New Media

When I’m not ruminating on conspiracies in central Asia, I can often be found at local tech events in Vancouver enjoying the company of fellow entrepreneurial-minded geeks. My roundup in Techvibes from DemoCamp last week, where tech start-up people got to tell other tech start-up people why they’re awesome. Highlight of the evening:

Honourable mention must go to Ed Levinson from Analusis, mostly because he was just so darn entertaining, in the tradition of manic street preachers. (Sadly, Ed didn’t actually get to pitch his idea. It went like this):

Sadly, Ed got pulled away at that point. He’d hit the 30-second mark. But I could tell that most of the people in the room wanted to hear more and I will be in touch with Ed to find out precisely what this entrepreneurial mentor was driving at.

In my other life as a copywriting nerd, I’ll be covering all of the New Ventures BC seminars for the next while. I really enjoyed the first one earlier this evening, focusing on “Assessing the Opportunity“. I found one easy-to-remember list for ways to turn your business idea into insane “swimming-in-money” success to be particularly worth noting:

* Find mentors to expand your vision
* Don’t overplan – take action
* Hire people who are smarter than you.
* Tailor your elevator pitch to different audiences
* Play to win but be willing to risk failure
* Acknowledge the competition. Never say “there is no competition!”
* Don’t let the critics get you down. Use the feedback. Adapt and overcome.
* Have fun and don’t take yourself too seriously.

Ah…. money.

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.

What could possibly go wrong here?

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