The dark side of the internet is alluring

Recently, fallen NBA start Stephon Marbury decided to take to the internet with a webcam to try and entertain the fans. The problem is, his show was tragic. Not in a horrific way, but in a sad way. J.A. Andande, writer for ESPN commented on the pathetic attempt in a great column on espn.com. today.

"It used to be that our need to see other people humiliated was satisfied with an hour of "Candid Camera" or "America's Funniest Home Videos" each week. Now, as LeBron discovered, it's nonstop. But if you attempt to feed the Internet beast, you'll discover that it's insatiable. You can become consumed by its need for consumption. So what's wrong with a little discretion? Do we need to see everyone's home pictures and sex tapes? About as much as we need to see every waking moment of Marbury's life."

I love the line, "But if you attempt to feed the Internet beast, you'll discover that it's insatiable. You can become consumed by its need for consumption."

Marbury's descent into confusion and self-absorption must be hell for him. But the exclamation point that makes it all painful is that we can't look away--we are consumed by his consumption. Reality TV and reality on internet can be entertaining, but they can also be a mirror of the pathetic human condition. With a medium like the internet, there is no weeding out what sickens and saddens us all.

Looks can be deceiving

I'm traveling again. For the umpteenth time this year I had to get on a plane and go somewhere. Not that I hate traveling. I'm not fond of planes--I can't fly anywhere without having to spend some major time in an airport or two on a layover--the joys of living in Montana. I am not good in hotels, however.

I like to sleep--not for long periods of time--but just straight through. Sleeping in strange beds and spending weeks recovering from neck and back pain has made me a disciple of Hampton Inns. They have the most comfortable beds across the board. But Long Beach, CA doesn't have a Hampton. I am here helping my daughter load up a container/pod for her move to Boston.

So I hit Trip Advisor to find a decent motel and hope for the best. I love Trip Advisor. It rates everything you need to travel. I've used it before and always had good luck with their reviews. This trip I decided to skimp on expense and took a chance on a locally owned "boutique hotel" called the Varden in downtown Long Beach. It was inexpensive and had pretty good reviews.

At first glance I was frightened. I think the neighborhood threw me off. I thought, "I'll just go in and ask to see my room before I check in." It had a tiny white edifice squashed in between a vacant building and a Mexican restaurant. But from the moment I walked in, I was impressed. One of the owners greeted me and the other showed up right away asking me if I wanted coffee or water. They showed me around the lower level, took my bags to my room, and explained the air conditioning/heating system and all the amenities.

It is a newly renovated "European style" hotel with very functional, contemporary-decorated rooms. The rooms are small, but they are comfortable. And, it's quiet (so far). To top it off, I attended the nightly wine tasting at 5:00 p.m. And--the beds are super comfortable. Reminds me of my visit to Germany/France in 1999 where I found the best beds ever (even in the hostels). I came away from that trip thinking that European hotels have the bed thing completely right. Down pillows, down comforters, high quality sheets. Heavenly. I don't mind the room has no closet or ironing board, a sink I can use sitting on the end of the bed and a toilet practically in the shower. None of that matters. It's clean, quiet and it has a fantastic bed.

That'll teach me to judge by outside appearances and price. When in Long Beach, check out the Varden.

The good, the bad and the very ugly

It had to happen sooner than later. Porn is growing like mad on Twitter. It is the inevitable conclusion of every social medium. Twitter has no policy on porn that I can find. When you read their terms of service , it seems that they are more concerned about spam and copyright and spam and unwanted email and spam.

Here is the closest their terms of service get to banning porn:
"We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Use."

"We may, but have no obligation"? Wow--what an invitation to smutters and porn junkies! I found out accidentally that Twitter was ripe with porn when I started following several sports-related sites. Out of the blue, three porn accounts showed up in my followers. I embarrassingly blocked them before I had the sense to take note of their user accounts. But after reading Twitter's terms of service and searching for a place to report the offensive content, I gave up. The only thing Twitter has that comes close is a place to report Spam--and it's a feed you follow--no place to email Twitter. I may try their blog.

In all fairness to Twitter, my daughter did point out to me that porn IS spam, and they do have a process for reporting that. Also, they do alert users, in the interior of their site somewhere, to report pornographic backgrounds. I ran across that info when I was looking for a place to report what I had seen. So it's in there somewhere--just can't find it again. I'll have to devote another half hour or so to looking thoroughly.

This presents a dilemma for me as an SID. I'll have to keep a close watch on who is following me. After all, their thumbnail pics show up under my followers and a couple of those pics left no question as to what they were soliciting. Since Twitter is such a wide open medium with very few restrictions, it presents a predicament. Any thoughts...suggestions?

Twitter-pated

As I was doing a design page this morning for our Twitter feed, I was looking at the Twitter blog--did you know there was any such thing? Twitter actually puts out a blog for creative ways to use Twitter, technical fixes and security issues.

One of the recent blog posts was an embedded YouTube video of Kevin Spacey making fun of David Letterman's Twitter ignorance. It's worth a look--two pretty funny guys. The video clip reminded me that there are disparaging levels of knowledge and interest out there concerning social media. I may be ecstatic about ways to use social media, be studying, talking, blogging, listening, whatever... and those I work with may have little interest or knowledge about what social media is and how to use it. One thing's for sure--it is part of my job to help those around me understand the importance of this new trend.

So how do I pass on important info without overloading? One thing I've done with our coaches is just encourage them to get out there--look at blogs, twitter feeds and online video. See how other people are using it with success. Get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Most people have a good sense of whether or not a certain use of a medium is engaging or not. Find some engaging people to watch and follow.

I have a list of bloggers on my sidebar that I follow. Most of them are related to social media info. My next quest is to find some coaches and schools out there that are using blogging and Twitter effectively. Have you seen any? Share?

Are You Addicted to Your Phone?

I got a new phone recently--a Blackberry Curve. It's a cute, pinkish-mauve sort of thing--very thin. I liked it because it has a good keyboard for texting and I was tired of my Treo always slipping out of my hand because of its awkward size and shape. That and the fact my Treo wouldn't sync anymore no matter what I did to fix it. Also, I wanted a good data package--bad mistake.

My Treo didn't have an internet package. But guess what--I have internet at my fingertips 24/7 now. Yikes. Our campus also has a slick Blackberry interface and getting my mail, appointments and everything from Outlook is way too easy. Never have to use a sync cord again--it just comes automatically. And boys does it come.

I am the department "info" default email (info@msubobcats.com). I get a ton of spam and a lot of general questions in addition to my own email. I field all the general emails and send them on to the appropriate people. I used to like that part of my job. Now I am constantly deleting and forwarding and answering--I can't stop. I am addicted to my phone.

Just turn off the email function, you say? I tried--I found myself feeling guilty. Can you believe it? I do put it on "phone only" when I go home. I have weaned myself from the email during off-work hours. One small step for mankind...

"Better gadgets save time." I am a total believer of that. However, the gadgeting has to stop at some point. When is enough enough? I don't know what I'll ever do if we get service for I-Phones here. Living in Montana, we don't have access to I-Phone service quite yet. But I am looking forward...is there an app for that?

Facebook Class, Anyone?

While cruising the internet looking for tips of how to make better video for internet, I came across an interesting tidbit. Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab recently offiered a class on Facebook. The technical name of the class was CS377W:Creating Engaging Facebook Apps. It was offered originally in the fall of 2007. Dr. BJ Fogg taught the class with a slew of TAs--probably a bunch of nerdy tech people, right? Here's an excerpt from the overview of the course:

"In this experimental course students will learn how to create, launch, and optimize web applications. Guided by the instructors and outside experts, students will work in small, interdisciplinary teams to conceptualize, develop, and distribute new functionality to Facebook users. This course will focus on how metrics and user feedback can help developers and product managers improve their applications... The tools are new, the platform is new, and many topics in the course are new for academic settings. This course is best suited for flexible students who are willing to take chances and blaze new trails."

Boy, I wish we had a Facebook class at MSU. It would probably be one of the most popular classes on campus--kind of like "Mysteries of the Sky" was back when I was in school. Every school needs a couple of those no-brainer classes. But Stanford?

The class is sponsored by the Persuasive Technology Lab which studies how machines can be made to persuade humans--"The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab creates insight into how computing products — from websites to mobile phone software — can be designed to change what people believe and what they do." Check out their blog.

I was almost enamored with this until I read a blog entry from one of the teachers of the class--he has a marketing firm called The Commotion Group, which specializes in viral marketing. They take video from clients and make it viral. If the videos don't get 100,000 hits, they offer their services free.

Woo-hoo! you say? Let me find out their secrets. There's nothing I'd like more than to have our promotional videos be seen by a minimum of 100,000 people. We have a video right now we are trying to get viral--the point guard from our women's basketball team doing her take on the Lebron chalk ritual--check it out.

So what do I need to do? Here are his tips--the few first are innocuous.
1. Make it short (15-30 seconds)--ok, I can handle that.
2. Design it for remixing for others can mess with it and re-post it.--ok, there are plenty of sites for that, try this one.
3. Don't make an outright ad. ok--no-brainer
4. Make it shocking. well...
5. Use fake headlines. hmmm...
6. Appeal to sex. yikes
7. Hire well-known bloggers to post your video. no budget for that...
8. Start new threads on forums and embed your video. done that...

Next, there were a couple technical tips on optimization on YouTube, but this next one really got me. It is worth a copy and paste:

Commenting: Having a conversation with yourself
Every power user on YouTube has a number of different accounts. So do we. A great way to maximize the number of people who watch our videos is to create some sort of controversy in the comments section below the video. We get a few people in our office to log in throughout the day and post heated comments back and forth (you can definitely have a lot of fun with this). Everyone loves a good, heated discussion in the comments section - especially if the comments are related to a brand/startup.

Also, we aren’t afraid to delete comments – if someone is saying our video (or your startup) sucks, we just delete their comment. We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.

We usually get one comment for every thousand views, since most people watching YouTube videos aren’t logged in. But a heated comment thread (done well) will engage viewers and will drive traffic back to our sites.

Wow--this raises a whole new conversation for a later time on online ethics--or is there any such thing? For the time being, I am re-thinking my view on Standford...

Social Media: Who Cares?

One thing for sure about social media--it is all about community. It's about building virtual relationships. So before you press that update on the tweet you just composed or talk about what you're doing on your Facebook page, make sure you pass the "Who cares?" test.

Recently, a poster on PRSA's blog, ComPRehenison, offered these suggestions about Twitter:

Before you hit “update” again, make sure your tweet passes the “Who cares?” test.

• Would the collection of strangers and friends following you find this information relevant, valuable and interesting?
• Would you pick up the phone to share this info?
• Would you invest a stamp on spreading the news?

If not, cancel the tweet. Then, instead of answering, “What are you doing?” recommend a great article or blog posting or share an insight others can use.

One of the dangers of using social media as a means of communicating "news" is that we assume that any news is important. In a world where we are just broadcasting or "telling", this may be true. But putting everything out there on Twitter and Facebook hoping people will pick it up is a misuse of the medium.

Twitter and Facebook are not just alternate places to post press releases. I predict this will be the failure of Twitter in sports information. Twitter is for conversing. Our challenge is to post information that initiates or continues a conversation. Remember, Shaq or Oprah we ain't.

As a sidenote, here are the latest Facebook and Twitter stats from Mashable.com. Interesting stuff including: Twitter () users spent an average of 31 minutes, 17 seconds on the site in June. This excludes users of clients like TweetDeck () and Seesmic Desktop ().

How are you going to use Twitter and Facebook? Is there a strategy behind your technology?

Everybody's Talkin'

Remember that song from Midnight Cowboy in 1968? "Everybody's talkin' at me, but I can't hear a word they're sayin'...only the echoes of my mind..."


Sometimes I think this social media stuff is a lot like that. Our idea of creating a buzz about our team or our events just consists of talking (or shouting, as some new media strategists call it). What happens is that we haven't changed our approach to how we do business, just our methods. Now instead of buying newspaper space or TV ads to announce our events, or sending out emails of our new stories, we are also posting all the same information on the internet via Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. We are still "telling" or shouting, just using different avenues. Will this really engage and energizing our fan base? I don't think so--just give them more choices to receive the same info. Everybody's talkin'...nobody's listening.



The need is to understand the new mindset that goes along with the new media. This takes work. It means getting immersed and learning the lay of the land first. It means reading info from the experts online and from the bookstore. I've mentioned Groundswell before and the group has a new book called Marketing for the Groundswell.

There are a ton of blogs out there on the subject (Groundswell has one as well). I heard Kami Huyse speak at COSIDA and she has a great blog called Communications Overtones. I like the website Mashable and another blog called The Bad Pitch Blog that actually has a lot of marketing/PR stuff in it as well. Boy, there's lot of stuff out there. Get busy and start looking and listening. Find out how other successful people are doing it.

What helpful info have you found out there? Anybody got any blogs, sites, books, websites to share?

The Most Fearful Phrase...

Next to my computer crashing, one of the most fearful experiences I can imagine as an SID is a website re-do. Recently, we decided to overhaul our website, which in and of itself would not be too frightening, but we have decided to go to an outside provider and basically start over. We have been doing our website in-house for years and now it's time to give it over to someone who knows a lot more about web technology than I do.

The impetus for this decision came from the influx of new media in the marketplace. We found ourselves lacking in relation to our conference competitors in the bells and whistles we offered our fans. Our university does not have video hosting capabilities, which is a huge downer. We have one flash programmer for the whole campus. Our website is coded in an ancient form of PHP, which sounds like a drug to me. At any rate, I'm so-so at HTML, but PHP is not just a foreign language, it is a different planet. We don't do podcasts or online auctions or live chats very often because we have to build the pages ourselves from scratch using free software we can find online. It is pretty labor intensive at this point.

But, we've been cruising the internet for website companies that seem to represent our culture for a while--we've seen this coming for a couple years. We finally settled upon one--Sidearm out of Syracuse--and we are looking forward to working with them. They have a lot of clients that are our size and we don't feel like we'll get lost in the jungle of CSTV mega sites in terms of cost and customer service.

I thought my summer was going to be fairly quiet, but that flew out the window when we signed the contract with Sidearm. Now don't get me wrong--if I could be locked in a room with my computer for a month t0 get this done, I'd be okay with that. But it doesn't work that way. There are coaches and ADs and SIDs and associate ADs and assistant ADs and managers and academic center people and booster club people and on and on that need to speak into the process. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it does elongate the process. I get brain freeze just thinking about the number of meetings this will take...

But, the bottom line is this overhaul will bring us into this century, which is a good thing. Fans today want more from a website than just news delivery, and it's time to get on board. More as the web journey progresses...

What are your peeps doing online?

By now we all know that there are many new media options out there to try and engage our fans --viral video (YouTube, etc.), social sites (Twitter, Facebook), blogs, communities (message boards and website chats, etc.) But how do we use them to create an enthused fan base?

The group at Harvard Press that created the book Groundswell developed a method of measuring what your fan base does online. They have something called a Consumer Profile Tool that can tell you what percentage of your fan base (according to age group and gender) creates material online at least once a month (posts videos, writes a blog or article online, maintains a website--you get the idea), who is a critic (rates products or services at online sites, comments on a blog or newstory), who is a collector (uses RSS feeds, adds tags to web pages or photos--if you're a facebook user, you know what that means--or votes in online polls), who is a joiner (maintains a profile on a social network or visits social sites), who is a spectator (reads blogs, watches videos from other users, listens to podcasts, reads online forums and ratings or reviews), and who is inactive.

These percentages are based on extensive surveying and research the authors have done on many different groups. The charts you can download online are based solely on age and gender from that same research. For a price, the company can specifically do your customer/fans base. Just to see where our biggest fan group is at, I entered males ages 35-44 and this is what I got:
Creators: 21%
Critics: 37%
Collectors: 21%
Joiners: 33%
Spectators: 74%
Inactive:21%

By the way, they are not math dumb--the total percentage is over 100% because there are overlaps in some of the groups.

This result didn't surprise me, but it sure helps me understand a few things. Our biggest group,by far, is spectators--makes sense for sports fans, right? In the top three, our biggest group is critics. Hello, Bobcat Nation (our hugely popular fan message board). I take comfort in knowing that Montana State is not the only college athletic department with a large portion of their fans actively engaged in activities where they can give their opinions and comment about other people's opinions. In the next older age group (up to 54 years old), the inactive group gets a little bigger and the top three get a little smaller.

The upside of all this hoopla is not the knowing, it's what you do with this. Now that you know where most of them are, you can concentrate your new media efforts on creating conversations where they are. You can also see places that you don't need to dedicate so much effort to. This info shows me that I don't need to spend a ton of time worrying about dial-up users, since the majority of dial-up users are in the older, more inactive groups.

Since our biggest group, by far, is spectators, we can feel comfortable creating content and generating conversations in those areas--on our website. This can include features like coaching blogs, AD blogs, fan feedback sites, more video content, more online forums where we solicit the feedback of the critics so they can spectate...on and on.

It also helps us see that because our second largest group is critics, we also need to offer engaging online content for that group and also become a member of the community they have already created for themselves: our fan message board.

When I first came to work at MSU, there was no pro-active presence on our fan message board. One of my fellow SIDs had started at one point, but there was a feeling that we should be a spectator and not so much a participant. After all, we were not part of the fan base.

Then came a series of incidents that forced us to get involved in the conversations and now, three years later, we are a valued member of the online community instead of the evil distant enterprise that everyone talks about.

I kept records of every post on the message board for a period of about three months initially--categorized them positive/negative/neutral and kept track of who was posting, how many times they were negative/positive/neutral and how many posts comprised the negative threads before they died down, etc.

I found some pretty amazing results. After we officially joined the community and became a source of information (our posts are always neutral and always professional), the duration of the negative threads lessened considerably if we were active on the thread. In other words, when we spoke, the nation listened.

But it didn't happen right away--it took time for us to gain respect there. But now, we are solicited there--they know we are listening to the conversation and are willing to participate. We don't always get involved on the negative threads because we know that people don't always agree with the way things go, but we do correct misinformation if it gets viral. Our fan message board is also the source of some pretty good ideas and we have been known to solicit their help in projects. Oftentimes, the best ideas surface on the negative threads.

So, do you know where your peeps are online? How are you engaging them to become enthusiastic fan-atics?

Twitter and the Death of Mainstream Media?

Gotta keep going on this Twitter thing...another curious tweeting event. A couple days ago, it was all over Twitter that Jeff Goldblum had fallen to his death over a cliff in New Zealand while on a film shoot. Today Show Australia even had a report complete with police confirmation. The mainstream news media stayed away temporariily (with the exception of Today Show Australia)--the story turned out to be a hoax. Steven Colbert chronicled the bizarre series of events in a spoof of Twitter on Comedy Central: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220019/june-29-2009/jeff-goldblum-will-be-missed

The pressure on the mainstream media to report Goldblum's death via Twitter (and seemingly confirmed by New Zealand police) was tremendous, given the events surrounding the death of Michael Jackson via Twitter from the gossip website, TMZ. It seems that last week, CNN was hesitant to report anything about Michael Jackson's death because the initial reports came from a "less than reputable source." In the meantime, the details of his death were spreading like wildfire on Twitter and before CNN decided to join in, the whole world already had all the details.
Here's an account of the events from one of my favorite blogs, The Bad Pitch Blog: http://badpitch.blogspot.com/2009/07/michael-jacksons-dead-now-comes.html

So the question still is, what do we do with Twitter? These two events show the dual nature of the viral social medium: fast deliver of legitimate news events; fast delivery of whatever I want to make up.

But, isn't there a downside to every medium? Heck, there's a downside to newspaper--our hometown newspaper often gets their facts wrong--but they aren't given to hoaxes that I know of. So, what do we do with Twitter? Trust it as a source of legitimate news? I'm not sure...Trust it to deliver engaging content quickly to a mass? Definitely.

Twitter--can't live with it, or can't live without it?