There’s a ton of social media snake oil out there. You’ve seen it. Crapware that promises you a million Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Social media marketing “gurus” with no experience ready to sell you their secret magic systems.

It makes me crazy. Much of it is apparent for what it is the minute you land on the ugly website with the direct mail design and the coiffed “expert” flashing their pearly whites at you.

These are easy ethical calls. It’s snake oil. Just say NO.

But there’s a wide, fuzzy grey area, too.

A Real Life example: there’s a smart, savvy social media marketing expert out there with a huge following. He gives great advice, and clearly knows what he’s talking about. He will also Tweet — as himself, using his hard-won social media reputation — on your behalf for a fee.

My first reaction to this is “Ugh! Not cool. Ethics FAIL.” But he does tell people that this is how he works. Not in every Tweet, of course, but it’s on his site. Not right up front, but it’s there. So is it ok? My gut says no. How am I to know when he’s Tweeting about something or someone he really believes in and when he’s doing it for cash?

I have a new, fun, very cool client. It’s a local small business. I’m working with them to get more business, and there’s a significant social media element to it. So is it cool for me to occasionally Tweet about them? They’re not paying me to Tweet, per se. And of course I know that I’d only do this for clients I really believe in. But that’s what everyone says, isn’t it?

I talked with Susan Price about this. As usual, she was able to point out how I was rationalizing.

“You should only tweet about them if you’d be tweeting about them even if they weren’t your client. That’s what I do. Else you’re diluting your own reputation on behalf of the client. You’re either selling tweets or you’re not.”

Ouch. She’s right.

On the other hand, when I owned Go Media — long before social media — I would often talk about/spread the word about my clients when I was out and about. How is Tweeting about them — with restraint — really any different?

And from my client’s point of view, part of the reason they hired me is for my knowledge of and access to their demographic.

So now I’m trying to find a happy medium that fits with my own ethics. Facebook and blogging are no problem — I can simply explain. Twitter is another issue.

We need a hashtag. Anything I Tweet on behalf of a client should be noted as such. That’s tough to do that in 140 characters. I used #pimpingmyclient on one Tweet, but that’s too long, and it’s not exactly professional. Would #client be enough?

Suggestions are most welcome.

What ethical quandaries have you bumped into?

Bruce Sterling gave a talk at Lift09 in France last year called “Shaping Things”. As usual, he gave a fascinating, somewhat stream-of-consciousness talk that managed to connect lots of seemingly disparate topics, from spimes to RFIDs to design to tranaparency to recycling.

His thoughts about tag clouds and industrial design made something click for me. He talked about how tag clouds had such promise, but are now revealing their weaknesses. What happens when the tags/words go away? Or evolve?

He transitioned smoothly from tag clouds into industrial design. Industrial designers make coherent things, and name them. But what about the components of the objects? They need tags too. So we end up with tags, and sub-tags, and sub-sub-tags, until we’re left with an organizational mess.

We need a way to filter and and organize.

The same thing is happening with location-based applications.

Location-based apps are hot as hell these days. They were the app-star of SXSWi this year, and new services are popping up all over the place. Personally, I’m using FourSquare, Gowalla, and Whrrl just to get a sense of what they have to offer.

Yes, checking in with multiple services is a pain, but it’s worth it to me to see how they evolve.

But I see another problem emerging, and that’s filtering. Any time I check in, I’m presented with a list of nearby spots. Gowalla seems to be more precise in locating me, but regardless I’m presented with x places. When the place I’m really at doesn’t show up, it’s another step, and often a slow one, to get it to appear. As often as not I just skip it.

I was at the airport the other day. When I went to check in I found listings for half a dozen gates, several restaurants, the Admirals Club, and specific baggage claim areas. It wouldn’t surprise me to see specific airplane seats and bathroom stalls very soon. During SXSWi, I saw checkins for bathroom lines, bus stops, and specific rooms in restaurants. I even saw someone’s moustache listed as a location, and some lucky friend had checked in. Amusing, for sure, but it makes the services much less useful.

We need a way to filter the locations, and fast, or the apps will become unusable and even more tedious.

Today I gave a presentation about Integrating Social Media Into Your Marketing Plan as part of this week’s RISE Austin conference in Austin.

It was standing room only for the presentation, and it was a fantastic audience. Not only did I get some great questions about everything from tools to analytics to psychographics, but there were some experts in the audience who taught me a few new things as well. How cool is that?

I made some great contacts this afternoon, too, including one woman who interviewed me for a class she was taking back in the 90s when I was still running Go Media. Apparently I played a small part in her decision to become an entrepreneur, which thrills me more than you can imagine. I’m looking forward to getting together with her and several other folks in attendance for some invigorating conversation.

Really, this session was so fun — I came out of it energized and excited and inspired. I’m so glad I decided to participate in RISE.

The presentation is embedded below. It’s pretty information packed — I show some analogies between traditional marketing and social media marketing while stressing the importance of both.

My Social Media Ecosystem slide is always a favorite, and that’s here too. I swear I have to update that file every couple of weeks, things are changing so rapidly. Ideally I want to create the same kind of diagram for traditional marketing and show where they overlap and where they diverge. I’ve been working on it, but this is proving to be a pretty big undertaking.

I follow that up with a case study of JPeterson Garden Design, my wonderful gardener, dear friend, fabulous client, and favorite success story.

Thanks to Jan Triplett of the Business Success Center for hosting my presentation.

Chris Garrigues and Jan Triplett

I hereby declare the first meeting of the Secret Cabal of Bloggers a success! We had a few last minute cancellations, but everyone who showed up got right into the spirit of things.

First up was introducing the secret handshake, of course. Curious? You’ll have to attend the next event to learn it. It’s highly classified.

Jenny Peterson and Karen Kreps

We talked a bit about our blogging platforms of choice, some of our experiences growing our blogs, and only occasionally meandered off into discussions of Twitter and Christmas and cookies. And yes, we did dive in and do some actual blogging.

People present: Jan Triplett, Chris Garrigues, Karen Kreps, Jenny Peterson, Susan Price, and myself.

Susan Price

Computers used: 6 Macs. Cool, huh?

Treats eaten: Pecan ball cookies, oranges, popcorn, and Susan’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Yum!

I don’t know what the Secret Cabal will become. That depends on you. Is it helpful to have dedicated writing time? Was the conversation even more valuable? Let me know in the comments.

And by the way, the groovy conference room you see here is at the Business Success Center, and it’s available for rent :)

Jan Triplett and I are have been talking about getting a writing/blogging group together for quite some time, and we’re finally doing it. Here’s the invitation – you can register at EventBrite.

Introducing the first intermittent meeting of the

Suffering from blogger’s block? Not posting frequently enough? Tormented by the constant updates of prolific posters?

Dust off your keyboard and join us for an afternoon of powow, prose, and publishing. We’ll guilt trip motivate each other and end the day with a real live post.

Tuesday, December 22, 2-4 Business Success Center 7600 Burnet Rd #130, Austin, TX 78757

Secret munchies and beverages will be served. No Charge! Seating is limited to 10 bloggers. You must RSVP to attend, and you must attend to learn the secret handshake.

Crowdsourcing: The Good

Crowdsourcing has been behind some truly great products and initiatives. Wikipedia and Linux are perhaps the best-known, and there are indeed stellar examples of the power of this model.

Other great examples include:

• The Netflix Prize for a 10% improvement on their recommendation engine.
• reCaptcha and their innovative use of the millions of typed words to help digitize old books.
• Foldit invites people to play a game that ultimately results in new protein-folding strategies.
• Microlending companies like Kiva are pooling small amounts of money and loaning it to poor business owners with enouraging results.

Opinions can do well as crowdsourced projects, although I contend people are more likely to supply them when they are bitching rather than raving. Still, reviews and other opinions certainly provide value, and I admit I readily use them when deciding on restaurants, books, and products. Companies like Yelp, Amazon, and Ebay are learning to navigate the intricacies (and legalities) of the relationships between businesses and reviews, making the content even more valuable in the process.

What do all these good examples have in common?

1. There is governance. Although anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, all contributors are not equal. A hierarchy of editors ensures that spam and misinformation are quickly weeded out. It’d be nice to think it’s all perfectly democratic, but it’s not, and it wouldn’t work if it were.
2. Crowds are used to solve problems or to offer commentary, not to determine strategy or any decide critical business issues.

There’s gray area, of course. Most software developers actively solicit feedback for new features and general improvements. Notice, though, that they rarely promise the most popular suggestion will be implemented. The people responsible for the business strategy are wisely learning what their customers want, but they know better than to leave the final decisions to the public. The customer may be good-intentioned, but they just don’t know enough to always be right.

For some excellent crowdsourcing stories and analysis, be sure to read Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

Crowdsourcing: The Bad

Logos. I cringe every time I hear someone brag that they crowdsourced their logo. For one thing I have an intense distaste for doing work on spec. Most logo crowdsourcing sites (as well as contests) do just this — a bunch of designers create a logo for free, getting paid only if the company likes and select it. But logos are critical to the identity of a company. It’s not just a matter of what looks nice on a business card and a website banner. The always-meaty and useful Smashing Magazine ran an article called Vital Tips for Effective Logo Design, accompanied by this graphic. Do you really want to entrust this critical piece of your image to starving artists out there eager to get their hands on your $200? Pay someone what they’re worth and get it done right.

Strategy. No one knows your business as well as you. Get Satisfaction and UserVoice are great for site-based feedback and ideating. Customers/readers make suggestions and vote on their importance, and the companies do with those suggestions what they will. Austin’s own BountyStorm lets companies post questions with a bounty (usually in the $5 – $15 range) for the best idea. Some questions are perfect for this model — creative Valentine’s Day ideas, for example. Some are a bit worrisome — ideas for a first tattoo (Yikes! Isn’t that supposed to be a deeply personal decision?). And some just don’t belong there. There are a ton of people asking for business names, taglines, and marketing strategies. Do they really think they’re going to get what they need from a stranger? For $10?

Crowdsourcing SXSW: The Ugly

And now we come to the issue that drove me to write this post in the first place. Programming at paid conferences should not be crowdsourced. Not even part of it. This will be the ⁶th year SXSW is letting the general public vote on panels, and the 6^th year that attendee complaints have swelled about the quality and selection of that programming. Lots of folks come to town and don’t even bother attending the conference, opting instead for the appropriately crowdsourced BarCamp Austin. Last year at SXSWi some really great panel ideas with excellent panelists never made the cut, while panels presented by often pathetically underprepared heavy hitters filled the schedule. The panel-picker was at least a little easier this year, with the option to vote thumbs up or down rather than assigning a number of stars as a rating.

This approach sounds really good in theory, but what ended up happening last year was would-be panelists filled our Twitter streams with panel pimping promotions and microcelebrity popularity contests, while many deserving panelists truly working at the edge of our industry were left in the dust. Bloggers with 10s or 100s of 1000s of readers ready and willing to vote for their panels crowded out those doing interesting, paradigm-changing work. SXSW is too important to the industry to run it as a popularity contest.

I’m not sure what the best solution is, but I have a few ideas that would improve the SXSW experience..

• Make it clear that there is a committee that is ultimately responsible for the programming. Not just 40% of it. All of it. There should be 2 (preferably divergent) experts in each area of content (coding, architecture, marketing, social media, business, etc.). The committee could be nominated by the public, and chosen by SXSW staff. Or nominated by staff and chosen by the public. Continue to accept panel suggestions from the public, but leave the deciding to the committee.
• Create a SXSW advisory group committed to uncovering and featuring new voices and industry trends. Some of the A-Listers are fantastic presenters. I’m in no way saying they shouldn’t be on the schedule. But there are some amazing thinkers doing cutting-edge work right here in Central Texas. Commit to finding them. Ask the public for suggestions of inspiring speakers they’ve seen in other settings and personally encourage them to submit a panel.

This year’s pimping wasn’t nearly as bad as last year, due in part to a bit of a backlash to the whole system, as you can see by the following Tweets.

What do you think? Is it time for SXSW to change the way they manage programming? How do you think it should be done?

This should be mandatory viewing for every person before they even consider posting online. (Cute 8-bit graphics, too.)

How To Behave On An Internet Forum

I’m here live at the MCA-I conference in Milwaukee, WI, giving a presentation on Social Media 101, technically called “What the Heck is Social Media?” What better way to show the audience how simple it can be than to do a blog post live?

These are my dogs, here’s another dog on video.

The Map My Name project aims to find out how many people are using the web, one person at a time. I freaked at first after I mapped my name and looked at the closeup map view – I thought the little dart was pointing directly to my address. But no, it’s just the Austin dart.

How long do you think it will be before they’re acquired by Google? I say 4 months.

Last night’s Twitter experiment was interesting. Drive is a new Fox show made by Tim Minear, the same guy who made Firefly. It stars Nathan Fillion, the same lead actor. Fox decided to offer director commentary during the premiere of the show Sunday night.

Sadly, the show itself was pretty lame. I’m sure there are some very disappointed Firefly fans out there. It definitely didn’t hold my attention well, so you’d think I could have easily kept up with the tweets. It didn’t really work that way, though. Twitter is very fast, but it’s not real time. Doing standard DVD-style commentary and saying “we wanted to do x here…” doesn’t work. By the time the tweet is delivered, “here” has passed. I’m sure sometimes it was the 140 character limit keeping any more descriptive info from being included. If that’s so, then perhaps this isn’t the right medium (or 140 characters isn’t the right cutoff point) for real time commentary.

That said, I think this was a clever experiment. I’m sure we’ll figure out better ways to do this sort of thing. We’ll look back on this first attempt and why some things weren’t more obvious to us. I still think advertisers have to love this sort of thing. They’re all scrambling to find ways to deliver ads to people with DVRs. Well, here’s one way. Normally I’d record the show so I could watch it later and fast forward through the commercials. Instead I watched it in real time so I could get the commentary, which means the advertisers got my partial attention.

I’m sticking with Twitter. I still believe it (or something very similar) is going to become an important tool.

The screen shot is obviously not the Twitter web site – it’s a sweet little Mac desktop widget called Twitterrific.

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