I’ve worked in social media since before Facebook was introduced to Harvard undergraduates and the term “social media” existed. Now a 50 billion dollar company, I’m consistently struck by the disruptive impact of Facebook’s executive decisions that force developers, advertisers, and corporate partners to rethink and adapt well-planned business strategies.
Privacy settings, API changes, terms of service, user interface design—all of these core aspects of the platform must be carefully evaluated when multi-million dollar brands make decisions on how to build and engage their communities. And they change unannounced, fan pages become deleted without notice, forcing seasoned executives, developers and legal teams into crisis mode.
There is a consensus of opinion between almost everyone I know that the industry is hostage to Facebook because the platform is gatekeeper to 500 million+ consumers. But as a long-term life partner, the relationship is one sided. There’s no listening, no feedback, you shower it with money and get no reciprocal love back. It’s like the young trophy wife Bunny in the Big Lebowski—pretty, attractive, and enticing, a status symbol that ultimately doesn’t listen to your needs.
The initial appeal of Facebook to early adopters was its open platform, which spawned a literal gold rush of innovation in applications fueled by eager investors and marketers. The symbiotic relationship that once drove the meteoric growth was exciting as new romances often are, but now that mature businesses have to plan for the future, raising the communities we helped give birth to into mature children looks like a one-sided picture.
The truth is, corporate partners want to appear like The Dude, care free and easy going, but the reality is they are more like Mr. Lebowski—the other Jeffrey Lebowski, disabled, unable to adjust so easily because some Chinaman took his legs in Korea. They want Facebook to be at the center of their marketing strategy, to have fun working together and nurture a relationship with millions of people that visit the platform every day. But look at a pattern of erratic behavior and your gut instinct tells you that Facebook married you for your money.
Like being married to a young trophy wife owing money all over town, companies spend millions in unnecessary staffing and development costs attending to details and last-minute changes. It’s akin to the scene in the Big Lebowski when Bunny returns at the end and—oops!—she just forgot to tell everyone that she was leaving for a while. There was no kidnapping after all, but we have to act like there was one—always, because unfortunately we just can’t plan that far ahead.
Let’s hope with a $50 billion dollar valuation and investors like Goldman Sachs that Facebook will grow up a bit. Enough building new features and making decisions that leave us frantic, take some time to think about your corporate partners, who would love to hop in the convertible and head to Malibu on a moment’s notice but unfortunately have infrastructures more akin to a wheel chair. If not, perhaps it’s time to file for a divorce, and reluctantly pay alimony but shift your marketing dollars towards building a lifelong partnership with a platform more reliable—a social media partner that really wants to raise a little Lebowski.
I developed my Twitter practices based on a decade of academic research on religion, culture, and emerging media. Twitter can make you smarter if used correctly. Here’s how:
Identify Relevant Trends
Publish 10-20 Tweets per day, a combination of retweets and originals. At the end of the week you’ll have about 100+ to review. Take time to synthesize what you tweeted during the week, and this will solidify your understanding of the most relevant trends – like writing short papers in school. Aggregated information can be leveraged in writing articles, blog posts, adapting to PPT presentations, or any number of things.
Sharpen Judgments
Daily Tweeting helps to make concise judgments about what is the most important. The necessity to distill your point into 140 characters or less forces you to think clearly about your audience. Similarly, the short length keeps other people’s information down to a minimum.
Quality Filter
Don’t read blog posts if you’re in information gathering mode, skim them first. Use Twitter as a first line of research, almost like a social bookmarking tool. Mountains of information can seem mind blowing and overwhelming.
Determine if the post is “good enough” to share – each tweet you are effectively publishing something to thousands of people. You don’t have to read every word of everything you endorse, just enough to decide if it is relevant RIGHT NOW. Wait until you have time to review a few posts to decide if it signifies an actual trend.
Followers Serve as Research Assistants.
Each tweet involves a process of quality filtering. Twitter followers are people that you trust enough to share relevant information. Follow the right people and you create a funnel of information about news and emerging trends delivered instantly in real time.
80/20 Rule
I follow people who publish relevant links generally 80% of the time. If more than 1 out of 5 tweets is a personal update or message to someone else, I stop following, unless I consider the person to be a real thought leader. You have to make judgment calls here, but for the most part if the person is really important, someone else will retweet the best posts.
Lists are Like Focus Groups
Lists turn Twitter users into research assistants, and groups of them into focus groups. My interests generally fall into four categories:
Social Media
Spirituality/Meditation
Innovation/Creativity
Current events
Lists allow you to segment information from trusted sources for quick reference. They are also excellent to use if you want to find new people to follow. Follow other people’s lists who are experts that you trust.
Beware of the Twitterati
I rarely look at my main Twitter feed because it is clogged with social posts from people who have 30,000+ followers. I keep following thought leaders because occasionally I want to know what they are saying, but for the most part I only use lists.
Many Twitter users are aspiring thought leaders (myself included) and so they like to feel part of the community chit-chat. Pop your head in before going to a conference, pick up some talking points for networking, but otherwise avoid getting caught in the trap that you’re being productive by reading someone is stuck on a plane. Tune out the noise – thought leaders usually express their main opinions on blogs.
Stay Grounded In the Present
Remember, the Buddha says desire is the cause of all suffering. Don’t get carried away trying to stay on top of everything. It is impossible to make qualitative judgments on significant trends when you are stuck in the trenches. You need to step back in order to move forward. Adopt these practices and you’ll start to make synthetic analysis quickly and more concise insights – and over time, you will become smarter!
Would you trust someone to produce advertisements for television because they can use your remote control?
Would you hire someone to do print ads based on whether they could read a magazine?
Of course not, that seems ridiculous, because everyone knows that television and print ads take a lot of skill, training, and expertise to produce.
But look at most classified ads for a “Social Media Guru” and you’ll find that they are looking for people with 0-3 years of experience. Many companies think that they can hire a kid out of college to manage social media because they are regularly on Facebook, Twitter, or write a blog. People become gurus after lives of dedication and experience. Most kids using social media are just being kids.
This points to a fundamental mistake that ability to use a communications platform equates to expertise and knowledge to build and engage communities in meaningful ways. Kids are naturals with social media because their profiles serve as extensions of their real-world identities. They help establish reputations, build trust, and provide the most convenient and efficient way to connect and communicate.
Kids don’t say to themselves “I am going to use social media now”—it is just something that they do. It feels natural and intuitive. And it doesn’t to people in charge at most companies. Some executives have trouble with sending emails and organizing online calendars. Social media is counterintuitive, awkward, and makes them nervous. And because they don’t understand how it works, anyone who can effortlessly use social media must clearly be a guru.
Social media requires strategy and planning, creativity and innovation, as well as consistency of messaging and community moderation. It collapses the roles of PR, marketing, and customer service into a fluid communication medium that demands real-time participation and dialogue. Each comment, tweet, status update, like, or other action delivers a branded message to tens of thousands of people. Social media engagement is more akin to public speaking than it is simply using a computer. The stakes are simply too high to hand over the keys to the Ferrari to anyone who can drive.
Brands need to properly hire people they trust to speak on their behalf. People who can plan and execute a campaign, quantify ROI and creatively incentivize word-of-mouth, and drive real results. Having an active social media presence is just what kids do these days but it’s not enough – chances are if you think 400 Facebook friends makes someone a social media guru, it might just mean you are becoming old.
I worked at Heavy.com years ago. We still have Heavy reunions. They had beer Fridays, a young corporate culture, sponsored events like private concerts with MiniKiss, the miniature Kiss cover band, and it was a fun place to work.
There was no such thing as social media, we did what intuitively made sense and went with our instincts. I miss that. I miss having fun with technology, stuff like:
Chat rooms and posting widgets, choosing songs for my player and custom profiles, and all the fun stuff on MySpace before they lost a handle on SPAM.
Facebook applications, most of which never did anything, but they were fun to play with for longer than the average person’s attention span.
Watching videos that made me laugh, and not thinking twice if they were created by some advertiser, because videos were fun and most brands didn’t have the guts to make content that might go “viral.”
I miss social sharing before it became SOCIAL MEDIA, before companies had to throw money around because of the sheer volume of people who are “social” online. Before there were 10 million experts writing about it. Before there were 20 million people who want YOU to promote their content because they want to be a star.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOCIAL PART OF SOCIAL MEDIA – SOCIAL, AS IN, FUN?
I’ve worked in social media for years. Before it was a discipline. I know how to develop content strategies, to engage and build communities. I can talk the talk – engagement, metrics, Return on Investment (ROI), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – it’s my job, and I’m damn good at driving real results for clients. I also use social media daily – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, I read blogs and write one, etc.
But I miss the fun. I miss content that just made me laugh. I miss self-indulgent entertainment value. I miss social sharing before it had to have a purpose. When it was enough to be creative, without having to be quantifiable. Social sharing helped forge communities that fostered self-expression because the goal was to do something interesting and fun.
Best analogy might be in my friend Rodney’s recent comment on Facebook, I’ll explain below:
IT’S ABOUT BEING SOCIAL, NOT ABOUT QUANTIFYING THE END RESULT
The rise of SOCIAL MEDIA has led to a deluge of experts on the subject and billions of dollars from corporate interests, resulting in a booming industry focused on how to connect brands with consumers in meaningful but ultimately quantifiable ways. Meanwhile, the masses of people using social media have led technology developers to transform them from platforms of self-expression into conduits of information publishing.
People are quick to dismiss SOCIAL MEDIA users as narcissistic in the same way as they dismiss young kids as hipsters. Doing so misses the point that we are increasingly narrowing the range of possibilities to be creative – or simply, to have fun – and overall the focus on engagement and end results stunts the growth of things like talent or innovation.
AUTO-TUNE OR AUTO PILOT? WILL SOCIAL MEDIA KILL OUR SOCIAL SKILLS?
I was a punk rock kid growing up. I had mixed feelings when Nirvana became huge because I was worried that mass adoption would kill punk rock. I was and still am a huge electronic music fan, but the high fees of touring artists make some of them only accessible at large venues that lack intimacy and impact the overall experience of the performance.
I can live with that. What concerns me, however, is that the change in the content quality across social media is having a similar impact upon how we communicate. That we’re becoming more information obsessed, and somehow less social, and by less social I mean genuinely less interested in the fun times had when people come together.
I saw for the first time last night the remake of “We Are The World.” What struck me about the song was the use of the auto-tune device on vocals, first championed by Cher’s song Believe. There have been so many remakes of things from my childhood, such as Transformers, GI Joe, Nightmare on Elm Street, Where the Wild Things Are, but one question came to mind – are there enough celebrities who can actually sing to do vocals for a short song?
There might not be. We’ve auto-tuned our vocals to reduce talent into screaming through a machine. What might happen to our social skills through using social media?
We are the world, and we can also change it. We can make it fun again. Like the Japanese did when they recorded their own tribute:
This is my first blog post after six months of travel throughout Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and India. Where to begin? How about pics of my favorite places – I’ll start with a few from India
The above picture is of a Shiva sadhu. He walks naked covered in ash, carrying his trident in one hand with eight-foot dreadlocks draped over the other. This was taken in Rishikesh, India, close to Haridwar, during the Kumbh Mela, the largest religious gathering in the world, which takes place once every three years in alternating cities.
We spoke for about fifteen minutes. Afterwards, he gave me a blessing on the forehead, and a blissful feeling of peace irresistibly came over me that lasted for several hours.
This next picture is from the night that I met my guru. It is said to be an auspicious sign to come across a calf being born. On my way to meet him my friend Brajesh and I encountered some people who were caring for a cow and its newborn calf.
We walked with them and alternated carrying the newborn. You can see how present and mindful guruji is holding the calf, the love of the cow for its child, and the beautiful intermingling of nature and spirituality that permeates daily life in India.
This is a worker on a bus in GOA, India. What I like about this picture is that he didn't know who 2Pac was. Often times we try to project symbolic meanings upon things that people do, this guy just needed a shirt to wear
This is the sunset in GOA, India. There is a slight haze that hovers over the water that makes objects in the distance seem blurry, but not a cloud in the sky. As the sun sets, it turns a deep red as the light refracts through the hazy mist. You can see the change in color below, but the pictures don’t really do justice to its magnificence.
GOA Sunset - Deep Red
This picture is of a guy who plays a flute with a dancing cow. I have video of the cow dancing, which I will post eventually. What I love about this picture is the creativity of how to make an honest living in India. Perfectly matched, and the cow rings its bell and lifts up its foot on cue. So many holy cows everywhere in India, but this one was my favorite.
Does this picture need a comment? Seems to capture the tourist industry quite well. What I also like is the Indian woman in the background to the right of the blond tourist is wearing a Yankees cap.
She did not know that NY stood for New York, she just needed a hat to cover her face working at the beach.
Below is the last pictures for now, taken from Kashmir, India, called “Paradise on Earth.” It’s hard to argue that any place on earth is more beautiful, too bad the media and politics have distorted perceptions of the region into a place of danger, conflict, and angry Muslim militants.
I will be traveling for the next several months in Southeast Asia and will be writing infrequently on this blog but devoting time to finishing my book, which I’m tentatively calling Buddha to Brooklyn – a Reluctant Memoir.
The book explores my perceptions on the co-evolution of modern marketing and the social sciences primarily from the 1960s to the present, along with the subsequent loss of (and yearning for) spirituality and meaning in the post-modern world. It’s written primarily from the first person in a lyrical style similar to the blog entry of the same name. I’d like to think of it as Malcolm Gladwell and Cornell West meets Charles Bukowski and Alan Watts, but that could all change as the story unfolds and manifests.
I will be in Thailand Nov 5-Dec 1, Vietnam Dec 1-13, Myanmar (Burma) Dec 14-Jan 10, and the rest is up in the air. Please be in touch. Pics above Bagan, Myanmar, and below Ko Tao, Thailand
I’ve always been fascinated with sound and believed since an early age that rhythms contained and could unlock intrinsic patterns to the underlying core of our being.
This reminded me of my early days studying Eastern religions and my former professor Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega’s work on the Hindu Tantra, in which he studied a non-dual mystical tradition of Abhinavagupta. Perplexed by why sacred texts repeatedly referenced different vowels of the mantra “OM,” Muller-Ortega came to the realization that Abhinavagupta was discussing how the patterns in sound mimicked the underlying patterns at the heart of all reality.
Practitioners could attune to these internal resonances through discipline of the mind via meditation on mantras, thereby both merging with and dissolving the misperception that one’s true nature is separate from the underlying fabric of all reality. It’s interesting to see the possible validation from modern science of perspectives dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in India.
