Rob’s blog
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Everything in moderation
A range of flag-for-moderation icons, e.g. a finger pulling down a zipper, labelled ‘Overdisclosure’. Caption: ‘Flag-for-moderation icons I might actually use.’
E-victed
(person watching another type on a computer) Whoa! That post is going to get you kicked out of social media!
This blog was made possible by…
(a blogger wearing a shirt covered in logos) FTC rules. I have to wear it whenever I’m blogging.
Every day is Blog Inaction Day!
(one blogger to another) It’s called Blog Inaction Day. We all vote on an urgent issue, then blog about how it needs more study.
RTWS: They’re EVERYWHERE
Post-It Spam
Noise to Signal: a collaboration with Li’l Sweetie
When I drew tomorrow's Noise to Signal for ReadWriteWeb, I asked my daughter, aka Li'l Sweetie, for her suggestions. She responded by grabbing the Cintiq and adding her own design elements - among them a bubbling mud pond and an extra volcano or two. She also asked me...
And then they invented the billable hour
(one neanderthal to another, who has built a fire) You doing it wrong. (Caption: First known ancestor of the social media consultant.)
A little history… and some of the cartoon’s greatest hits
If you’re visiting from PC World – or just happened to stumble onto us – we’re glad you could come by. Pull up a chair. Lemonade?
Your timing’s terrific: I was just about to start the slide show. Oh, no, don’t get up – the holiday pictures aren’t until later. No, this is all about Noise to Signal, my cartoon about the intersection of technology, communications and life. Sit back and make yourself comfortable.
Let me just plug the remote… into the projector… dim the lights… and here we go.
Here’s the cartoon that launched Noise to Signal (although I didn’t call it that yet) waaaay back in the spring of 2007. It was a simpler time (at least in the Oval Office, ba-dump-bump!)…
This is a tribute to the famous New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” (I’ve come back to this theme once or twice.)
This one is probably the first one I published under the name “Noise to Signal”.
And now, as measured by raw hits, here are the top 10 Noise to Signal cartoons of all time:
Number 10, sadly a little timelier now than when I drew it:
Number 9, a cartoon the PC World folks (and Amazon customers) will recognize:
Number 8, for everyone who obsesses about their Twitter follower count:
Number 7 is for my fellow gadget freaks out there whose spirituality glands may be underperforming:
Number 6 goes to a pie chart. Somewhere, my grade 6 math teacher’s ears just pricked up.
Coming up to number 5, a reminder that it’s probably a good thing Alex and I didn’t have iPhones yet when we got married:
Number 4 promotes both privacy awareness and good dental hygiene. Hard to do in one cartoon, but we’re committed to value here at Noise to Signal industries:
Third place – bronze! – is the closest I come to a religion: typography.
Number 2 – ooh, so close – makes that case that, while Flooz may have flopped, alternative currencies for the online world are still alive and well:
And the number one Noise to Signal cartoon of all time…
Thanks for checking us out! You can also find Noise to Signal on Facebook… and if you’re hankering for the RSS feed, it’s right here.
Know the people doing your social media marketing – and their methods and ethics
It can happen so quickly: a few misplaced tweets, an ill-considered blog post, and suddenly an organization is at the center of an online firestorm. They’re called spammers and liars, and tagged with the Hashtag o’ Doom, #FAIL. And the worst thing of all is they had no idea what was happening.
Where, oh where, did it all go so wrong?
Probably somewhere around the moment they decided to outsource their social media marketing.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with outsourcing per se. Organizations often have limited time and staff resources, and don’t yet know the online terrain; recognizing that you aren’t going to be able to keep up with conversations, and taking measures to increase your capacity, is actually a positive step.
But you need to do a lot more than just hand over the keys (and usernames, and passwords) to an agency, and let them run wild. You need to know they won’t trash damage your good name by doing things like spamming Twitter conversations about the Iranian elections.
How do you know if you’re dealing with a responsible firm that will respect the communities you’re engaging with – and protect your reputation?
- Know who you’re dealing with, and who will be managing your social media presence. Do an online search – both a traditional web search, and a social media search using tools like Technorati. What’s the reputation of the company and the individuals involved?
- Check for the level of personal experience the people have who will staff your presence. Do they participate actively in social media, with a blog, Flickr account or YouTube channel? Are they currently engaged in the communities you want reach? How do they act online personally as well as professionally?
- Talk with them: in person if possible, by video (or audio, if you’re visually impaired) otherwise. Get a sense of their personalities, and your own sense of their trustworthiness.
- Ask them about their track record and the tools and approaches they use. Ask for references from past engagements, and follow up with those clients. Find out whether the company stuck to the straight and narrow, or took some ethical shortcuts.
- Ask them what they plan to do, and how. What you’re looking for here isn’t a strait-jacket – you don’t need to know exactly how many times they’ll post to Twitter and the exact minute they’ll do it – but the ethical compass guiding their approach.
Here are the red flags:
- They take a cavalier attitude toward disclosure, offering to pretend to be staff members or even specific people within your organization.
- They plan to pay people to “seed content”, link to you or blog about you.
- They’re vague or evasive about their tactics. (They may tell you that it’s proprietary information; remind them that it’s your reputation on the line when their “secret sauce” turns into egg on your face.)
- They brush off ethical questions, telling you that less-than-honest tactics are the way the game is played.
- They have no real social media presence of their own – which is a sign they lack both accountability and direct knowledge of the field.
- They want to operate completely on their own, without regular contact or reporting to you.
And if you do decide to outsource, here’s one more thing to look for: a commitment to building your own capacity for social media engagement. The greatest value you may get from your outsourcing contract may well be your organization’s growing understanding of social media… and ability to engage on its own with your audience.
Alex and Rob to teach Introduction to Social Media at UBC
One of our favourite things about working in this field is the chance to pass on what we know, to see what happens when people start to grasp the potential of social media… and to see what they do when they run with it.
So I’m delighted to announce we’ll be teaching an introductory course in social media this September at the University of British Columbia. The course runs for three Wednesday evenings at UBC’s downtown Robson Square campus, from Sept. 9 to 23. Tuition is $375 plus GST.
Here are the details:
This introductory course provides an overview of social media: its history, theories and the principles behind online communication. Through hands-on demonstration of a variety of social media tools including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, RSS, wikis and social bookmarking, you discover how these tools are shaping modern communication and how to incorporate them into everyday business and personal communications. Topics also include upcoming trends as well as predictions for what’s next in social media.
For more info or to sign up, visit UBC’s registration page. We hope to see you there!
(By the way, the first night of the course happens on – get this – 09/09/09. Can you imagine a more auspicious date?)
Just because there’s no price tag doesn’t make you aren’t paying for it
It happened again today. Every time an online service like Twitter or Facebook hits a roadbump, or stops working altogether, there’s an outcry of protest from its users. Then, just as quickly, comes the backlash: “How dare you complain about a FREE service?”
At one level, I understand the thinking: there is an army of developers, sysadmins, designers, administrators and other great people who work hard to conceive, create and maintain the web apps. And behind that, a lot of money is being invested.
On the other hand, there’s another kind of investment being made in these services, and that’s the time and content that you and I put into participating: the photos we post to Flickr, the videos we share on YouTube, the hours we pour into Facebook – and the millions of observations, complaints, links, updates, insights, jokes, memes and random stuff we tweet on Twitter.
That effort doesn’t just represent an opportunity cost on your part (you could be spending that time working out on your Wii, for example) – it represents value to the owners of the web service you’re using. Facebook’s business model involves delivering highly-targeted eyeballs to advertisers, as does YouTube’s. And while nobody’s quite sure what Twitter’s business model is, it isn’t philanthropy.
Look at it this way. If Twitter was nothing more than its hardware and software, does anyone seriously think people would be bouncing around multi-hundred-dollar valuation estimates?
The implicit bargain between social application provider and user is this: they’ll provide these amazing tools whenever and wherever you want them, and you’ll provide the content, conversations and relationships that create value and help them realize a return on their investment: financially or (in the case of reflected-glory marketing) in brand equity.
Now, most of us understand that these are still early days, and sites will have the occasional hiccup. But when repeated or lengthy outages seriously impair our access to tools, people and content – especially when those outages come without an explanation – then our patience rightly wears thin.
So if you’re a user on a social web site, do cut them some slack (especially during a denial-of-service attack)… but don’t feel you have to apologize for feeling irritated over repeated fail whales and error messages.
And if you’re running a social web site that’s running a mild fever or fending off a cough, thank your users for their patience, explain what’s happening… and do what it takes to get back up and running.
Why, yes — I’d LOVE to speak at your event
Public speaking and speechwriting: the essential guides
Looking for advice on public speaking, speechwriting and leadership communications? Here are some of my most comprehensive posts, on topics that people ask me about most often.
