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