Tag: social media

By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Thirty-one years ago, the housemate with whom I’d found an apartment moved out, and I invited a poet friend of mine to take his place. We shared that apartment for several months, until he, too, moved on, and another friend moved in.

Today, I went to see that poet friend for the first time since around 1980. We’d been completely out of touch–but about a year ago, a mutual friend tracked my wife down on Facebook. Turns out that mutual friend also convinced my old housemate to join Facebook, where we found each other a month or so ago.

The friend who moved in after him stayed in that apartment after I left, but later moved to Vesey Street, two blocks from the World Trade Center. It was a primitive form of social media that let me know, finally, that she was OK, two weeks after 9/11.

And there are a number of others.

I remember very clearly the first time something like this happened: AOL was still my Internet portal, so that fixes it somewhere in 1994-95. All of a sudden I got an e-mail from a high school friend. Tom and his wife Liz came up to visit (we live four hours apart), attended my wife’s book party in New York, and have generally reentered our lives. As have Lew and Katherine, the friends who connected us with my old housemate. A few months ago, they moved up from New Jersey to two towns away from us in Massachusetts; we hadn’t seen them since a falling-out somewhere around 1989. Now, we’ve seen them several times. In fact, we’re seeing them tomorrow.

Oddly enough, when I’ve searched for old friends, I haven’t had much luck finding them. But quite a few have found me.

I’ve forged or deepened many connections via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and other communities with people I hadn’t known before–but those reconnections from 20 or 30 years in the past are particularly special.

(A slightly different version of this article was published on Technorati under the title Technology Helps Me Cross Time Tunnels to the Distant Past.)

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By Posted on Posted in Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

My friend Elsom Eldridge has a nice article about how to avoid becoming “Social Media Roadkill.” And I agree with almost everything he says.

Almost everything. With my usual focus on transparency, here’s what I disagree with (emphasis added):

Be personable but don’t give people a reason to dislike you. Mention your dog or your kids so that consumers see you in a dimensional way; skip over religion and politics where you are sure to make enemies no matter what you say.

This was my response:
On the whole, good advice–but I think it’s possible to succeed in social media without hiding your politics. As long as you don’t promote them in an offensive way. I’ve had spirited but friendly debates on political issues for years via social media. My politics are part of who I am, and it would be a blow against integrity to hide them.

I find that most people respect my stances, even when they disagree. And I am careful to challenge views while not attacking the person who holds those views, to keep the debate positive, to avoid namecalling or other forms of dumping.

Some of the people I disagree with strongly about politics have in fact sent me clients, endorsed my books, and had long, complex off-list explorations with me about our points of agreement and disagreement. I am seen as a friendly, helpful, and yes, opinionated person.

Shel Horowitz, award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

Great discussion on Green Biz between Green business expert Joel Makower and emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman, on the roles of informed consumers, “radical transparency,” and social media in eco-friendly consumer buying patterns. Start with Makower’s post, click over to Goleman’s response, and then read the comments on both pages.

This was my comment:

I don’t see you really at odds. Joel says the eco-friendly products have to show a clear advantage–but couldn’t that advantage be something idealistic like lower carbon footprint, especially if it’s combined with, say, a health benefit from avoiding toxic chemicals?

Daniel puts a lot of faith in social media, particularly for the generation coming behind ours. And he’s right. Social proof is in the process of leapfrogging in importance.

I find it interesting that Daniel looks to the Internet, considering he and I both live in the Northampton, MA area, which has very strong offline culture in favor of eco-friendly purchases. Offline cultures, too, can provide social proof.

In the research I’ve done for my books, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and my forthcoming eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I found that consumers will indeed choose the better choice, the choice more in line with their values, all things being equal. They will even pay more for it. The challenge then becomes to make Green products as good or better than the choices that don’t align with values, and then choosing the better one becomes a no-brainer. Examples abound, from organic food and bodycare to hybrid cars. The danger, I think, is if people find out they’ve been greenwashed (hybrids being an example), the new habits may not stick.

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

A Neilsen Online study, quoted by Adam Ostrow on Mashable, claims “66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.”

In other words, social media has become more popular than e-mail.

I’d find this hard to believe if I didn’t have kids in their teens and 20s. In that demographic, e-mail is all-but-irrelevant, except when they need to talk to parents or teachers. They talk to each other on Facebook and Skype and mobile text messaging–all day long. This is one very wired generation; my wife reports that her university students constantly try to text their friends during class, even at the risk of lowering their grades. To my generation, that’s really rude. To theirs, it’s accepted, almost demanded.

As for those who text while driving, or worse, that idiot who killed himself and others by driving a train while texting, that’s a serious safety hazard for those around you, and should be treated like driving drunk. No way can you drive safely while your eyes are looking down making sure your thumbs are in the right place.

I love social media. I’m always haunting Twitter, though from my own computer and not from a phone. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and some other sites. But call me old-fashioned; I still prefer e-mail for many situations.

And even though I don’t text, I certainly see the power of texting. Especially in situations where talking isn’t practical. But I wonder, will this be the generation that forgets how to talk on the phone, just as we were the generation that forgot how to write letters? I never understood why my daughter and some of her friends prefer to text, despite the awkward interface and much higher cost (our cell plan charges extra for all texts, because we got it for the voice features) than a computer-based solution–or than picking up the phone.

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

Four years FedEx took over the Kinko’s copy and office services company, the Kinko brand was dropped entirely in 2008; those services are now grouped under FedEx Office.

When Marketing Sherpa interviewed FedEx’s Director of Global Brand Management, Gayle Christensen, she outlined eight steps the company took to smooth the transition in the public eye and retain/acquire market share. (Note: Sherpa’s content goes behind a barrier, for purchase, after a few days. “Norman,” referred to in the quote, is Eric Norman, of the marketing strategy firm Sametz Blackstone Associates,)

What caught my eye was “Step #6. Set up interviews with bloggers”:

High-profile people (e.g., new chief executives) should do interviews with bloggers, trade publications, and other media outlets to address weak speculations and preclude skepticism, says Norman. “You have to engage folks who are writing about you,” he says. “If you are not engaged, you concede the control of the message to them.”

Find out who’s talking about the merger on social media outlets, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or niche online forums and blogs. Search for the merging companies’ names or set up an email alert, such as Google Alerts, for the company and brand names.

Make a point to comment on blogs or social media sites talking about the merger, especially if something is false.

I’m fascinated that setting up interviews with bloggers warrants a main headline, while traditional media is mentioned but glossed over in the paragraph. It shows how far we’ve come that bloggers are considered opinion molders, while traditional journalists are barely noticed. This is a growing trend, I think, and it has many implications for how we (as a society) deliver and digest news.

I’m a big believer in citizen journalism, including the blogosphere (I’ve blogged since 2004, after all), and participate actively in social media.

Still, I question the decision to pretty much ignore the mainstream press. There’s also a place for the trained and skilled journalist, who knows how to ask deep questions, has a really strong BS detector, and understands the importance of telling a story that encompasses multiple points of view. I, for one, am not ready to give that up just yet.

But I also note that for many years, some “mainstream” journalism outlets have had a very clear point of view, and have thrown objectivity out the window. While in recent years we’ve seen this very dramatically with, for instance, the strong right-wing bias of Fox News or the somewhat less strong liberal tilt of NBC, even during the golden news decade of the 1970s, there were news outlets such as New Hampshire’s Manchester Union-Leader that were unabashedly partisan and sharply opinionated.

With huge budget cutbacks, bean counters making policy decisions, and corporate ownership sometimes casting a pall over the selection of stories and the decisions about how much resources to use in pursuing them, the future of professional news gathering looks a bit shaky from here. I hope it pulls out in the clutch. It’s an important perspective, despite its flaws, and we’d be poorer for losing it.

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