blog: Random Thoughts About Online Marketing

My wife, Shirley, started a Facebook group that now has over 1900 fans, over 1000 photo uploads and rising all the time. The group is called “My Border Collie is smarter than most of the people I know.” In contrast, I’ve seen many other people try to start Facebook fan pages for their companies or sites with far worse results, while spending a lot more time and resources as well. The difference is that my wife’s group is fun and interesting and creates a community of people who can easily communicate about a subject they love. It’s definitely ‘social’ first, definitely ‘media’ last. She affectionately calls it “my border collie group” but it obviously belongs to a lot of people.

“My border collie group” is smarter than a lot of people I know
Companies I’ve seen will try sending some “social media expert” or a young person (because they “understand” Facebook) to try and set up a Facebook group and get people to join without any idea whatsoever why people would join or like their page, group or company.

And they have little foresight about what might be the effect of people liking the group or becoming a fan. More often than not those people will never ever give the fan page another thought in their lives and will likely delete it if they ever get around to cleaning up their Facebook accounts. This is usually much worse than just a me-too mentality; it’s more like “let’s force this on people and on ourselves regardless of any sense of relevance.”

Social media has to be fun. People get together to have fun. They hardly ever get together to be bored and do nothing together. You need to give people a fun reason to join your group and come to your party.

My wife didn’t set out to create a huge Facebook group. She didn’t even know how much activity would be possible on it when she started it years ago. She just set out to have some fun. Sure enough, people wanted to join in.

Social media “experts” & business
Companies getting involved in social media need to put people first and fun first. There’s very likely something immediately wrong when a bunch of people sit around a boardroom talking about how to get involved in social media. In fact, I can vouchsafe for the fact that there has definitely been something wrong every time I’ve had the misfortune to actually be one of those people.

If you are interested in hiring my wife as a social media person with a good track record of success, don’t bother, I’ve got my eye on her. But I know she has no interest in ever sitting in on one of your boardroom meetings focused on “how to leverage our position in social media.” She’d rather be having fun, I think.

Just to close, here’s an awesome video I once posted to my wife’s group. Why say goodbye when you can say hello. After all, social media is all about being friendly.

added later: There’s a good final pun to be made about old dogs (even though my dog was not that old at the time of this video) and new tricks – but I’m not sure I want to make it. Comment below to add your pun?

added later still: Sadly, Samson (featured below) passed away suddenly in his own home, November 16th. 🙁

We’ve seen other posts about Google suggest before, of course. And last night Michael Gray (@graywolf) tweeted, making fun of the fact that Google suggests that “google is skynet,” among other things (image below). I thought this was a good enough idea for my first blog post in a while.

I was going to blog “a look back at 2009″ or ” a look ahead at 2010″ but there have been way too many of those and at this point, another one would be just sad. And no one knows where search will be by the end of 2010, I guarantee you that. Of all the posts I saw, I do like Rand Fishkin’s that criticized (rightly) Google’s real time search window (among other things).

So I won’t do that.

Instead, let’s have fun with some screen caps from Google suggest.

Starting with… what does Google suggest that Google is?

How about Twitter?

Go broader.

All of us in Web publishing are wondering what Google will do in the future. If you really want to know what Google will do in 2010, maybe Google can tell us!

Wait a minute, is that true, that Google will not search for Chuck Norris?

No, but it does have some interesting things to say about Chuck Norris. (Has Chuck Norris heard this?!)

Beyond fun, there is more to be learned from Google’s tool:

You can get existentialist (or, if Chuck Norris is a fag, what am I?):

Find some scary suggestions about the current President of the United States:

You can check out the latest in the zeitgeist perhaps… say, about the biggest movie right now.

You could probably have hours of fun with Google suggest. But then you wouldn’t be working.

Hey, kinda like Google suggest, apparently…..

And as that shows… Google suggest is not all that helpful. Come to think of it, I don’t think there are very many times I’ve actually used it practically.

Although it can be fun.

Belated Happy New Year!

In a VERY CLEAR instructional video posted on Youtube, Matt Cutts explains the importance of letting Big Brother Google know all about your social circle so you can then participate in Google’s social search, which is all the rage this week.

A funny thing for me is I found this by searching for Matt Cutts on my newly purchased social search engine.

On a bit of a lark last week, I bought bigola.com, a social media search engine. You can use it to search for your friends to see where they are on some social media sites or you can use it to find out how some trending topics are doing on a variety of social media websites. I also had a designer setup and very simply skin socialmediation.com. If anyone has any great ideas about what to do with this domain, contact me.

I’ve said before who I like best between Facebook and Twitter. It seems I’m not alone in admitting that I don’t really ‘get’ Twitter. TechCrunch is reporting that comScore does not have great news for followers of Twitter.

Read the original.

To me, free music on demand has always been one of the very best things about the Internet.

In fact, I would have to admit that downloadable and freely listenable music was a definite turning point in my relationship to the Internet. For one reason, in one word: Napster. (I’ll get back to Napster, later.) The music industry and its relationship to the Internet has been old news for ten years now, but we still hear too much about the RIAA, if you ask me.

A while ago, recording artist Mathew Good began a campaign to maximize the sales of his next album, Vancouver, to be released in a month. Aside from blogging about the process and tweeting about things going on during production, he began streaming the album a month before its official release. I’ll get into musical reasons that make this an album everyone should buy in my review of Vancouver below.

I want to point out what Good does that the RIAA does not seem to understand. His process goes like this: make a really good CD of music that you think people will like. Give it to them in a way that they can’t steal. Use this whole scenario to build and strengthen your fanbase so they will be on your side when the album is released and they will go out and buy the album, already certain they will like it. This is the same strategy he used last time to sell Hospital Music. As he boasts in the link, he understands “the reality of what can be accomplished through unconventional means utilizing new technologies without having to endure the resistance of those that haven’t the foresight to realize their importance.” Well, that’s pretty much everything I want to say in this blog post: “those that haven’t the foresight to realize their importance” being the RIAA, etc.

I suspect that we will see once again that Good is right about how to get a musical message to the masses. I am sick and tired of the Metallicas and the Offsprings of this world worried about a few albums being downloaded. Try showing some loyalty to your fans and they might have some loyalty to you. Radiohead has it right. Even Coldplay has some things right. As of today, Pearl Jam has it right (as we might expect). Lots of artists have it right, and Matt Good is definitely one of them. I am preordering or certainly picking up Vancouver the day it comes out. Because I’m a loyal fan who feels that his loyalty is repaid in kind.

To go back to Napster, for a second, I want to say that I am one of many people who think that Napster was critical to the success of the PC and Internet revolution in the late 1990’s. Until Napster, I was content to have a three year old machine and the slowest Internet connection I could get; never since then. And I know I’m not alone in that. I knew so many people who upgraded or bought more disc space or bought several computers, so they could download and hold more music. That doesn’t help the music industry to know that, but if everything was fair, they would have gotten some royalties for all the computer equipment sold during that time.

But alas, the RIAA and its minions are picking the wrong battle, one they will fight to the death. (Which they almost certainly are facing.)

I know that many people will also point out that this (allowing free music) is easy for an established artist to do and new artists may not have the resources or the buzz-building ability to let people listen for free then try to sell albums later. But everyone is going to have to adapt to the new reality. Fighting it is definitely the wrong thing to do but that is still the RIAA’s one-note strategy, one they presumably pass on to young, recently signed bands.

CD Review of Matthew Good Vancouver

Now, after a few listens to the album online, let me offer a review of Matthew Good’s new album, Vancouver. I’m not going to confess to being a fanboy – but that’s because I think that’s irrelevant. I’m a fan because I like good music, and Matthew Good has made a lot of really good music.

Matthew Good’s latest album is one in a series of his sonic-pleasure old-fashioned “music albums”… you know, a disc of music whose existence is not predicated on one song that “kids’ll go for.” Personally, I think his best album is the last one he put out, Hospital Music, one of my favourite albums of the decade, certainly. Among his other great albums, Good has produced Avalanche in his solo career and mammoth ’90’s rock albums Underdogs and Beautiful Midnight.

There are highlights on this album certainly, but on the whole there is no bad track here, nothing I would have thought about erasing. Good’s tendency to sample is kept to a minimum here and used very judiciously on the unsettling rock track “Fought to Fight It.” After a couple of listens, I wonder if this song is up there with some of the best rock tracks he’s ever done. As with Avalanche, Good employs strings and orchestral arrangements throughout the tracks here and often this is really pleasant stuff, especially on the closer “Empty’s Theme Park.”

Other highlights? “Great Whales of the Sea” really grabs, a paean to Vancouver’s national animal. “The Vancouver National Anthem” is a seven minute epic that fans of later Good have come to expect. It’s full of timing changes as any song this length must be. The “we all live downtown…step over ourselves” chorus, backed by a violin and Good’s friend Pete Yorn, is definitely haunting. Then they extend this for a good two minutes. The song winds around here and there, too, a kind of microcosm for the sound of the entire CD.

“Us Remains Impossible” has a great loping guitar riff that pulls you into every verse (and that you will find hard to get out of your head) even if the chorus is a bit too low key for me. “Nights Like Tonight” rises early in the first verse then goes into some odd directions before dropping back to a listenable acoustic riff. Like all great bands, Good is very good at playing with song structures and listener expectations just enough to intrigue on all his original material.

Throughout this album, you have to marvel at Good’s ability to know what sounds are worth drawing on, to make a song truly worth playing and listening to. That he has so many weapons in his arsenal – a great voice, great song subjects and some true talent on the guitar – only makes this so much easier to do.

There are aspects of Matthew Good’s music to detract. Occasionally he does seem to have been influenced a little by fellow Vancouverite Bryan Adams – just ever so much, in very small corners. The only time I hear bit of that on his new material is on the song “Bad Pennies” which is left off the final track list; it’s a tiny bit Bryan Adams and a whole lotta Good.

Still, some might dismiss Matt Good’s music as “ordinary.” I am certain that not one of these people has ever listened to one of Matthew Good’s five best albums from start to finish, though. Vancouver is certainly one of those five.

Here we go with another acerbic-sounding title. But bear with me. I allude here, as some people may recognize,  to Theodore Sturgeon’s assertion that “90% of science fiction is crap, but then again, 90% of everything is crap.” The last part of that sentence has since become known as Sturgeon’s Law.  Let’s note that Sturgeon was in fact defending science fiction (and I love science fiction, of course), so maybe this is not all bad for Twitter, to be 90% crap.

Twitter is a phenomenon, there can be little doubt. As we all know , though, the short history of the web is already full of fantastic shooting stars that have long-since passed into complete irrelevance.

There are many people who hate Twitter, think it is overrated and overhyped or who simply ignore it. It has a fail rate of 60% or more, in percentage of users who never use it again. Failwhale goes up often, as we all know.

One thing I definitely do not like about my Twitter friend feed is that many of the people who use it only use it for marketing; I know, maybe I know the wrong people or at least I think I should be following people I really don’t like a whole lot. I hate the whole, “Let me be the first to tweet this” mentality that is a byproduct of Twitter’s immediacy.  Twitter would do well to start figuring out ways to get rid of commercial interests who are only interested in promoting themselves. Should Twitter ideally only be used to share thoughts, ideas  – and links – that are valid, then? I have an okay-hate relationship with that concept. I find it very annoying to read tweets about nothing. I.e.  Please don’t tweet that you are just stepping into the shower, especially if you are not terribly attractive. But actually, I find links most annoying. I have followed some people who do nothing but post links to news items or blog entries in their industry, all day long it seems. My impression of you, ex-following people, is that you do not have an original idea in your head.

I haven’t quite covered the 90% crap of Twitter… but there are some things about Twitter that could make it last.  It provides acces to some celebrity news that is unavailable elsewhere, for one example. Although I really could care less about Liz Taylor tweeting from her hospital bed, my fifteen year old says she uses Twitter to keep up on her favourite bands.

I don’t think I will ever really like Twitter. I do not feel, though, that this is necessarily because I don’t ‘get’ Twitter. I think the real problem with Twitter is that it is just far too thin a concept to really have any legs.  I think Facebook still has far more potential because it is so much more robust and I think Zuckerberg’s concept of a social graph will still be developed into something with massive enough revenue to rival Google’s, someday. As was shown today, Facebook could very well have the means to completely swallow Twitter (its lamprey, of sorts). I still love wasting time on Facebook far more than I ever will on Twitter.

But let’s never forget Twitter’s (difficult-to-understand, for us detractors) popularity and its still untapped potential. Twitter’s suggested feeds is one way in which Twitter might be able to leverage itself into generating revenue. There are rumours that Twitter is developing something that will generate significant revenue before the end of next year. So the jury is still really out on whether Twitter will really ever matter for any length of time.

But really, if you ask me, Twitter is 90% crap.