Jim Louderback of Revision3.com has a great article up at JackMyers.com entitled “Murphy-Goode Wines Social Media Campaign Goes Horribly Wrong” about the companies recent trip to the Internet woodshed over their handling of I-celeb Martin…
The “Special Sauce” for news media has always been investigative journalism, ala Woodward and Bernstein. It’s what made myself and an entire generation of young writers want to get into journalism back in the 1970’s,…
My father used to tell a story from his youth, growing up in the depression with my Grandmother and my Great Aunt Sue, the family matriarch and a woman whose strength I never fully appreciated in my youth. There were rules which Aunt Sue used to keep the family together, and one of those was “No Day Laborers.”
It was tough times in Dorchester, Ma during the Great Depression. As it turned out, that rule worked quite well for the family. It was also taken loosely to also banish “jack of all trades.”
What’s that got to do with new media? Well, I see a lot of “new media specialists” in twitter, on friendfeed, etc. these days. It reminds me of the distant past when I started working on the web, I started as a webmaster (you haven’t heard that job description for a while, have you?). You see, then the field was so new, it was the province of the generalist. We had to know a little about everything, from server management, to installing code libraries, to writing and debugging scripts, SEO, SEM, community management, advertising, etc. Each of those areas of knowledge now is its own particular specialty, with people who devote virtually all their time to thinking about it. In that transition, the need for a real webmaster died.
Over the past couple weeks we’re seeing a lot of folks coming around to the view I express last year:
The thing that calls it all into question for me is the number of people who are generally ex-online marketing folks now using strange titles like “Social Media User Guru” or something equally ludicrous. It reminds me of a networking group I once attended that turned out to be a room full of sales people, each hoping to sell something, and none realizing there weren’t any real customers there.
As the astute Esteban Glas points out here, both Robert Scoble and Joel Mark Whitt decry that which Witt calls “Social Media Incest”. As I have said many times before: when the when the communication in the medium is mostly about the medium, the medium has failed.
You’d think it wouldn’t be hard this year to come up with a list of the ten worst autos, but indeed, with so many trying so hard, the folks at TheTruthAboutCars.com have had a real…
Paul Gillin posted on a topic that I’ve been mulling over for the past few days: Branded Communities. I’ve said it in the past and I will say it again here and now: why would…
The idea: to run a live Tweet stream from the varied events of the Sutton, Ma Chain of Lights, a celebration that happens at many different locations thoughout the town and its villages. I used my Iphone with the Twitterlator Application that lets me post pictures direct to Twitter with pictures that I take on my phone uploaded right at that moment. The tweets all contain the hashtag #suttoncol – short for Sutton Chain of Lights which make them searchable via the Twitter search function, formerly known as Summize. You can check out the full tweet stream here.
Additionally we (my 9 year old daughter Mackenzie helped me with this) took photos at the events we attended with my Canon Power Shot A530 5 megapixel point and shoot camera.
Why Would You Bother: Sutton, like many small communities, doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the local paper, The Worcester Telegram, and substantially less from the television stations. Even if they did send someone out to cover the events, they’d have gone to a single location, took a quick couple pictures, or did a quick standup talking to some happy kids, then they’d have been off to their next assignment. Local events are naturals for crowd sourcing, and what better way to do it than live tweeting with a hashtag, posting a photo gallery, etc.
When I sat down last week to add pictures to the National Gallery and Gift Shop site to help publicize the event, I was surprised to find there were no pictures online anywhere from the Chain of Lights last year, save a few marketing shots by The Vaillancourt Folk Art Museum.
PC Magazine announced last week that their January issue would be the last issue they actually print, from then on, they’re a web-only publication. From The New York Times: It is the latest of…
Yes, sometimes it’s in our best interest to do something we don’t really want to do, to literally kiss the pig. Nothing could better typify this than the great ad debate, that age old…
Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy. Wow – read the post before this first. Then read this. Here’s where we’re going, folks. This is earth shattering. The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in…