Category Archives: Social Networking

Dec 9 2012

The 12 ways of Christmas – Secret Santa


It’s that time again, we spend 10 months hoping it gets here, one month preparing and then the whole of December questioning the sense of it all.

I’m going to start with Secret Santa. This year over half the people in the #Cubefarm decided that they’d like to do a #SecretSanta.

I have some ideas why the other less than half opted out, the stress of finding a $10 trinket, or for a couple of course the obvious religious reluctance.

I managed to persuade one of the non participants to draw the random name thing for everyone, much easier than going desk to desk, person to person, get everyone signed up and then get them a name. Hopefully the person drawing the names made some common sense decisions about pairing people up, despite everything there are people that wouldn’t match well with others.

Really, it's a boob mouseIn previous years I’ve managed to accrue some really tacky things, things that aren’t even remotely funny or even vaguely related to my own sense of humour or interaction, the comedy computer mouse with boobs as buttons for instance.

Perhaps someone should have got me a funny bone instead.

To be fair I kept this in my office cupboard for ages before it suddenly made its way into oblivion.

There is, at least for me, at least a little bit of skill required to get something that’s at least pertinent to the person you’re buying for. But there are always the obvious and desperate box of chocolate gifts that are just thoughtless, at least they’re trying though.

But and also, I’ve been part of the #NZTwitterSecretSanta thing, whereby @Websam for the second year mashed together a webs site and a random pairing generator to connect nearly 800 people together for a similar process.

The obvious drawbacks, some of the twitter accounts turned out not really to exist, some of them were locked or protected accounts, some of the participants are not regular tweeters. Of course there is always a percentage that will receive and not give.

I’ve given, and wait patiently for reciprocated love, and I’m aware a few people in the same boat, waiting for both the receiver to acknowledge the gift, and to receive their random thing.

Last time up I received a water pistol. Like I said random, and not always thoughtful or pertinent.

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Jan 19 2012

How not to do Social Media – the RT This! Lady


Like I’m an expert at it. But there are some things that just prickle, and this is one of them. I’d like to think that I’m pretty inoffensive and mild, which is possibly untrue, but I would prefer a live and let live existence to a confrontation and bad blood.  At the risk of being called out as mean-spirited or cowardly then, this is what is under my skin with this.

A while back I stumbled upon a particular and peculiar twitter user that caught my eye for the appalling way they ‘do’ Social Media Marketing. She’s the RT This!! lady

Just about every tweet ends with the missing “RT This!!!” or similar, sometimes a “please” sometimes not. You have to click to belive it

These are people who market themselves as “the experts” in Social Media Marketing, they have this tandem account they use for that and it makes me frown with angst about who is overseeing this nonsense.

Well no-one since it’s their own company and they are the directors, but I mean to which body are they responsible to? It’s all well and dandy to know how to fiddle Google into a page ranking, and know the tricks of SEO / SEA and LSO but that doesn’t make you a viable company, or an expert in the nuance of Social Interaction for sales purposes. And the website has many what I would call unsubstantiated claims about the effectiveness or comparable value they offer.

I’m not so flash on Grammar and spelling but it’s cringingly bad when you’re opening sentences uses “gotta”- twice

““WHERE SHOULD YOU START?”, it can be daunting, you’ve gotta learn this and you’ve gotta learn that, whats the best direction to take?, well, we are the best direction to take, we know business owners are busy so we can take the hard work out of building a true and visible online presence for your business”

and this gem

“websites and all of your Social Media Marketing accounts, set them up, get them working for you and then hand you the reigns when you’re ready” (they mean, I think reins)

and this

“Sales all over the world, Alaska, Canada, USA, Japan, Australia, Columbia, Niue, to name a few” so State of America, Country, America all over, country, country, State of America, country” and then they mention Florida too!

It’s just staggeringly bad, and I wish I had the balls to send them a message to tell them just how bad I think it is. But I’ll be a coward and just blog my disdain. After all they are the people with their “finger on the pulse of Social Media Marketing” and perhaps it’s me that doesn’t get it.

I hope it isn’t.

Sep 18 2011

Not a good day to be a minor league tall poppy. #1 in a series.


Today we bring you  Rabon Khan  and  Rachel Smalley

(1) Raybon Khan. Who seems to set himself as Mr.People, some brainpower gifted individual who urbane toss-offs speak to and for the people.

Well he is a comedian, makes his money with humor, or a sort. The tweet is an inference, and that is all. It’s implied that it’s Germanic, therefore Nazi, therefore Jewish. And frankly that is indeed what it is. Doesn’t make it less humorous. Gallows  humor is important.
(2) Rachel Smalley
Rachel got confused about what she is, and what her tweeting account is. You can’t be both a corporate tweet and a person. You’re either for your or you are you. It’s no good having 999 tweets about good a talking head you are on TV if then in some kind of faux outrage pick a fight with someone, about something you know nothing of, but have formed an opinion on based on your privileged position of being “in” the media. Rachel Smalley is a talking head. She reads an autocue device for a living. That is all.
So what will happen?
Well Raybon will throw himself at the public mercy, “Don’t read it” he’ll cry, which makes him seem like he’s 11 years old.
Rachel Smalley. Well TV3 needs a talking head, she has broad appeal which equals money, and will bring out the same “It was me talking” line that isn’t really an excuse when 99.99% of everything else she tweets is for her not about her.
So two rather minor poppies who’ve brought a collective passing eye-roll towards them that has kept a small part of the nation occupied in the colonies. Nothing in their somewhat small and limited appeal career with change, they’re not people you get favors from or rely on to do you favors. They have passing and fleeting influence as a talking head, but that glitter fades quickly.
#FauxOutrage at it’s best then
Aug 31 2011

In an instant…


Way back when, before the internet and mobile phones we’d agree to meet somewhere and we did. The newspapers arrived with the news from far-flung places, with the best bits held for the Sunday papers. Junk mail didn’t exist. There were weekly local newspapers. We all watched either the news at 5:45, 9pm or 10pm or all three. There was no 24 hour TV.

Fast forward a bit. Now we have everything in an instant.”Social Media”. For instance  we have Twitter, which is about as real-time as it gets without being there, sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes not. If you’ve ever witnessed the rise and decline of a twitter meme you’ll understand how fickle it is.

And we have deal-a-day websites, by the hundreds, imploring us to buy now, immediately, things we don’t need at prices we can’t ignore. We have deal a day advertising on twitter of course, and Facebook.

We can’t just agree to meet somewhere, we have to text and call numerous times ‘just in case’ It’s scary how frail we’ve become, how unsure it all is, how needy.

Facebook has given everyone access to our lives, out thoughts and deeds. And we accept it. FourSquare has given you the ability to let people know what cafe, shop, street, bar you are in all the time. It’s “me” central!

But it can’t carry on. This explosion of socializing on the internet is doomed at some point, where it becomes intrusive. And I mean intrusive to me – I don’t really care that you’re the mayor of the donut shop, I don’t really want to see your party pictures on Facebook. There are bits of your life that I am interested in, just not some bits.

Twitter, Text, Facebook, et al, is where the wild west is. “Everyone” is trying to get a piece of the action, to make a buck, and to get you to spend a buck. At some point you just have to switch off and tune out.

Now I can’t actually think of a service that I’ve used that has fallen into obscurity, other than the web hosting Geocities, other than that Bebo, and MySpace perhaps. So I can’t see a tailspin for any of the services we use right now, or are familiar with, which are, to repeat them, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and Youtube. Even an aggregation of all these things into one super app isn’t what is going to happen, because why? It’ll be too cumbersome, too awkward, too heavy.

The thing that we overlook  with Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Youtube. Google+, Flikr, WordPress, LinkedIn et al is that they are all “free” That’s right we don’t need to part with any cash of any kind to use them. Sure we have to have a device that can access them interactively, but they are free to use. And we accept that without question that we’re giving up something for something. We just don’t seem to care about what it is we’re giving up, which in two words is privacy and ownership. Of our identity and our intellectual property.

Anything that rises will have to have some basics, speed, reach, ease and appeal. Anything that falls will have become bloated, tedious or have some cataclysm around it like bankruptcy, where users fall away like hair falling out never to return.

Aug 4 2011

Foursquare, now there’s a thing, I became the Mayor!


I was Foursquare Mayor of my house, the street I live in, the street I drive down to get into my street, the bit of the motorway I get stuck on in the morning, a few local businesses and one or two places I shopped at, and quite a few that I didn’t. I was mayor of a couple of shopping malls.

I was at one point Mayor of the place I worked and of three of our competitor companies. I became mayor of a car park, and a playground. I was mayor of the 3 different versions of the hockey stadium.

I think I had 17 mayoralties all going for me at one point. Clearly I’d missed the point.

And you know what the useless thing about foursquare was? That someone could take my mayoralty from me, and being ever so slightly OCD that’s not going to work out for me. Or them, because then it became a staking game where all I would do it redouble my efforts to become mayor again, and rob them of “Mayor of playground” title that I so covet!

Never mind that it has a business application, I’m sure that some companies have fantastic offers and incentives to check-in to their establishment, a loyalty card scheme, I was mayor of 17 places, all for my own ego.

And you can only be mayor or wannabe mayor. You can’t be a councillor or assistant to the mayor, it’s all or nothing. You can earn “badges” for various things, these are but trivia compared to be being Mayor.

They had a mayor only party at skycity one time. You could only get in if you were mayor of somewhere, how whacked is that? Do they still have that every month? Don’t know never went, never was going to, and couldn’t understand why I would.

So I stopped using it, since it appears to be a solution that has no problem, a pissing competition for the OCD, and a terribly gauche way of showing off your coffee habit.

Jul 11 2011

Bromance – How to handle the overfamiliar friend?


We change. We age. We spread out. Our tastes change.
The type of people we like changes, we gravitate towards those we like and similar to us, we avoid those that disturb on on some level or other.

What do you do then when a long time friend crosses over from the like side of the ledger to be in the margins. Now they’re just brash, rude, foul and annoying. You’d still do anything for them but just don’t want to spend time with them.

You could make excuses for their behavior, mostly it’s drink. Some of it is lack of respect. Some of it might be jealousy. It’s probably more the latter than the former.

What do you do though, in baulking you just move further away from the middle ground you have and base your friendship on.

This isn’t like the Odd Couple, were not joined at the hip, we don’t share events, locations or other friends. We have a habitual relationship based on my visiting them. And there’s the point where it goes wrong. They are a stay at home friend. They know my house, they visit to pick me up to go to their house. I don’t think they like my well ordered neat and tidy wife and life.

Or I’ve decided that 3 hours of beer on a sunday afternoon isn’t as much fun as it could be. Or that wii golf is pathetic and is just an excuse for boorish oneupmanship. Yet I’m avoiding telling them, the friendship is worth more than the not having them as a friend. Il avoid them by doing things I want to do, and the bored I’ll go back to letting them win at wii, it keeps them happy.

Jul 2 2011

Keeping it a secret – part 2


The ‘corporate’ me is involved with a Social Media initiative at work, which I’ve variously described as either being “leading edge” or “mad”, because we seem to be the only organisation of our type attempting to forge a new path, making us visionary or delusional.

It is a fantastic journey, and there are lots of affirmations along they way, but mostly it’s a circle of “experts” all citing each other, all citing the same success story, with little concrete “how to” advice. There are some exceptions and I would suggest you read the “Tweet this book” http://tweetthisbook.posterous.com/

So we have Twitter, we have a Squarespace ‘blog’ page to land to, and a LinkedIn group. We’re not so keen on FB.

Two or Three  things
> The direction is somewhat herky jerky and random
> The resource is limited and what we have pointed at it isn’t savvy about the content need, and
>To be honest I’m not sure the ‘real’ me wants to be associated with some of the content.

By the last remark I mean I don’t want to have to paint myself into a corner where you can define me. I don’t want to be known as the guy who linked to a lot of fluff pieces about products. And if I change my job I don’t want to have to undo all that I have done if I have to.

And all of  that makes me a little uneasy about the ‘corporate me’ and the results we can get, and for the business we are in (which is distribution).

I’m sure we’re not delusional and eventually the others will follow us, what I should be doing is making capital about the effort I’ve put in and getting myself some more money for it. That’s the big secret.

Sep 22 2010

Truthing on Twitter


One of my followers is also my boss. This is problematic of course because there are days when all I want to say is how much of a doofus he is. ‘cept that he will read it and then it could go badly.

There are peeps I follow that seem to be angry all the time, and it’s like a stream of bad-tempered bursts of 140 character railing against the world, everything, men, pets, makes me annoyed because among them there are people I know, and like, in an internetty kind of way.

How important is the number of followers, what vanity is it to outwardly say that all you want really is x number of followers. We can all get those. But it must be quality rather than quantity. Do you think that your whole follower list actually reads your 140 character bursts ? What all of them ? Get on with you .

I could of course address my angst by making yet another twitter account- one which I can be anonymous in, but anonymity is not my strong thing. I’m a serial user of my own name as user-name and blogname places.

And Twitter- is it for marketing or presence ? Who are all these “experts” who actually don’t tell you anything or impart knowledge but pass the story from person to person like a parcel of truth. Am I having a pop at SM experts now? I guess I am.

Which leads me to the other bit. Of course I look after an account that is our corporate presence. ‘cept my boss thinks that he needs to follows x number of social media experts on our follow list, wherein I go and unfollow most of them as not appropriate. I’ve got away with it so far.

Social media then, tricky on the field as well as off it. I’ll get he hang of it one day.

Jul 19 2010

Social Media – Only for the masses


I’m lucky to have a  Manager that is keen on Social Media, and allows me some leeway in discovering and investigating the whole Social Media construct.

The corporate ‘We’ – have a Twitter Account, a Face-Book presence and a Blog Page at Square-Space, and a LinkedIn group.

What I’m coming to realise is, is that this stuff is ok, but it really is useful if you are in a business or service that is frequented by the end-user type. That is to say it’s not useful for a distributor company,  such as the one I work for, that is in essence representing brands that already have their own Social Media presence.

For example? Air NZ and the Air Points Fairy is held to be one of the big NZ success stories. How would this go, or would be as successful  if it was a service being offered by say Flight Shop (just to name a name).

Telecom and Vodafone and Microsoft have a twitter presence in NZ too.

I’ve yet to see a success story, or a way to be successful story, for a company such as the one I work for.

Sure we can become a twitter presence and present information as it comes to hand to the market- but garnering followers for information that may already be available from the source appears to be the the missing bit that no one can offer up a solution for.

Many twitter”experts” are quick to offer the same pithy advice on twittering, that is you have to be in to win, listen and interact. What they fail to tell you is how to connect to the audience, especially if you are not the company directly responsible for the product being commented on.

Sure twitter is good and closing down or interacting with complaints/complainers, but given that we have interactive (real people) contact with those likely to complain then our twitter presence appears to be just lip service, for us anyway.

Recently out Australian parent company ran a daily twitter based comp, that frankly had #fail all over it. Basically because the “build it and they will come” ethos does not apply, or did not materialise.

Very generalised I know, I bet dollars to cents that there are niche distributor type business to business companies that are successful – these I would pick though are seen as brands in their own right, and not being representatives for the goods or service they offer.

What I am saying is that Business-to-Business type Social Media is a different game to the Business-to-End User customer one. And I can’t find a play book for the B2B model.

Sep 15 2009

Twitter in the workplace Pt4


The one where we get Blogged down

I am kidding the only thing we’re stuck with is motion towards, that is finding a blogging service that will ultimately suit our needs. And as I think we’re leading this from the from in NZ it’s going to be imperative that we get it right first time.
The project sponsor has a site host in mind – SquareSpace – so the next thing to do is sign-up for one of those on a limited basis as an individual and try-it and see.
As mentioned though it’s going to be a challenge to have enough things to post – no use starting with a hiss and a roar if after a week you’ve used your best stuff and get writers block or cramp.

Some of the criteria we are looking for include the use of tagging, so that we can identify an article in a number of ways, say for instance we have 5 key topics that drive our marketing and our vendors, call them 1,2,3,4 and 5. We need to be able to tag an article so that it can appear in 1,3,5 or 1,2,3 depending on its content.
What are the fabulous 5? Security, Virtulisation, Storage, Collaboration and Networking.

Like a said, quantity and quality of words, and a place to display your wares.