I understand that there is no one, true definition of “social media,” and that alone is a problem, illustrated by a story a few friends of mine relayed to me recently:

A colleague of ours, a rather big name in the “social media world” and a bigwig at a rather large, world-famous company, was to speak about social media at a local event. I did not attend said event, but my colleagues did, because they wanted to hear what he had to say about how he’s used “social media” in/for his company. Based on the questions from the audience, however, it became more of a Twitter 101 class, and my colleagues admitted they were a little embarrassed for him. This was not a marketing fail, as the event was promoted appropriately. Or was it?

My colleagues’ definition of social media was and is much more complex than that of the audience. They were expecting how this guy applied “social media” for marketing/PR purposes. The audience was apparently expecting how to use a tool or two, which is a lot different.

Social media is the new smurf.

Smurfs used the word “smurf” for just about anything, and it was understood without question. Or they used it when they couldn’t think of any other word for something, which is where we are now with “social media.” Hell, any kind of interaction via the internet or mobile now can be considered “social media,” and I can’t believe that for a society as chatty and as articulate as we are, we can’t think of any other words for what the heck we’re talking about.

We need to expand our vernacular.

I was taught that you shouldn’t complain about something without proposing a solution, but honestly? I don’t have one. What I do know is that the more we use “social media” as a term for just about any kind of communication these days, the more confused people get, and the more smurfy things become. I like to be more specific when I speak of expedited communication through ever-changing technology, but I realize that sometimes it’s easier smurfed than smurfed. I know that many times, I still go over peoples’ smurfs and they still don’t smurf what I’m smurfing about, even when I think I’m smurfing on their level.

So what do you smurf? Is “social media” too smurfy these days? Should we be more specific and throw that term out the smurf? Or is it fine and smurfy? Leave your smurfs in the smurfs.

I can’t believe I almost forgot it was Festivus today. I was reminded by Rico Thomas Rico, who posted his airing of grievances on his blog. Knowing I’m long overdue for a blog post, I’m following his lead and now posting my 2009 Airing of Grievances. Enjoy!

Dissappointing me this year in the world of social media were …

1) Auto-dmers. People on twitter who automatically follow you with a direct message when you follow them. A very amateur move. Especially disconcerting when said person claims to be a social media marketer, or even worse if it’s a “Thanks for following, click my junk!” type of DM.  You people should not be allowed online.

2) People who claim they won’t join Facebook “because they don’t want everybody to know all their business.” Grr … that’s what the privacy settings are for, idiots.

3) On that note, people who over-protect their stuff on Facebook so much that they appear as a faceless “Facebook user” when commenting, and refuse to share ANYTHING. OK, seriously? I’m all about the privacy settings but if you think you have THAT MUCH to hide, that’s called paranoia and there’s medication for that.

4) People who claim to work “in social media” but then say they can’t stand gossip. I got news for you — gossip fuels social media. In a very big way, social media IS gossip. Can’t handle the heat? Get the hell outta the kitchen.

5) Places that start their e-newsletters that I receive with “Dear Communicator” - I have a name, and if YOU were a communicator, you’d know that. You’d also know the %name% function in your email client to insert it so that it wouldn’t sound so generic.

6) People who say they “do” social media as their job. Do you say you “do” the copy machine? Do you “do” the phone? Do you “do” a word processor? No, those are tools you use in order to do your job. Use it as a means, not an end.

7) People who assume I’m a graphics designer just because they hear that what I do has something to do with the internet. I don’t know how many times I hear “I know a guy who needs a graphics designer, I referred him to you…” That’s great, but I’m admittedly artistically retarded. I’ll have to give them a referral to one of the 1000000000000000 graphics/web designers I DO know.

8 ) All these “life coaches” who insist on following me on Twitter. What — you couldn’t figure out what to do with your life so you decided to tell people how to live theirs? For real — go away.

9) Those who do not question “thought leaders.” There’s a term for you that’s not as nice as “thought follower,” it’s “sheep.” See this post.

10) SEO people, especially those who feel the need to put “SEO” after their name. OK, here’s a newsflash — SEO is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Having said that, if you are in the Cult of SEO (a.k.a. those who believe you have to be in some kind of secret society and know some kind of secret handshake in order to get SEO), YOU DO NOT NEED TO PUT SEO AFTER YOUR NAME. SEO is NOT a PhD. You do not need a doctorate degree to figure it out, and if your name is “John Jones, SEO” on LinkedIN or Twitter, it does not make you look credible, it makes you look like a douchebag.

Disappointing me this year in the rest of the world were …

1) Whoever took Randa Jawhari. This person is actually at the TOP of my list. My hometown of Fenton has a hole in it because she has been missing since February 2009. It won’t be filled until she’s found. Please give her back.

2) Traffic weavers. I hate you. You people are DANGEROUS. And you know what? Danica Patrick does it a helluva lot better than you. And she’s much better looking.

3) The people who live above me. I haven’t lived here for long but I’m convinced they think their living room is a mosh pit.

4) Kanye West. Do I have to even explain why?

5) People who toss cigarette butts out car windows. Dude, if you absolutely HAVE to pollute your lungs, don’t pollute the planet, too.

6) That guy who warns everybody about being “that guy” but doesn’t realize that HE IS THAT GUY. You know that guy.

7) Ghost bloggers/writers. Pardon me for being a purist, but I find it highly ironic that the very things that would get someone expelled from college (plagiarism) are common practice in the professional world today. That’s nothing but B.S.

So there we go. My airing of grievances for 2009. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have more, but these are the ones off the top of my head. Now I ask you — what are YOUR 2009 Festivus grievances? Leave ‘em in the comments.

I’m not sure why it took me four months of working at the chamber to realize that although I didn’t have any time or energy to blog because I was busy driving and being tired and exhausted, I could easily video blog while driving.

(It takes me a while sometimes.)

So this morning, even though I’m relocating very soon, I decided to do a video blog, and I’m not sure why because I HATE to be on camera. And then I did one on the way home, because I apparently like to be thorough. (OK, well I actually did three, but the first one was long and I wasn’t sure I recorded it, and the third one I’d prefer to use but I’m not sure what happened to it.)

I posed the idea on Twitter, and although I hate seeing myself on camera, the demand was enough either publicly or in direct messages I decided to give it the ol’ “what the hell,” so here ya go, morning and night driving vlogs (DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any boredom that may ensue.):

Keeping true to my obsession with semi-obscure Canadian independent music, last week I was lucky enough to find myself on the guest list for one of my favorite alt-country/folk artists, Amy Millan, when she was in town at the Pike Room, a swanky dive upstairs from Pontiac’s Crofoot Ballroom. Now, it should be said that playing in the Ballroom downstairs that night was this angry-guy band that sounds like every angry-guy band — extremely loud, obnoxious, and with a cool sounding name like Five Finger Death Punch, which was was so loud that we could both feel and hear it over our nice, intimate, folky show of about 60 attendees.  Oddly enough, in my Harley Davidson jacket I could have easily slipped into the other show and not looked out of place, but any band whose name sounds more like a concoction prepared by a goth mom at a Halloween party and whose album is entitled “War is the Answer” can safely be assumed to be the very antithesis of the very Canadian, very folky music that I love and came to see.

Opening the show was an interesting fellow named Afie Jurvanen, who also goes by artist/band name Bahamas, for what reason I have no idea except to perhaps convey sheer irony in being a Finnish guy from Canada. I was pleasantly surprised, however, as he opened with a beautiful ballad called “Hockey Teeth” and instantly won me over. His drummer was missing, but his goofy demeanor and commanding stage presence made him make going solo look easy. His vocals are reminiscent of Jack Johnson but he can play a mean stratocaster.  Always one to support the opening act, I bought his CD, Pink Strat (affiliate link), and encourage you to check him out and support him, too. He’s really, really good.

Now, onto Amy Millan. The best way for me to describe her sound is the bastard child of musical Williamses – Dar Williams, Lucinda Williams, Victoria Williams, and Hank Williams – somewhat folky, somewhat breathy, somewhat twangy, somewhat depressing, but everything she plays sounds instantly classic. She opened with a strong “Losin’ You,” the lead song off her first solo record, Honey from the Tombs (affiliate link), followed by a steel guitar-infused cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” From there she played a mix of songs old and new, this tour to promote her latest album, Masters of the Burial (affiliate link), which has a slightly sad tone but is nonetheless beautiful. 

Any band who can play live with a steel guitar, an upright bass, a mandolin, a ukulele,  and a trombone and make it sound AWESOME earns MAD RESPECT in my book. (The only thing that could have made it better would have been a successful accordion accompaniment, but they can’t all be like Cowboy Junkies.)

Highlights of the show had to have been a spunky version of her Rolling Stone acclaimed hit “Skinny Boy,” and a bluesey, almost-jazzy “Bruised Ghosts,” which is her first single off the new album. For her encore, she played my request of the song that made me first fall in love with her music years ago, a very country-esque “He Brings Out the Whiskey in Me,” that rings like a classic country song a lá Hank Williams or Loretta Lynn.

Having been disappointed with my new iPod Nano video’s lack of ability to record well in loud, dark spaces, I decided to try shooting some video with my BlackBerry instead, and surprisingly, the quality wasn’t too bad, save for my obviously-shaky hand. Below is my shaky capture of “Bruised Ghosts” from Amy Millan at the Pike Room, October 15, and you can find a few more at my YouTube channel.

A while ago, I wrote a post about a side project I’m involved in called uwemp – you | we | me | empowered — which is an open-source, reader-directed magazine focusing on learning from the journeys of others and redefining journalism as we know it.

Moments ago, we released what I’d been biting my tongue about for a long time — an exclusive, one-on-one video  interview with uwemp founder Jordan Wolfe and none other than The Bald One himself, best-selling author/entrepeneur/marketing genius Seth Godin. (He’s also the guy who started this interesting little site called Squidoo, you may have heard of it.)

So, what are you waiting for? Why are you still here? Go watch the exclusive interview with Seth Godin now!

(And while you’re at uwemp, be sure to check out our uwemp/UPIU National Student Journalism Writing Contest. If you’re not studying journalism in college right now, you probably know somebody who does, so share it with them. Thanks!)

(Real men of genius!)

Tonight, I salute YOU, Mr. “I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Accounts”!

(Mr. I-Sync-My-Twitter-and-Facebook-Status!)

Yes, you sir, are oblivious that your Facebook friends really don’t care about your every move & your Twitter followers are a) mostly the same people, and b) annoyed as hell.

(Absolutely, completely oblivious!)

It’s imperative that you tell EVERYONE POSSIBLE about that ham sandwich you had for lunch, or that you are happy it’s football season, because you are just. that. important.

(I’m big on the internet! I’m big in Japan! Germany loves me!)

So go on and open a Ping.fm account, Mr. Twitter-Facebook-Syncer, because YOU are a REAL MAN OF GENIUS.

(Inspired by the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” radio commercials, you can hear all of them here.)