New Media

If social media is all about conversations, engagement and community building, what to do when there is only broadcasting and not actual conversation? As social media enthusiasts (and I call myself one), do we look in the mirror often enough and ask of ourselves am I really engaging or just pushing my message out?. Is social media becoming an echo chamber again? – Hummingbird604

So, do I practice what I preach when it comes to social media? Not always. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I’m long overdue for a social media-themed post, so I’m glad I saw Hummingbird604’s query. I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while.

Linking to his post is a social act, so at least I’ve got that going for me. But like many social media evangelists of late, automation through Web 2.0 tools has gone from supplemental aid to crutch to virtual substitute for engagement. I still try to engage when I can, but I’d guess that upwards of 70 per cent of my messages in social media are broadcasting.

But that’s OK.

What is broadcasting, anyway? It’s not “anti-social” behavior, just not directly “conversational”. Mostly, I’m talking about those automated 140-character messages, usually containing links, that get churned out automatically from blog RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, hopefully engaging the eyeballs of my combined audiences. I do want to share interesting content with my friends and followers, and logging into separate profiles to do so is not an option. I just don’t have the time.

Don’t get me wrong. I love it when people respond to these syndicated messages with their own tweets, comments and email messages — and I do strike up conversations when that happens (And before I forget, if you do find this post interesting, please leave a comment!).

But how often do my “broadcasts” result in these conversations? Probably less than half the time. and I usually don’t have the time to engage beyond a few back-and-forth tweets before a project deadline wrenches my attention away. I have to keep my “social” conversations pretty streamlined — the equivalent of meeting a friend in real life for a pint, enjoying some stimulating dialogue and then skipping out 15 minutes later, just as things are getting good.

And how often am I actively visiting other people’s social media profiles and blogs to leave a comment or spark a discussion? Certainly, not as often as I’d like. I can probably count on one hand the number of comments I’ve left on blogs in the past month.

Partly, it’s a reflection of a tough economy where marketers have to justify their efforts with shorter-term ROI. Social media engagement can pay off big for organizations, even in the short term. Abandoning social media campaigns entirely to bots with RSS feeds — or just abandoning them, period, is a recipe for failure if you’re really looking to engage an audience. But when we find ourselves wearing so many hats and facing increasing pressures at work to deliver more with less, the “social” part of social media, just like the “social” part of our our non-work existence, will inevitably take a hit.

Social networking and social media are here to stay. The real engagement that comes with it is also here to stay, too. But work is work and there’s a time and place — online or in the real world — for conversations. We do what we can.

A reminder that Vancouver social media expert Raul (Hummingbird604) and I will be speaking in downtown Vancouver this Thursday at Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog. You can RSVP here.

Here are the event details:

Internet Marketing Mastermind: Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog!

One of the most requested topics I get in this group is on blogging. From what is it for, how to do it, and how to build your company brand with it.

In fact, everyone, person or company, should have a blog as it’s a great way to connect with and build trust with your audience. And a blog can do so many more things, from great SEO, to marketing special offers, ask for feedback, etc…

We are privileged to have Yu-Kai Chou, a renowned speaker on social media who has agreed to speak to us on how to Build Your Brand with Your Company Blog. Yu-Kai is a social media expert and has been invited to VC groups in Silicon Valley to teach them to have their portfolio companies take advantage of social media with Twitter and Blogging.

He will start off with a basic introduction about company blogging and then touch on the advanced techniques and tactics of blogging in his 40 minute presentation. Then we’ll invite a panel of blogging experts to answer your questions for the last 20 minutes.

Who are our blogging luminary experts? In addition too Yu-Kai, we are privileged to have:

Dr. Raul Pacheco (http://hummingbird604) whose blogging ranges from restaurants to technology to discussions of environmental issues; and who speaks about online community building and best practices in social media for businesses, government and education. He is also the organizer of the Vancouver Bloggers Meetup.

Jonathon Narvey (http://jnarvey.com) is a communications specialist, freelance journalist and copywriter who has worked with a wide range of companies in many industries. Jonathon provides industry-specific blog posts for his clients and helps them to understand how to integrate social networking and content syndication for their business.

Moderated by Ronald Lee, meetup organizer.

You don’t want to miss this! Please RSVP early.

Yu-kai Chou is an Entrepreneur, Social Media Advisor, and aspiring Power Coach. He is the founder of Future Delivery, creators of Viralogy.com, FD Career, and various other web properties. Yu-kai has been running successful social media campaigns for companies to reach their target market in a lean and efficient manner. He is also a speaker on Social Media and Career Gaming at various entities including Google, Venture Capital Groups, Entrepreneur Organizations and Universities.

Best regards,

Ronald Lee
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On Twitter

In modern warfare, collateral damage is taken for granted. Even pinpoint strikes can result in unintended death and destruction. Now witness the age of cyberwarfare, where a single shot is truly heard round the world.

When hackers used a directed denial of service attack against the online presence of an obscure Eastern European blogger going by the handle, Cyxymu, they also neutralized 44 million Twitter users, along with millions of users of third-party services and other social networking sites (Global News). To put that in perspective, imagine a lone sniper on a battlefield firing his weapon and the entire population of Spain taking the bullet.

Of course, in this case, the effect was not lethal, or even all that disruptive (even though cyber attacks have continued sporadically throughout the week). Few companies use social networks extensively, and very few, mostly those in the still-minty fresh social media marketing industry, are significantly dependent on Twitter. I do spend a fair amount of time on social networks, so I could count myself among those disrupted, but the downtime was really more of an annoyance than a disaster.

That paradigm could change quickly. Larger enterprises may integrate networks like Twitter into their workflow, opening up a security vulnerability. That’s the case according to an IT World report that suggests the problem isn’t so much hackers disrupting social networks as using it to hack all of the users:

Hackers have managed to imbed malicious code in tweets, and enterprise users who are on the network can bring that code inside the firewall. The shortened URLs used in Twitter, for example, can be misleading and can take users to dangerous sites.

In the big picture, the threat from hacking isn’t limited to social networking sites. Every serious company today has a website. Most use the Internet to promote themselves, if not to conduct operations or sell their goods and services. The modern world economy, still in a fragile recovery state, needs the Internet to work reliably. That is what is at stake here. It mustn’t be held hostage by the whims of cyber-thugs who don’t care about the collateral damage that can affect us all.

No Twitter for Hitler

From Jon Swift’s deliciously satirical blog post about critics of homeless people with cell phones, Let’s Make Poverty Less Enticing: “Contrary to what many people think, the poor are actually very rich, which explains a lot.”

Love it.

Cell phones and other mobile computing devices may actually help the poor and homeless to network, find potential employers and locate opportunities to improve their lives overall. There is already some very interesting experimental work going on in Vancouver around this, led by Fearless City.

Vancouver’s social media pro Raincoaster gives tips on how to handle one of the more unnerving versions of blog trolls:

I would advise you, as I already have, to avoid engaging with him on these points. He’s already said that if you attempt to debate his assertions, he will treat your responses as denial of self-evident fact. Continuing to engage him on a priori statements (like “The Illuminati have been around for 6,000 years”) is to invite him to write you off, and to only excite him further and encourage him to dig himself deeper into his mental foxhole.

This is advice I wish I’d heeded much earlier in my blogging experience. Sadly, most of the comments I got in my early days were from conspiracy-minded trolls, the only oddballs who managed to find my SEO-challenged site. My efforts to engage my commenters to build the conversation led to pointless conflicts and, after I’d come to believe that all commenters were insane jackasses, unnecessarily harsh invective against non-trolls.

Long story short, don’t feed the trolls.