Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Wed, Dec 31, 2008
It was hard to pick just a few ‘best’ tweets from this fall. I started with dozens of favorites. Here are 10 that killed me.
10. @nick: Just got an invite confirming that anything described as “INCREDIBLE” is not. As in, “an INCREDIBLE tech/social media summit.”
9. @ilinap: My son says Cheesus instead of Jesus. Now Chuck E Cheese’s commercial on TV really has him confused. What does Chuck have to do w/ Cheesus?
8. @InsoOutso: I could nap on so many horizontal surfaces in this office.
7. @joshdmorg: There is a single fly in my office – he mocks me
6. @laughingsquid: Free giant squid on Craigslist, I would take it in, but I’m not sure if it would get along with our cats
5. @marklisanti: Pretty sure that Blagojevich believed that when he put on his enchanted hair-helmet, no one could eavesdrop on his corrupt thoughts
4. @marklisanti: Oh, darn! A bag full of loose turkey innards again! Guess I was on the naughty list. Thought I might find a new train set this year
3. @mriggen: My family’s emergency preparedness plan involves not just one but two trips to the liquor store
2. @nick: It’s the year 2008. Can’t they design pasta that screams just as it gets al dente?
1. @nick: How are there still typos on the Wikipedia page for meth?
And if you’re craving more… check out:
To learn more, check out:
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Mon, Dec 29, 2008
Here’s a countdown of 10 toons, articles, and videos I can’t stop laughing over.
Oh, business humor, if I had more chutzpah (and you’d think I have a headstart on that, with the ‘kah’ in my name), I’d make you myself.
But at least I’m doing the next best thing… collecting the most entertaining things I run across at work. Not all are about business. But all of them have been useful while doing business.
Sorry to post links rather than images. I know it’s not very sexy. But I don’t want folks with traditional copyrights (versus Creative Commons copyrights) to yell at me.
10. “…[whereas] the run-of-the-mill Amazon bracelet provides no special protection.” — Wikipedia entry revealing details of Wonder Woman’s bracelet technology http://tinyurl.com/78zldt
9. “Dude, Cold Calling Is For Losers” – Hubspot video http://tinyurl.com/42w3jl
8. “You should invest all of your money in diseased livestock…” – Dilbert cartoon http://i35.tinypic.com/2liwwvn.jpg
7. “Free giant squid on Craigslist. I would take it in, but I’m not sure if it would get along with our cats.” – LaughingSquid tweet (ok, I snuck in one tweet!) http://tinyurl.com/9xzprh
6. “Let me see the first one again.” – Tom Cheney cartoon http://tinyurl.com/74lguz7
5. “Twitter in Real Life – the Follow Back” – Hubspot cartoon http://tinyurl.com/6ru58j
4. “How about never? Is never good for you?” – Robert Mankoff cartoon http://tinyurl.com/howboutnever
3. “Just build these features into your web site. They’re like an internet marketing mullet.” – Conversation Marketing article http://tinyurl.com/4sqbbo
2. “Work-chair with a giant no-distraction hood.” – BoingBoing http://tinyurl.com/5lkmdu
1. “I love market analysis, Fred, but my heart’s with the World Wrestling Federation.” – Leo Cullum cartoon http://tinyurl.com/6buvdg
I’m pretty sure I’ve violated the “Do Not Make Fun of Your Industry” rule set out by Brad Shorr in “The 5 Rules of Business Humor“… probably several times. But I think people can handle it. And there’s good reason to think so… the New Yorker Store gets $125 for a framed print of each of their cartoons!
So… what’d I miss?
Next up: 10 tweets that kill me
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Thu, Dec 25, 2008
It’s standard practice for marketers to plan their companies’ newsletter communications using an editorial calendar. Marketers should back off that sort of approach when it comes to a company wading into Twitter. In fact, Johnny Cash is great inspiration if you’re thinking of using Twitter for business. He’s authentic – ugly, even, up close. And his revelations are anything but boring.
Imagine: would Johnny Cash use Twitter for business… that is, to plug his albums? Probably not! But if he did, he wouldn’t conform to his manager’s orchestrations.
If Johnny Cash were to tweet, he’d be more likely to admit to being tired of being cornered by fans. To feeling old. To feeling an addiction tug at him. To daydreaming about one of his many affairs — or battling his immoral impulses, as in the Walk the Line lyrics.
And we’d cheer for him. We’d follow him like mad. Because Johnny Cash was a package deal, warts and all, and that made him real… and really interesting.
What’s the problem?
On LinkedIn I recently read a post that said (paraphrasing):
“I’m planning to start using Twitter on Dec 1st 2009. I’ll be writing about x, y, and z.”
I wrote back that I think it’s great they guy is getting engaged in Twitter, but that I think it would be difficult to plan great tweets.
Planning what you’ll tweet about is not like planning a newsletter’s editorial calendar. Contributions need to be shaped in part by what’s happening in the network. They need to be inspired. And some or most need to be connected in some way to other people and ideas.
It’s standard practice for marketers to plan their companies’ newsletter communications using an editorial calendar. Marketers should back off that sort of approach when it comes to a company wading into Twitter.
As I tweeted as @b2bcommunicate on Dec 8th: in October, I wondered whether B2B marketing might go obsolete because of social media. It won’t. The thing to fear is being boring. And I suspect that nothing is more boring than a history of perfect tweets.
Thoughts?
Are you thriving on Twitter with a carefully planned approach?
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Great people to watch/read/listen to when it comes to Twitter for business:
Nicole Nicolay (for ProBlogger Blog Tips): Make a Tweet Plan to Get the Most from Twitter
Chris Brogan: Using Twitter for Business
Duct Tape Marketing: Twitter for Business
Hubspot: How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR
David Meerman Scott: Marketers: Stop Abusing Twitter
Laura Fitton at Pistachio: Twitter for Business
Darren Rose: Twitter for Beginners
Tom Pick: Twitter Twaddle
Posted by Rebekah Donaldson on Tue, Dec 23, 2008
I’m working on a list of action items I have for our main website. Meantime, a thought struck me: is my site obsolete?
My web team may kill me for writing this. And for good reason. They’ve got blood and sweat in that nav, content and tags. So am I nuts? And which articles on this am I overlooking? I’m sure there are many good ones.
Since launching our business blog in early 2008, I’ve tended to steer fresh content to our blog instead of posting it to our main company website. I favor the blog vs the main site. Why?
B2B blog content vs B2B website content — a theory about why what goes where
- I really want to have a two-way communication with visitors. But, sans public comments feature on our main site, we’re encouraging… listening. That is, I don’t think that offering a response form with a field for entering comments counts as fostering dialogue; that mechanism sends a private communication to the site owner. What fires people up is playing a part… impacting through contributing.
- My perception is that reader/visitor expectations are different for the main site and the blog. And as the author, publishing to the blog is lower stress. The blog posts are supposed to be authentic. It’s not the end of the world if I leave out a word. It’s ok if I don’t know the answer to a question. As long as I’m not squandering your time or committing other heinous acts on Tom Pick’s memorable list, ”The 7 Deadly Sins of Blogging“.
- Because of (2), publishing to the blog is quicker. It feels gratifying to get an idea ‘out’. Making something new is creative. These days, it’s the closest I ever get to making art.
I’m not suggesting that our main corporate website be a wiki. Or that it’s not worthwhile at all without a public comment feature. I am, though, observing that blog infrastructure invites public dialogue; a traditional website does not. And wondering if that is ok in the long term.
So in the vein of the hard-hitting “reality bites” Forrester telecon I helped Laura Ramos with on Oct 29th – I wonder: are traditional websites without comments, obsolete?
Traditional website + public comments = all the usual social media benefits and challenges?
To walk the walk regarding participation, could we invite comments using a form at least on B2B Central pages where we lay out ideas/approaches most likely to spark reader feedback?
At the simplest level, we could manually post people’s comments to the page as they are submitted… or get fancier and automate it. The online Business Journal websites, for example, has space for comments under each online article now. (Note: to my knowledge, no reporter or editor has responded to any comment I’ve posted at a bizjournals.com site.)
However we rig up the technology, I feel there’s still the question about why a business would maintain a main website and a blog separately.
- Perhaps it has to do with separating personal opinion from corporate policy.
- Perhaps it’s because buyers still expect a company to have a company website that looks like a company website.
- Perhaps it’s because a company needs to convey respect for visitors by presenting a polished online presence – not one created with haste or inattention to detail.
B2B websites — why not abandon ship?
Now, why not? That is, why not just do what comes naturally and keep posting all the fresh content to our blog?
Again, I fear my web team is going to absolutely kill me. And for good reason! For one thing, this blog is not optimized, and it shows. It doesn’t ’sell’ our company. It is about ideas, persepctive… connecting with others.
The main site, by contrast, was designed to make our business case. It shows we know our best customers are savvy consumers seeking not just a likeable or hip consultant but a pro wearing the scars and medals that indicate trustworthiness. There are testimonials. Pages telling our skills and services and experience. Press releases noting our successes.
And it’s more usable — content is ‘chunked’ up. It has calls to action. It shows we’ve got some Skills. It’s like wearing business attire for a Friday client meeting.
And I can just hear David Meerman Scott now, thundering “Nobody Cares About Your Products and Services!” I mostly agree David, I mostly agree!
Applying Peter Kim*
Peter Kim’s thinking about Social networking and the ego trap may be applicable here. Kim writes,
Social networks are valuable for building and maintaining relationships. Updates and status feeds preserve the signal strength of current ties and boost the signal of weak ones. But adding connections with low relevance and connection result in static, increasing in annoyance as one’s network grows. Useful social networks require a high signal-to-noise ratio.
Extending this idea: could it be that, while a high volume of comments is gratifying, the ”signal-to-noise” ratio will worsen overall?
His thinking about the scalability of social media bears mention too. In Social media marketing’s scalability problem he writes,
People don’t scale, either. Frank at Comcast does a great job, but he’s only one person. Dell has 17+ people on Twitter, like Amie Paxton. Scott Monty is a new kind of leader, but he’s only one person…
…From my last post asking if social media matters, the commenting consensus seems to agree, with its impact in awareness, consideration, and preference.
But if social media marketing matters, then does it scale?
I don’t think so. I think the technologies scale. But the programs – especially those with a labor-intensive component – don’t.
What if our main site did have a public comments feature and 50 thoughtful visitors weighed in tomorrow? I’d need to surf that wave, rather than drown in it. And that might require Brogan-ish Social Media Skills.
Other website doomsdayers
Others have written about this – some an impressively long time ago! But while their headlines grabbed me in the Google results, their beefs seem to be different. Here are some examples:
In a 2002 article in Digital Web Magazine Jeffrey Zeldman writes in 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete that,
“…In off-brand browsers, in screen readers used by people with disabilities, and in increasingly popular non-traditional devices from Palm Pilots(TM) to web-enabled cell phones, many of these sites have never worked and still don’t, while others function marginally at best…. Peel the skin of any major site, from Amazon to Microsoft.com, from Sony to ZDNet. Examine their tortuous non-standard markup, their proprietary ActiveX and JavaScript (often including broken detection scripts), and ill-conceived use of Cascading Style Sheets-when they use CSS at all. It’s a wonder such sites work in any browser.”
Someone called Titus Hoskins of bizwaremagic.com writes, in Are Websites Obsolete Already? Will they go the way of the DoDo?, a seemingly orphaned blog post dated 2005:
“…we see the start of such a direction in the blurring of sites that are not exactly a blog or a website — but a cross between the two. People are building complete websites in rss/xml coding so they can feed them directly to their site’s customers or patrons…”
Now – I noticed some months ago that a couple of industry leaders don’t have separate blogs and corporate sites. Their blog IS their corporate site. It has pages for Services and About… but the main area one lands at when you use their root URL, is their latest post and its comments.
This is interesting to me because it’s an acknowledgement of the way b2b conversations need to happen now… two way, less formal, less preachy, more authentic, more inclusive, more timely, more shaped by the community of players and ideas of which it is one part.
Thoughts?
What do you think? Is trying to structure all corporate communications to be interactive an ego trap… and too hard to support? Or is it silly and shortsighted to get stuck on those issues… in the same sort of way that it’d be silly to not use email because there’s so much of it to keep on top of?
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* A far cry from Being Peter Kim