Month: March 2013

By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

These are my rough notes from Podcamp Western Mass 5, held March 30, 2013 at Holyoke Community College. It uses abbreviations: SM = social media; the others are pretty obvious. If I spelled your name wrong, I apologize.

According to organizer Morriss Partee, @mmpartee, since the Boston folks did a big regional thing several hundred miles south, this is now the longest continuously running Podcamp in New England.

I took notes on every session I attended except my own session, “Making Green Sexy.” I would be happy to send the slides from my talk; simply e-mail shel at greenandprofitable.com or Tweet @ShelHorowitz with the message “Podcamp PPT” (if tweeting, be sure to include your e-mail).

BUILDING OFFLINE RELATIONSHIPS FROM ONLINE CONNECTIONS

Thomas J. Fox, former addict, financial literacy/econ devel, lots of speaking:

I started in SM as the Pajama Poet on MySpace! Became the top poet there.

Social media eliminates the gatekeeper. I get an invitation to sit in on a financial literacy conference at the White House, b/c Twitter. Ask questions of important people, start conversations, build on conversations get known by them—get immersive. But it can’t be about you you you—be genuine. You build the relationship organically.

And then you take the relationship OFFline. I had a coffee with a guy I met on Twitter and I connected him to 10 people in the community. When you meet, you already know what you have in common. It goes right to how to help each other. You’re catching up with an old friend.
Listen 100% to what someone is saying.

Not interacting on SM is like having a drawer full of business cards.

Work/exercise your networking muscle, and remember you’re a brand.

Vine: new platform, 6-second videos!

Foursquare can build your brand. If you login from PV Planning Commission, Develop Springfield, etc., networking events, it shows you’re serious. And every time I’m speaking, publish an article, I post on SM. People see I’m serious and I’m genuine. At networking events, I focus on the coordinators, and they know everyone else.

And if I’m traveling to speak, I make time to meet SM contacts in Denver or wherever. And it can be huge for business.

Promote others.

For three years, I’ve been trying to meet Harold Grinspoon. I met a janitor who works for him, and he introduced me. Just because you don’t think someone can help you… I’ll have coffee with anyone. You never know.

Audience: people who built their personal networks BEFORE they needed them were much more effective. This predates the web, but online makes it faster and easier.

I’m doIng everything I do right now b/c one person invested time in me. Otherwise, I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere. I work w/ Junior Achievement to create economic opp for young kids. It takes a village to sustain an economy. Get involved in SOMETHING: friends of the homeless, whatever.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ACTIVISM (open panel)

Cool apps:

ittt: If then then that: tweets take actions depending on your tweet

software to give nonprofits access to your tweet stream (David Pakman knows what it’s called, shared it last year)

Triberr, spread messages throughout tribe

BufferApp.com (allows prescheduling and bit.ly shortening and some analytics): time a ppt preso as tweets, coordinate with tweetchat and hashtag

Aldon Hynes: sharing my coloring books in kindergarten, 1965, was social media. The oldest post I can still find online is from 1982. Wrote some of Howard Dean’s Deanspace, in Drupal.

Trends: Geocaching, gamification

Leslie Rule: I train how to do three-minute videos, data wrapped around a narrative, very teachable.

Aldon. I have a FB interest group and a Twitter list to monitor state reps in CT.

Tip O’Neil was right that all politics is local, but also, all politics is personal. I can reach my Senators directly, they will read my message because of the work I’ve done in social media.

Me: you have to merge online and offline. Congress all seem to tweet. But when the developer saw Save the Mountain at the farmers market, it got to them.

Leslie. You in MA are too polite. In CA, if you don’t like your rep’s actions, you go picket their house. And with coalitions, build allies, it’s not just yourself. It’s other people with 10,000 members. You won’t get allies saying schools need a hard reboot, but you CAN find allies to oppose Common Core.

Consensus: all of these causes and constituencies overlap; we have to get out of our silos and collaborate.

PERSONAL BRANDING

Lesley Lambert, Realtor. I remember when there was a book, and you’d fall in love with a house and it would have been sold two weeks ago. Now I spend no money on offline advertising. I’ve niched myself as the high-tech realtor with old-fashioned service.

80% of buyers start online, I suspect it’s even higher. I use social media/Internet to market my clients as well as myself. I have a hand in most SM but especially Twitter. I’m also very community-based and spend a lot of time talking about where we live.

Alfonso Santanello, Creative Strategy Agency (and Strictly BusiNews, business TV show)

I’ve been getting more personal, sharing about me and not just about my business. People wan to do biz with people they like. So I show people who I am. Who I am in person is exactly who I am online, and that’s very important when you brand yourself.

Kelly Gellanis, Red-Headed Diva, social media education for educators. “Professional socializer.” I help them reflect an online persona that reflects who they are offline.

Myke Connolly, stinkycakes.com, “the diaper cake boss” Twitter: diapercakeboss and mrstinkycakes People are paying attention. You have to watch what you say, keep in mind others’ feelings (and personal safety). I’ll post about a trip AFTER we come back. I posted something that someone else interpreted as degrading. That was not my intent. The goal of SM is to get people to fall in love with you. Then they support your projects.

Lesley: My name is the one brand that will be with me forever, sop if you put my name in any social network, you find me. If I’d named myself MissParkSqaure and Park Square was no longer, all that branding is wasted. But there are advantages of company name, etc.

Alfonso: Even if I don’t intend to participate, I grab my name on every social platform. I don’t want someone else impersonating me. Whatever you do, stick to it across all platforms.

Kelly. I use redheadeddivak on all sites, b/c redheadeddiva was taken on Twitter when I started (adult toys).

Myke: I listened to what my audience called me.

But if your name is taken, and a lot of celebs can’t get their own name, you can be creative. Or fi celeb enough, you can get it back. Go ahead and call yourself Stinky Cakes; you will be writing me a check.

All: you also want to get a business page if your biz has a different name. SEO benefits (Lesley).

Alfonso: with FB’s new Graph Search, biz shows up before personal, and they’re ranked by activity and engagement.

Kelly: But even on a biz page, sprinkle some personal stuff in.

HappyGrasshopper.com: email marketing service that does the writing for you (realtors. Others?), and guarantees replies. It’s a 3-sentence e-mail that has nothing to do with real estate, just little viral-video text messages. I approve the messages, and they get more response than anything else. It reminds me that consumers aren’t always looking for dry toast; they want fruit or at least some butter.

Myke: And those messages, we can forward them around, and oh yeah, Lesley does real estate. It’s more memorable than something dry about real estate that you get 50 different people sending you.

Being known before needed: Myke: I love Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Kelly: I treat my name like Target does. What I do as RHD may shift, but I will always have that as my name.

Alfonso: I got business because I did the TV show, and I didn’t talk about marketing, I talk about business and the local WMass scene, and without ever talking about the agency, it brings business. I used that platform to get known before people knew what I did.

Lesley: Blogging has been huge, and that’s why I write a lot about non-real estate. I blend community and R.E. and my life. I do a lot of video blogging. I’m an open book. If it happened to me, I probably blogged about it, and that includes the ups and the downs. And hopefully you’ll feel a little empathy coming through, and they’ll know me when they’re ready.

Myke: One of my mentors says “there’s a butt for every seat.” Your audience will follow you. I spent a year getting the same qs over and over when I was training kids at Westover Job Corps. So I did a book, and I go back to the same people and say hey, I put it all in a book. And the big brands are losing because you can’t know the people behind the brands.

Lesley: the best response I ever got was asking “do you care if your realtor wears a suit?” (and the answers were overwhelmingly no).

Myke: Different fish need different bait. Not all posts will work for everyone. Most will not. So figure one answer represents 250 people. Listen to your audience, see what they engage about and start to add to that convo. Then they will engage when you don’t expect.

Alfonso: 99% of your videos won’t be viral, and most that do are mistakes or embarrassing moments. You have to have patience.

Myke: you move viral much faster if an influential person picks it up. You can buy a lot of followers, but they’re not engaged.

PSYCHOLOGY OF SM: Jennifer Williams, @verilliance

Every platform has a psychological profile. It’s all about interaction.

FB: Who am I

Tw: who am I/what’s in the world RIGHT NOW

Pinterest: who do I want to be

Instagram: How an I express myself and my world?

G+: What do I think?

LI: How am I important? What do I have to offer? What’s on my resume?

Audience (Jeff): LI will show up first on Google, and most are high-income. I did a search for a certain HR credential, and it brought up thousands of people. Those are people I can network easily with.

Psych profile influenced by timing of entry, intent, parameters, demographics

FB entered when MySpace was “kind of a hot mess.” MySp was unfriendly to age 25+. I didn’t like the anonymity, and usability was atrocious. FB had no intention of uprooting MySp but it was a very clean, simple interface. You had to use your real name, lot of white space, and people were ready by the time that hit. They realized they wanted to connect wit the people they know. It ix the closest representation to who we are. They only want to associate with you if you attract on a deep personal level. It’s deeply intimate. 67% of all Internet users, but skewed toward under 30s.

Twitter: after FB, tried to capture snippets. Who am I with, what am I doing/reading/watching right now. Half-life of a tweet is 8-15 minutes, vs. 80 minutes in FB  post. Archive is difficult to search, everything is pushed down very quickly. As a business, don’t say what you’re doing, but give others something to relate to right now: news, opinion, quotes.

Pinterest: aspirational. ~66% women—do women want to gather more? They are still the primary homemakers. It’s very concrete, what color things are, what your furniture or food looks like. Some college education, more rural. Is there not enough opportunity in real world so they’re doing it online? Yes, images, but they have to be aspirational. Quotes do really well in an image. “I want to be that good.”

Instagram: self-actualization. Everybody loves pictures. Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, but the pictures looked terrible. Instagram provided simple filters to make them look nice. Lower income, urban, younger (under 30). If using in business, use in conjunction with other tools, or be REALLY visually interesting. It integrates very well with FB.

G+ looked a lot like FB, people looked at it  as FB competition, but Google was looking at something different. The people who flocked in were tech people, early adapters, thought leaders. Huge population of scientists I don’t see anywhere else. Also great space for artists. You get much bigger images, text area, and videos, and real-time commenting. A doodler was able to build a whole product line from his hobby. There’s still a dialog happening about the images, what inspired them to create it, how technically did you get that photo? Audience (Karo Kilfeather, @aspiringkaro): you get the best of Twitter—discovery—and FB—big canvas.

Jennifer: The ability to select who sees which messages. Like Twitter, you don’t have to follow them back. You can put them in the “I don’t know these people” circle or just ignore.

I don’t focus on upping the numbers on any of the channels I’m on, and I have wide variance in numbers. Much more important is how you’re sharing.

Personally, I don’t want to be connected all the time. I disconnect. But when I connect, I want to know right where to go and jump in, post the right things in the right platforms.

SM should be your outpost; your base should be your own website.

Blog posts on Twitter: you have to pique their interest.

Val Nelson: But I want the complete thought. I don’t want to go clicking over to the blog.

Jennifer: that’s what I like about G+, you have room to see a whole blog post.

Audience: I miss the full conversations on Twitter. Now, everything’s a link.

Paul Bogush: Twitter has shifted from stationary computing to phones, and it changes what people tweet about. Fewer in-depth convos. And people want to be seen as smart, so they tweet links to good content.

Jennifer: but young people, Latinos, blacks are using Tw for convos. White upper class have more access to other tools.

verilliance.com/hispi: co-op for high-end group marketing/conversion consulting.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

I just got back from a Nigerian Highlife concert at Mount Holyoke College. The place was set up with a huge dance floor and folding chairs off on the sides. The audience was mostly female, mostly 20-something college students, and more racially mixed than the typical crowd in this mostly-white area.

And yet—for the first fifteen minutes or so, I was the ONLY one on the dance floor, even though the opening song was a very danceable number called “Shake Your Body,” and even though the bandleader kept imploring people to get out and dance! I’m a 56-year-old white guy with gray in my beard and a history of ankle and shoulder injuries, and I was dancing, by myself. Why weren’t those lithe 20-somethings out on the dance floor?

Finally, the bandleader pretty much ordered everyone on the floor. And what do you know—one they were out there, they liked dancing, some of them were quite good, and a lot of them stayed dancing (as did I) for the remaining hour and a half. A few even got up on stage and strutted their stuff with the band.

But in my day, we didn’t have to wait to be commanded to dance. We heard music, and we danced!

(Note: in case it’s not obvious, this post is an attempt at humor; I’m not actually upset, just surprised.)

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, Innovation, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Note to manufacturers: your green products (including recycled products) have to compete on quality. If someone buys a recycled product and discovers it’s crappy, not only are they a one-time customer who won’t repeat, but they’re also a negative talking machine, trashing not just your product but in many cases, green products or recycled products in general.

In other words, any time you put out crap in the name of selling recycled products, you hurt the prospects of every green business. Don’t rush to market; take the time to get the quality right first!

This rant was inspired by the cleanup after my daughter’s Passover Seder.  She had recycled aluminum foil. I was excited to see it, as I hadn’t known such a thing was  available in the consumer market. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration when I tried to use it, and discovered it was so brittle that I had to use about three times as much; it ripped wherever I touched it. It was as bad as the first generation of biodegradable diapers that we tried to use when she was a toddler, circa 1990. As bad as the solar cell-phone charger I bought a year or two ago that was so ineffectual I returned it for a refund.

Now, I’m a committed green, and I will give recycled aluminum foil another try in five years or so. But if this had been my first experience of a recycled product, it probably would have been my last.

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Assault weapons have only one purpose: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest possible time. And yet, the Senate leadership just pulled the limited assault weapons ban out of the new gun control legislation. Apparently they cannot even figure out that we don’t have to put up with them. Either they are too intimidated by thuggish pressure from the NRA or they are actually in favor of people walking down the street with enough firepower to take out a whole schoolyard full of kids. And where is the pressure from honest citizens to regulate these ultradangerous weapons? If Congress has no spine on its own, it needs to find its backbone through citizen pressure for an assault weapons ban.

I see no justification for refusal to control assault weapons in the Second Amendment. On the contrary, I see that regulation actually comes before the right to bear arms. Grammatically, the phrase “well regulated militia” is the focus point of the paragraph—the justification for what follows. It could be restated as “BECAUSE a well-regulated militia is important, citizens may possess guns.” Here’s the complete text:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Seems to me, the Second Amendment actually creates an obligation to regulate weaponry. I don’t see how regulating semiautomatic assault weapons is any more a contradiction than banning fully automatic weapons (which have been illegal for most of a century). And those regulations could clearly include banning weapons of mass murder, background checks, and the rest of it.

Do we really want more Newtowns and Auroras and Virginia Techs and Columbines? Isn’t it time we approached this with some common sense? After all, the government regulates who can cut hair, for goodness sake!

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

Ten years ago, the United States began its illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq: an operation based on numerous lies, no real evidence, and a lot of testosterone.

Iraq, as we know now and strongly suspected then, had no connection with Al Quaida, nor did it have “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” It had a stable, if nasty, government. And it had the bad judgment to have a little war with the U.S. over Kuwait during the first Bush administration.

So George W. Bush and his minders decided to get even. And the United States became the “rouge state” that the Bush administration accused Iraq of being.

What did we accomplish with this shameful chapter in our history? Hundreds of thousands dead and injured and homeless, vicious acts by US troops and Blackwater mercenaries at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and widespread enmity throughout the Arab world. Oh yes, and the worst kinds of extremist terrorists established a beachhead in places where they had never had strength before, including Iraq itself. And Iraq’s economy shattered. And the US economy—let’s remember that GW Bush inherited a SURPLUS from Bill Clinton—badly damaged.

A weak President Obama has brought us back into the company of nations, and partially rebuilt the US economy but has failed to reverse so many of the wretched Bush policies and has allowed the right-wing extremist fringe to frame and control the discourse.

To commemorate these ten years, MoveOn.org asked people to share one memory. Rather than focus on the negative, I wrote:

I remember the amazing demonstration in NYC just before the invasion that filled at least four wide avenues on the east side of Midtown Manhattan. I am guessing there were about two million of us, and the police wouldn’t even let people down to the low-number avenue (I think it was 1st Ave, near the UN) where the “official” rally was—so we spilled over and filled up 2nd, 3rd, and Lexington. The media only counted people on the official avenue, but those of us who were there know it was enormous–possibly the largest US peace demonstration in history.

Of course, it should not be a surprise that the mainstream media severely undercounted us. After all, Judith Miller of the New York Times and many other supposedly skilled journalists were cheerleading the run up to the war, neglecting their journalistic due diligence, and even firing those among them who dared to speak out (including Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue).

No more illegal, immoral wars!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Energy & Sustainability, Innovation, People Helping People, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Innovation, privacy, Technology, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

In all the buzz about Google Glass, some people are raising deep concerns about privacy. Mostly about the privacy the wearer of Google Glass will sacrifice.

But the issues go well beyond that. Mark Hurst’s very thoughtful article, “The Google Glass feature no one is talking about,” for instance, brings up the disturbing spectre of Google creating a world where everyone is watching YOU. In other words, non-users could be deeply impacted, and human behavior may actually shift in response to the Big Brother phenomenon of being under constant surveillance, person-to-person as opposed to camera-to-location.

Yet I think privacy concerns may be far less significant than something I don’t hear anyone discussing AT ALL: the question of whether literally seeing the world through Google Glass’s technology is essentially a radical shift in the human experience: an engineered electromechanical “mutation” that could have results as far-reaching and unforeseen as genetic engineering.

Already, we live in a world where centuries-old patterns of communication have been blown apart by computers, mobile phones, and other disruptive technologies. And for the most part, this is positive–despite idiocies like the pedestrian I saw the other day who couldn’t stop texting long enough to see if it was safe before he crossed the street. But when a device becomes an extension of our bodies to such an extent, I have to wonder: What are the consequences of seeing the world through the Internet and Google Glass, rather than through our own eyes, as we walk down the street? What happens when governments or corporations start filtering and controlling our very sensory input, even when we’re in the “natural” world away from our computers?

I’m not a Luddite. But I do believe in the Precautionary Principle, which states that we should not engage in actions that have potentially harmful consequences if we don’t know what those consequences are. Violating the Precautionary Principle has led to many calamities, from catastrophic climate change to ecosystems being thrown out of balance to the 250,000-year threat of global contamination by nuclear waste leaks. In other words, we should keep our assorted genies in the bottle until we know what we’re about to unleash. And I think Google Glass could be one such genie. Particularly if future iterations in totalitarian states make Google Glass or similar technology less optional, and less easy to remove.

Love to get your comments on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

It happened again—the first words out of the robocaller’s synthesizer box were “press 1 for your free directory listing.”

Guess what—if that’s the first thing I hear from you, it’s also the last—because my phone will be back in its cradle before your robot even finishes the sentence. CLICK!

It’s like telling me you want to marry me the moment we first meet—before we’re even introduced. And guess what. I’m already happily married and I’m not in the market. Even if I were, that’s not how I’d want to be approached.

Sure, I’m in business, and I love free listings—useful ones, anyway, like Literary Market Place (which typically brings me a very small stream of very large clients). But I’ve also wasted a lot of time over the years filling out free listings that have zero benefit, like the gazillion Who’s Who books I got listed in back in the 1980s and 1990s.

So…when your call ID shows up as something unrecognizable (RL2 Services Co? What the heck is that?), the first thing I want to know is “who are you, really?” The second thing I want to know is “what’s the catch/the actual cost?” Then “how much time is this going to take?” And of course, “who reads your directory, how many readers are there, and how targeted is this to what I sell?”

No robocall is going to answer those questions.

I will listen to the first few seconds of a robocall, because sometimes it’s the bank’s identity theft with a security alert on my credit card, a school district telling me classes are canceled for weather, or something like that. I don’t love them but I have learned that once in a while, they’re real. But try to sell me something, anything, with a robocall and I just think you’re stupid, disrespectful, and annoying.

And some of the live operators are no better. I’m very protective of my cell number and give it out on a need-to-know basis. I got a human being calling me who told me he was calling because of a survey he filled out. I responded, “I don’t give my cell number out on surveys. Who are you really?” His response: CLICK!

Does this company really think it’s going to get on my good side with this?

I’ve had others who can’t deviate from a script. Honey, if I’m going to do business with you, we’re going to have a two-way conversation. If you’re human and you talk at me as if you are a robot, I will treat you like one. My turn to CLICK!

I continue to be amazed at the clueless, deceitful, or just plain disconnected marketing “strategies” I encounter. Presumably, businesses do these things to attract new clients. But it would be more accurate to call them “client repelling strategies,” because they do the opposite of attract.

If you would be pushed away by bad marketing when it’s done to you, why do it to others who will feel the same way?

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