michael lynch

There’s a video of Jay-Z going around on a streetcar talking to an elderly woman and I’m sure he’s a really nice guy, but just because he rides the subway doesn’t necessarily make him a “man of the people.” Recall during the Occupy protests his company Rocawear profited off t-shirts that read “Occupy All the Streets” and despite being pressured by the media to donate their profits from the shirts to the movement, he decided not to. Worse, only months later, he dissociated himself from the movement criticizing their ambiguity. If he was confused about the movement and truly passionate about the people he would have gone to the parks, sat down with the protestors and tried harder to understand their concerns. Instead he made a quick buck off their efforts and months later got on a streetcar to film a PR stunt to redeem himself.

Micro bits of media like this come at us so rapidly and so frequently that it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture. Think of Kony 2012. Everyone was so quick to share that video without doing their research, which could have taken a whole two minutes to Google the charity name. We need to get better at thinking critically. A two minute Youtube video isn’t enough to stand on it’s own.

Like I said, I’m sure Jay-Z is a really nice guy (I’m aware he’s donated a lot of money to relief charities) and I know he’s a very successful entrepreneur – for that I have much respect for him. The point of this post isn’t to take anything from Jay-Z, but simply to remind you to think critically about each piece of media we consume. Why was it made? What was the objective of making it? What will it accomplish? How will it be used? etc… Ask these types of questions and we’ll all have a better understanding of the whole.

I personally don’t use lists at all but I find myself being added to lists related to user experience, web development, design and such. I presume whoever added me to their list either saw one of my tweets related to whatever topic it is they’re categorizing their list by, or did a search for a keyword in which my profile was returned as a relevant result for what they were looking for. In any case, adding me to their list doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, because most of what I tweet isn’t related to a single subject.

This is why, for the most part, Twitter lists work best to categorize users based on your relationship with them and not on what they tweet. The reason for this is that people’s tweets are too diverse to categorize. It makes sense to have a “Best Friends” or “Family” list, but maybe not a “Musicians” or “Web Developers” list because musicians and web developers are complex individuals who often tweet content that isn’t necessarily related to their expertise. In fact, users may not tweet anything about their expertise at all. If that were the case, categorizing them by their expertise wouldn’t make any sense, and even if they did tweet content relevant to their expertise, they would probably tweet enough unrelated content that it still wouldn’t make much sense to define them by it.

However, all of this this only applies to regular people. It’s a much different case for brands, organizations and the like because companies generally do only tweet content that is relevant to their industry. Therefore categorizing them in a list based on their industry such as “Oil”, “Banks”, or “Beverages” would make sense because you can count on these users to tweet only what is relevant. For instance, whoever is running the Pepsi twitter account likely isn’t going to tweet about their lunch or weekend activities. They’re going to tweet about it’s products, events, campaigns and possibly the beverage industry in general – in a nutshell, all things Pepsi.

Anyone in marketing today will know how important being or at least knowing an influencer is. For those of you who aren’t sure what an influencer is, an influencer can be understood as someone who has the ability to convince those around them (or in the digital word, those who follow them or are “friends” with them) that something is cool and worthy of your attention (this of course is why marketers promoting products love influencers). An influencer gets people on board. They are honest, insightful and informative. They posses qualities that others admire. They know what’s cool before it is cool. People want to be influencers because they are given an audience and more importantly, respect.

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Blogging implies the idea of consistently and frequently generating content where it is acceptable to produce a large quantity of work that likely isn’t the best it could be. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. This type of content can be praised for it’s raw form (read: it’s lack of editing) because what is revealed is the process and evolution of thought, not an “end product.”

Not long ago the credit crisis crashed the stock market (watch how this happened in The Crisis of Credit Visualized by Jonathan Jarvis) having a ripple effect throughout global economics and forcing the United States to make a contribution of $700 billion to bailout the banks of America.

Arguably it was predictable since the events of The Great Depression in the 1930′s, one of many events known as an economic bubble. Credit, the dot com and oil for example are all bubbles that have or will soon burst. Like any other bubble, social networks, namely those predicted to go public in 2012 like Facebook and LinkedIn, are vulnerable. Look no further than Digg (although never made public) to see how quick an application can change and unfortunately burst as we have seen in the past.

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It seems to me that commentary on businesses leveraging social media focuses merely on companies having an account and “using” that account frequently. I’m not sure why we stop there though because it goes much further than that. Yes, most often a company should have an account on Facebook and Twitter and engage with their audience but how they engage is what is really important to me. I don’t want to say hello – I want service!

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