» Internet

Anonymity is the Enemy

shawn — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:43:01 +0000

I am restating some ideas already expressed by Seth Godin, David Kirkpatrick and Mark Zuckerburg, but I believe the current greatest enemy to online privacy, copyrighting, legal, libel, and simple self-governance, is the issue of user anonymity.

The motion of many organizations, including the social media leader, Facebook, is towards an internet that requires identification and validation of the user.

The method currently used is very primitive: validation through registered email, placing verification code onto a personal website or blog, and early steps into universal profile connections such as Google’s Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and Facebook Connect.

The leaders in this are obviously Google and Facebook, both racing to become “The Internet,” essentially being everywhere and touching everything, the most recent play by Facebook of putting the “Like” button everywhere. But here is where the move toward a user-identified web is affecting the world of online gaming:

Bye-bye trolls? Blizzard forums to use real names

July 7th, 2010 @ 12:49pm

By BARBARA ORTUTAY
AP Technology Writer

NEW YORK (AP) – Activision Blizzard Inc.’s move to require people to use their real names if they want to post messages in online forums for games is the latest sign that online anonymity is falling out of favor with many companies.

The upcoming change has upset many gamers who prize anonymity and don’t necessarily want their gamer personas associated with their real identities.

Blizzard, the maker of “World of Warcraft,” said Tuesday that the new rule will go into effect later this month. It will apply first to forums about the highly anticipated “StarCraft II,” out July 27; other games are to follow.

Blizzard hopes that making people use their real names will cut down on nasty behavior in the forums and create a more positive environment. Players will have the option _ but not a requirement _ to display the name of their main game character alongside their real name.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Blizzard is the latest company to require real identities. But he added businesses have “a lot of freedom” in doing so.

Facebook, the world’s most popular online social network, asks users to sign up with their real names. The company tries to delete fake profiles it comes across. A growing number of blogs and news sites are also abandoning anonymity. The Buffalo News said last month it will start requiring commenters on its website to give their real names and the towns they live in, just as they would do in a printed letter to the editor…

Article continued here: http://bit.ly/beMaK4

Social Networking Existed Before LinkedIn and Facebook

shawn — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:52:37 +0000

The other day I had someone ask me, “Hey, I saw that you know thousands of people on your LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter pages, could you ask one of them to get me a job?”

I felt utterly stunned at having to state the obvious, “I don’t actually know most of those people.”

I love social media sites. I spend entirely too much time on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter… especially Twitter, but I want to establish a clear distinction between social media sites and social networking.

“Social Media” is the term that generally groups together websites where the majority of content is created by the users. Typically they use log-ins, account names and personal profiles to connect people and focus on the “interactive” elements that have been key to the web 2.0 progression. We think of sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. But “Social Networking” existed long before Web 2.0.

Mankind is a social animal with a long tradition of societal interdependence. Ashton Kutcher, the self-appointed champion of the Social Web, recently said:

“[H]uman beings are born not able to even sustain themselves, so at the end of the day, if you ultimately did something in your life that was great, you at least owe your mom.” –Ashton Kutcher from AK FTW, SKY Magazine, Feb. 2010.

Social Networking is the normal and timeless practice of making connections and helping people out. Using technology to facilitate these contacts makes it easier and more efficient, but just as in the past, “It’s not about the number of contacts you have; it’s how you use them.”

Another great quote about the effectiveness of this new tool today and its potential in the future comes from one of the all time greats in peer-to-peer marketing, Seth Godin:

“Social media is either a time-wasting, wool-gathering, yak-shaving waste of effort or, perhaps, just maybe, it’s a crack in the wall between you and the rest of the world. It’s a choice” –Seth Godin

Make your choice. Use your tools wisely.

Georgia Rivalry Week and a Video

shawn — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:07:01 +0000

Here at Relevant Social Media, we’re from Georgia and we love college football. That makes this week a significant one. You see, the two top football schools in the state, Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia, have a long-standing college football rivalry. And usually, the game where they play each other is steeped with tension and, um, even a little, shall we say, animosity?

Well, this year, Tech is a top-ranked team and headed to a BCS bowl regardless of how they play on Saturday. Meanwhile, UGA is having one of its worst seasons and has suffered some significant losses, including the unexpected death of their mascot Georgia Bulldog, Uga VII.

Well, we decided to add insult to injury and share our slightly veiled opinions of how the usually heated rivalry will play out for the 2009 game. This Mac vs PC style ad highlights that for Georgia college football fans, this is the Most Important Football Game that Doesn’t Matter at All.

The Georgia Rivalry game will be played this Saturday, November 28th. Kick-off at 8pm at Bobby Dodd Stadium.

Or Leave Us a Comment on YouTube: UGA vs GT 2009 “Obviously”

A True Universal Profile

shawn — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:24:00 +0000

Uh-oh for the King and Queen of Social Media Sites, now Google is looking for a non-proprietary way for people to join and create social networks. In the article Google Wants To Be Your Universal Profile Too…, Stan Schroeder explains how Google’s “Friend Connect” service will make online profiles completely portable.

Here’s Google’s own explanatory video and Schroeder’s definition:

“Friend Connect is a tool which enables any website owner to add some code to their site and get a number of social features. You know, all that stuff you usually can’t be bothered to install plugins for: user registration, invites, members gallery, reviews, message posting, and – most importantly – third party OpenSocial apps.

In practice, this means that anyone will be able to log in, for example, with their OpenID on some blog, and converse with their Gtalk, Facbeook, or Plaxo friends. The web as a platform, it’s finally happening, folks.”

The idea of an Open Web is not without opposition. Zuckerburg’s Facebook again shows its monopolistic bent by obstructing Google’s initial launch of the service. So, in the battle to control the newest online medium, while Facebook and MySpace square-off over proprietary profile info, Google leaps both by creating a universal profile open app. The future of social media may be in another Google mashup. To truly achieve the effect of rubbing their noses in it, I think they should call it “MyFace” or “SpaceBook“.

The Future of Social Networking Sites

shawn — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:03:00 +0000

The Future of Social Networking Sites is that most of the Social Networking Sites Have No Future. MySpace and Facebook have battled for new users, climbing up the demographic food chain. MySpace has struggled to hide the migration of their user-base over to Zuckerburg’s much more hip interactive site. All the while, the giants of online have been eyeing the now-established online phenom and have plotted their own fast-track into the social media cash pool.

VS.

Much like XM and Sirius, this will become a market where only one can survive. Social media users have watched as the two majors, MySpace and Facebook, each reporting over 65 million U.S. monthly viewers, revamped their user profiles and interactive applications into a strikingly similar format. Both now incorporate FriendFeeds, both incorporate (limited) customizable layout options, and both feature a Twitter-like status update.

Facebook boldly steps towards the next obvious plateau in social media networks, the Universal Profile. Rather than creating multiple individual profiles or even cutting and pasting your favorite quotes, pictures, and About Me’s from one site to the next, you will be able to create one profile and export it across platforms. Right now, Facebook only offers this feature with “partner sites” (see highlight), but soon it will have to expand the service to their top competitors, like MySpace, Bebo and Google’s Orkut.

What Facebook says about its new Exportable Profile:
Real Identity
Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friend Linking
People count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, they can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers can add rich social context to their sites. Developers even can dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Social Media Internship in Sports Marketing

shawn — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:39:00 +0000

I am looking for 6 to 8 Social Media Interns to work at our Sports Marketing Firm

Do You Love Sports and are you already spending hours of your life on blog sites (your own or others) posting comments and responses? Then you should be able to put your passion to work, be compensated for your skills, and be able to write about your ability on your resume.

If you would like a chance to prove yourself in the world of Online Sports Marketing, please send me an email or DM me on Twitter.

Please know that to be considered for this position, you must have a knack for online promotion, creating groups and collecting friends using MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We can help you turn those skills into a resume-building asset, but you have to bring some know-how and a lot of passion. We are promoting an exclusive sporting event that will be broadcast on national television this fall. Let me know you’re interested by sending your resume along with links to your social networking profiles to my email: sbutler@sportslegendschallenge.com.

Location: Sandy Springs, North Atlanta
Compensation: $8 per hour/ 40 hours per week

The Value of Being Amateur

shawn — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:02:00 +0000

I recently wrote about professionally-produced videos and music being passed off on YouTube as amateur work and I labeled it “Promateur” creation. I also labeled it as “Inauthentic.”

This morning, Seth Godin wrote that there are four ways to offer professional quality service to clients in the marketing business:

1. Hire a professional.
2. Be as good as a professional.
3. Realize that professional-quality work is not required or available and merely come close.
4. Do work that a professional wouldn’t dare do, and use this as an advantage.

What Seth is talking about in number 4 is what I called an “Amfessional,” and this is an exciting concept. An Amfessional is the person that is doing something that would normally be done by a professional and doing it at the professional level because he or she loves it. It’s the MySpace fan site that has more friends than the Athletes own page. It’s the YouTube video that is getting more views than the TV ad. In the past, Amateur Work was looked at as shoddy and second-rate. But today is the day of the Amfessional.

Because of advances in technology and the availability of professional-level production and editing tools (i.e. PhotoShop, Final Cut, DreamWeaver) the non-pro “regular guy” can now create and interact at the professional level. And now, more than ever, the mainstream audience respects and assigns value to work at this level. Watch as the model is reversed in businesses where, instead of hiring a spokesperson and trying to create a brand around them (Nike’s Michael Jordan, the Snapple Lady) brands are finding individual fans that live their brand and then bringing them onboard (Microsoft’s I’m a PC, Coke Zero’s NCAA Fans, Jared for Subway).

Watch as Target adds more and more Mompreneur brands and hand-made boutique items on their shelves and erodes Wal-Mart’s annual sales of store brands and imports. Watch as the heavy-consuming 12-17 year-old category moves from stocking their ipods with big label movies and music and creates playlists of homemade videos and songs from their friends and connections.

Corporations and Marketers right now are not giving us what we want: Authenticity. In a few more years, maybe they’ll get it, but right now is a perfect time for the person in the trenches– that is closest to the product, the brand, the experience– to create the meaning for the product his or herself. Now is the time of the Amfessional.

Professionally Homemade

shawn — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:35:00 +0000

I found this amazing video of a guy biking through the song Prisoner of Society on Guitar Hero World Tour. (If that made no sense to you, then you need to take 3 and a half minutes and watch this video.)

For more on the video, you can read this guy’s comment. As many of the nearly 1 million viewers noted, this video is good… a little TOO Good. Many YouTubers were immediately suspicious. Well, I first learned about the ad from Creativity.com, who was praising the work of Droga5, the agency that created it. So, yes, it was created by professional Ad Men. No, it was not shot by a group of GHWT loving kids in Indiana with a lot of free time on their hands, as we were deliberately meant to believe… but is that dishonest?

Another example is the band Boyce Avenue. The story is cliché and inspiring– three brothers in Florida start recording cover songs on YouTube, quickly gather 3 million views and 1 million fans, then start recording their own stuff and now they are releasing multiple platinum-selling albums and going on a national tour. I saw the video. These guys are good… a little TOO Good. You be the judge.

The inventor of Murketing, Rob Walker points out that today’s consumers assert they are not influenced by the messaging of “the Man’s” corporate broadcast media nor the silver-coated brand imaging of Mad. Ave’s Ad Wizards. But all our consumer data reports that we are buying MORE than ever before and our purchasing is (even more) based on Branding and Perceived Value.

So, in conclusion, today’s consumers want to buy, they just don’t want to be sold to.

What this leaves us is companies manufacturing “Homemade” advertising. Professional advertisers and marketers are now turning their talents to making messaging that looks like it came from amateurs. That it was made by your peers. I add my own word to the marketing lexicon-

Promateurs. noun. def. – The ad agency that made Bike Hero, the recording label that created Boyce Avenue, the makers of LonelyGirl15, and others. Antonym – Amfessionals. def. – The makers of the Doritos Super Bowl commercials.

What Brand Authenticity is Not

shawn — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:59:00 +0000

A magical lesson in Brand Authenticity was learned this week by Johnson & Johnson: You can’t fake it. My takeaway from this weekend’s Twitter-Fueled Motrin Massacre over the “We Feel Your Pain” Ad is that people know when you don’t know anything about them. The ad is here. More on my thesis below.

My wife, an official “baby-wearing” mother and Assoc. Editor at Pregnancy & Newborn magazine, saw the ad and laughed. She thought it was not very sensitive and not very well presented, but she could appreciate what they were going for.

J&J is a huge company with decades of experience in marketing. They helped create the system of running campaigns in front of test audiences and focus groups, so what happened this time? As Seth Godin points out, they treated this ad different because it was viral. Companies look at ads differently for the web than they do for broadcast media. And they should, but they don’t know why…

Another case-in-point, a company called Celebrity Smile is trying to use viral to attract potential customers to their website. They created a fake blog about a mother who Wants to Whiten her Teeth that is so coated with insincerity that it is an insult to the internet-using populace. Faking a blog to draw “word-of-mouth” traffic to your site is a fast way to destroy any trust that could have been engendered by the idea of a real blog. It’s like copying off the dumb kid in class, you’re cheating and you’re still going to fail.

An example of a really bad answer on a test question. Funny, but wrong.

And, just for laughs, here is the (fictitious) List of Ideas that Motrin Ditched before Going with the Baby-Wearing Ad.
I’m cutting and pasting my favorite…

3. I’ve always been a staunch supporter of abstinence as a birth control method. Then, right after I decided to run for Vice-President, my 16-year old daughter told me she was pregnant. Motrin: We Feel Your Pain.

The trick with viral is you have to be SO in touch with your audience, you have to already have SO much “authenticity,” that your customers hear your voice as their own voice. Your audience has to know that you get them, otherwise they will suspect that you are mocking them or worse, condescending and alienating them. A company with strong branding does NOT own its brand, instead it recognizes that its brand is the property of its customers.

Brands that have done this right: Nike Sports, Mac, Converse Shoes, Weezer, Target

Brands that have failed to do this: Hurley, Microsoft, New Coke, Southwest Airlines, and now, Motrin. Feel free to add your own examples…

McMonopoly: "I'm Losin' It"

shawn — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:52:00 +0000

For those of you without your McCalendars handy, we are in Week 3 of the 2008 McDonald’s Monopoly game. (If you don’t know what this is about, you can educate yourself on the topic on your own time using the greatest reference known to man, wikipedia.org, then come back here and read the rest.)

For many of us Die-Hard monopoly fans (I use the 1st person plural, here) this is an exciting annual event where a classic American board game involving fake money and dumb luck is paired with the international icon of American sloth and gluttony. And big macs.

The biggest difference in McOpoly this year (that’s mine, by the way, I just made it up but I am registering it as soon as I finish typing this) is that you can not only play it with the old-school paper tear-off “game pieces” tabby-things, you can also play online! Well, that and the grand prize is reduced from $5 million to a $1 million annuity paid out over 20 years, which, using the present value of an annuity formula:

PVoa = PMT [(1 - (1 / (1 + i)n)) / i]

We can determine to be, approximately, something much less than $1 million dollars. (Do your own math, I’m busy.)

All that being said, I am on my 24th consecutive day of eating only McDonald’s food -but not just any food- you see, they’ve tied the tear-off paper pieces ONLY to what he wants you to buy, Big Mac, Large Fries, Large Coke, that kind of stuff. “He” being the clown, of course.

At any rate, I did a little searching to see why I haven’t won yet, and I learned this bit of interesting knowledge: my odds of winning are actually “approximately 1 in 184,698,474,” To give that any sort of comparison, the oft-quoted odds of getting struck by lightning are 1 in 244,000. So, I am actually 75 and a half times MORE likely to get struck by lightning than to win the million dollar McOpoly® prize.

You see, the little paper bits are rigged. There’s nothing random about it. They’re all distributed “randomly” except for 1 piece of each set, the most famous being Boardwalk, of which there are 3. In the world. And don’t fool yourself by thinking, Well, I can still win the online prize. That’s rigged, too!

The same properties you can’t win in “Real Life,” namely the last property in each set listed alphabetically and Boardwalk, you can’t win online. The code you put in on each paper bit to roll the virtual dice determines where you can land. The Clown has successfully taken all of the fun out of the fake money and dumb luck game that so many Americans have cherished.

In summary, with the 2008 McOpoly® Game, the only Real Winners are the people that did not realize the Game was happening, Collected no game pieces, did not pass Go, and did not endure the ultimate price of contest entry- 1 month of eating reheated burgers and greasy fries.
–Shawn Butler

Oh, and the attribution for the awesome McSticker above is that superhero of the blogosphere, Steve Sneeds. The equally awesome McJoker image is from a post on HALOLZ.com.