social media

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10
Apr 13

A Broken Tibia Teaches Us Nothing About Social Media

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Whenever an important event occurs in our world, somebody, somewhere, has to write a blog post that explains what said event can teach us about social media.

It’s inevitable.

Everything from “The Book of Mormon” to the Super Bowl has been exploited to earn a few extra clicks.

Let’s face it: There are social media lessons to be learned in anything, if we look hard enough.

But I’ve seen a picture of the gruesome injury suffered by Louisville basketball player Kevin Ware during the NCAA Tournament, and I can report, with confidence, that we can learn absolutely nothing about social media by what happened. (If we learned anything, it’s that we should look away when such situations present themselves.)

BusinessWired, however, a PR and marketing blog from Business Wire, wanted in on the action, so they baited their readers into clicking on a recent post that used the injury in a thinly veiled attempt to explain how a possible career-ending injury can teach public companies about how to use social media.

How about no?

At worst, it was in poor taste. At best, it was still in poor taste. Not because it took advantage of somebody getting hurt, but because it was lazy. And it didn’t make a lot of sense, either.

Tips ranging from establishing clear policies on company’s use of social media, to tracking social media sentiment, have nothing to do with the fake Twitter account that received a majority of well wisher’s tweets. There’s a brief mention of this near the bottom, but, by that point, most people have stopped reading.

I would expect a company like Business Wire to be more thoughtful in their approach. But then when I see them hawking their services in that same post, it all makes sense.

This wasn’t just in poor taste, it was positioned to drive sales, as well.

Gross.

Like I said: You can find social media lessons in most anything. And, most of the time, the comparisons are harmless. It’s when you try to hitch your wagon to a notorious event that  you put your reputation at risk.

The Business Wired post could have been written without any mention of Kevin Ware’s injury. It may have garnered less clicks, but it would’ve accomplished the same goal: selling a product.

By trying to be too clever, they just came off as insensitive.

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03
Apr 13

Are We Really That Forgiving When It Comes To Mistakes?

mistakes

Who would have thought that a teen heartthrob from the 90′s would be able to so eloquently explain why it’s harder today to be successful than it was when he was a star?

Certainly, not I.

But during a podcast he recorded with Grantland editor-in-chief, Bill Simmons, Luke Perry brought up a good point: In today’s day and age, where everything we do is out in the open, it’s damned near impossible to make the mistakes that were so important to an older generation.

As Perry put it, he, and the rest of the cast from 90210, didn’t have to deal with the paparazzi, let alone fans with cellphone cameras watching their every move. They were able to move around in relative obscurity. If they did something stupid, nobody captured it.

Seth Godin would approve of this. He argues that making mistakes is essential on the path of learning.

And if you’re paying attention to your Twitter feed, it seems everyone is writing blog posts about the benefits of failure.

The popular perception is that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as you know how to react in the event of a screw-up.

But in today’s climate, where everything we create — Facebook posts, tweets, e-mail — is captured in perpetuity, are we really that forgiving?

Seems like there is always someone who wants to be the first to point out an error, which has become the digital equivalent of pointing and laughing, because that gains the user notoriety. The fake shock we exhibit when somebody tweets from the wrong account grabs us instant karma. And that karma can be parlayed into instant credibility; the belief that you, the pointer, know your social media.

Deadspin has made a habit of pointing out errors made by ESPN’s graphics staff. I realize they just have a deep-seated hatred for the Worldwide Leader, but is anyone hurt by the absence of a team’s logo?

It’s easy to assume that pointing out mistakes has little consequence. I mean, we move on from everything so quickly that errors quickly become an afterthought.

And remember: The guy responsible for the Chrysler account tweet was fired because of one mistake.

One.

We, as a digital community, need to be forthright in our advice.

Either really mean it when you say that it’s okay to make mistakes, or don’t say it at all. We can’t have both.

Now I leave it up to you: Are we really forgiving of mistakes, as we claim to be? Or are we all talk?

Image courtesy of opensourceway.

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22
Mar 13

Your Food Is Getting Cold

foodie

So I’m out to lunch with colleagues a few weeks ago at a seafood restaurant in Detroit that overlooks the still-frozen Detroit River.

As we sit down, I notice three people two tables over who are about to get their food. Since I’m so hungry I’m practically salivating, I decide to torture myself and watch the waitress place their food in front of them.

One of the gentleman sitting at the table is engrossed in conversation with the woman sitting to his right, smiling and nodding politely as the food is placed in front of him, waiting to be devoured.

But before he takes his first bite, and without breaking eye contact with the woman, he pulls out his phone and holds it over his lunch, doing this as nonchalantly as if he was placing his napkin across his lap.

The woman continues to speak as the man steals a glance at the picture of his dish to ensure it’s in the proper focus before he snaps the picture with his camera app.

The contrast of colorful seafood on a white plate, emblazoned with the restaurant’s logo, will make — pardon the pun — an appetizing image on his favorite social network, which one can only assume is the final resting place of this image.

And when it goes live (probably with a hashtag like #nomnom) it will become another blip in the never-ending food photo gallery that clogs our social networks.

I mean, I get this. Food is delicious and we want others to see what we are eating. And it makes more sense when we go somewhere with unique food to capture it in a picture. But, yet, it’s still weird that this is a thing. Isn’t it?

I always imagine what my grandpa would say, were he still alive. He died in 1995 – long before the advent of smartphones. Hell, the Internet. So if I were to tell him, “Grandpa, people have cameras on their phone and they take pictures of their food with their cameras on their phones,” he’d probably take a swig of his Piels, then a drag of his cigarette, and tell me that was the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.

And you know what? It is kind of the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

People taking pictures of their meals before they start eating and putting it in a public forum for others to drool over. That’s weird, right? (It’s even weirder when the food looks unappetizing, but that’s for another time.)

But maybe that’s the point of social media: The weirder the better.

There’s nothing worse than somebody coming down from above and bestowing the “rules” of social media upon the masses. The whole point, in my opinion, is to have fun. Experiment. Do something out of the ordinary.

Humans have loved food since the beginning of time, and we’ve talked about it since we could make words.

Perhaps this is just the natural progression of human evolution: food on screens.

It would bring a whole new idea to the idea of a seafood diet.

We see the food, but we can’t eat it.

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19
Dec 12

In Morgan Freeman We Trust

morgan

If you had to choose one person to narrate the movie of your life, it would have to be Morgan Freeman, right?

The man could give to you the play-by-play of a cock fight over a telephone with a bad connection and it would sound like he was describing two gentlemen quarreling over the latest Jonathan Franzen novel.

When it comes to verbal eloquence, there is nobody better.

Unfortunately Freeman’s verbal eloquence doesn’t parlay into the world of online diatribes. This might come as a shock to the thousands of people who have shared this on Facebook, but Freeman didn’t pen that statement about the Sandy Hook shootings that you have undoubtedly seen by now. That honor goes to a guy from Vancouver who correctly predicted his stance against the media’s handling of the tragedy would go viral once it was attributed to somebody more famous, like Betty White or Morgan Freeman.

But we have never let facts get in the way of the message we want to share. Sometimes we even eliminate the pesky “facts” that block our intent.

You’ve probably seen this comic strip on Facebook:

strip

It’s obvious what your Facebook friends are trying to convey by sharing this comic strip, but did you know it is missing a panel?

The two panels you see above were clipped out of the full strip, seen here:

fullstrip

It was created for a website called Chainsawsuit.com. The third panel certainly changes the message your Facebook friend intended when they shared it, eh?

The guy who drew the comic is named Kris Straub. When he found out his work was being shared without his consent or giving him credit, he explained why it hurts his livelihood.

Somewhere along the way, somebody thought it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to crop this down to something that suited what they wanted to express. That last frame just got in the way of the message. And after all, it’s the Internet; it’s not like anybody is going to notice.

But as Straub writes, there can be real consequences to sharing false information.

Like Gini Dietrich talked about yesterday on her blog, all of us who use social media have a responsibility to be sure that the information we are disseminating is accurate. And because it’s just on Facebook doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

During last week’s tragedy, we jumped on the media for reporting information that later turned out to be false. We claimed we were never going to turn on FOX News and CNN again. But we are just as reckless when we click on a Facebook ad that promises two free tickets on Southwest Airlines.

By falling for the ruse, we expose it to everybody else in our network. It soon becomes a vicious cycle, taking up space in our minds as truth.

Maybe we need to take the same tact with those on Facebook that we took with the national media: shutting them out entirely.

It’s one way to start.

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05
Nov 12

If The Truth Hurts, Get Your Facts Straight

This is a counter-point post to something I wrote last week.

Before this year’s World Series began, somebody I follow on Instagram posted a picture of an old sports page from the Detroit News that featured a picture of former Detroit Tigers slugger, Cecil Fielder. The user’s caption stated that her Grandma had saved the paper from 1984 — the last year the Tigers won the World Series — so she was posting it for good luck. [Editor's note: A lot of good that did!]

It was a great idea. But anybody with a shred of Tigers’ baseball knowledge knows that Fielder didn’t play for the Tigers in 1984. The paper was from 1990, the year Fielder hit 51 home runs.

Being the helpful baseball fan that I am, I left a comment alerting her that it was from 1990, not ’84.

To which she responded later: “1990* for all you annoying fucks.”

I guess I wasn’t the only one who wanted to set the record straight.

Then, last week, my friend posted to Facebook the image of the soldiers standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns in the middle of a downpour; the same image that the Washington Post originally reported was taken during Hurricane Sandy.

Again, being the helpful friend that I am, I commented that the picture was from September, not the hurricane.

And, again, I was put in my place (although not as harshly) for trying to set the record straight.

Based on these two incidents, I get the sense that a certain percentage of social media users are more concerned with what they want the picture to portray than how accurate it is. And what’s even more troubling is that the general population (read: the large portion of the population that still views Facebook and Twitter as fun time-wasters) is okay with this.

I wrote last week that perhaps what we are sharing on social media doesn’t matter if the majority knows the intent behind it. But at what point do we approach a dangerous line?

When Hurricane Sandy was making landfall, one Twitter user knowingly spread false information. He was quickly outed, but not before he scared some people. On the flip side, Con Edison took to Twitter to keep customers apprised of the situation, providing valuable information to people who had limited ways of getting it.

In both situations, Twitter played a noticeable role during and after Hurricane Sandy.

If we let inaccurate information spread unchecked, we eventually lose the trust in the users and, eventually,  in these social media channels that have become so important during emergencies. Oftentimes, these channels become a person’s only way of communicating, which is why I believe it’s important to correct people when you have the right information at your disposal. I’m not doing it to be a dick.

Twitter (and, in a way, Facebook) is growing up before our eyes. It is no longer just a service that we use to tell the world what we’re doing but, rather, a way to help people in the most dire of circumstances.

We cannot afford to sit idle and watch falsities and inaccurate information spread. If you have the knowledge, use it. After all, knowledge is power.

It might involve just baseball and soldiers standing guard now, but in the days following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall, we’ve seen firsthand why it’s important to leave these channels open to share accurate information. In extreme circumstances, it can save lives.

Sometimes, the truth hurts. And if you don’t like it, get your facts straight.

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