Answer Guy Central

Thank you, Federal Trade Commission. Just when I thought the FTC was doing something potentially useful, they’ve decided that their own regulation providing for fines of $11,000 each time someone tweets or otherwise blogs for payment without disclosing that payment isn’t worth enforcing.

Last year, The FTC created a regulation that was designed to make knowing what was trustworthy amongst all the stuff you read on the Internet easier. If you blog, tweet, or basically say anything and are paid for doing it you have to disclose the payment. Failure to do so carries an $11,000 fine.

Soon after the regulation was enacted I mentioned that one Kim Kardashian was shilling for Carl’s Jr. over Twitter and that her tweets weren’t marked. I presume Ms. Kardashian hasn’t been fined.

Yesterday, the FTC gave me good reason for that presumption. A public relations firm that placed many uncredited reviews for their clients’ music on iTunes has reached settlement with the FTC, and will be removing the offending posts. And that’s it; there’s no fine. It’s kind of the equivalent of this short conversation:

• “You’ve made a mess of this wall, young lady, please clean it up”
• “OK, Mommy”

But on the Internet, nothing ever gets erased. Sure, the PR company might be able to “remove their reviews from iTunes”, but those words have already been stored in thousands of other places; they aren’t going away.

The business change lesson in this is simple. Just as Google and Verizon understand that the real impact of their pact on Net Neutrality is control, on the Internet, you’re in control. All you need is a clear understanding of how the things you say impact the space.

I’ll make the offer again: For $11,000.01 I’ll blog about you, and I won’t disclose that you paid me.

Social Networking: The topic that just won’t go away.

No, really: social networking really isn’t going away any time soon and you need to figure out your plan for social media, social networking, and how they impact your business change. Yes, I’ve said that before. I’ll be saying it again, too.

A few days ago, one of the writers at TechCrunch wrote a piece that made me think about social networking in a whole new way: all the tweeting, all the Facebook updates, and whatever else you do to scream “look at me!” is a matter of something a bit . . . scary: all we’re doing is trying to eat everyone around us.

I’M more important than YOU are. MY words are worth hearing. GET OVER HERE AND LISTEN TO ME.

And then I’ll eat you. Or at least own you.

What’s strangest about this dance is that social networking is being done in the name of better communication, while what it’s actually creating is communication that’s worse. MORE, but worse. We’re not saying anything worth listening to.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m part of a team that’s creating a new social networking platform. It’s going to be unveiled very soon, and it’s different. Seriously. It isn’t “more”. It isn’t “special”. It’s respectful and focused. And if you join you’ll be happy you’re there.

Which is what being social is supposed to be about, right? Nobody really likes big parties where there’s so much background chatter you can’t even hear the person you’ve chosen to spend time with and are standing next to speak, right?

That’s how Twitter feels. Facebook, too.

The Guy Sure Looks Like Plant Food To Me. Feed Me Seymour!

If you live in New York City you know The Village Voice. In fact, even if you don’t live in The Big Apple you’ve probably heard of what was once an important, influential weekly newspaper.

The Village Voice has become irrelevant. Why?

A few days ago, I responded to a tweet by social media guru Jeff Jarvis. His question: “When Did The Village Voice Become a Prude?”

My answer was that when they stopped being an independent property (The Village Voice is now part of the same big company that owns mainstream newspaper Newsday) they stopped having the freedom to say what they wanted to, when they wanted to, about what they wanted to. Simply put, The Village Voice had lost its voice.

Do YOU have a Voice?

Business changes. The business change at The Village Voice has been to make itself irrelevant by being careful about politically correct wording and homogenization of their message at the hands of someone with a “higher purpose”.

And THEN The Internet came along, and social media and social networking became the way we all started getting our information. Not a good combination of events.

Nobody is listening if you don’t have a message. Your job is to create one, hone it, find the people who want to hear it, and deliver that message, over and over and over again. That’s business change for you, creates business change for them, and is the way business (and marketing) get done today.

Need help? Contact Me Here.

Clients (and others) ask me all the time: how do I find something new to write about five times each week? My answer is simple: I’m passionate about what I write about, and the people who come here like it, get value from it, and call The Computer Answer Guy, or Answer Guy Central, or PC-VIP when they need our help.

I write this, then, because there are reasons for me to do so. So why are you using Twitter, Facebook, or any of the many other social networking tools that have taken hold of us, our businesses, and our lives?

The answer, of course, is that you must; as business evolves and business change keeps happening all around us it’s becoming more clear every day that failing to engage means you’ll become disengaged. But you still need to have a message.

I recently came across this post from David Risley. David is a young Australian fellow running a successful Internet business selling nothing more than words of wisdom on how to run a successful Internet business . . . which makes him by most measurements not all that fascinating. But in that post David presents a very simple, easily followed road map for answering the question “why am I doing social networking?”.

Remember, I had to look a client in the eye recently when he asked me, after much thought and research, if the world has too many blogs. Similarly there are some very real questions to deal with when you think about whether it’s simply too late to start blogging. And hey, it’s even been suggested that Facebook and Twitter themselves are doomed.

But at the end of it all, social networking, whether by blog, Facebook, Twitter, or some other tool, and Search Engine Optimization are now critical to your business’ future.

The questions aren’t really about if, but about how and what. And you need to answer them. We’ll help, if you think you need that. But get started, and keep going.

There’s an old saying: the only bad press is no press. I hope Chris Brogan believes in that because as much as I like the guy personally and think the focus behind his work is solid I’ve found myself criticizing him more and more lately.

Chris and I aren’t competitors, although I do so of the same kinds of things for my clients that Mr. Brogan does for his. I point this out because I don’t want anybody to think that my point is to cannibalize Chris Brogan, Tom Peters, Tony Robbins, or anybody else (not that I could).

What is my point? In an age where business change is all happening on social networking sites like Twitter you need to get real. You need to be honest.

And honesty doesn’t happen in platitudes.

A couple of weeks ago, Brogan wrote a piece on whack-a-mole marketing. It made a great point: when we’re all on Twitter, Facebook, and a thousand other social networking sites, using them as the tools of our marketing efforts, then much of what we say will sound like marketing.

As I said, I’ve found myself picking on Chris Brogan lately. He recently wrote about how he doesn’t actually read his Twitter stream, and while I understand the issues it’s hard to have sympathy for Chris; this is where he makes his living and he simply needs to find a way to walk his own talk.

And so do I. And so do you.

When you put out a message, marketing-focused or otherwise, you need to own it. There’s a restaurant in Westchester County New York where for about $650 (tax, tip, and wine included—hey, did you think I was completely insane? ), you and a partner can have a meal like none other. The chef and owner is a man named Dan Barber, and if you have about twenty minutes you should watch this video of Dan:

Dan Barber walks his talk.

You may think you can’t afford to do things the way Dan Barber does them. What he’s left out of his speech is that even though the long-term result of doing things the right way is a win-win-win for everybody it’s incredibly expensive to get started doing things the right way.

That’s fine. But you can buy your eggs brown instead of bleached white the way they are in supermarkets in the United States, and the extra cost is close to zero. And when you’re on Twitter, and you’re engaging as a form of marketing you can actually be engaged.

It’s not as expensive as it might seem. Big companies employ teams of people who do nothing but watch social media sites for mentions of them and engage people who mention them, but until you’re a big enough company to justify that expense you won’t have enough mentions for it to be a problem keeping up.

And until you start, you’re falling further and further behind everyone who has.

We’ll help, by the way. Just call and I’ll tell you how. Personally.

It’s ALL whack-a-mole, isn’t it? But you can fill in the holes, too. And that’s what social media and business change are all about.

I’m neither a famous actor/celebrity type nor a dictator (although my kids might argue with the second half of that statement). But I use Twitter, and by now I hope you do, as well. There’s really no more effective way for a business to stay in touch with its customers, and thus bring about business change in a constantly evolving world.

Hugo Chavez, the dictator president of Venezuela, agrees. Mr. Chavez turned on his Twitter account less than two weeks ago, and is already has the most-followed account in his country.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, and given Venezuela’s small size the fact that Hugo Chavez sits at number one with only a couple of hundred thousand followers shouldn’t come as too much of a shock, either. And never mind the ridiculous number of followers that a B-movie actor like Ashton Kutcher or a celebutante like Kim Kardashian can rack up.

What matters is this: social media and social networking work. Invoking my kids again, I’ll point out that they’re shocked to hear how many people follow me in one way or another on social networking and social media sites. I’m just not important, right?

But whether you’re Ashton Kutcher / Kim Kardashian, Hugo Chavez, or just Jeff Yablon / The Answer Guy, you can be using tools like Twitter to get your message out. And the world wants to hear your message . . . or at least some world wants to.

Hugo Chavez has found his world. If you like we’ll help you find yours. But please: if you don’t already have a strategy for social media and social networking, create one. Now.

FOLLOWUP:

It’s less than 48 hours since this posting went live, and while looking at the traffic reports for answerguy.com I notice that we’ve become Google’s second most important site for the search term “what works well in a dictator“.

If you still aren’t sure about the importance of search engine optimization, this should seal it for you.

Now of course, I don’t care about ranking high for the word “dictator”, or more specifically the word dictator in the context of that phrase. But because we drink our own SEO Kool-Aid, we’re there, and we got there fast.

Thank you Hugo Chavez, dictator President of Venezuela. And thank you, Twitter.

Reality: Social Networking Matters. Twitter is important. It’s an old story by now, and one that I tell over and over.

This morning, I read this in my Twitter stream: 

Wow. I’m like the only one who doesn’t really go back. I read whatever the 10 are visible when I load Seesmic.

Uh-Oh.

The words would disturb me no matter who wrote them, because they’re either a sign that the author doesn’t know how Twitter works, or that Twitter simply doesn’t work at all. But they really bother me because of who wrote them: Chris Brogan, one of the most “influential” people in all of the Twittersphere isn’t reading what the people he follows are writing.

As I said, I’ve written many time about Twitter, how it’s used, how it should be used, and that it’s pretty much impossible to interact in a meaningful way with thousands of people, unless by interaction you’re referring to a one-way “I am a celebrity or brand” kind of relationship. AND THAT’S FINE, AS LONG AS YOU’RE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR INTENTIONS.

Large companies, to their credit, are taking the ideas behind my words and using Twitter as a customer service tool, watching for everything said about them and responding. But this takes manpower. The question effecting business change as it relates to Twitter for the rest of us is: are you really trying to network socially, or are you just a user?

Back to Chris. Mr. Brogan is a very smart man, and truly a gentleman. He’s one of social networking’s biggest stars, and deservedly so. And when someone like Chris Brogan, who made his fame and fortune by telling people that they need to engage admits that he simply doesn’t read what his people have to say, I have to be concerned, maybe for Chris, and certainly for what it says about the medium.

There are a couple of different schools of thought on the “right” way to use Twitter. Some experts believe that following and being followed by the largest possible number of people is the way to make Twitter work, while others try to keep up with the information in their streams by only following people whose thoughts are pre-screened as “important”.

If you’re a celebrity and (sorry, celebrities) and don’t care what your people have to say, go with the former. But if you’re trying to build real community, you need to do the latter. Yes, that’s hard, and gets more so as you succeed.

Business Change has to be executed the right way. Drop me a line, and I promise I’ll read it . . .

So it turns out that nobody cares what you say on Twitter.

OK, so that isn’t true. But if you’ve been wondering why the more influential people you follow never retweet (RT) your words, the answer is simple: they don’t do that. You’re not surprised, right? The more “important” you are, the less incentive you have to care about the people you know peripherally. Ever been to a book signing and see how little real connection is in the eyes of an author signing copies of his latest masterpiece?

Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve seen authors exhibit real empathy, and professional athletes, too. But by and large we’re all creatures of habit and when more people are looking for our attention than we have time to give it to we fall into the habits that make the most sense—the ones we use to protect ourselves.

On Twitter, though, aren’t we all supposed to be bringing something “real” to the table?

The answer is yes, but the issue is how you define real. My kids use Twitter as kind of a big bulletin board on which they tell their closest friends what they’re up to. Anyone who walks by can read the board, and they’re OK with that. Celebrities use Twitter to increase their brands. And those of us in the middle? We wish we were celebrities.

While it’s statistically unlikely that you’re ever going to be HUUUUUUUGE and command hundreds of thousands of followers who genuinely look forward to and digest your words, the story on Twitter isn’t really that, anyway. For those of us who are brand building or marketing, or just trying to be heard by three more people today than were listening yesterday Twitter is one more way of grabbing the long tail.

That may seem unexciting, but the business change we’re all going through really is one where each of us is building a brand, and some brands are simply not as large as others. I’ve written a couple of time about Kim Kardashian, for example, and there’s genuine question about whether she qualifies as brand or not. Her three million Twitter followers suggest that she is, but when you analyze what that number means you might conclude otherwise.

And Ms. Kardashian’s a celebutante. We ALL know who she is, right?

Well, no. And Kim Kardashian isn’t going to retweet you, either. So unless you’re really buddies with Bill Gates, don’t expect his help getting famous on Twitter. But keep on tweeting, anyway. That long tail can be whipped into amazing results.

So I’m minding my business this morning and what comes across my Twitter stream? This:

25% of companies prohibit access to social networks while entire US Air Force is encouraged to engage

It came from Lee Odden, who’s become one of the hot-hot-hot names in Internet Marketing, and it attributed the statistic and statement to David Meerman Scott, who seems to be a big shot in that arena, too. I accept that one in four businesses are doing what Lee says, and asked him for details re: the USAF reference.

I asked Lee what “encouraged to engage” means. It could have simply been a “don’t ask, don’t tell” situation (OK, that’s funny, but you get the point). Or it could mean that the United States Air Force has actually told its people to get out there and talk it up. Lee’s answer, which I choose to trust:  not blocked & provided guidelines.

There’s a lot to be learned from this.

• First, business change is real, and Social Networking matters.
• Next: You need to manage the process.
• Third . . . even large, convoluted, often-secretive entities can be smart about social networking

I don’t imagine that the United States Air Force is going to gain lots and lots of otherwise-disengaged recruits by letting its personnel use Twitter. And I’m not sure what their other potential gain could be. But . . . maybe that’s wrong. Maybe social networking really is all about just getting a message out there. Repeatedly. Everywhere.

OK, not just maybe.

People like to feel engaged. It helps both sides, by the way, but even if you don’t care about your people, letting them engage with the outside world will make you look better to the folks they engage with.

And that’s where business comes from today.

Engage. Now. Social Networking IS Business Change.

Last December, I had the opportunity to interact at a webinar with Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, the authors of Trust Agents. This book has been a New York Times Bestseller for months, and I can tell you from my subsequent contact with them that both Chris and Julien are stand-up guys who say what they mean, mean what they say, and in general seem to be about as trustworthy as authors with an agenda to push can be.

I genuinely mean that as a compliment. It sounds measured, right? That’s today’s subject. On his website, Chris Brogan has written a great piece on the execution of social media. Ostensibly, it’s about scaling, but I see something else, and I’m disturbed.

Chris is now doing most of his formal preaching to larger business and social groups. That’s fine, of course, it’s his market and where he makes his living. At the same time, though, Chris’ Twitter Account is replete with quick messages like “Do Good Things“. It’s the kind of woo-woo rah-rah that we’re most used to hearing from the Tony Robbins’ of the world, and while it has a place (and Twitter sure is a great place for such drivel), it feels like a disconnect.

Allow me to repeat: this isn’t an attack on Chris Brogan. I think Chris is one of new media’s real stars and deserves his success. But I’m reminded of one of the things that Chris and Julien said at that event last year, and that I’ve told my own clients for a very long time, too: there’s a top end to the number of people (relationships) you can manage. Most experts, including Chris Brogan, agree that the number is somewhere around 150.

When you get to a certain size, you need more people to manage your operations. Let’s assume that when a large company gets serious about social networking and social media they figure out that there are going to be “x” number of potential customer touches per day in the social networking space, allot a certain number of minutes per interaction, and decide from there how big a staff needs to be created to handle the company’s social  activities. That’s a start, and there might even be some variant on the “150 people theme” that we can apply. But . . . when it’s just a formula, hasn’t your social networking become nothing more than that rah-rah stuff? The engagement is . . . false. In truth, it’s not social at all; it’s practically anti-social.

Bring it back down to a more personal, more manageable level: social networking, like all business change, doesn’t just happen. You need to plan, to need contingency options in place, and then you need to be ready to make new, unexpected, and even unwelcome changes on an ongoing basis. Social networking, at the end of the day, is a lot like being someone’s friend.

Or customer service. But the term can’t be a oxymoron.

I’m being less social. My Twitter Community has spoken.

As cool a thing as social networking is (or can be), every time you write something you risk rubbing the people who follow you the wrong way. You probably want to avoid the “I’m Eating Breakfast” messages that I’ve joked about, but how close to that standard is it OK to get, in the interest of being social?

I use Foursquare on my Droid. I’ve told you about the service / game / social networking tool before, and I’ve said both here and in conversation that I’m not really sure what its purpose is. The test goes on, but I’ve disabled one of Foursquare’s features.

Foursquare will no longer send my activity to Twitter. >> update 29-April-2010: you may have noticed I recently turned Twitter updates from Foursquare back on.

My kids saw everywhere I went, and now they can’t. They tell me that’s a good thing; even my own children just weren’t interested in my moment-to-moment movements and periodic search for free WiFi. Occasionally, I got a funny response on Twitter from accounts that were set up specifically to annoy people who were broadcasting their movements the way I was.

And every now and then a real person would ping me back. But that opportunity for social networking interaction is no more. Ditto my use of AppAware, a program in my Droid that keeps me up on the latest trends in software for Android SmartPhones. I’m still using the software, but it’s no longer telling my Twitterverse when I add or remove software.

Why have I stopped using Twitter integration in AppAware and Foursquare? Because I was losing followers. Simply put, I was talking too much.

I’m not going to rant about the “right” way to do social networking. It’s simply: be genuine and bring value to the discussions you join. But in the quest for using social networking in your business change, keep an eye on what works and what doesn’t . . . and especially on what detracts. It seems that for now, automatic posts from one social networking platform to another may still be in that latter category.

Do you want to hear what I think of Tiger Woods’ apology-heard-round-the-world? I’ll tell you, but let me be clear this is a business change conversation, and not a gossip piece.

If you want to watch the entire speech Tiger gave today as apology for his recent behavior, you can see it here.

Here’s what I think: I don’t care how good a golfer this man is; I can’t look at him any more. I’m not making a moral judgment; Tiger Woods, like anyone, is a human being, and human beings make mistakes. We should all stay out of his personal life, period. Being a celebrity does indeed open you to scrutiny, but nobody needs to know what happens inside Tiger Woods’ home.

My brand-new issue in watching Tiger Woods is that as a superstar celebrity he needs to learn how to speak convincingly. I believe that he believed every word he uttered today, so sincerity isn’t technically in play here. But Tiger Woods gave a thirteen minute speech about the most intimate details of his life—or at least acknowledged them, which couldn’t have been easy—and sounded like a robot. John Kerry would have been President of the United States if he didn’t sound like a block of wood every time he spoke to the American people in 2000. And Senator Kerry’s subject matter on the campaign trail was never as personal as Tiger Woods’ was today.

This applies to you and your business.

In an era of ever-more social networking, where we blog, post details of our lives on Twitter and Facebook, and generally are more “with” people than ever before, it’s imperative that you’re perceived as “real”. Write and speak from the heart. Think hard about open processes and engagement . . . because pretty much everything you do and say is open.

Business Change is about change. Be social. Add value to conversations. Don’t be like Tiger Woods.

So it turns out that young people have stopped blogging.

Really? When were they?

It was only a few months ago that kids thought Twitter was stupid, and unsafe. Now, young people are embracing the world’s hottest social networking site in droves. But the impetus for this change isn’t that Twitter has become any better; the deal here is that regular blogging takes too long, while just spewing your thoughts 140 characters at a time is easy!

When I told you a few months ago that Miley Cyrus had stopped using Twitter, my commentary ran toward how bad a business decision that was. My recent comments about Kim Kardashian and her $10,000 Titter posts have been about business change in the advertising world and how things that look unimportant can be huge.

Then, there are my own recent thoughts that blogging, as important as it (or something like it) is to your future business success, might be “over” if only because there are so many blogs being written, often about the same thing. Clients ask me about that idea all the time. Is it too late to blog?

All of this ponits, ultimately, in the same direction: the amount of business change we’re going through at this moment in time might be unprecedented, and unique or not is a lot to manage. But manage it we must.

“Young people have moved from blogging to Twitter“? Then if you want to do business with them you’d better be there too, and understand how it works. Or, just do nothing; your competitors would love that.

Yesterday I came across an absolutely fascinating article about how much your Twitter Follower Count “matters”. It’s conclusion? Not at all. The article is ten months old, so this is a guy who was way ahead of his time in asking the question, witnessed by his reference to Ashton Kutcher trying to be the first person on Twitter with one million followers (he’s approaching 4.5 million as of today). That rate of increase, by the way, is a business change we could all live with.

He came to the conclusion that your follower count doesn’t matter. His point, well-taken as it was, was limited, though: the larger your follower count gets, the higher your percentage of not-real-people “followers” becomes.

A while back, I told you about Kim Kardashian ‘s deal to be paid $10,000 per tweet by certain advertisers. I suggested that paying that amount of money to reach 2.8 million opted-in receivers of an advertising message was a relative bargain. Now, in light of the story I read yesterday I ask: what’s the real number of people being reached?

And the answer is: nobody knows.

There are services that will look at your followers and offer an opinion on how many are garbage, but that’s the easy part; if it turns out that 80% of her followers are garbage does that mean that the other 20% actually read what she writes? No; and . . . we don’t know how many DO, and as far as I know there’s no tool that will tell you that.

In fact, even if Twitter wanted to try to answer that question, it couldn’t.

wI follow only about 50 people. Their tweets show up on my Droid. I scroll through them and scan for useful information, but let’s be honest: I miss a bunch. AND I’M ACTUALLY ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO GOES THAT FAR. My fifty people, by the time I pick up my phone each morning, generally create about 200 stacked up tweets; people who follow lots of big names can’t possibly keep up!

Twitter is in no position to say anything meaningful on the subject, so there’s truly no fix. So can you even get a meaningful CPM figure to decide whether paying for access to Kim Kardashian ‘s 2.8 million followers is worth it? No.

Nevertheless, this doesn’t invalidate the importance of social networking. Get on Twitter, and wherever else makes sense to you. Follow only people who are genuinely useful to you (ask us for help if you aren’t sure who that is).

And remember that business change, by its nature, is change. So don’t try to apply what you already “know”.

At least this one is over. Stay tuned for what’s next . . .

Last July, we told you about a young lady who, frustrated by the conditions in her rental housing, had posted on Twitter exactly what she thought about her landlord.

The landlord sued her for libel. Today, the case got thrown out.

I’d like to say “I told you so”, but I didn’t; not being an attorney I withheld opinion at the time. Now, with the court basically refusing to get involved one way or the other and going so far as to dismiss with prejudice (meaning the case can’t be refiled) my opinion deserves to be re-stated:

Business Change is hard, but unavoidable. USE TWITTER, but be careful how you do so.