Maybe Social Media Is Not For You

(editors note: This is not my story, but a combined story of a few friends with a common thread).

You go to your favorite blogs and forums.  You post, helping people, relating your stories.  You’re a member of the community.

And over time, you notice.  You notice there is this douche who’s posting right after you on almost every comment or discussion you start or create.  Even more douchey, he/she is in your field, posting the equivalent of a press release in the comments above every comment you have, joining every group you join - even though that person knows no one in the group.

Now, I’d like to think that the people reading, in fact, I know the people reading the comments or blog posts or discussion threads realize it’s PR, and badly executed PR at that.  It’s PR with a side helping of douchebag.  My PR friends and acquaintances, for the most part, would cringe at how poorly executed the multiple instances I’ve seen for this are.  I’ve saved them as case studies for clients for what NOT to do, but I won’t post them publicly.

It’s interesting that the more successful one is in social media (or anything), the more people try to poorly imitate it; and although imitation is the greatest form of flattery, it’s also dead-nuts proof that you don’t have a unique value proposition.

So here’s the lesson - have your own voice (link to awesome presentation on where this idea comes from). It’s worth something.  And if you don’t think your own voice is worth something, and you have to hide your messages behind press release copy all the time, maybe you should take your ball and go home.  Social media is not for you as you’re only hurting your credibility being a copycat.  And that’s okay.

I’m becoming an avid devotee of Merlin Mann’s reformation around his work habits and “being better.” Although I don’t have a child that radically changed my view on life, I realized we all have priorities in our lives and we need to focus on that.  I’ve whole-heartedly swiped some of his ideas for my life, and they’ll ooze onto this blog when pertinent because after all, interactive media, social media - it’s about people and their stories and sharing the stuff that matters.

Found Online: “The Problem With Being Free”

I don’t just like to post links without editorial, but I don’t have time right now - may write more later, but this was found on Chris Brogan’s Twitter, about the problem with being free in social media and web work.

After all, having been in this game for a decade in both “traditional” and “online” media, I totally get where Justin’s coming from.

Love Your User #1: Keep Friction Low

I twittered on this earlier today, and thought it good enough for a blog post to share with the rest of you.

I saw a cool campaign for some pretty valuable B2B information - sounds snore-o-riffic, but it was some pretty cool stuff for business nerds.

However, when I got the link from a friend, I got a note that “the form was too long and they want too much information, but it sounds interesting.”  Well, I went over there - and lo and behold, 20 fields of information that they need.  Obviously, they are qualifying people for follow-up; however, don’t you just basically need a name, an email and (maybe) a phone number?  After all, there is nothing stopping someone from entering 20 fake fields of information instead of just say 4 or 5.  The term in the industry is to aim to have “low friction.”

The lead-generation CRM nerds might dislike me for this - but we’ve seen consistently that more fields = less participation = less reach.

One of the reasons I like to “put things out there” and make sure podcasts are in big directories like iTunes and the blog that’s attached to the podcast is in Technorati and other high-profile places is that you want content to be sharable for this whole “viral” thing to work.  Yes, metrics suffers a little, I know - but the goal is to sell stuff, or influence minds, isn’t it?