Foursquare made The New York Times. An amazing piece written by Jenna Wortham featuring the mobile web darling that has taken over metro cities and my friends alike. (Seriously, don't even DARE try and steal my mayorship of Pete's Tavern. :) )
This quote in the article from Deborah Schultz, an analyst with the Altimeter Group who specializes in trends in social media basically summed up my view of early adoption in social media apps/sites:
“There will always be people who love new technology and want to test it out, kick the tires,” she said. “Once those services become too big and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd shows up, they can lose some of that initial interest.”
It's kind of like Twitter now. It's still part of my daily life and an extremely valuable resource, but it's not the same as it was. It's cluttered and there are tons of people adding an overload of information daily. It's lost that "it" factor that a service like Foursquare has right now and I don't want it to. I like using it and want everyone that I interact with to stay involved.
Services like Facebook and MySpace, the long lost days of AOL 3.0 dialing up for 3 hours to talk in chat rooms and browse the Internet are past memories. But, they were the Foursquare of that time. That cool new thing we all wanted to be on.
For companies like Twitter and Foursquare---in some way I think the key thing that needs to be discovered is not just the growth and acquisition of new users, but the maintenance of that "it factor." I hope they figure this out.
October 18, 2009
October 13, 2009
Another Social Media Controversy
Note this post originally appeared on my company blog. Check out the original post here.
The Internet was buzzing yesterday with commentary on the latest iPhone app from AMP Energy Drink. In case you missed it, AMP launched a new app to help guys land women (the main Amp Energy site is down, but you can still download the app from iTunes). Users who download the app can browse through a selection of women including the aspiring actress, the nerd, the princess and so on and so forth. Each type of girl comes with a cheat sheet list of things to bring up during conversation, to help the guy, they say, score. The obvious commentary from the peanut gallery followed - Pepsico was sexist, discriminatory. And from the other side, the general public left wondering why, yet again, a huge deal is being made about another flimsy PR stunt.
It got me thinking about the now regularity with which other campaigns have blown up, once the online community got their fangs in it. From the client side, these crisis-lite incidents are seen as something that needs to be buried or moved past, but the bigger pictures is the question of "what's the point here, folks?", which seems to be the strongest consumer takeaway from social media PR stunts and campaigns trying to mix too many things in one. This is a very vocal and opinionated audience that you're now dealing with, so everyone should expect to receive some feedback. Constructive or otherwise.
Here's a rundown on three of the biggest social media firestarters in the past year or two. If you think of anymore, add them in in the comments.
Amp "Before You Score" iPhone app- Aims to help guys land women. Mashable has more on the app announcement and the backlash. Video demo of the app here:
Motrin Moms- The controversial advertisement aimed at "moms who spend their days carrying their child in a sling need Motrin." The key message was that while carrying a baby for long hours can be painful, it makes them look like an official mom. The obvious chatter uproar exploded in the mom blogger community with a tweet storm of responses and the official ad being pulled. Social media: 1. Motrin: 0.
Skittles Social Sites Homepage: Remember when Skittles.com did a full rebrand of their website making the homepage a new social site each day? Wikipedia. Twitter. Facebook. Flickr. The Skittles campaign received questioning from the mainstream audience (and social media critics) around why they chose to do this when the majority of the Skittles audience is not on these channels. Additionally, because of the openness of the Skittles campaign allowing users to publicly comment on the main website, internet jokesters immediately jumped in to grief the campaign with expletives and NSFW comments. The full recap of the campaign can be read here or whatch the video by Onion editor Baratunde Thurston, mocking the campaign at last year's SXSW.
While the peanut gallery endlessly questions why anyone would ever create these campaigns, I have to applaud the marketers. In this day and age when everything has to be new and fresh, pushing the envelope is a necessity. Something that inspires others to be creative and try even newer things for today's brands. Without these mistakes, we wouldn't be able to pull off some of the success stories.
The Internet was buzzing yesterday with commentary on the latest iPhone app from AMP Energy Drink. In case you missed it, AMP launched a new app to help guys land women (the main Amp Energy site is down, but you can still download the app from iTunes). Users who download the app can browse through a selection of women including the aspiring actress, the nerd, the princess and so on and so forth. Each type of girl comes with a cheat sheet list of things to bring up during conversation, to help the guy, they say, score. The obvious commentary from the peanut gallery followed - Pepsico was sexist, discriminatory. And from the other side, the general public left wondering why, yet again, a huge deal is being made about another flimsy PR stunt.
It got me thinking about the now regularity with which other campaigns have blown up, once the online community got their fangs in it. From the client side, these crisis-lite incidents are seen as something that needs to be buried or moved past, but the bigger pictures is the question of "what's the point here, folks?", which seems to be the strongest consumer takeaway from social media PR stunts and campaigns trying to mix too many things in one. This is a very vocal and opinionated audience that you're now dealing with, so everyone should expect to receive some feedback. Constructive or otherwise.
Here's a rundown on three of the biggest social media firestarters in the past year or two. If you think of anymore, add them in in the comments.
Amp "Before You Score" iPhone app- Aims to help guys land women. Mashable has more on the app announcement and the backlash. Video demo of the app here:
Motrin Moms- The controversial advertisement aimed at "moms who spend their days carrying their child in a sling need Motrin." The key message was that while carrying a baby for long hours can be painful, it makes them look like an official mom. The obvious chatter uproar exploded in the mom blogger community with a tweet storm of responses and the official ad being pulled. Social media: 1. Motrin: 0.
Skittles Social Sites Homepage: Remember when Skittles.com did a full rebrand of their website making the homepage a new social site each day? Wikipedia. Twitter. Facebook. Flickr. The Skittles campaign received questioning from the mainstream audience (and social media critics) around why they chose to do this when the majority of the Skittles audience is not on these channels. Additionally, because of the openness of the Skittles campaign allowing users to publicly comment on the main website, internet jokesters immediately jumped in to grief the campaign with expletives and NSFW comments. The full recap of the campaign can be read here or whatch the video by Onion editor Baratunde Thurston, mocking the campaign at last year's SXSW.
While the peanut gallery endlessly questions why anyone would ever create these campaigns, I have to applaud the marketers. In this day and age when everything has to be new and fresh, pushing the envelope is a necessity. Something that inspires others to be creative and try even newer things for today's brands. Without these mistakes, we wouldn't be able to pull off some of the success stories.
October 5, 2009
Interesting
I don't know the source of this photo, but I saw it on this person's Tumblr. It's kind of perfect.
October 4, 2009
Providing value in a cluttered world
Everyone knows the saying "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." It's a great saying.
In this age and time when "saying" something can be translated to blogging, tweeting, posting, Skyping, iming, etc...what if we focus more on a new type of saying: "If you don't have anything valuable to say, don't say anything at all."
Many of the people I follow on Twitter have smart things to say. That's why I choose to follow them. Comments on current events. Links for news articles relevant to me. Or, responses to my questions. As streams are so inundated, I've started to really try and focus on the type of content I'm putting out there. Will what I say matter? Will people care? Will people respond? Will they laugh? Will it brighten someone's day? Will it cause controversy? If I can answer yes to at least one of those questions, I'm OK with posting it. Otherwise, what's your point in posting a message besides adding more clutter to the already overpopulated feed of content?
You've seen it. The people who post two words just so they're heard. It's like Kristen Wiig's Penelope character on SNL.Those people out there DRIVE. ME. CRAZY. Thanks for sharing that you're awake, but so am I. And so is the other person reading the tweet. Come on.
Think of it in real life like in the hilarious College Humor video.(embedded above) You wouldn't just announce on a corner somewhere "I really love the coffee here!" But, you WOULD ask a question in hope of an answer. You would inform someone that there's some interesting news coming out. And, you would listen to others to have a conversation.
Everyone sees a person's value to the community differently. That's what makes networks like Twitter work. Some provide value being the go to source for all things Yankees. The account that has breaking news and deals from a major airline. Others use it as a soapbox to be absolutely hilarious and an interruption to our daily lives with comedy and comments that break through the clutter in the way that only this one person can. All different content-all providing value for those individuals who choose to follow them.
Anyway, back to my original thought--provide value.
And sure, you can call me out for telling you what I think value is, and I'm not telling you to think exactly like me. (You can even call BS on me for posting things that are stupid--I know I have) I'm just asking that as more and more people join these networks, try and think about what you say before saying something and help provide some real content and information to the community. If we all change the way we post to this type of strategy, imagine the amount of clutter that could be removed? No more of those random "I'm sitting in a bar" or "Good morning world" tweets. The less clutter, the more interesting these networks become and the more likely you are to stay involved with them. If Twitter or Facebook becomes a place to just spam or randomly post because you're bored, I'm outta here. And I don't want that because I do find this "value" of information from the smart folks out there doing it right.
What do you think?
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