Category: Web 2.0/Social Media

By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, media-general, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Lostremote.com has an astounding post: a traditional print journalist ranted that a TV station allowing its viewers to select one story for the nightly newscast was the death of standards. The station, in best-practices Web 2.0 fashion, invited him on the show to debate the issue publicly.

And this is how the journalist responded:

“I’m told that this multiple-choice reporter has called me out with a public invitation, on her blog or her twitter or whatever, to debate her before her ubiquitous Web camera with its on-line audience of literally dozens of voyeurs and three or four lonely, misfit bloggers who spend all their time communicating only with each other. I need not lend my experience and credibility to draw her a crowd.”

Talk about clueless! This kind of arrogance might have worked for The New York Times 100 years ago, but it sure doesn’t work now for an unknown journalist working for a newspaper in Arkansas! What he doesn’t get is that he has no credibility with the audience he’s rejecting (other than he apparently writes a blog on politics)–and that his appearance on the show might have built credibility for his position, and might have gone viral, being seen by tens of thousands.

Now, mind you–I am trained as a traditional print journalist. I have enormous respect for people who follow the old principles and standards–who do research before they write, who understand the importance of objectivity, and who try to tell the important stories that are very hard to find on mainstream broadcast media–and I’m horrified by the decline both in journalistic standards within a story and in the general willingness to go after a tough (and expensive) but important story. That failure in part led us to the Iraq debacle. Journalists absolutely need to ask hard questions, grapple with the answers, and filter the world for their public. In an era where we all have far too much information and limited ability to process it, we still need traditional journalists as intermediaries. Citizen journalism is vital, but it’s not the whole thing. Professional journalism is crucial, still.

But I think you can have both journalistic standards and an openness to listening to your readers/listeners/viewers. You can have deep investigative journalism and a viewpoint, even in nonprint media–look at the amazing radio/TV show, Democracy Now, if you want an example. And you can have dialog without threatening your position. I think this journo was extremely short-sighted.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Web 2.0/Social Media

The post directly above this one, about the death of traditional journalism, has a very interesting provenance. I thought I’d share it with you and provide a look into the mindset of one blogger choosing one story–because as someone who was raised on newspapers, I’ve obviously come far in my information patterns.

PR guru Peter Shankman started a service less than a year ago called Help A Reporter Out; it matches journalists seeking sources with over 40,000 readers seeking news coverage. The venture is free, and advertising-supported. It started as a Facebook group, an I’m proud to say that I was the sixth member.

Today, Peter ran this ad:

This HARO: Cinterim. Cinterim is technology marketing like you
never seen it before, time-sliced marketing: only what you need,
when you need it. They’ve termed it Marketing as a Service: From
Chief Marketing Officers and market-driven business strategy to
complete outsourced marketing services. But they don’t have any
clients or accounts, rather, they serve as a partner to every
company they work with, whether helping a start-up to focus or
turning a later stage or public company’s strategies and execution.
Cinterim is fully invested in each partner’s short- and long-term
success. Make Cinterim your secret weapon. Find them at
www.cinterim.com. And be sure to check out co-founders Lisa Arthur
and Michael Bloom’s hard hitting blog, www.fearofmarketing.com , a
prelude to their book-in-progress, Fear of Marketing, Why the
companies that connect people are disconnected.

Now, I’m not someone who clicks on ads a lot, but I do read Peter’s sponsorship notices, and have followed several of them. I went to the blog. And found this very intelligent and thoughtful article about GM’s troubles (I’ll forgive the sloppy proofreading–lord knows, I’ve certainly been guilty of that!). I even put in a comment, about market share not necessarily being what it’s cracked up to be.

And then I glanced at the blogroll, which only had four entries. I saw three blogs I knew and respected, and this intriguing-sounding one called Lost Remote. So I clicked over and found the story I blogged about.

In fact, I sent my assistant a note asking her to add both Fear of Marketing and Lost Remote to both my own blogroll and my personal blog-reading widget that notifies me of new posts.

Of course, the problem with this kind of journo-voyeuristic ADD, which I get a lot, is that my goal for the last hour was to lower my inbox from 997 to 950.I got it all the way to 996. Yeah, my inbox is so crowded because I’ll get a mailing from Huffington Post or Marketing Sherpa or dozens of others, and I start following a lot of the links, and then at some point I have to do paying work. Oh well, next time!

And if you haven’t read my post on the death of journalism, please scroll up. It’ll be right on top of this one.

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

Wow! Mashable reports that the Pulitzer Prize people have opened up the award to online journalists without a print publication, if they meet certain criteria. That means bloggers, e-zine/webzine publishers and perhaps others are seen as legitimate journalists.

As a blogger, publisher of four e-zines, and publisher of five webzines, I welcome this.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that I heard this news on a social media site: Twitter.

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

Just read PCWorld’s review of Facebook Connect–a service that not only lets you log in to many sites with your Facebook ID (a la Open ID), but also pings back your participation (if you allow it to) to your Facebook profile.

Oddly enough, the last section of my new book I wrote yesterday was on the idea of growing your influence by syndication (something I see and use constantly on social networks)–and here’s Facebook implementing that very thing.

Already, thousands of Twitter users (including me) feed their Tweets into their Facebook profiles. And I can tell you I get a lot of comments from Facebook Friends about my Tweets.

For a great article on the power of syndication across multiple sites, visit this post by Alex Mandossian.

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

Twitter is the latest evolution of many-to-many online networking, something that started with Usenet newsgroups, for-pay proprietary services like Compuserve and AOL, and online BBSs more than 20 years ago.

I was an early adopter of many-to-many discussion platforms online; I experimented with them when I briefly went online with a Compuserve account in 1987 (though between the command-line interface that I had to relearn each time and the noisy 300 bps phone lines that kept throwing me off, I didn’t stick around very long). I wrote about them back in 1991, and began using them actively in 1995. At that time, I mostly used e-mail discussion lists.

Thirteen months ago, I began migrating to social media platforms by signing up first for Facebook and then Plaxo, CollectiveX, Ning, and, this summer, Twitter. I’d made a stab at it earlier; I’ve had accounts on LinkedIn and Ryze for several years, and put up a MySpace page a couple of years ago. But I hadn’t really used them, and other than LinkedIn, I’m still not using those networks.

Facebook was the first one that (excuse the pun) clicked for me. The interface was intuitive, it was easy to find both old friends and people with common interests, and it conveniently notified me by e-mail when someone shared anything with me. Plaxo and CollectiveX are similar. I was drawn to CollectiveX in particular, because it seems to be where a lot of discussions about environmentally sustainable and social-venture triple-bottom-line business take place, and it has a wonderfully international scope that I find refreshing.

And then in August, I finally signed on to Twitter. It’s hard to believe that such a simple idea can be so powerful. Or how much can be said in 140-character installments!

I’m shocked, amazed, and delighted by how much I like it, and what treasures I find there:

* Tons of resources: useful articles and blogs, audios, upcoming teleseminars
* Access to movers and shakers (I’ve exchanged messages with luminaries like Guy Kawasaki and Mark Joyner; I’ve sent messages to Obama’s Twitter account, but am not convinced that anyone actually reads it. He has over 120,000 followers and follows nearly all of them back.)
* Powerful ways to grow my own community and get connected with people I ought to know about
* Media leads of reporters looking for sources, by following @skydiver and @Profnet
* Ability to flag useful articles, including some that I write, or events I put on
* And yes, a number of new friendships

All this with only a few hundred that I’m following. I have cut drastically down on the number of e-mail discussions I participate in, so that I have time for a few visits a day to Twitter. I don’t quite understand how so many people manage to follow thousands of people, but I see myself reaching that point.

Twitter is at the Model T stage. I don’t think anyone could predict the full impact in, say, ten years, any more than in 1995, people would have predicted that by 2008, a lot of people would be not only shopping but paying bills, managing databases, running surveys, doing full-scale audio and video, and actually cataloging the world’s knowledge over the Web.

I may not know where we’re going, but I’m sure excited to be on the journey. And it’s FUN!

Want to follow me on Twitter? https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst for Forrester Research, found some pretty important stats about the uses of various Web 2.0 portals by the two major presidential campaigns. The study looked at Twitter followers, Facebook supporters, number of videos uploaded and watched, and more. And Obama wildly outperformed McCain on every single metric–from 380% more supporters on both MySpace and Facebook to an astonishing 240 times (that’s 24,000 percent!) more followers on Twitter.

Of course, McCain’s cluelessness around the Internet was the butt of many jokes–but Obama really gets it, and that may be a contribution to the landslide victory.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media

Does your skin crawl every time you hear Ann Coulter, William Bennett or some other radical-right wingnut savor the pleasure of saying “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”

Did you take pleasure in learning the famous story of World War II Denmark, when the Nazis ordered all the Jews to wear yellow stars–and the King of Denmark proudly pinned one on, as did many of his countryfolk?

Well, we’re not alone. Mark Hussein Gordon, of sonomacreative.com, has set up a Facebook group called Hussein is my name too! All you have to do is join, change your middle name in your profile, and remember to change it back after the election, and you can show solidarity both with Barack and with the Arab and Muslim communities by being Hussein for a couple of weeks.

I think this is brilliant. And I thank Robin Hussein Blum for drawing it to my attention.
Shel Hussein Horowitz

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

A certain popular website, that I will not name or link to, posted a bunch of Sarah Palin’s government-related e-mails posted through private, non-government, non-archived accounts.

This is, to put it mildly, not according to Hoyle, and especially because there was even a conversation about how to keep prying eyes away from these posts by using “private” email.

Of course, as Palin found out, e-mail is never really private. It’s not a secure medium. It’s also not particularly reliable. and you shouldn’t expect to have any privacy.

However…while Palin had absolutely no right to conduct state business over non-government e-mail–and certainly no right to delete the emails and the account and thus destroy evidence of possible wrongdoing in the Troopergate scandal, I have just as big an ethical bone to pick with the site that unmasked her.: it listed the emails of her correspondents, in big print, and in hackable form.

I’m sorry, but it is not anybody’s right to have the personal e-mails of her kids and others who corresponded with Sarah Palin. These people will have to go through a lot of time and trouble to change their addresses, notify correspondents, etc.

Palin was wrong. But so was this website.

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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

Last night was the twice-a-year Town Meeting in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts. We still have an old-style New England Town Meeting, where any registered voter can speak (about issues already on the agenda, anyway) and vote. And these votes really do shape the town; every zoning change, for instance, has to get a 2/3 supermajority at Town Meeting.

During the Save the Mountain campaign several years ago, for instance, one of my neighbors submitted a citizen petition to restrict the altitude of a building lot. She gathered the requisite number of signatures,w e organized turnout at the meeting, and her new bylaw was overwhelmingly adopted, along with some others we’d put in.

But some financial outlays are a two-step process. First, Town Meeting approves them, and then, a paper-ballot election is held at a later date, to appropriate the funding.

Last night, a longtime citizen environmental activist raised the point that we
d passed some of these improvements several times, but they kept getting voted down in the later election because most people didn’t know when that election would take place. She asked if the election date could be announced at Town Meeting, but the Selectmen (kind of like a Town council) hadn’t set the date yet.

So I stepped to the microphone and offered to create an e-mail notification list. Then I went home and set up an announce-only newsletter on yahoogroups with this mission statement:

An announce-only media channel to notify residents of Hadley, Massachusetts of upcoming votes and meetings of town boards, committees, and commissions. This non-partisan list will not take positions on any issues. It is solely to notify the public of upcoming votes and meetings. It will distribute information as received; the listowners make no promises or claims regarding the completeness or accuracy of information received. We just want to help get the word out.

By phrasing it as a “media channel,” and by not stating opinions on the matters before us, I will be able to receive and forward the press releases from the town administrator, and hopefully over time several hundred people will be able to learn the dates of the elections in time to vote.

Seems like this is a pretty good model for lots of communities. It costs nothing to set up, and I’m anticipating a whole year of administering the list will add under an hour to my workload. We’ll see how it works.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media

For years, I’ve been a proponent of viral marketing; as one among may examples, it’s the main tool I’ve used to gain support for the Business Ethics Pledge.

One of the best viral marketers I know is Ken McArthur, known for his joint-venture Internet marketing conferences. I met Ken several years ago at one of Fred Gleeck’s book marketing conferences, and then again a few years later at Mark Victor Hansen’s book marketing conference. We’ve stayed in touch. And since meeting him, Ive noticed that he crops up absolutely everywhere.

Yet even though he’s obviously been gong to book marketing conferences for years, he didn’t have a book. Now, he’s finally about to release IMPACT: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World (yes, its an affiliate link). I’ve been one of his many informal advisors, and even commented to him a few months ago that I also have a book title that ends with “in a Noisy World” (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, published in 2000 by Chelsea Green

Frugal marketing genius that he is, Ken wouldn’t be content with an ordinary book launch–so he created one of the most powerful viral marketing ideas I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d thought of it.

You know the concept of internships: students donate labor in exchange for training. Ken has taken this to an extreme: he recruited over 100 people to be his unpaid Internet marketing corps, in exchange for learning all his tricks via a series of conference calls. What a perfect example of the Abundance Principle at work! The six-week program started tonight.

I decided that one of my contributions to the effort would be to chronicle it here. So thus, my key takeaways from call #1:

  • 100 people can have a huge impact in a number of ways, for example all contacting the same key influencer, or divvying up John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book (fewer than 10 ideas per participant)
  • Not only are affiliate commissions an effective motivator, but you can motivate your affiliates further by making the deal open-ended. When people sign up for Ken’s affiliate program, they will not only earn a couple of bucks on the book, but also on all sorts of backend products from now to eternity–products that will pay many times better than the book sale.
  • Ken is providing tasks and thus not only training others but outsourcing the ground work. He asked participants to generate lists of key contacts, blogs, forums, and potential joint venture partners.

    • This is an easy one for me, as I know a lot of people in the independent publishing sector. Except that I can’t really separate influencers from JV partners. But because what he’s doing is newsworthy in the publishing world and in the Internet marketing world, I have a number of people I could approach to let them know about what’s going on, including John Kremer, Dan Poynter, Fern Reiss, Patricia Frey, and Joan Stewart–all very big names in the world he’s trying to reach.

    Ken being Ken, he makes it quite worthwhile to visit his site, offering a truckload of quality resources just for dropping by.

    Is this your chance to learn from a master launcher, without paying thousands of dollars for a product? I think it might just be.

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