2011: End of Year Wins

Twitter released their official Year in Review “Hot Topics” for 2011.

Much to my surprise and excitement, the inspirational hashtag Maria Shriver and I created back in March — #threewordstoliveby — was the #3 most popular hashtag on Twitter, following #egypt and #tigerblood. Amazing! And, even after 10 months, people are still tweeting their three words to live by.

In addition, a FastCompany blog recently included Maria Shriver on a list of the “7 Greatest Communications Successes of 2011.” For those who don’t want to click away and read the article in its entirety, here is the section that references Maria Shriver.

Maria Shriver: Shriver handled her husband’s very public betrayal in a way consistent with our times. She had recently established herself as a leader in the women’s empowerment movement, one of the characteristics of which is telling it like it is in the daily act of juggling work and family. She reached out to her legions of followers by releasing a series of unglamorous, do-it-yourself videos in which she asked for their advice about getting through tough times. This endearing tactic cemented the relationship all but ensuring attendance at future Maria-sponsored events.

Onward to 2012…

- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

The Traditional Script: Just Flip It

Maria Shriver interviews philanthropist Wallis Annenberg and wows on the cover of the special October “L.A. Woman” issue of Los Angeles magazine.

When everybody expects you to do one thing, do something else.

Every Tech Company Needs a Dennis Crowley

Ad Age’s Edmund Lee wrote an absorbing profile of Dennis Crowley, co-founder and chief executive of Foursquare, that attributed his company’s success largely to his media and marketing-savvy rather than his technological prowess.

While it may be curious that advertisers, investors, and Foursquare’s ever-growing horde of users continue to maintain faith in the company’s fortunes, this allegiance has almost entirely to do with the enchantments of a single person: Mr. Crowley. He is part of this late generation of entrepreneurs — showmen and polymaths, ringleaders of a geeky, sometimes awkward sort who dominate whatever conversation they’re having. But unlike other internet celebrity founder-CEOs — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Larry Page — Mr. Crowley isn’t a master of computer science or an impresario of technology. His particular talent, according to those who know him, lies in his awareness of something his more highly remunerated contemporaries are often criticized for lacking: how media works.

“I’m not an engineer,” he says. “I tell the story. That’s what I do.”

His early boss in the ad business agrees. “He’s one of the best storytellers of his generation,” Michael Duda, the ad exec and entrepreneur, tells me. “He comes from a marketing-journalism background, and he knows how to tell a story and killer products tell a great story.”

It’s easy to forget that the principle responsibility of any CEO is to be their company’s Chief Story Teller or Chief Evangelist. So many tech start-ups are led by engineering geniuses, not storytelling ones. The skill can certainly be taught — as a communications consultant, I can attest to that — but just ask Apple what it means to have a natural storytelling talent at the helm of a technology company.

- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

A Comment on Comments

The Huffington Post celebrated its 100 millionth comment this week and, as a measure of audience engagement, it’s an arresting statistic and a remarkable achievement. There’s no question that comment sections and website forums can, if moderated based on clear policies and strict guidelines, create satisfying conversations and a sense of community around content. The sheer number of people who feel empowered to opine, preach, expound, rebut and respond on any given article and topic area across the social web proves that people are getting something meaningful out of the experience.

But let’s face it: many website comment boards are among the scariest places on earth. When not littered with spam and trolls, a downward mouse scroll often feels like a descent into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the majority of comments are, at their best, uncivil and, at their worst, sociopathic.

How can a social technology so often lead to such anti-social behavior?

The Observer’s Tim Adams, who dubbed the times we are living in as the “age of rage,” offered up an answer recently:

The psychologists call it “deindividuation”. It’s what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under “normal” circumstances they would not have considered.

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.

- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

Twitter: Much Ado About 140 Characters

Ezra Klein shared an interesting insight today into Twitter’s success.

Forget the 140-character limit: it’s not the platform’s forced brevity that has led to its popularity. Klein suggests that Twitter’s key differentiation (from Facebook, at least) was putting this insight into practice: that the “circle of people you want to follow and the circle of people who want to follow you are not necessarily the same.”

Yes, I buy that. And I think he’s right that Google+ can overtake Twitter at some point in the future because it incorporates this useful asymmetry, but it’s not “hindered by the 140-character limit.”

I was optimistic about Google+ from the beginning, but mostly because I thought it would offer a chance to create the sort of private social network that Facebook originally was, but eventually evolved away from. But it turns out that Google+ retains Twitter’s appreciation of asymmetrical social networks: people can follow you without you following them, and you can choose to broadcast messages to them, and they can reply, and so on. I’ve been experimenting with this over the last few days and have been really surprised and impressed by how rich the resulting discussions are. It’s really highlighted the drawbacks of the 140-character limit and made Twitter a lot less appealing to me.

That’s been a surprise. I thought Google+ would be a better private social network than Facebook, and that’s proven true, at least for me. But I didn’t expect it to be a better public social network than Twitter. At this point, however, Twitter seems good for posting links, making jokes about live events that everyone is watching at once, and, on my private account, informing friends which bar I’m at. Google+ is better for posting interesting quotations, actual thoughts, and having real conversations. That’s a much more engaging set of activities, and so my guess is I’ll end up spending more of social-network energy on Google+.

- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

More Social, Less Self?

Are we becoming so “social” that we are losing our selves?

Zadie Smith seems to think so (an oldie but goodie):

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

Books, Meet Your Future: Our Choice App

If happiness is about managing expectations, then books are seriously stoked right now.

We humans were promised hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes and our bitterness knows no limits. But thanks to Push Pop Press and former Vice President Al Gore, books can rest assured that their evolution is in safe hands.

The book-app they created provides an immersive experience that brings Our Choice, Gore’s book about the solutions to climate change, to full digital life. With all the interactive multimedia (photos, video, audio, geolocation), the experience more closely resembles game play than reading.

Frankly, the environmental movement needed this shot in the arm. It has been on life support recently.

When Apple first launched the iPhone and iPad, the company messaged the products as magical and revolutionary. I now understand that positioning as less hyperbole and brand braggadocio than a statement about the promise and potential that others would help them fulfill.

Through this app, the iPad’s potential is being realized.

Oh, and by the way. The crisis of climate change is, in fact, real. And there are solutions. Alas, only if more legislators could get their hands on a iPad and take less crazy pills.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

Tim Sanders Invites You To Enter The Good Loop

Books make the greatest gifts — to give and to receive.

Even if I have a stack of shiny new books vying for my attention, I’ll crack open the book a friend or colleague has given to me (or recommended to me) before all others.

Such was the case with Tim Sanders‘ new book, Today We Are Rich. A colleague gave me an autographed copy recently and it immediately went to the top of the lineup.

I don’t typically devour motivational self-help books. I’ll often skim their surfaces or jump around from chapter to chapter and stop when something strikes me as personally relevant. But I read Today We Are Rich cover to cover because it was a different kind of self-help book.

For starters, it had a strong narrative and chapter sequence that built on itself. More importantly, though, the book is about achieving and leveraging a true sense of confidence that comes from living beyond one’s self in the service of others.

That beyond-self message is conveyed in a folksy, commonsensical and down-to-earth tone centered on the wisdom and life lessons passed down to Tim by the grandmother-sage who raised him, Billye King Coffman.

True to the spirit of the its message, Today We Are Rich doesn’t try to be anything but immensely helpful, providing a lifetime’s worth of tried and true tips, tidings, tools and takeaways.

The loving — yes, loving (that’s Tim’s thing) — spirit of the book was captured best in the epilogue:

You see, by making a difference in my life and later noticing and accepting it, Billye entered the good loop of life. She’s got rocket fuel, an endless supply of it… This is a place I want to end up, a virtuous cycle, where I can make a different to others and let the results continually refresh my soul and body. And I’m excited to know that it’s possible, as long as I’m willing to faithfully practice the timeless principles Billye handed down to me. I invite you into this loop too. It’s big enough for all of us.

I love the phrase, “the good loop of life.” What a great way to describe what social responsibility, social media and social marketing — being “social” — is all about. When organizations and individuals come together, not as companies and consumers but as citizens with a common cause, they really do enter “the good loop” together.

So, what are the 7 principles that will put you on the path to the good loop of life?

1. Feed Your Mind Good Stuff
2. Move The Conversation Forward
3. Exercise Your Gratitude Muscle
4. Give To Be Rich
5. Prepare Your Self
6. Balance Your Confidence
7. Promise Made, Promise Kept

That’s the skeleton. You’ll have to read the book to get the meat off those bones.

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

Pepsi’s Social Vending: Consumer Mousetrap?

In its apparent quest to exceed every company in the world at being “social,” PepsiCo announced that it has designed a social component into its vending machines. What was once just a mundane, transactional and (better yet) anonymous experience has now been made social by the ability to give away your friend’s valuable contact information while you “gift” them a drink.

A prototype of the “Social Vending System” debuted this week at an incredibly wonky-sounding trade show — the National Automatic Merchandising Association’s One Show in Chicago. I’m kicking myself for not requesting a media credential.

While I applaud companies for doing something truly innovative in this space (and the Pepsi Refresh Project was just that), what this vending technology seems to really be about is how to take a consumer touch-point, apply social wrapping and a piece of social cheese, and turn it into a consumer mousetrap.

At its heart, I think being a “social company” is about transforming customers into better citizens, not better consumers.

I have a different standard for what constitutes a social technology. And “Social Vending” just doesn’t meet that standard.

What do you think?

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
- COMMENT ON THIS

- Matthew DiGirolamo

Publicists: The Social Media Clean Up Crews

It seems every week brings another high-profile social media mishap. I’ve been saying this for a long time and wrote about it recently: social media isn’t a job for interns. Well, according to the NY Times, social media isn’t a job for celebrities either.

This line summed up the perils of celebrity tweeting best for me:

“I don’t think about it as if I’m talking to a reporter,” he said of Twitter. “It’s a bit strange.”

It’s very easy for a celebrity to be lulled into the false impression that they are only communicating to their own followers and fans.

On an intellectual level, celebrities know that every tweet or Facebook post is public information broadly available to the media. But the casual directness, immediacy, intimacy, and one-to-one engagement that social media affords can confuse that understanding.

Most celebrities are natural performers. They intuitively know what will make their fans happy and social media allows them real-time feedback and confirmation of their instincts. Yet, what may serve, amuse or charm one’s own “community” may not play well in a wider context. What hits the spot for one group may badly miss the mark for another.

There are simply no walls around social media performances, and that’s a painful lesson many celebrities learn.

When asked, my advice is always — apply a filter. And I’m sure that advice is music to a publicist’s ears.

- Matthew DiGirolamo