0Posted by Nate Ludens on January 12, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Here’s a selfish little pet peeve of mine that I wish to see the death of in 2011: Internet Muscles.
I have used this phrase for a couple years now, and I have no idea if I’m the original person to coin the phrase, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Some people are real tough-guys online, hiding behind anonymity or the “out there” that the internet provides. Newspapers and Facebook Pages really bring out this phenomenon. Here’s some examples:
1. I’m in a long line. Any line. A restaurant. A drive through. A grocery store. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. I tweet scathing words about it, I facebook it warning my friends not to ever come here. I Yelp! I’m proud that I can share this with the “out there” and face no real downside. Honestly, it’s a pot-shot and an ego trip. Who am I? Just a dude in line, right? Who are they? Some busy, underpaid, overworked folks with sore feet, most likely.
2. A fan (Okay, a “Like”) on Facebook. Say it’s a sports team. They’re changing goalies. They make a trade and lose my favorite player. We’re comment-makin’ fools! We’re all veteran team General Manger’s all of a sudden!
3. You comment on a news story. You get to lobby for whatever you support (truth or fiction) in the comments section under a controversial (or not) story. You know this lends ZERO credibility. Especially when you sign it “yousucknewswriterX” Real nice. Meet you after school at the flag pole, tough-guy.
Look, the game has changed. The expectations of “the other side” of social media has elevated. What? You have a problem? Companies are EXPECTED to be watching their feeds real time 24/7 to respond to a client or reader’s every need, no matter how small. Here’s what I think:
Change your game, too! Be polite when you tweet. Be understanding. Be HUMAN. Don’t flex your internet muscles.
Instead of whining incessantly online with your newfound power, have some respect. Could you do it as a DM? An email? Ask a question first. You never know, there could be someone working overtime just in case you have a problem at a given establishment. Or on vacation with his or her family, even. The company social media representatives take one for the team – just for you! They fight to give people the opportunity to… blindside them with complaints?! Yes, they do. Because the social media representatives at companies love what they do and the possibilities of being a part of this revolution in commerce and communication.
If you read traditional business media, you frequently hear about how challenging it can be for a company to integrate social media as a legitimate division to open up a real dialogue with you – the patron – to give you what you want- and more: Free meals, free tickets, free vacations, discounts, coupons, checkin specials, and on and on… Pretty nice folks, if you ask me.
So please, lose the juvenile, playground mentality and recognize when you’re flexing your Internet Muscles.
0Posted by Nate Ludens on December 2, 2010 at 10:56 pm
I recently discovered Serj Tankian’s Elect The Dead Symphony Album and I’m thinking of buying the movie and/or LP. I’m super impressed when a band busts out of a mold like this. Serj did it big time by going from System Of A Down to a solo gig with a 70-pc orchestra. I commented to my wife that I was blown away when I heard Sky Is Over on SIRIUS the other day.
My wife asks: “Why does this one impress you so much?” and “What’s so different from what Serj did and what Metallica did?” [S&M was a similar project a few years ago: Symphonic Metallica, or something like that. I didn't jive with it much, but my wife liked it].
Here’s what I said, pretty much:
“Serj and System get to you. They irritate and pry into you with crazy heavy rock and random melodies, but they do it with a silly top coat and scathing ferocious humanitarian undertones. Metallica does one thing, whether they admit it or not: kick the world in the balls as the best damn metal band on the planet. Every time they try to break that mold, I usually hate it. Dude, when the black album came out, I liked it – but only a tenth of the way I liked the other Metallica records. I absolutely hated St. Anger. Still do. Lars sounds like he’s beating on pans on that record. (Bought it and sold it back a few days later. I think I traded it in for some punk records in Laramie, Wyoming. Anyway – back to the comparison and why I love symphonic Serj and not symphonic Metallica.) Serj and System have the versatility and the creativity to chant, sing, dance and goof off. They’re unpredictable. Metallica – nope. Just kick our asses. I think they’re back on track with that when they hired Rick Rubin, the baddest producer on the planet, to do Death Magnetic. Holy crap. That record is phenomenal. There are original riffs on a new tune like I had’t heard in a decade. I credit Rubin for identifying the strengths and weaknesses. Still, I hope they stay away from the Symphony and the other experiments. There’s nothing wrong with being the best damn metal band on the planet, ya know?”
Ended that conversation, for sure. I don’t think she wanted all that, but I think she got her answer… I think.
Live, Raw and Hilarious – Feel The Steel! This show was a photographer’s dream. I interviewd frontman Michael Starr for the Station Casinos Blog recently. What a kick in the pants. Great show, too. Let’s wish them luck landing a show on Comedy Central. I’d watch it. Well, I’d Tivo it. Links to the 2-part interview are below the flickr slideshow below.
Like Peter Griffin once said so eloquently on Family Guy: “You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?”
Phone books.
Does anyone else think it’s monumentally hypocritical that this giant yellow PLASTIC bag with recycling logos all over it contains a heavy block of paper that will never see the light of day is back on your doorstep?
Dear Yellowbook:
Wanna save some money? Make your product-of-yesteryear OPT-IN, instead of OPT-OUT. I have opted out of every one of these darn things for the last few years, and I keep getting them from Sprint, Embarq, CenturyLink, Yellowbook, etc. Seemingly every month or two! Do you really think that guy you’re paying more minimum than minimum wage gives a crap if I opted out of this travesty? Doubt it. He just wants his beer money and to get on with the weekend, I’d guess. He probably doesn’t care about the karma of slaughtering acres and acres of woodland for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Apparently, neither do you.
Thanks,
The people of 2010
P.S. Whatever smoke you’re blowing up your advertisers butts about impressions… Yeah, probably also not so good in the karma dept.
Of course they are. But there’s a few no-brainers I want to shed some light on that can help your company save some money and evolve your 12 point piece of paper into a conversation piece, instead of something someone writes notes on.
1. Retail & sales contacts need cards. Back of the house staff don’t. Save yourself some dough and make a company card for those who don’t need a lot of them.
2. Don’t use a template that came with Microsoft Word/Publisher, etc. There’s a reason nobody uses clip art anymore. It’s garbage. Usually these are the wrong resolution, the wrong color mode, and incompatible with any professional software your printer can work with. Pay for a real designer who knows what it means to build a cohesive brand identity for your company.
3. Don’t have cheap cards. If you do, I fully expect you to show up to your next business meeting in sweatpants and a torn, stained white shirt, because you clearly don’t value first impressions.
4. Websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, eLance, etc. won’t kill the business card industry. Why? Not everyone has bump (or an iPhone, for that matter), and what are you going to give people at mixers, bars and golf courses?
Want some cards designed? Email me, maybe I can help.
Be smart about Social Networking. It’s a concept that some people aren’t familiar with.
Go where your clients are. i.e. if they’re on Facebook, be on Facebook. Don’t just “keep up with the Joneses” – find new, innovative ways to utilize these social tools. Be creative! Don’t just have a MySpace page for your business just to have one. I used MySpace to find models for photo sessions, Facebook to invite people to events, Twitter to tell someone your plane is delayed. (Side note: I used to think “who gives a shit if you’re stuck in traffic or going to lunch?” when I saw someone’s tweet. Now I get it. Hey – Social Media is all opt-in, after all).
Old-School businesspeople are up in arms (it seems) about “Is it making you money?” You will never see a dollar = time ROI from Social Media. It’s ridiculous to expect one. Just as it’s ridiculous to expect every person who sees your billboard to buy your product. It’s different in that you can engage your clientele like a billboard never could – so engage. Or get the hell off Facebook and concentrate on updating your company website or design some new business cards or something. Lots of creatives use Social Networking in brilliant ways (proofs, feedback, events, tips, etc.)
Oh, and it’s FREE.
*Part of this post was originally content from my comment on this blog post by FreelanceSwitch. FreelanceSwitch is The Undisputed Heavyweight Champion Resource for Freelancers. If you don’t subscribe, you should. Go there now. Thank me later.
I read an outstanding article on Rob Hahn’s blog today telling us why social media might be all hype. It was excellent. Please feel free to go read it and come back here when you finish. On the same note: while attending Blogworld Expo last week, I attended more than one course focused on trying to make sense out of this phenomenon – is social media a fad, a.k.a “all hype?” Or, is it legit. Is there a return on investment – and how do we profit? After a few weeks of swimming in social media, I wanted to share my conclusion: It’s not all hype. It’s just an over-analyzed, tech-driven revolution.
Social media’s popularity has grown side by side with society’s intolerance for bullshitters. We want to trust authority, but we just can’t. Its high time for a revolution in reliable messaging.
I don’t need to tell you how badly Americans have been bullshitted into this current economic depression. You already work harder than ever for less return. You pay more taxes than ever, and have very little influence on anything remotely democratic through “trusted” traditional arenas. (Election recount, anyone?). So we use our computers and social media as our collective voice. Obama won the last Presidential election in large part by trusting a young visionary who took a leave of absence from his other job – at Facebook. (Brilliant, in my humble opinion). Sarah Palin’s doing it now, too, so says Mr Hahn’s blog post. John McCain has 1.5 Million Twitter followers! Read that again. It’s kind of funny to see an old war vet politician tweeting. Still, that’s one beauty of social media – everyone’s finally created equal.
Social sites are shifting retail like crazy because consumers don’t want crap! We prefer quality, but we don’t trust advertising bullshitters because we don’t have much money and we need to stretch our dollar (due to the afore-mentioned political bullshitters), so we read User-Generated Content (UGC) like product reviews and ratings. There’s bullshitters there, too – but for some reason, it’s more genuine, as a whole, to read these reviews. (There’s numbers to prove this stuff if you want them, go to YouTube and Search “socialnomics.”)
These are a couple examples of the allure of SM and how it drives technology. There’s countless others: newspapers, magazines, sports, renting movies, real estate, the classified ads, ordering a pizza, porn (the pioneers, probably) and the ten o’clock news.
Middlemen are an endangered species because of social media. They’re synonymous with bullshitters, to me, in most cases. Middlemen get in the way, they can filter the truth, add cost, and frankly, they just slow us down.
The new consumer wants it now, and if you tell us that we can’t have it now – we’ll control-alt-delete your ass and find a way to get it directly and immediately. It = everything.
In summary, there’s no way in hell this is all hype.
Special thanks to Ryan Weber from Radiant Photography for sharing this video developed by Scofield Editorial. It’s painfully relevant in 2009. I couldn’t have demonstrated this practice any better. It’s basically robbery, and it happens to creatives all the time.
I gathered my mail tonight and saw that my annual AIGA | Aquent Survey of Design Salaries 2009 arrived. I rolled my eyes and thought to myself, “Great, just what Las Vegas creatives need: a reminder of how much money everyone left with a job in our profession is making.” From my involvement in a various creative organizations here in Sin City, I can tell you that we have a pretty bitter bunch here “in times like these,” since the design, print and advertising industries have been dragged through the mud over the last year and most are still wallowing in it, collecting unemployment checks, bidding against craigslist, or packing their boxes and moving back to wherever they came from in hopes for a new start. (I read today that the Venetian & Palazzo laid off 200 more employees – in the last 3 days).
You might be able to tell, but since I first saw one, back in 1998-ish, I haven’t been a big fan of this Design Survey.* But check this out: I’m going to recommend that every creative who reads this gets their hands on this publication. The first 15 pages of this document are freakin’ priceless. Kudos to each of the ten senior creatives who share their advice on what the heck creatives should be doing right now. Some are very Dad-like: “Adjust your expenses,” “Be stingy with your money,” and “Be broadly talented” – but some are absolutely brilliant! There’s something relevant to everyone in each essay. To my dismay, more than one said “hunker down” – which has replaced “times like these” as my new most hated catch phrase. It’s so G.W. Bush.
* Look, AIGA and Aquent, it’s nothing personal, it’s just that the cities I have resided in over the last decade are not fairly represented in the survey – Cheyenne, Denver and Las Vegas. These were or are currently lumped into vague “Mountain and Pacific” categories. This survey, our organizations and publications all do their best to impersonate the antiquated Electoral College. Huh, you say? That is, they ignore and discredit creatives from small cities and rural areas. Anyone can tell you that salaries in Las Vegas don’t resemble the same positions in L.A., San Francisco or Seattle. Never has, never will. I will urge my local AIGA chapter to push for better representation for the 2010 survey. Let me know if you need names & numbers.
