DISQUS

Chris, if I didn't know better, I'd say that was a great peel off of my post on the quality of your social net. engagements.

Robert, The emergence of so many social nets has decreased our attention span but increased our interest in more things, and more communities-but also has reduced the types of participation, or the depth of that participation.

Nice Job Chris, where do the conscripts sign up?

Great post Scott, In fact I had just mentioned you and some of the others you highlighted in a rebuttal of a blog post of the top 50 most important people in social media. You guys were not on the list and I thought that therefore negated the purity of the list. I agree though we need to check ego at the door.

Adrianne, good point I notice some of the a-listers spend more time patting each other on the back and enagaging in witty dbl entendres with their peeps than they do sharing their knowledge and expertise-not that they're required to but still...

Here was my mistake as a community manager. I banned someone whose whole life was the community. Thinking that would be the end of it. I moved on. It was far from it. That person took it upon themselves to try and blow up (figuratively) every aspect of social media, myself, our brand, and my company was associated with. I had to "let" the person back in because it was easier to manage them under my watch. Big Lesson learned about the power of the community and the need to understand the players and not resort to knee jerk power trips.

Aaron, not the misery needs any more company but I too am going through some similar changes. It is truly a most volatile time in my life. As much as I think it's isolated to me, it is not. Does that give me solace? Absolutely not. I never talk about my personal life with anyone but decided to commiserate with you.

For me, I'm at the cross roads of my career. The cross roads prompted by the fact that I was given an ultimatum 3 months ago. I had till the end of October to generate more income for the company. Interesting statement given that I am not in a sales position. Made even moreso by the fact that the ceo is my sisters husband.

Trying to ignore that fact is very very difficult. Communication has dwindled to a cursory good morning and good evening. Uncomfortable would be a kind word in this case.

I'm not sure what the next few months will bring. Bankruptcy, being humbled, appreciating what you got, loving your immediate family, knowing who your true friends are, lack of sleep, stress, not eating, taking stock, resumes, brainstorming, applying for jobs, accepting the inevitable-all these thoughts and more come to mind.

I can relate on some levels what you're going through...

Marc

Steve, Think about all the times where someone asked what they should do and what should they say when faced with a difficult decision or conversation. Rather than just being honest we spend more time trying to lie, deceive and wiggle our way out of it. Reminds me of the people that work really hard not to work-seems sorta labor intensive and that being honest and truthfull is really easy and not very labor intensive???

I'm stuck on "you can't manage what you can't measure" so for a lot of people unfortunately-their knee jerk reaction is to see where this person is online via search. So their measurement is going to be how "out there" are they. Resume's are a snapshot, but instead of it being the only measuring stick along with references, there is now this compendium or body of work that can now support it that person's resume.

Scoble, it's because they are guilty of the echo syndrome. They repeat what they read and don't really formulate an expressed opinion. They're not blogging to express themselves, they're blogging perhaps because they have to, or they have an ulterior motive. I'm so tired of the me-too blogging phenomenon.

With all the social media networking sites that are now available-you'd better be on them and, you'd better be consistent. That means LinkedIn and Facebook and Friend Feed and your corp.site and your blog etc etc. BTW, I'm looking for some collaborators on a cool project that won't pay anything. Hit me up.

Hi Robert, Here's my solution, it's so simple. but I have to do something:

http://emersondirect.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/s...

Hi Dan, I commented on David's blog post and just wanted to throw out to you some key talking point that keep bubbling up over and over and over again.

Character, Ethics, Honesty, Respect, Listening, Being Human etc.

It would appear to me that adhering to these tenets and beliefs "In the longterm" would be the framework for any marketing endeavor, social media or not. It doesn't matter if it's 200, 2000, or 2 years ago.

We all talk about social media as this wonderous thing that is now extending the conversation and it very well may be, but I'm dumbfounded when people say the way to be successful in social media is to be genuine, truthfull, transparent, and honest. It's as if those things are not needed elsewhere or it's as if we're discovering them for the very first time. Kind of like saying,"Hey you know what,? this honesty thing really works"!

Having just seen the echo manifest itself on a larger scale at the web 2.0 expo in NYC. I'm all for taking off the me-too fucking glasses and seeing a new approach to everything that is associated with SM.

OK, all right already, most of us get it. Why? because we sit around and re-hash it, over think it, and we talk about it, and talk about it some more, and then we pat each other on the back and wonder why others don't get it.

They don't get it because we AREN'T talking to them. We're just talking to ourselves. It's like we're stuck in an elevator. The people that we follow on twitter, the people that read our blogs, those are OUR peeps. Wanna know why the conversation is getting tiresome? There's your answer.

We all might as well wait for the timer to go off and pull the fries out of the oil, because thats how mundane it's getting talking about the same shit, and recreating the same app, or same site, over and over and over again.

I'm all for taking this in another direction. I don't care who drives. Let's just fucking go.

Lorraine, you're right. Different outfits for different occassions. The only difficulty I see is maintaining more than one outfit. Makes me wonder what Richard@dell is going to do should he ever leave... I'm going to have the same problem since I work for Emerson Direct and my screen name for a lot of my social media personas is for them and not Marc Meyer. I would like to try and separate them and it's a task that looms on the horizon. The question is how do you transition when so much of what has been done up to this point has been done on behalf of one's company and not for the personal brand. Chris..any thoughts?

I'm as guilty as we all are sometimes, but I think for some of us, we are pushing out information and want to stay on point. I do think that variety is the spice of life, so it's important to step outside and look in to see whats going on. I personally love hearing different opinions and different POV's on the same subject, and thus we can write about the same topic from a different angle and that keeps it's fresh.

Lets take Video games, the biggest name in sports, mash it with YouTube, WOMM, viral marketing, and sprinkle the ability to not take one's self to seriously and you have magic. Whoever thought of this, keep them and give them a raise.

Charles, very timely. I've been in heated discussions about this over the last week and a half. To the extent that I have a forthcoming post on this. But here is an angle from the other side http://emersondirect.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/h...

Its all about engagement and ROI, the chicken or the egg and what are you looking for. Obviously we all want to make money, but perhaps most do not realize that this is not your 1980's business model of intrusive, in your face marketing. It's even more than Godin's permission based marketing.

Marc

and the second half- http://emersondirect.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/s...

Hey David, here is a primer that might help-http://emersondirect.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/the-definitive-list-of-what-social-media-is-not/

Marc

Chris, I think it might be important to differentiate online personal branding versus offline. Think about what we all do offline in regards to maintaining an offline brand persona. One's offline image may be no less important than the online. And ironically, some of the critical components to developing a quality personal brand online are just as important offline as well, namely to be genuine, to be real, and hopefully observe some decorum of civility and decency. The parallels are there, it's just some choose to talk the talk. I think if we all had to choose one brand to maintain. It would be the offline brand. At the end of the day, it's the face to face transactions with loved ones, close friends and our partners that matter most. It's what they think of us that matters to us.

Marc

I look at #4 speaking more to the mobile social aspect rather than the portability aspect, but in a sense, they are both somewhat similar in their goal. The social as a more portable, fluid entity.

Marc

Whitney, I lived in the Burgh for quite a while and have had numerous friends from CMU who used to talk about him, I then moved to Florida awhile back and heard about the last lecture via the PG. It was at that point that I blogged about Randy Pausch and basically followed every step of his life.

it was with a tremendous amount of sadness that I heard about him this morning and it was like being punched. Good people are taken from us far too soon and he was one of the good people.

Thanks for writing this.

Marc

Interesting.There's a good takeaway from this. Here's mine:

If you're blogging or tweeting, it has to be clear cut why you're doing it, but there also HAS to be an end game result in all of it as well. I do this(Insert social media activity here) because it will____________ and the result of that will be__________

Nice rant

As I'm reading this, I get a tweet from her. Unbelievable. Very odd and ironic...

so what do we call twitter spam then?

Chris, good post, couple of points...

First, I can never say "goodbye" and I can never say "no", and with that being said, I'm exceedingly nice to people who might be longwinded. So I had to do something.

Somehow, and I'm not sure how it happened, it may have just been some brutally honest twig that snapped in me, but interestingly enough seems to have spread virally amongst my friends and colleagues is this: When I have nothing else to say, I just say, "that's all I got". And the conversation ends right there, no harm no foul.. and we're all satisfied, and we walk away. This generally covers phone conversations but...

What to do at the dinner party or conference? What seems to work is similar to what happens in some chat scenarios. I use the ole brb. So I'm talking and if I see the other person glazing over or vice versa, I just bust out the brb and it's an acceptable out for both parties. It offers nothing more than a, "hey I'll cya later". Which is cool.

Lastly, the way I get out of the having to say goodbye is, what my friends and colleagues have called pulling a "Meyer". Which infers this, "Where's Meyer"? I don't know, he was just here a second ago. At which point they all shrug their shoulders and life goes on. Meanwhile, I have slipped out, 15 minutes ago....

Lastly, Lastly, I agree, "what do you do" questions make me cringe. The answers certainly do not define the sum total of the individual that is truly inside all of us, it only defines what pays the bills. The interesting stuff, is what we find interesting, and what truly is our passion. I wonder what types of conversations we would have if we started it by asking what each others passions were...