Entries from June 2009 ↓

Nobody likes criticism, but novelist Alice Hoffman may have taken her anger a little too far when she turned to Twitter to vent her frustrations about a negative book review. As reported by the New York Times Media Decoder Blog, Hoffman took exception with a  review from the Boston Globe’s Roberta Silman. Rather than merely taking the criticism with a grain of salt, as we were all no doubt taught to do as children, Hoffman tweeted out her dissatisfaction 140 scathing characters at a time.

From the post:

Reviewing the book for The Boston Globe on Sunday, Roberta Silman wrote: “This new novel lacks the spark of the earlier work. Its vision, characters, and even the prose seem tired.” In a series of Twitter posts, Ms. Hoffman fired back with her own opinion. “Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron,” she wrote. “How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away.” Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman’s phone number and email, inviting fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Naturally, Hoffman’s rant, particularly the part where she gave away Silman’s phone number and e-mail, did not settle well, leading to a full apology the next day. Hoffman also disabled her Twitter account, presumably to mitigate any further reputational damage caused by this unfortunate affair.

While there are some out there who will no doubt feel sympathy for Hoffman, or even say her actions were justified, the truth of the matter is that she chose the wrong venue to air her grievances. Social media makes sharing your opinions easier than ever. But, that doesn’t mean that all of your opinions need to be shared.

In his coverage of this story, Frank Reed at the Marketing Pilgrim Blog suggests that people should have licenses to use social media in the same way they have licenses to drive cars. While he’s clearly joking, or at least half-joking, maybe there’s some value in that idea. The Internet can be a wild place, for sure, but social media doesn’t have to be. Intelligent, productive, and meaningful conversations can happen online. You just have to be the one that starts them.

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I wanted to blog a quick shout out to Libby Sartain, who was recently named Executive in Residence at the Institute for Corporate Productivity. Libby is the former CHRO of Southwest Airlines and Yahoo!, and will lend her expertise and insights to the Institute for Corporate Productivity.

Quoting from the page:

Libby Sartain, former CHRO at Yahoo! Inc., is now an executive in residence at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the company announced today. Sartain brings more than 30 years of experience in HR and business to i4cp’s expanding array of corporate performance experts.

As an executive in residence at i4cp, Sartain will be available to participate in the major project assignments i4cp conducts over the course of a year. She will also provide her insight to aid in the development of:

· Playbooks, designed to enable managers and leaders to take action based on specific scenarios and situations;
· Pulse Survey Analysis reports, which analyze and interpret the research data from i4cp’s 50+ annual studies;
· Highlight Reports, which take an in-depth look at each of i4cp’s 58 topics of expertise and provide research, corporate examples, scenario planning and more.

Sartain, who was a keynote speaker at i4cp’s 2009 Annual Conference, will also be available through i4cp membership to business leaders seeking input and/or advice on specific projects their companies are facing.

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Sartain is the author of HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business (AMACOM) and Brand from the Inside: Eight Essentials to Connect Your Employees to Your Business (Jossey-Bass), as well as the recently released Brand for Talent: Eight Essentials to Make Your Talent as Famous as Your Brand (Jossey-Bass).

For full disclosure, Libby is an adviser to ReputationDefender. I have recently posted a guest post on her blog, Brand for Talent, that examines how search engines are impacting job searches in the digital era.

ReputationDefender congratulates Libby on her new leadership position and is grateful for the insight she has lent to this firm over the years.

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Because of social media, I feel like Michael Jackson died right on my doorstep. The neighbors, more numerous than I had previous thought lived on my block, are all gathered around. Michael Jackson was a cultural phenomenon, a truth substantiated by the strong reactions his death has generated.

The online responses to Jackson’s death have been many and varied. It’s been only a day since Michael Jackson passed away, but Twitter and Facebook are crowded with thoughts  about the King of Pop. The L.A. Times reports that other servers, too, are straining under all the transactions they’re trying to support.

Much of this activity is generated by the neighbors who genuinely grieve. Thanks to some dodgier Internet users though, there are also a lot of opportunities to contract malicious software floating out there on the web. As posted on Mashable, there are those who would offer Michael Jackson related news but only link you to malware. Be careful.

Another matter in which to exercise caution: false spin-off news. After Jackon’s death followed Farrah Fawcett’s, false information spread about other celebrities who had died. One of the prominent pieces is about  Josh Bloomberg. The original article was written as a parody, but casual words have passed so quickly that the truth got temporarily capsized. Fortunately though, there are reliable online sources that are quick to refute such claims. At any rate, a good dose of skepticism is usually a healthy thing to nurse when evaluating fresh information.

For anyone curious about how the news began, SEOmoz mapped the journey Michael Jackson’s death took across the web. It is interesting to note how such small beginnings expanded so rapidly and to such great porportions once they hit the popular social media sites.

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You know, it’s funny. No matter how old you get, it seems like everyone wants to be the cool kid. That’s certainly the case with Facebook. Even though Facebook is the world’s largest social networking site, for the past year, the company has been playing catch-up with the world’s newest social media darling, Twitter.

The company’s efforts in this regard have led to some major changes to the website’s interface. The result has left many Facebook users angered and annoyed. Just this past March, Facebook switched the whole layout of the site, prompting major protests. Now, it seems, Facebook is hoping to further mimic Twitter with a major new change to the way messages are shared within the network.

In an effort to increase the amount of public data Facebook shares with the world, the company has implemented an “improved” Publisher application, which gives users the choice of sharing their information with everyone.

As described by TechCrunch, the feature works like this:

You can now control who you want to inform of your Facebook friends when you add any kind of content to the site. Here’s how it works: After writing a status, uploading a photo or creating other content from the Publisher, use the lock icon in the lower-right corner of the Publisher to access the drop-down menu. From there, you can then choose to make the post visible to everyone, friends and certain networks, friends of friends, and a custom list.

The idea of allowing users to selectively share content with the world is fine. The question is, will this alienate some of Facebook’s most loyal users? What made Facebook likeable compared to other social networking sites was its sense of privacy. Unlike MySpace, which has devolved into a spam-filled nightmare of glitter writing and loud unstoppable music, Facebook allowed people to make connections with friends and family in a setting that was clean and easy to use. As the site moves more and more toward a Twitter-like live streaming interface, however, the notion that Facebook is a “closed community” is being called into question.

I have no problem sharing information about myself online (I have a blog and I use Twitter) but, for me, that’s not what Facebook is for. I use Facebook as a way to connect with friends whom I might not take the time to personally e-mail or call. That’s it. In its effort to become more and more like Twitter, I fear Facebook may lose some of its value as a networking tool and become just another haven for self-promotion and spam.

Perhaps I’m overstating this change. After all, it is optional, so there’s a good chance that all the Facebook users who think like me will simply opt out. What do you think? Are Facebook’s attempt to become more Twitter-like helping or hurting the site?

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I recently wrote a post at ReputationDefender Blog that examined the fad-like nature of social media.

I would like to look a bit more closely at Twitter in this post and examine why it has experienced such a remarkable cultural zeitgeist. First, we must come to terms with the fact that everyone loves, uses and talks about twitter. And I mean EVERYONE. CNN is tweeting. Politicians are tweeting. Celebrities like Ashton are tweeting. Oprah is tweeting, for the love of fun, and she makes and breaks main stream culture for a living. Read any social media blog or tech news site and you’ll inevitably run into a few twitter articles- per day.

So the question then becomes- WHY? Why have web nerds, tech-savvy students, PR firms, celebrities, politicians and the media complex writ large embraced the micro blogging platform?

The first reason has to do with ease of use. Not everyone has a laptop. The number of smart phones with web capabilities is growing, but still small. But almost everyone has a phone that can send SMS data. That means that Twitter opens the door to global, real time communication to end users who carry nothing more than a cell phone. That fact, in turn, lets more people participate in the twitter-verse by lowering the technological barrier of entry. The results are staggering. From the recent Iranian updates to breaking news via tweeting, the fact that a text message can now be heard around the world is an impressive and important milestone for connective technologies. It is also the primary reason that Twitter is so pervasive at the moment.

But ease of use can not explain the twitter-quake that has sent shock waves across media and culture. There are many reasons for the ubiquitous tweeting now found in the media landscape, but the one that resonates most with me is the overcompensation theory. I believe that the main stream media is overly hyped up on twitter because they were overly harsh on bloggers in the past and are now repping micro-blogging to seem “hip” and “with it.” In the recent past, traditional journalists often scoffed at bloggers and downplayed their journalistic credentials repeatedly. But the blogosphere would not be denied. It knew there was a real there there. And now blogs are seen as real and staying. And the MSM missed that bet completely. From politics to sports to local news, blogs have repeatedly held journalists and citizens accountable. Blogs have fact checked stories and reinvented old notions of the news cycle. Bloggers now routinely meet with Presidents and CEOs.

And now the intertubes are all aflutter with twitter. And this time, THIS TIME the MSM are not going to be left behind in the wake of a great techno shift. So they tweet and they tweet and they tweet. And part of the reason is because the technology is new and brilliant and connective and disruptive. And part of the reason is because they don’t want people to remember how established media cast a death knell for one of the most vibrant forms of media, art and online socializing ever created.

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