MindComet

Elementary my dear Watson….spammers

The blogosphere is a stir about Seth Godin’s latest undertaking, Brands in Public. Words like brandjacking and blackmail are being spoken in the breath as Godin.

Love it or hate it, I fear that Brands in Public could be doomed from the start due to one simple, yet omnipresent force on the Internet, spammers.

From the looks of it, Brands in Public appears to be a keyword-based aggregate, which are ripe for exploitation by spammers…and trust me they will come. Seth Godin, marketing genius, will work his voodoo and push these pages to the tops of the search engines. He has to, otherwise he can’t demand the monthly fee he’s looking to leech from brands. Once these pages hit the first pages in Google, it will be no time before they’re targeted by spammers and rendered useless by links to porn sites and cheap Viagra (just like Twitter’s Trending Topics).

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 24, 2009

Twitter’s trending topics is a spammers dream

Twitter’s API is a double edge sword. On one hand, it’s enabled hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter apps to spring up and has provided a mechanism to morph the platform into some really neat and useful tools. On the other hand, the simple and open API allows programmers to easily build and manage spam bots. The place is littered with them.

To their credit, Twitter is has been pretty aggressive in their fight against spam. This is not only good for Twitter, but given the full court press from Facebook, it’s a MUST DO.

This brings me to the Trending Topics feature of Twitter. A mechanism that allows anyone to inject their message into a filtered, yet public, feed based on a keyword with the link to that feed being displayed prominently on a user’s homepage and the Twitter homepage. That is a spammers dream come true, served up nicely with a side of brown butter sauce by Twitter (who some say is drowning in spam).

Check out this snapshot of a trending topic today, “AT&T”:

Everything outlined in red is spam.

I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous. Over 50% of the posts are spam. I’m asking myself, “What’s the value here? And how is this useful?“ Given Twitter’s fight against and problem with spam, why would they keep this feature around?

My advice to Twitter: Remove trending topics altogether. It’s quickly becoming an unused feature, that is, if you’re an actual human.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 23, 2009

Injecting social media into your organization

Do you want to know what the hot topics are in marketing circles? Ask the business development person at an agency. Field enough leads, and you begin to see some recurring trends. Currently, about nine out of every ten marketing leads involve some interest in social media—awesome news for someone trying to sell social media, right? Well, yes and no. Despite the frequent interest in social media from organizations, selling social media isn’t getting easier. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

So what’s the problem? Marketers are lining up for social media projects. It should be easy, right?

Wrong. The opportunity may be there, however, nine times out of ten, the concept hasn’t been completely sold internally. Helping the marketing team get buy off from key stakeholders and decision makers is the first step. This can be challenging to say the least. Marketers are generally already in tune with social media and use it. They’ve had a good solid two years of news trickling in through blogs and industry publications which all support the notion of social media as an effective marketing tool. Start venturing outside of marketing and you’ll find that this doesn’t hold true. And as the age of a person goes up, social media tends to become increasingly foreign.

So, we’re essentially being tasked with selling the business application of social media to stakeholders that, quite often, aren’t even participating in social media casually. It’s kinda like selling cake to a person who’s never eaten before.

Education is the first step

This whole process would be a much softer sell if people had previous experience that they could relate to. Here are a couple of ideas for bringing social media into your organization.

Offer social media education brown bag lunches - Pick one tool, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, blogging, or whatever. Explain the tool and show relevant examples of use. Is your CEO attending the brown bag? Go ahead and put together examples that show other CEOs using social media for business purposes. The proof’s in the puddding.

Create a social media reverse mentorship program - I personally love this one. Rest assured that the younger members on your team get social media and are using it regularly. Go ahead and pair them up with someone on your management team in a reverse mentorship program. For the junior team member, this role could be a great honor and provide them with an opportunity to shine. For your leadership team, this would be a great way to quickly get “on board” a crucial business trend.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 18, 2009

And the CommuniCause winner is…

It’s been a long and enjoyable journey, but the first phase of CommuniCause is coming to an end. All the votes have been counted and the winner of the $25,000 social media makeover has been selected.

Overall, the campaign has exceeded the goals we originally set. In three months, over 1000 charities were nominated and over 60,000 votes were cast through the site and via Twitter. That’s a pretty astounding number considering that the entire campaign was promoted via word of mouth by CommuniCause participants. We simply seeded the message through Twitter, Facebook and a small email blast to our existing MindComet email list. We’re patting ourselves on the back over here.

Now we’re on the next phase: engaging the winner of the $25,000 in MindComet consulting services. So who is the winner?

Well, you’ll have to tune into our virtual awards banquet on Sept 17th 12:30PM EST. Just head on over the the CommuniCause homepage at http://communicause.com where we’ll reveal the winner. It won’t take much of a commitment, maybe 10 minutes or so, but we have a surprise in store, so you won’t want to miss it.

Hope to see you there!

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 16, 2009

What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?

Imagine this for a second.

You visit a website and there’s some really good information on the homepage. It’s about a subject matter that interests you. Now imagine there are “photos”, “discussions” and “videos” links in the top nav. And when you click on them, the page that comes up has no content. What would you think? What would be your first impression? If it were me, I’d think that the site’s creator had abandoned the project and published anyways.

Doesn’t sound like a great experience right? Well, that’s the experience provided by a large majority of Facebook fan pages. The title of this blog post asks, “What are you doing with your Facebook fan page?“. On second thought, I think the question should be, ‘What are you not doing with your Facebook fan page?“.

Take a minute and evaluate your fan page. Are there tabs that serve no purpose? Is there a tab (think blue sky here) that would serve a purpose?

Why waste real estate?

If you’re not using the default fan page tabs, why not just remove them? Did you know that you could? Or, better yet, use the Static FBML feature of Facebook to create a custom tab! This forum thread shows you exactly how to achieve this feat.

So what am I really saying?

Apply the same critical eye to your fan page as you would to your main website. In fact, do this with all your social media outlets. As your social presence grows, these outlets will be the first impression your brand makes to new visitors. Make it a good one.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Aug. 05, 2009

Get your S**T together Twitter!

Twitter announced on July 23rd that they were purging spam accounts from the platform. Given the recent homepage changes that are intended to position Twitter as a “conversation search engine”, this move makes sense.

However, I fear that legitimate users are getting caught in the crossfire. My friend over at doterati, Tara Lamberson recently found that her Twitter account had been suspended. The suspension date, according to Twitter Grader, happened on July 24th, one day after Twitter’s announcement. She’s not a spammer and, as far as I know, has always used the platform within the stated terms of service. To compound what is an extremely frustrating issue for her, she can’t get anyone at Twitter support to respond to her request concerning the matter—what a surprise.

Frankly, I am getting sick and tired of writing posts about Twitter not acting grown-up. I’m sick of writing about a platform that doesn’t seem to respect it’s users. Twitter, get your shit together. Offer timely support, especially to those users who were shafted by your mass-suspension! Many people have come to depend on your service, especially those who use it in a professional capacity. If the lack of a monetization strategy is the barrier for your attention, how letting me pay for your service? I’d happily give you $10 a month if it meant you’d lend an ear when I had a problem.

By the way Twitter, if you’re listening, reinstate @taralamberson

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Aug. 04, 2009

Facebook privacy directions

I’ve had some requests from friends asking how to prohibit 3rd party applications from accessing your Facebook photos… here they are in screen shot form.

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Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Jul. 24, 2009