Stuart Elliott from the New York Times writes an interesting piece on brands and social media missteps. Elliott points to two recent examples of Aflac and Chrysler Group in which the person managing the social media presence said something offensive and out of taste using the corporate account and was subsequently terminated. If you represent a brand in social media, be careful what you say or you just might find yourself without a job. His article is a cautionary tale of using social media as a branding tool. If you’re a brand that just getting into the mix, check out my recent blog post, “Personal or Professional Profile? 9 Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing How to Manage a Brand for Work,” for some advice on how to conduct yourself.

Read the article at the New York Times: “When the Marketing Reach of Social Media Backfires.”

Luxist recently featured an excellent review of “The Flood” by Ahron Weiner, a friend of SnapDragon Consultants. Weiner has his artwork on display at the Verge in Brooklyn as part of Armory Week 2011. The product of what Weiner dubs, “semiotic archaeology,” “The Flood” retells the story of Noah’s Ark by “digging through layers of words and image to create new meaning.” Weiner has created his masterpiece by taking layered advertisement posters around New York City and pealing back advertisements to reveal a story from the Old Testament. Nothing in his work is positioned or taken from outside of the original layered posters. His work is a compelling commentary on the nature of advertisement as a fleeting piece of imagery and also shows us that these fleeting images can be recontextualized to tell their own more eduring story.

Hear Weiner speak about “The Flood” in the video below:

It’s a Monday morning, you had a late night with friends and now you’re sitting tired and sleep deprived in front of your computer. You login to Facebook and decide to post a witty update about your wild night. Except oops – you just posted that to the company’s wall which you administer and not your own. Better delete it fast and hope those thousands of fans didn’t notice. Another day, you’re tasked with publicizing your organization’s new product, but the media isn’t interested and the bloggers see it as old news. As a last ditch effort, you post it to your social networking account, and that elementary school acquaintance, who studied in journalism and now works for the big newspaper, likes what he sees and the next day a story is published about your product. Both scenarios exhibit the power of social networks and also the costs and benefits of blending your personal and professional worlds. As social media becomes a more common tool in the workplace, these scenarios will become increasingly frequent.

Here at SnapDragon, clients often ask us whether they should use their own personal online accounts to manage their brand’s social networking activities or whether they should use a separate “professional” account. This question draws on a fundamental need for many people to keep their work lives separate from their personal lives. Here are a few questions to help walk you through this important decision.

1. Does my employer have guidelines?
Although less common in the past, more and more organizations are coming out with rules or guidelines about how they expect their employees to conduct themselves online while at work or on behalf of the brand. If your employer is one of these organizations, turn to these guidelines first to see how your organization feels about your social media use.

2. Who are my online audiences?
Perhaps you have a private account but already think of a global audience. Or maybe you only use social networks to exclusively communicate with close friends and family. Your audiences may also differ based on the social network – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn – you are using. These may include close friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, customers, and strangers.

Ask yourself if your work use will conflict with these audiences. If you are already using the account for professional purposes, like LinkedIn, there may be no conflict. In some instances, what you do for work will be something that you are personally passionate about and thus harmonize with your personal identity. You may not need separate accounts because the professional activity you generate will not be so different than what you would already be doing on your personal time.

3. What type of content do I post in my personal time?
Are your social media updates not quite “work safe”? Do you use Facebook to vent about your boss? Will your updates reflect poorly on your brand? Are you uncomfortable living your life in the public eye? If so, you may want to think about maintaining separate accounts or editing your updates to reflect a more public persona.

Additionally, you may also choose to maintain a personal-professional account by moving private topics to the back channels. Whether you’re using the more closed Facebook or the more open Twitter, the majority of social networks have a means to message another person in private, and if they don’t, there’s always email. For example, I don’t mind tweeting that I’m going on vacation, but if friends inquiries get too personal, I message them privately.

4. How visible will my professional actions be?
In some cases, your professional actions may not be all that visible to your personal network, allowing you to maintain one account. One example is Facebook, in which page administrators can switch between the identity of the fan page and their own personal profiles. Any action done through the page’s identity will only appear on the fan page and not show up on your personal profile.

If you are using your personal profile to promote work-related activities, you can also setup customize groups on Facebook and then choose or exclude specific groups from seeing an update. You can also use this in the reverse to limit personal updates to a close group of friends and family.

5. Do I want my name or profile associated with my work?
If you’re worried about your name showing up in association with a Facebook fan page, only other administrators can see your name, and these administrators can only view as much of your profile as you’ve allowed in your privacy settings. Likewise, if you manage a Facebook group where your name is visible to the public, non-friends can only view what is available in your public profile.

Another way to get around this is to use initials. I have a rather unique name, Karynn Ikeda, making it easy to Google me, but if abbreviate my first name, K Ikeda, or my last name, Karynn I, my name become much less traceable.

6. Will public visibility be helpful to my career?
In other instances, you may actually want your name associated with your work. Academics, writers, and journalists build their credibility through their writing, and in the online world, your influence is a combination of what you create, what you share, and who you know. Some online influencers, like Robert Scoble, started out as the promoter of a major brand, Microsoft, and then when they moved on to other projects, their fans followed them. Especially if you work in communications and plan to do more social media work in the future, having an established and active account will be something you can carry with you and add to your resume. It is a professional asset. Social media accounts are like credit cards: don’t open too many, keep them active, and have a long history.

7. Can my brand benefit my personal network or vice versus?
Perhaps your work is something that would interest your personal network. Maybe your friends are fans of your brand’s product or your family donates to causes similar to the one your organization advocates for. What you do for work may add value to your personal network. Embrace this and don’t feel like everything you post is spam.

Like the second example, a personal network can be a powerful tool for amplifying and spreading a message, especially if your organization is young and relatively unknown. Shy away from press release type language and repetitious announcements and be a filter to showcase the best your brand has to offer. Pay attention to your network, and if people seem worn out by your work announcements, scale it back. The key is to find a balance between the personal and professional so you present a holistic person.

8. Will managing a joint account overload you?
Sometimes managing a personal-professional account can be more work than it’s worth, and it’s simpler and less stressful to keep things separate. You may need to carefully scrutinize all your personal updates and be sure that you don’t post the wrong thing in the wrong place (recall the first example). Think of it like individual and joint bank accounts. When you’re single you can make whatever purchases you want without someone asking you why you made them and have a good idea about how much money is left since you’re the only one using the account. But once you marry, another person is scrutinizing your financial decisions and you just might overdraw the account if you’re not keeping up with the other person’s purchases. If you’re the type of person who’s afraid of of social media overdraft, then separate accounts may be for you.

9. So what should I do?
The choice to use one’s personal account in the workplace is a personal decision. For many, keeping separate accounts is the safer option, but also consider that a joint account has benefits as well. Ultimately, people may feel more strongly about the personal-professional divide than they might in the next generation. Social norms are constantly changing, and with the younger generation living from cradle to grave in the online limelight, the distinction between personal and professional may fade in its importance.

I welcome your opinions on this topic, and if you have additional questions, please feel free to ask in the comments.

Photo by piscue

I was flying back to New York from California this weekend and happened across a group of three master yo-yo teens departing from the California State Yo-Yo Championship. While our plane was going through a maintenance check, these three young yo-yo advocates converted a 10-year-old boy into a yo-yo fan. The process was so quick and so seamless that I was taken aback by how easily they had managed to turn a passive onlooker into a fully engaged fan. They provide an inspiring example of how any brand can do the same with social media.

Be bold. And don’t be afraid to stand out. These teens were yo-yoing in an airport terminal – unusual and out-of-place behavior. But if they hadn’t put themselves out there, the boy wouldn’t have gotten curious, and I wouldn’t be writing this blog post. For brands, this may mean taking the plunge into social media if you haven’t yet, or if you’re already doing something, then thinking how you can stand out in your particular space.

Engage with your audience. These masters could have only played with their yo-yo’s and boarded the plane without inquiring about the boy’s curious gazes; instead, they openly asked if the boy had seen a yo-yo before and if he wanted to learn. Even if a brand is on Facebook or Twitter, it may be only be performing without the followup. It’s great to tweet and post about how wonderful your brand is, but don’t forget to look for the curious gazes. They may appear in the form of direct questions from fans, or brands can stimulate this curiosity by posing questions to their audiences.

Cater to your fans’ needs. Remember that there can be barriers to a fan’s engagement. In the boy’s case, he didn’t know how to yo-yo or where to learn. The yo-yo masters told him about a website with tutorials and wrote it down for him (make it easy or your fans will move on). The three even went a step further and showed him how to yo-yo in person. And finally to close the deal, they gave him his own a yo-yo! Unfortunately, brands cannot cater to each fan so individually, but they can look for those fans most in need and give them individual attention. For example, many airlines scour social networks for signs of unhappy customers. When they find them, they send an apologetic update (if there’s not much they can do), a helpful link (if it will help solve the problem), or in some cases actually rebook a canceled flight (talk about customer service!).

Give your fans space. There were three yo-yo masters in the room, but not all three of them needed to be teaching the boy how to yo-yo. Instead, after the three had gained the boy’s attention, one of them – the most charismatic of the bunch – showed him how to yo-yo. If all of them had crowded around him, the boy might have felt overwhelmed or patronized. For brands on social media, don’t constantly blast your fans with updates, especially those that seem repetitious, or demand that they friend, follow, or like you on every social network. Even the most engaged user needs some breathing room. A brand should also be cautious about joining ever single new social network. It is better to have one strong social media presence than multiple ones that drown out the conversation and overload fans.

I expect that when this boy got home he took out his new yo-yo for a spin. While he was spinning it, I bet he wasn’t only thinking about how cool the yo-yo looked but how these three yo-yo masters had helped him without him even needing to ask. Certainly, we all can’t give away free yo-yo’s, but brands can give their fans positive interactions. And these positive interactions are what stay with users long after the product has disappeared.

In case you were wondering how yo-yo’s could be so exciting and captivating, here’s a clip from the contest to give you a taste of what I saw.

A (somewhat) recent Wired magazine feature titled “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” boldy announced that we are leaving behind the era of the browser for the era of the app:

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

This is very silly and it reflects a misunderstanding of how these technologies and practices co-evolve and overlap. That’s an important thing to get right because it’s typically where the interesting developments take place.

Just to be clear, Anderson’s argument is that the Web as a means of communication is in decline at the hands of new, non-Web Internet protocols:

Today the content you see in your browser — largely HTML data delivered via the HTTP protocol on port 80 — accounts for less than a quarter of the traffic on the Internet … and it’s shrinking.

Well, if by “it” you mean traffic over HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol, the communication medium that defines the Web) then this is simply false.

Let’s look at the informative graph they included:

Thankfully, Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing dealt with the obvious problem here already, that the vertical axis represents proportional—not absolute—traffic volume:

In fact, between 1995 and 2006, the total amount of web traffic went from about 10 terabytes a month to 1,000,000 terabytes (or 1 exabyte). According to Cisco, the same source Wired used for its projections, total internet traffic rose then from about 1 exabyte to 7 exabytes between 2005 and 2010.

So with actual total traffic as the vertical axis, the graph would look more like this.

If “it” is the proportion of data on the Internet that goes over HTTP then yes, that is shrinking because other things are growing in volume faster, notably video and peer-to-peer communication.

Because peer-to-peer includes Bittorrent, which includes lots of big media files and because video files are a whole lot bigger than text and images this is even more misleading. Moreover, a lot of that video goes over port 1935 (used by Adobe’s Flash player) that doesn’t count for the Web even though one watches it in a browser window.

But it’s not just the facts about the present that are being misrepresented. The history of the discussion about the fate of the Web also gets distorted for the sake the argument being made. Anderson writes:

A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of the computing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of time before the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operating systems to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers,” as Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen famously said.

But that isn’t true. George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, had this to say about the apparently inevitable ascent:

Another software technology will come along and kill off the Web, just as it killed News, Gopher, et al. And that judgment day will arrive very soon — in the next two to three years, not 25 years from now.

(Hat tip to Douglas Crockford for digging this up on Wayback Machine. It’s no longer included on the Forrester site, shockingly.)

Bizarrely, Anderson also points to his own magazine’s similar incorrect predictions from the 90s as support for his own argument that this time, they’ve got it right:

“Sure, we’ll always have Web pages. We still have postcards and telegrams, don’t we? But the center of interactive media — increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment,” we promised nearly a decade and half ago. The examples of the time were a bit silly — a “3-D furry-muckers VR space” and “headlines sent to a pager” — but the point was altogether prescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting.

I’m not really sure how clear the browsing/getting distinction is when it comes to information or what makes Anderson think that the Internet prior to this new post-Web era didn’t involve machine-to-machine communication. Regardless, Mr. Colony reached somehwat similar conclusions about what would come next.

While Web communications are conducted via the exchange of pages, the new software model will use executables (programs). What’s the difference? Think of pages versus executables as the difference between reading a book and talking to a friend. Yes, all of those pages in the book are interesting and instructive. But you can’t converse with a book the way you can with a friend. You can’t cooperate with a book to perform a task. A book won’t answer an unexpected question. The Web is like reading a book. An executable-powered Internet is like a two-way conversation.

The mistake here was a failure to realize just how flexible a technology the Web was and remains. The Web is here to stay because it is profoundly, fundamentally, and irreversibly open. One only needs to look at the completely unanticipated diversity of Web services that have blossomed in recent years to see how vast the room for innovation on the Web is.

Again, Anderson manages to somehow see the evidence through some sort of bizarre filter that makes it confirm, rather than disprove, his argument:

But just as Web 2.0 is simply Web 1.0 that works, the idea has come around again. Those push concepts have now reappeared as APIs, apps, and the smartphone.

Okay, let’s break this down. First of all, Web 2.0 is not “Web 1.0 done right”. To the extent these terms are meaningful, Web 1.0 refers to that flat, one-way, non-interactive pile of documents that Anderson and Colony both think of as the limit of the Web’s potential. Web 2.0 refers to interactive Web applications that create value by linking users together and increase in effectiveness the more people participate. That sounds a lot more like the supposed post-Web world Anderson and Colony talk about than it does the sepia-toned Web of 1995 they’re so bored with. Web 2.0 is a metamorphosis of this truly collective platform made possible because of its inherent flexibility. It’s not insignificant that one of the key notions associated with Web 2.0 from early on was the “perpetual beta”. Web applications can be continuously under development. They can change from day to day without asking users to update software or change platforms or even notice. The Web itself is in perpetual beta and that’s why it’s silly to talk about something coming along to kill it off. Apply pressure that causes it to adapt in new ways, sure, but not kill.

But let’s also look at these things that Anderson points to as the belated realization of this decade-old notion that the Web is dying.

APIs. What are those? Well, “application programming interfaces” are ubiquitous in software design. It’s a very basic concept—the “interface implemented by a software program that enables it to interact with other software” (Wikipedia). What Anderson is talking about are the APIs exposed by companies like Twitter or Facebook that allow users to interact with them through applications other than the browser. This subset of the general category of APIs are more accurately termed, wait for it, Web APIs or Web services. Again, Anderson’s evidence suggests if anything the very opposite of his sensationalist claim—the Web isn’t dying, it’s becoming even more ubiquitous. The APIs he points to are delivered over the HTTP protocol on port 80.

Moreover, if it were not for that fact the world of smart phone apps wouldn’t be possible because there wouldn’t be this familiar and shared context for information exchange. The Web lowers the overhead to implementing new access points to technology services by being a sort of universally interoperable switchboard. Just because an application that consumes Web-based data doesn’t happen to be a browser doesn’t mean it doesn’t come out of that vast innovation space created by the Web.

The Web is not in decline. If anything it is only becoming an increasingly important area of exciting advancement as its inputs and outputs become more varied and multi-modal. Dismissing the Web in favor of vague predictions about other technology displacing it ignores the fact that the Web isn’t a specific mechanism like cassette tapes that can be rendered obsolete by a new one. I would argue that even if HTTP over port 80 were replaced that wouldn’t mean the death of the Web. Rather, we should understand the Web as we understand the Internet: an assemblage of components that shift and change even as the collective context remains the same. The technologies that Anderson and Colony before him point to will become part of that dynamic process too.

A week later there’s still plenty of chatter regarding Facebook’s recently revealed location-based feature, aptly named “Places”. A great deal of the discussion focuses on the fate of existing social applications based on place—particularly foursquare.

I posted last week about my initial sense that places wasn’t quite as polished as it might be and that this might have something to do with Facebook being in a rush to jump into the location game. I also reiterated my point from about six months ago (the idea that Facebook was going to launch this sort sort of geo-social feature has been in the air for over a year) that just because Facebook is very, very big doesn’t mean make it a forgone conclusion that they will crush any smaller players in whatever market they decide to enter.

But let’s back up a moment and think about why Facebook might decide to build this new capability. In the post linked above I sort of take for granted that Facebook wants to be a big player in the nascent location-based social Web scene and that it makes sense for them to want this. Those aren’t controversial assumptions, but they should be. Facebook is in a pretty good spot at the moment with their half billion users and unchallenged position as the social network. Why would they want to risk getting involved in a still quite small, immature niche of the social media world that hasn’t quite yet demonstrated mass appeal or staying power?

Well, what is the alternative and what are the down-side risks? If Facebook doesn’t get involved in location-based social networking and it turns out to somehow be a temporary fad then, they’ve saved some money and maybe get some “told you so” points on a tech blog or two down the road. If Facebook doesn’t get involved and location-based social networking becomes central to how people communicate and share content on the Web, then maybe they have given competitors a narrow opening to knock them off their perch.

“Getting involved” in the sense used above doesn’t mean “crushing all competition”. It means deploying the necessary tools to make the relationship between Facebook and location-focused services not a competition at all.

Look at what they did with Twitter: The transformation of Facebook from a directory of linked users to a stream of constant updates has been gradual, but back when Facebook status updates were first introduced the service was accused of Twitter envy and the two companies were thought about as competing in the status updating arena just as Facebook and foursquare are being spoken of as competitors in the location arena.

But Facebook wasn’t competing with Twitter, they were just putting themselves in a position to be unthreatened by them. Feeding one’s Twitter updates into Facebook is one of the easiest things to do on the site (much easier than managing privacy settings, for instance). But when is that last time you saw someone pumping their Facebook updates into Twitter?

Similarly, foursquare (and friends) allowed users to post their activity to Facebook, but only as flat information, not meaningful location data. Now, once the Places write API (which will allow external services to send geo-tagged data into Facebook) is enabled, you’ll be able to get all your friend’s location updates through Facebook just as you can get all your friends Twitter updates through Facebook. In other words, Places protects Facebook from the horrible possibility of people looking elsewhere for information about their own social graph.

This makes a lot of sense. Facebook’s dominance isn’t because it’s the best at everything but because it can absorb enough of anything that it is good enough for most people at it. From Facebook’s perspective: “If the social location thing fades away, so be it. If it turns out to stick around, don’t give people an excuse to go elsewhere for it.”

That doesn’t require Facebook to eliminate foursquare. It doesn’t even require Places to be innovative or interesting.

And winning here doesn’t have to be about keeping people from using other services. People still use Twitter but no one talks about Twitter displacing Facebook or anything like that. Similarly, Facebook’s goal may not even be to keep potential foursquare users around to actually profit from them but rather to prevent a coherent case from evolving that Facebook missed the boat on the location thing. There have been rumors of a Facebook IPO for years now. The value of the company is tied to perceptions about how it fits into the market for social media services generally. Places helps insulate Facebook from negative evaluation, so it is a good idea from the perspective of people whose primary concern may soon be the opinions of people without a great deal of understanding of this market (people who would determine Facebook’s potential share price).

So I believe the current discussion about Facebook’s entry into the geo-social game misses the point by focused far too much on an either/or relationship between Facebook and foursquare. If anything should be made clear by the big changes the major social web players have made this year (Facebook’s Open Graph, Twitter’s @Anywhere), it’s that tactical integration has become a preferred approach to achieving market dominance.

A great video interview today from Mashable with Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records (back in 1950).

He has some wonderful and deeply felt insights into how influence works on the Web—and in music. It’s applicable to multiple industries.

The interview is here.

Yesterday, Facebook finally announced its much-anticipated new location-based feature, Places. There’s plenty of chatter about the implications of this move—there has been for months, actually. Back in March I posted about an item from TechCrunch from November (as in, 2009) called “Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo”. Use of “poised” might have been premature.

Foursquare was watching yesterday in fact. They even had a representative on hand to sort of rubber-stamp the roll out along with counterparts from Gowalla, Yelp, and Booyah. As you can see from this follow-up interview with that foursquare-er (Holger Luedorf, new VP of Mobile), despite being an official “launch partner” the relationship isn’t exactly all hugs and kisses. He not-so-subtly mentions his excitement for foursquare’s existing, long-term product roadmap and the fact that Facebook only reached out to them a few weeks ago—in other words, foursquare isn’t about to just let Facebook stroll into the location game like the own the, ahem, place.

Here’s what I wrote about the relationship between foursquare and a potential location-enabled Facebook about six months ago:

So in the context of the predicted conflict between Foursquare and geosocial Facebook (which has allegedly “already won”), Facebook’s supposed big advantage, ubiquity, is just as likely a disadvantage in that Foursquare and similar services lend themselves to contact networks that are much smaller and specifically defined than one’s fuller social graph as mapped out on Facebook. And, to the extent that Facebook “owns” the social graph, the benefits of that aren’t exclusive and are already being leveraged with success by Foursquare.

The things that differentiate Foursquare form other services—like all those quirky game features—can easily exist on top of a Facebook-based geosocial framework but are very difficult to imagine being reproduced by Facebook itself as a hard-wired component of that platform. Foursquare certainly needs to watch out for what Facebook is doing in terms of geosocial features (and what Twitter and everyone else involved is doing too), but not because it points to Foursquare’s imminent demise. Rather, the rapidly evolving ecosystem of interlinked social services in this category means everyone has to be on their toes. (Emphasis Added)

This remains true, but of the companies that joined Facebook for the announcement, foursquare had the least to say about pending integrations.

Mark Zuckerberg started the announcment presentation by explaining that Facebook doesn’t set a binding timetable for product development, but works on things until they think they are ready. I wonder if he wasn’t protesting a little too much. Places is only available through the Facebook iPhone app and the touch.facebook.com version of the site. No native applications for other platforms. When I tried to use the feature here in New York on my iPhone, I got this:

Doesn’t exactly feel ready. At the same time, foursquare has begun improving its privacy controls, touting the wealth of apps built against its API (over a thousand, including this one), and experiencing the types of outages that (while frustrating for users) are the result of rapid growth.

Did Facebook rush Places out the door because everyone was expecting them to and, even with their 500 million users, they were worried about foursquare running away with the location niche?

Daniel Luxemburg, who leads SnapDragon’s work on leveraging new social Web technologies, has just released a new iPhone application called Mayorama. It is a client for the location-based social network Foursquare. Mayorama focuses on helping users become “mayor” (most frequent visitor) of their favorite venues in the system.

You can learn more about (and download) the application from its listing in the Apple iTunes store.

Mayorama has already gotten significant attention in online media in the first 24 hours of availability, including coverage on the major tech blog ReadWriteWeb.

Jodie Wasserman, a dear friend and SnapDragon colleague is comedian facing a very common problem: how to manage one’s reputation on the Web.

Comedians, since they are constantly out there and in the public eye, are very much like a consumer brand. People will interact with them with the like it or not.

We’ve also seen comedians who don’t know how to leverage the audience support they get in clubs, take the support  into the online space.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be looking at ways comedians and other artists can better leverage the Web and manage their reputations.

Meanwhile, here’s Comedy Central Clip of Jodie.