Tag Archives: social media

At Mizzou, the tension between the message, the medium and the marginalized

Graduate student Jonathan Butler leads the protestors in a chant in Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2015. (KOMUNews image via Creative Commons license.)
Graduate student Jonathan Butler leads the protesters at the University of Missouri on Oct. 6, 2015. KOMUNews image via Creative Commons license. Link

I’ve been struggling to reconcile competing thoughts on what’s happening at Mizzou, specifically between students and reporters.

This Vox post, quoting a Washington Post article about the parallel conversation at Yale, talks about an important part of these stories that’s often ignored:

One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant… As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.

The difference today is that because of social media, it is easy for college students to have their opinions go viral when that was not the original intent… If you are older than 22 and reading this, imagine for a second how you would feel if professional pundits pored over your undergraduate musings in real time.

So on one hand, I get it: Nobody wants an unintended gesture made or statement said in the heat of a chaotic situation to represent you on the Internet for the next 10-15 years. On the other hand, a cause that’s just and fair should withstand the scrutiny of an open press. The most newsworthy part of the Mizzou story was the black football players banding together and refusing to play – a story that touches on lots of hot-button issues: race, the ongoing conversation about unpaid student athletes, worker protections, social justice, etc. These issues should get a proper vetting in the press.

Still, how do Mizzou students exercise their collective right to protest and make change, do it in a transparent way and protect their rights to privacy? Honestly, I’m not sure. Yes, this is all being done in public space and on some level this isn’t private. But the coverage often outlasts the moment and at some point it affects the comfort level sources have with the press.

Is it possible to protect the right to make a mistake in protest efforts but also keep traditional media close? Does that get you anything as a protest group in 2015? It’s as much a risk as a benefit. If you have access to social media, which – thanks to Black Twitter and other groups – can amplify a story to its intended audience and understand it in a way traditional press cannot, why risk talking to CNN? Yes, there’s a First Amendment right to a free press, but these student groups aren’t a governmental body. Late today, the groups seemed to realize they’d perhaps started to do themselves more harm than good.

Prior to the last year, the national media has often undercovered stories on race. Even with an increased effort to cover these kinds of stories, they’re usually filmed through a Manchiean lens – this view vs. that view. A story like Mizzou is far more complicated with some folks seeming to act in a contradictory way. After a year of watching the way on-the-ground stories have been twisted by a virality-driven national media, I’m not surprised there’s a distrust of people who parachute into an event that has a complicated backstory. Somewhere in here, the affects of all the cuts that have happened to newspapers’ local and regional bureaus have prevented an ongoing dialogue between the press and their potential sources and the press now finds itself literally blocked out.

I don’t have a clear set of answers or a way forward here, but it’s clear this won’t be the last time reporters will be challenged in how to cover on-the-ground stories with marginalized groups. Just like their counterparts on the business side, they’ll need to stop insisting on a return to a previous model and adapt, perhaps – as local stories like this blow up into national stories quickly – by rebuilding the bureau model around beats, rather than geographic areas.

EDITED TO ADD: Having said all that, I pretty much sign on to the views expressed in this Atlantic article, too.

Banners are broken. So is social media. Let’s fix it.

A colleague and I just wrote a piece for Digiday called “How to fix social media and banner ads.” It’s pegged to the twentieth anniversary of the first banner ad and a reflection of brands’ insistence on shoving their products into conversations where they don’t belong, a topic I’ve written about before. Our central thesis is pretty well summed up here:

…Banner ads have lost most of their usefulness in an environment that trades impressions for engagement. At the end of his piece, McCambley says banner ads need “to get back to asking customers: How can I help you?”

Marketers seem to be repeating these same banner mistakes with social media. What began as an opportunity for one-to-one conversation with people is now driven by like-based metrics that only satisfy the needs of a brand’s messaging strategy. What users really want and need runs second to the scaled-based approach that killed the value of the banner.

Read the full piece at Digiday.

If the above resonates with you, check out Social Media Strategery, a blog maintained by my former boss, Steve Radick. His thinking has been a huge influence on me over the past year. As a starting point, read his post on the dangers of becoming what you measure in social media.

Silence is a strategy sometimes

Napa Road
Thing I did this month: Ran through Napa Valley and took this picture

I swear this will not turn into a blog about my work.

This has been a month of work trips, live readings, volunteer projects and personal distractions. Hence, the neglect here. (Not counting the drafts of things that felt best left in that form.) In many ways it’s been a fulfilling month but when the glass is full, it’s sometimes best to stop pouring water into it before you make a mess.

When I get some spare time, I’ll post the essay I read at The Paper Machete earlier this month and the two-minute burst of goofiness from last week’s 20×2 Chicago (though I think I’ll wait until the video goes up for that one as it works better performed than merely read).

Until then, here’s a piece I co-wrote with fellow Cramer-Krasselt’er Jeana Anderson about five questions brands should consider before they make  “newsjacking” a part of their social media plans, particularly on days when tragedy occurs. I can sum up the whole piece with this paragraph:

It’s unlikely your fans will get upset if you decide to “stay dark” for a day. If you post something anodyne, your commentary will probably get lost in the volume of conversation or you’ll risk earning a spot in the inevitable roundups of embarrassing brand posts. When in doubt, leave it out.

I’m a big believer in making a bigger impact with less content so it felt good to plant a flag here.

A few more words on 2013 Super Bowl ads and social media

This week, I participated in a live chat about 2013 Super Bowl ads and social media’s influence on them. Today.com writer Ben Popken and I discussed whether previews of the ads detract from the “big reveal,” why companies  spend so much money for a Super Bowl ad and how negative publicity affects ads.

As usual, I over-prepped and I had a few more thoughts that we didn’t discuss so I’m dropping them here.

Lots of television programming can be time-shifted; the value of them doesn’t go away when you watch them an hour later, a day later or even months later. You feel a little left out of the conversation but you get caught up.

Live sports events and awards shows, on the other hand, have way more cachet as they’re happening – both in social and offline. People move on from a discussion of these events much faster than, say, a show like Breaking Bad, which has so much time in between seasons that you can get “in the know” again and still be ready to go when new episodes start up again.

All this – plus a stat that says 36% of people will use a “second screen” when they watch the game this year – helps to explain why so many advertisers are going after the social media/digital audience in the Super Bowl this year: Lincoln had audiences help write its ad, Volkswagen created a teaser filled with viral video personalities, Psy is in a pistachios ad and Coke has an ad fueled by a real-time hashtag.

Advertisers want to say X people saw the ad or participated in the campaign and they want that X number to be as big as possible. It’s not enough to just get the passive TV audience, they want eyes from everywhere including those that are attached to an active social audience. The glut of post-Super Bowl ad conversation only room for the top 3 or best/worst ads. If you’re an advertiser, you don’t want to have to depend on making those lists, you want to get people talking about the ad prior to the game, during the game AND after. So a preview ad, the actual ad and a hashtag help to drive all that (it’s more complicated than I am making it sound but that’s the gist).

A few things I’ll be keeping my eyes on this year:

* Sexy ads are always a given (check out this list of racy ads; I’m quoted in the PETA discussion) but the real winners this year will be the ones where the sexy woman is the one controlling the action instead of being manipulated by it (as in this Fiat spot). I’m not sure, but I bet the Mercedes-Benz ad with Kate Upton will break that way.

* Shazam had a good 2012 Super Bowl but this should be the year it goes wide. They’ve been a bit quiet about their Super Bowl presence, which I don’t get at all so they may be going for the surprise factor.

* GIFs will probably jump the shark in 2013 but this year’s Super Bowl coverage will be lousy with them.

And some ads to watch for during the game:

The ads for Lincoln, Best Buy (with Amy Poehler!), Mercedes Benz (with Usher and Diddy) and Coke ads will all do well and as I said in the chat, the “Fashionista Daddy” ad will end up winning the Doritos contest. But the Hyundai ads will have a solid impact, too, even though they’re not flashy. The Flaming Lips song featured in one of them is aimed at the social media crowd and the Don’t Tell Mom ad has a nice punchline. The Soda Stream ad will likely make an impact, too, as they’ve had a buzz due to their first ad getting rejected. View them both here. Getting an ad in the Super Bowl definitely gives you some prestige so 2013 will be the year you hear about lots of folks getting one at home.

Other ads to watch for will be from M&Ms, Anheuser-Busch (featuring their famous Clydesdales), Chrysler, Oreo, Walking Dead, and Cars.com. None of them were previewed online except for Cars.com so they’re all hoping to make a big splash. Even the Cars.com ad preview played it close to the vest.

The ads that will probably end up on a lot of worst lists? Axe, E-Trade and GoDaddy. They’re all mining stale territory, though GoDaddy promises to redefine sexy somehow, which is totally what you expect from a Internet domain provider.

For a complete list of who’s buying what in the Super Bowl, check out this Ad Age list. Most of the previewed commercials are on this Facebook page.

The Evolution of Professional Social Media or Why Twitter is Great-Tasting and Good For You

On October 10, 2009, I gave the following talk at TweetCamp Chicago, “a day-long “unconference” for anyone interested in utilizing Twitter professionally, or just learning more about it.” I’m just now getting around to posting it because:

A) Life previously got in the way and
B) I just got laid off so I’m burnishing my professional reputation in various spaces, not the least of which is social media.

I gave this talk to a varied group of newbies and Twitter power users; business-minded individuals who wanted new ways to promote themselves; journalists and writers of various stripes; and folks who were just interested in learning more about Twitter. If you fall into any one of those categories, there’s something in here for you.

And if you like what you see here and you think “Gosh, we could use someone like this in our organization” then peruse my resume and if I look like the right person for the job, send me an e-mail at ourmaninchicago at gmail.com.


Good afternoon. Thanks for coming back from lunch. I will do all I can to keep you from feeling like a nap.

First, I’d like to thank Maura Hernandez and Keidra Chaney for asking me to deliver the keynote address here at Tweetcamp Chicago. Having recently organized a conference of this size, I know the work that goes into such an endeavor and they deserve a lot of credit for giving so freely of their free time. Many are quick to complain about the lack of women and persons of color here in Chicago, but few do anything about it. So they deserve a lot of credit for filling a need.

Second, allow me to apologize for reading from prepared remarks for this talk. While I can extemporaneously talk a blue streak given the opportunity, you’ve all paid good money to be here and therefore deserve organized thoughts and salient points rather than a verbal stopped clock that’s only right twice a day.

To give you some quick background on me, I’m the editor and director of content at Playboy.com. I walk into work every day hoping and praying that people do still read us for the articles. As for how I got here, I’ve had a few different careers in radio promotions, tech support and social work – with a brief tenure as a substitute teacher – before starting a freelance career as a writer at Chicagoist.com, a local news and culture blog. From there, I landed at Time Out Chicago as its Web Editor, which is where I first started using Twitter. After two years at TOC, I moved to Playboy.com as a senior editor and was made editor in July of this year.

What I learned in each of these jobs was how to convey information or an experience to someone in a way that feels real, that feels personal. And that is exactly what the best social media does.

The title of this keynote address is The Evolution of Professional Social Media. At first glance, the title suggests that social media has finished evolving, that it has come into its own as a medium, as a platform, as a mature means of communication. Nothing could be further from the truth. For those of us who’ve spent a lot of time in the digital space, this becomes painfully obvious anytime you try to explain things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Digg to someone who doesn’t use these services on a regular basis. Let’s be honest: The easiest explanation of how you use them sounds a lot like dicking around to most people.

When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was a really dumb idea. As much as I’ve made a career online, I didn’t feel like the world needed one more way to exchange IMs with each other. Plus, 140 characters? What could you possibly say in 140 characters? And what use would I have in sending a message to a whole bunch of people at once or hearing about what people had for breakfast?

(By the way, you’ll hear that line about breakfast a lot from people who, at best, misunderstand Twitter or, at worst, fear it. I’ll return to this point later but for now trust me when I say it’s a crock. I’m on Twitter all the time and I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve read “These scrambled eggs are a great start to my day!” or “Just eating my Fruit Loops!” I will, however, admit to extolling the virtues of my morning coffee on several occasions but that has more to do with the devil’s bargain I have with caffeine.)

ANYWAY!

What I didn’t realize – and what few people other than Twitter’s founders probably realized at the beginning – was the power of it to convey a larger picture, one short update at a time.

In April of 2007, TOC ran a story on Twitter. Creator Jack Dorsey was quoted at the end of the article this way: “I think text as a medium is not as explored as it could be. In a short message, in those tiny details, there’s a lot of meaning there and a lot of our personality.”

And that’s exactly it. Social media thrives because it brings personalities to the fore, yours, mine and even the personalities of businesses. It’s about a diversity of voices and if you’re not adding your voice to the mix…well, it’s just not as interesting. Have you ever gone to a party and just stayed in the background not engaging with anyone? Not dropping into a conversation, not speaking up, not injecting yourself into the discussion? That’s Twitter before you sign up, log in and hit send. It is absolutely pointless and boring…until you contribute.

Twitter and other forms of social media are already affecting you personally. They’re also changing the way businesses create a brand identity, and the way journalism works. But it’s nothing more than a tool for communication that is no more or less fallible than the people using it. The nature of it means it has not finished evolving and probably never will.

Now then: How does Twitter work for you as an individual? On two levels: as a way to enhance communication within a community and as an information resource.

One of the frequent knocks against Twitter is the suggestion that there are all these people out there that you HAVE to pay attention to and read and etc. etc. Let me ask you something: Between the moment you walked out of your house this morning and the moment you walked in the door here at Tweetcamp, how many strangers tried to tell you about their day or made you listen to their thoughts on Obama’s Nobel peace prize or told you “Hey you need to check out this link! OMGROFL!” Not that many, right? This is exactly how Twitter works: you choose whom you’d like to read or follow. Sure, there’s the occasional spammer or some other annoying person trying to get you to pay attention to their blatherings. But you run into Crazy People on the bus all the time and it doesn’t make you stop taking the CTA does it?

Most – if not all – of us are very busy people. We frequently lament our inability to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances or to do all that networking that we all know is important, particularly as journalists, writers and media types. The people on Twitter are not strangers you’d like to avoid, they’re the people with whom you wish you could spend more time. Twitter not only makes it easy to find out what people are working on and what they’re up to, it makes it easier to find time to do it. Rather than having to find a few hours out of your week to catch up with an old friend or trade professional tips, you’re able to do so a few minutes each day, several friends and associates at a time, replying to their questions, seeing pictures of their kids, and telling old jokes. It’s as if a huge group of important people in your life are at one cocktail party that you can drift into and out of at your leisure.

This cocktail party is like a series of concentric circles filled with friends, acquaintances, influencers, problem-solvers, and, yes, even celebrities. The information I get from the people I follow on Twitter creates a road map of the world for me. Spending a few minutes each morning checking my Twitter feed gives me a sense of which bus lines are running slow, how my friend Mike’s home-brewing project is going, what the weather’s like, the big local news stories and what Alyssa Milano is doing right now.

So how does all this affect businesses?

Twitter allows businesses to apply this level of personal engagement to their brand identities. That sounds like a lot of corporate BS so let me say it this way: Twitter allows businesses to seem human.

To illustrate this, let me share with you an experience I had at Time Out Chicago. I started a Twitter feed for Time Out Chicago in March of 2008 so we could report from the South by Southwest music festival. When I returned, I connected TOC’s blog to our Twitter feed so that every time we posted something, it would automatically send the headline of the post and a link to all our followers so they could click through it, our blog would get more traffic, etc. While not exactly a failure, it didn’t really succeed either. It would be like you coming into this auditorium expecting to hear me – a living, breathing person – give a talk on the professional use of social media and instead having me hand you a few sheets of paper with my talk written on it. It’s flat, there’s no personality. Once I started including questions or comments for our followers in our Tweets, and started responding to their replies to our content – along with those links – our followers grew. And people started to share the links among themselves and develop a relationship with us.

So let’s all agree to stop describing Twitter as “what I ate for breakfast.” Even as a joke. What Twitter proves is that more personal engagement is something people want. Not just with people they know, but with businesses they patronize. How many times have you rolled your eyes as you punched your way through a menu tree when calling a customer service line? Or sighed when you realized someone was working off a script instead of really listening to you? People want to know that the businesses they deal with are staffed by be people who are real. By people who seem like they eat breakfast.

Once businesses understand that Twitter is a form of two-way communication, myriad possibilities emerge. Want to know what your customers think about your product? Go on Twitter, search for the name of your product and see what people are saying. Yes, it’s a self-selected sample. But it’s immediate, costs nothing and allows you to follow up with people in a way that traditional customer surveys don’t allow. If you want to start a buzz, drop hints about what you’re working on. Or, better yet, bring them behind the scenes of aspects of your business they wouldn’t normally see.

We’ve had a lot of success with this at Playboy in live-Tweeting from parties at the Mansion, the Casting Call photo sessions or even goings-on in our office. (As you might imagine, this coverage usually comes with links to photos and I’m not ignorant enough to suggest that this doesn’t do most of the heavy lifting for us). The inner workings of our business are now open to the public in a way that was not previously available. The best part about it is these updates come to people via their laptop or their cell phone. It’s the embodiment of something I learned when I was in social work which is to meet the client where they’re at.

This isn’t insidious. Remember: These folks have invited your brand, your business into their personal lives by following your Twitter stream. You’d be foolish not to take advantage of those possibilities.

Now, this isn’t without its own set of challenges. It’s easy to sometimes overestimate the influence of the conversation that’s happening on Twitter, especially if the things people are saying aren’t positive. But there are case studies involving some of the most-groused-about industries out there like airlines or cable companies who have used Twitter to reach out to their customers, resolve their problems quickly and end up with happier and more loyal customers.

Still, you’ll need to make peace with the fact that your online brand messaging is no longer something you can fully control. Perhaps even within your own company. For example, how many people have heard that we’re putting Marge Simpson on the cover of next month’s Playboy? Most of you probably heard yesterday thanks the way we got the word out on Twitter. We did such a good job that even now Marge Simpson is still one of the most-discussed trending topics on Twitter.

But guess what? The word leaked out about this back in August. Guess who leaked it? Our founder and editor-in-chief: Hugh Hefner. On his Twitter feed. But it got picked up by a couple of blogs, and ended up building a small buzz that we capitalized on later with a larger push.

One of the challenges we have in using social media at Playboy stems from its very personal nature. But you have to allow the people who work for you the freedom to develop a voice that speaks to your specific audience and you can’t expect that the way you communicate in one part of your business will apply everywhere. We have a lot of different aspects of our brand from the magazine to the website to Playboy TV to Playboy Radio to the Girls Next Door show to our extensive licensing division which works very hard to slap the Bunny head logo on everything we possibly can. But this means the group of people who count themselves as fans of Playboy – and we have 1.3 million people on Facebook alone who say they are – all have a different experience with the brand. So we need to find a different way to personally engage with those people based on their individual experience with Playboy. Twitter is a great way to do this for all the reasons I’ve already outlined. Plus, we have a huge coterie of Cyber Girls, Playmates, various other Playboy models and even Playboy employees on Twitter who are all contributing to the discussion.

I want to wrap this up by talking about how Twitter can be valuable for journalists, personally and professionally.

It’s no secret that the many of the people in the newspaper-slash-publishing industry are wetting themselves with fear over where the industry is headed. It is entirely possible that gainfully employed people in this room could be laid off next week. How can Twitter prevent this? Well, it can’t. But what it can help you do is start expanding your personal and professional profile now.

Speaking as someone who has not been pursuing a writing career his entire life, I can tell you that there is a large group of folks – outside of the industry – who follow the careers of writers and journalists like other people follow Brad and Angelina. It used to be that a newspaper or magazine writer’s following was hard to judge. Perhaps a column would spur several letters to the editor or result in an angry follow-up quote from Mayor Daley at a press conference.

But if you’re a writer or journalist with a Twitter account, it’s very easy to see how many literal followers you have. What do editors and publishers see when they see that number? They see web traffic, they see potential press mentions. In short, they see money. And you making money for them means they’re more likely to spend money to hire you.

Let me give you a tip when you’re setting up that Twitter account. Do include your professional affiliations in your bio but don’t let your boss be the boss of your Twitter feed. Create your own personal Twitter account and tweet about your work there. It might be harder to get followers at first, but unlike other work assets, it can’t be taken away from you when you leave that job. And if your company is smart, they’ll want to leverage your presence by linking to it often anyway.

In our jobs as journalists, we are often only as good as our reporting. And in reporting, we are often only as good as our sources. Guess what Twitter is? A direct line to thousands of sources who are revealing breaking news every day. Food writers follow the many chefs on Twitter discussing their restaurants’ operations. Political beat reporters are familiar with Cook County Board commissioner Tony Peraica’s tendency to tweet whatever is on his mind at any given moment. Following several prominent people who make up your beat is a very efficient way to stay on top of the local and national trends that influence them. This makes you smarter and better at your job.

If you’re looking for an expert on a particular topic, Twitter is good for this, too. Even better, the transparency of Twitter and the Web lets you research a source before you pull out your notebook. That source’s Twitter feed likely contains several links to their blog, their other media appearances, and what primary sources they’re reading. Plus, you’ll get a very good sense of how they speak from their Tweets. I guarantee that someone who can consistently make a sharp, witty observation in 140 characters will be a quote machine for your piece.

At the beginning of this talk, I said we’d be discussing the Evolution of Professional Social Media. If I’ve done my job, you’re walking away from this with two ideas in your head. 1) The evolution of professional social media depends largely on personal interactions and 2) it is impossible for you to fully experience and understand social media without involving yourself in it. Luckily, the barriers to such involvement are low. And for those of you still worried that you’ll make a mistake as you put yourself, your business or your journalism career into the world of social media…well, mistakes are a part of life. And social media is life evolving because of them. One update, or one moment, at a time.

NBCChicago.com even sadder now

Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader discusses NBCChicago.com’s new redesign in a larger story about what happens when errors are introduced as you “collate and synthesize the news.”** (Those are the words of NBCChicago.com’s managing editor, not Miner.)

On the redesign, which incorporates a poll on each story that asks users how they feel, Miner says:

“Stunts like this pander to the public in order to attract the elusive online advertiser…That’s the voice of a utility, not a news medium. When every news medium sounds like this, who will we count on for serious journalism?”

I don’t know if Miner realizes it, but every one of NBC’s local news sites “sounds” like this thanks to rolling out this redesign across all their local sites. The better question is, “When every online news medium looks like this, how does your local news coverage differentiate itself?” Certainly not by treating them like network affiliates. (The “Rock Stars on the Rampage” photo gallery is a “lead story” on three of NBC Chicago’s sites right now and don’t get me started on its “Local Beat” section.)

More on the NBCChicago.com redesign from me last month.

** I don’t mean to say this happens every time someone blogs about a story. There are plenty of talented people who do this and manage to get the details right.

Motrin gets it, why doesn’t Ad Age?

Last week in TOC, we hosted a roundtable with professional food critics, bloggers and chefs (full transcript is here). It’s a follow-up, of sorts, to our critics’ roundtable back in January and it’s the second story our senior food and drink writer, David Tamarkin, has written on the topic (in the first, he profiled the foodie site LTHForum.com and in the second, he talked to local professional critics about how online critics affect their jobs*. I realize I’m biased, but I’ve been impressed with the overall tone of TOC‘s coverage of online critics (which includes this article I wrote). It isn’t fear-based and doesn’t seem like it’s trying to unring the bell of online amateur criticism.

Would that everyone else in the publishing industry could get hip to that.

This Ad Age article on how an online blog/Twitter-driven campaign caused Motrin to pull an ad shows that not everyone has put his or her finger to the wind. (The ad is here. I don’t have a uterus, but even I’m irritated with that ad.)

This graf stood out to me:
“The ultimate demise of the campaign demonstrates either how quickly social media can galvanize a groundswell of opinion or how much power over online discourse they can give a few vocal tastemakers with outsize weight.”

First of all, these people were – for lack of a better phrase – experts in their respective fields with audiences to match. Just because they’re online, doesn’t make them any less so (I’d argue it makes them moreso but whatever). Plus, the bitter snarl hovering over the phrase “a few vocal tastemakers with outsize weight” wouldn’t be there if we were talking about, say, academics or traditional publishing outlets. Or is it only OK to have a few vocal tastemakers so long as they serve a business model?

If I was a company, I’d want to know what people are saying about my product – good or bad. Which is worse for a company like Motrin: To know there’s a wave of displeasure about an ad, so you can pull it and show you’re responsive to the views of your customer base or to trundle along in ignorance and contempt of that same audience. Eventually the latter will wear down your market share (incidentally, that’s how online critics serve your biz model). As anyone knows, for everyone one or two people that let you know about their feelings about your product, there are several who share their views but haven’t let you know.

So this isn’t about the few, this is about the many. Everyone has the potential to be a vocal tastemaker now, which the Ad Age article does point out:

“You don’t have to have thousands of followers to start something like this,” said Mr. Armano, who also blogs for AdAge.com. “Many people with small networks have just as much influence as a few people with large networks.”

The ones who add little value to the conversation will get lost in the din.

* In a comment on this story, a woman quoted in a WSJ article that David references mentions that Yelp now labels reviews of a restaurant where Yelp holds events as “Yelp Event at ___.” I always thought it was an ethical lapse for Yelp to allow for published reviews about a venue when A) they were involved in a business relationship with that venue and B) the reviewer’s experience during these events is hardly representative of the venue. Now if only they could get Yelp employees to stop publishing reviews of businesses they work with…

"There was no Facebook the last time a new president came to town."

It doesn’t bother me that the Obama pre-administration is asking to see every piece of email, every diary entry or every random piece of effluvia that you’ve posted to your Facebook page, in an effort to save itself from potential future embarrassment. As a vetting process, it’s certainly…invasive, but I get it.

No, what bothers me is the application pool that will result from this level of vetting. I’m sure that if you were at one point a member of a Facebook group called “I Love Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!!!!!” then it would probably disqualify you from employment. Then again, if you posted a picture of yourself on the business end of a beer bong, it might not. It’s entirely possible they’re just doing due dilligence. It would be impossible to find someone who hasn’t expressed opinions, one way or the other, about the government or hasn’t doing something embarrassing or shameful in their past.

But for someone like me, going through all my electronic history is enough of an impediment to filling out the full application. (Chicago Reader’s web editor Whet Moser says the same.) That’s going to rule out exactly the kind of folks who were instrumental in putting Obama in the White House.

I’m not saying that because those people helped put him there that they deserve jobs. But there was a lot of commentary during and after the campaign about how Obama was the social media president. Yet this application process is unfriendly to social media applicants, who are traditionally more involved in and knowledgeable about local and national issues. Aren’t these the kind of folks we want in the government?

Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded blogger?

I don’t generally blog about my personal life here, unless it’s in the service of a larger point (or if I meet a member of The Faces). But this week I’m taking part in something that allows me to talk about a couple things that I’ve been looking for an excuse to discuss.

Next week, I’ll be getting married. So, of course, my fiancee Erin and I started a website about it: scottanderingetmarried.wordpress.com*. I explain the reasons why we did this on the site so I won’t re-iterate them, but suffice it to say doing this allows people who won’t be at the wedding (which is everybody) a way to experience it, while still allowing us the freedom to focus on the two of us coming together in marriage. I think having the site actually enhances that. There are two ways to really understand something: teach it to someone else or write about it.

This isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people have wedding websites, though most of them document the events up to the day of the wedding, not necessarily the day itself. Still, I’m sure there are people out there who have taken this idea much farther than we intend to. Yes, we’ll be Twittering throughout the weekend; no, we won’t be Twittering during the ceremony; and no, we won’t be streaming it live. We’ll leave that spectacle to someone else. Maybe Julia Allison** once that dear girl settles down.

For me, this is the last garrison to fall in my efforts to limit the amount of “me” that’s out on the Internet. I wrote about this last year when Erin and I decided to stop keeping details of our relationship off her blog. Most of you know that, in addition to being a published author, Erin has quite the following online. A lot of wonderful things have happened for her as a result, but a few not-so-wonderful things have as well. Knowing how difficult relationships are in the first place, I didn’t want to invite scrutiny or criticism of us by making that part of our life public.

As Erin pointed out to me, part of who she is involves writing about her personal life. And if I was going to be in a relationship with her, I knew I needed to accept that. But Erin’s also never been the type to take a warts-and-all approach, so generally it’s the good stuff that makes it onto ejshea.com, not the rough stuff. In the year or so since my relationship with Erin has been online, I haven’t found occasion to regret it, and I’ve been the recipient of some lovely comments from her peeps.

Regardless, I don’t see myself following her lead. I’m quite happy with this blog being about issues of culture, rather than all the wonderful things that happen day-to-day with Erin (and our dog). Still, I’m enjoying the change of subject.

It would have seemed like an obvious omission to not mention our wedding site here, especially since I often write about online culture. As I’ve said, if you do what I do for a living, it’s pretty much impossible to not leave a big digital footprint. And with Facebook et al., even the stuff you did ten years ago is out there for public consumption, nevermind the stuff you did ten days ago. So it’s best if you embrace it and learn how work with it, as working against it is futile.

* If you want to set up a quickie blog-based website, and want maximum flexibility in working with various “Web 2.0” widgets, avoid WordPress like the plague. You can’t add a Twitter badge (the RSS version of Twitter feeds looks like ass) and I couldn’t embed an Imeem playlist. Yes, the layout is clean and sharp. But almost everything we’ve tried to add, aside from a Flickr badge, has been a major pain in the ass. Maybe this changes if you use a local install or spring for the customizable CSS, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the cheapest, easiest solution is still Blogger.
** Am I the only person who didn’t know she was from Wilmette? Man, that really explains a lot.