All posts in Social

So just like a ton of other people, I am going to rant about why I’m skipping SXSW this year. This will be the first time since 2005 that I don’t make it out to SXSW, and I’m not really that heartbroken about it. In the 5 years I went, I met a lot of people, spoke on a panel at the event, and made lots of friendships that last to this day. The key thing I’ve gleaned from SXSW over the years has been the relationships. Being in South Florida, its hard to find a central meeting point for all my friends spread out across the globe, and Austin just so happens to be the easiest one.

So after all these years of going, why am I stopping this year? Well for one the price of getting there has skyrocketed. My first year I paid $150 for the ticket, now its $750. I paid $200 for my airfare that year as well, now the cheapest flights are $500. I paid $100/night for my hotel then, now, well there are no hotels at a reasonable distance. All in, it would probably cost me close to $2k just to visit Austin for a few days, and that doesn’t include my bar tabs. Sure I could probably crash on someone’s floor, or not get a SXSW pass, but getting into parties and such without the pass is a bit tough (not impossible though).

I miss the days when you could walk up to anyone and start chatting with them, and have them be someone whose blog you read or software you use, those days are largely gone. Now half the people there are sales reps for some new company trying to pitch you on their stuff. Sure they might give you a t-shirt, but its not the same as the personal connections.

What about the actual conference?
Well to be honest its tough to make a conference where speakers have to submit their topics in JULY the year before. Lots of stuff I could talk about in July 2010 might not be relevant anymore in March 2011. I don’t blame the organizers for this, because its tough to schedule 300 sessions out of 3000 submissions without tons of lead time. To be honest its been a while since I went to a panel and was truly inspired or learned something new.

Ultimately though, its the lines. As a person who abhors waiting in lines (I won’t go to a club if I have to wait more than 5 minutes to get in), I can’t fathom a party being fun if there are 300 people waiting in line to get in. So I guess SXSW has gotten too big for me to enjoy it anymore. I’ll be spending my two grand on something like going snowboarding or learning to surf this year.

I guess the signal to noise ratio is too high for me. :-/

So last week during my panel on location based services I brought up an interesting (to me) theory that foursquare would be a great fit for groupon. This came about because my presentation was about facebook places and their having successfully created a complete funnel to track leads from social network all the way to physical destinations. It made me realize, in order to survive, foursquare needs to find a suitor with tons of sales infrastructure, and lots of $ behind it. That would be: groupon!

So why do I think groupon should acquire foursquare?

• Groupon has a huge sales staff
• Groupon has an infinite need for new deals and sales
• Groupon isn’t in every city yet
• Groupon gets a bigger mobile presence

So why do I think foursquare should pray for groupon to buy them?

• They don’t want to work at yahoo
• They aren’t going to get bought by facebook
• They don’t have as many viable options left
• The salesforce and cash infusion could grow them like crazy
• Groupon has 15-20Million people on their mailing list = nice bump in audience

So will this happen? My guess is as good as yours. Should it happen? If the price is right.

-note I heard rumors of google buying groupon since i wrote this -

Above are the slides from my pubcon 2010 presentation on Location Based Services beyond foursquare and gowalla. Full writeup coming soon.

Below is my presentation at the pubcon 2010 panel about Twitter apps and trends.

Key tools mentioned in the presentation:

• Assistly
• Cotweet

More links coming soon. As well as the transcript/writeup.

If you were dropped in our society (western, specifically the united states) with zero support system, zero money, zero job, nothing. You have absolutely nothing at all but the clothes on your back and your wits. What would you do?

I was hanging out with my dad driving around Miami the other day, and I noticed two important things that were occurring: There were more people shopping at the mall than a year ago, and there were more homeless people asking for money in the streets nearby than a year ago. It made me wonder: is the gap between the rich and the poor expanding even faster than ever before?

Is our society designed to make it impossibly hard for the have-nots to compete with the haves?

Malcom Gladwell wrote a fascinating essay in 2006 about the apparent cost differences between managing a problem like homelessness and solving it.

When I first started writing this post, I thought, maybe there are deeply rooted reasons we rationalize this divide between haves and have nots. My thoughts jumped from religiosity to classism to bigotry, but in the end I don’t think we can point a finger at any one cause and make it our scapegoat. All we can do is see what little things we can do across the board to improve everyone’s situations. This isn’t a socialism or communism issue, this is a people issue. So please don’t get this confused. This is about helping our fellow man, something I’d hope transcends political and theological boundaries.

I’m very curious to know what you think, and what you would do in the situation at the beginning of the post.

I speak about social networks, social media, viral marketing, yada yada, all the time and figured it was time to use my pulpit to dispel lots of the myths and bullshit we’re seeing out on the web these days. So here are my top five things you need to know when you’re getting started with social media. The intent of this is also to teach you sound business advice in addition to providing you with a solid web marketing background.

1. Social media is not your end solution.
If your business plan’s marketing/user-acquisition/business development section says anything like “we’ll use social media to engage/capture new users,” then you need to light that sucker on fire. Burn that shit. That is the vaguest line of bull you’ve likely written in ages. You’ve got to understand that social media should be a component of your overall strategy, not the entire strategy.

2. Social media is about evolving your business communications
Right from the get go you need to understand the premise of how social media has shifted communications so radically. It has changed your communications from being a largely mono-directional system to a bi-directional or multi-directional tool. Forget ever being able to solely talk down to your customers. That shit is over with. Seriously. You now have to learn to listen as much as you talk.

3. Quit ignoring your customers and start embracing them.
Jason Fried of 37signals fame once quipped that you should ignore your customers ideas and suggestions. This my friends is some seriously short-sighted advice. He probably meant you shouldn’t pivot at every customer request, as they haven’t been validated (from a business perspective), but you have to keep track of them and acknowledge them to those customers. It has never been easier to get instant feedback and instant advice from your customers, so take advantage!

4. Don’t dive headfirst without looking
Do some research before you launch your campaign. Do what you would do in business, research the competition, research the tools, and weigh your options. Treat these decisions as you would a big software purchase (because it is), and make sure you find what is the best fit for you. These products may be largely free to use, but if you end up wasting your time on things that may be a bad fit, they can be more costly than your previous alternatives.

5. Set yourself some goals.
You’d be amazed at how many people have no goals in their heads for their social media campaigns. Without a goal/objective, how are you going to plan for getting there? Say you want 5000 facebook fans to your company fan page. How do you get to them? What are the steps you need to take in order to get those first 500? Set goals, and plan out your strategy to get there.

So what’d I just do there? I gave you 5 social media tips that are really just business tips didn’t I? Think about that.

A couple weeks ago I was on a panel at the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce annual goals conference, and the topic was getting noticed using social media amongst other tools. On the panel with me were a PR specialist, an Advertising specialist, an Email/direct marketing specialist, and me, not really a specialist (I detest the social media guru/expert term). The audience was made up of about 100 business owners from around Coral Gables, FL (a fairly wealthy enclave in South Florida).

So as our panel got rolling, lots of good questions kept coming in about best case uses for various pieces of technology, how we integrate these tools into our repertoire and so forth. I went through the usual rant about what social media should be to them (a component of what everyone else on the panel was an expert in). We talked about simple ways to integrate, and not overwhelm themselves. We also talked about some of the fears people have. It was interesting to see how this group approaches social media in particular considering their demographic (largely older crowd [avg age 50+], these are the people who OWN the businesses after all).

A few days later though I went to speak at a young professionals group (avg age ~27) about social media. I had gone in here expecting to have a completely different experience than the previous week’s talk. Surprisingly, these younger professionals shared many of the same trepidations that the older crowd had. The big difference was the higher % of personal users of facebook vs the chamber crowd.

Something struck me in both of these talks: all the social media advice you can give is just general good business advice. I realized about halfway through the second set that I wasn’t giving people social media specific advice, I was giving them startup advice. Everything I was telling people was tips I wish I had received as an entrepreneur, not a social media marketer. You can’t really tell people in generalized terms how to be successful at social media without teaching them how to be successful at business first.

I’ll do my best to outline the things I touched upon, but the gist of it is: research, plan, measure, and then adapt.