Erica Glasier: Oversocialized! Social media & interactive futurism from sunny Winnipeg

You get to rub (possibly the wrong way) elbows with the smart and famous! Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, lifestreamer, AdAge and Forbes columnist and avid sports fan, has personally told me to ‘buzz off’. I earned it for protesting that he nearly roped me into signing up for Google Buzz, when I (kind of  ironically) went to comment on his ‘buzz’ about social media overload.

Steve has tweeted 10,095 times (as of this tweet), so that means .009906% of the time, he’s talking about me!

I should also take this opportunity to note with gratitude that I get a large amount of traffic (for me) from comments I’ve made on Steve’s lifestream, and that Steve’s readers spend by far the most time of any visitors to my site reading content—an average of  12 minutes each over 5 pages! Some smart fans, Steve Rubel’s lifestream has.

/sense of accomplishment for today.

Next in a series of interviews with female Canadian social media stars! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Kelly Rusk is Manager of Marketing and Communities at Ottawa media analysis and PR measurement firm MediaMiser, and she blogs about community and conversations at Web 2.What? She has nice hair.

While women may be more inclined to social media, it seems in terms of influence (i.e. number of followers, subscribers, fans etc) men still seem to win every time. I’ve seen tons of links leading to that conclusion and it’s been bothering me lately about why that’s the case. NYU professor (and social media author) Clay Shirky did an interesting post that theorizes about it.

I think on a macro level, women want to be supportive of other women, when it comes down to individuals “cattiness” can exist (and I definitely don’t think it’s intentional).

This past September myself and two friends co-founded Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa which is a spin off of Girl Geek Dinners London (and now takes place in over 45 cities in 22 or so countries). And as such I made a conscious decision to be more open and supportive of other women… Not that I wasn’t before (and I certainly was never publicly critical of any women), but if I found myself thinking negatively about another woman in a professional capacity, I now make an effort to reach out or try to meet her with an open mind.

What I learned from talking to Kelly

The idea that women who self promote are perceived as “bitches”, and that inhibits them from speaking up, surfaced a few times the comments of Clay Shirky’s A Rant About Women. It’s a good idea to examine your preconceptions once in a while.

Winnipeg now has its very own version of Girl Geek Dinners, so get yourself over to Facebook and check it out.  The inaugural dinner just went down, featuring Coree Francisco of Girl One Interactive. I hear it was both girly and geeky Why not put yourself out there and speak at the next event in March?

The first in a series! The premise, which you can read about here, investigates how women act towards each other in the quest to be head social butterfly.

Here’s Kate Trgovac, Vancouver social media star and co-founder/President of LintBucket Media, which sounds like a very cool place to work. Kate blogs about social media over at My Name Is Kate.

Provocative topic and series of questions! Well … while I am the first person to complain about the lack of prominence of women in marketing in general and social media in particular in Canada, I’m concerned when we start saying things like “women are more suited professionally to social media b/c of ABC” because that leaves the door WIDE open for statements like “men are more suited professionally to be a doctor, be prime minister, be a brigadier general b/c of XYZ (or PMS, as the case may be)”. While, historically, women in society may have had more call to develop and use skills that are aligned with social media, in general, anyone, regardless of gender, can work on their people skills and start to turn a taciturn nature to a more social one (we only need look to Austen’s Mr. Darcy for evidence of this )

Regarding the cattiness, I have not personally noticed that women are harsher to their own. I have witnessed both genders being catty to their own sex and to the opposite one. And I have experienced incredible generosity from both genders as well. We are in one of the most narcissistic and self-involved industries around. Heavens, we use our product (media) to talk about our product (media) – our professional lives as social media marketers are the very definition of “self-referential”. Combine that attitude with the money that flows around the marketing, technology and media industries, and you have a recipe for cattiness that has nothing to do with gender. Frankly, we’re ALL waving our chubbies (natural or strap-on) around to compare size and ultimately grab a piece of the pie for ourselves. Continue reading

Image: The New York Post

Here’s what I think. There are some big time alliances going down in the social media stratosphere right now. People are picking sides.

ReadWriteWeb had that trouble the other day with people thinking they were logging in to Facebook when they got ReadWriteWeb as a Google result for “Facebook login”. ReadWriteWeb, in a post immortalizing their own internet-famous moment, blames Google for this.

But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it.

But does that sound like an accident? This might seem obvious, but Google controls search results. Google’s taking on Facebook head on with Google Buzz. Steve Reubel thinks Facebook might have a crush on Bing, confirming, in my mind, Google and the One Social Network To Rule Them just aren’t that into each other. I betcha Google pretended to think ReadWriteWeb was cute to capitalize on the usual disgruntled user fumbling during a Facebook UI change rollout.

Huh, that’s an interesting idea. What happens when the business that controls the news has to manage news about their business? I know Google’s not evil and all, but if I was the PR guy over there I’d be hanging out around the search guys, um, quite a bit.

So Google hates Facebook, plays ReadWriteWeb to annoy its users. RWW, while flattered at the attention, knows Google is just using them and makes it clear they will never, ever be their date for the prom.

So who is trying to bff the all-seeing GOOG? Continue reading

Tactica Interactive, Winnipeg-based interactive agency & my husband’s company, recently launched the Reason to Live campaign with the Manitoba Suicide Line. The launch, held at Klinic, featured Minister of Healthy Living Jim Rondeau & some moving Aboriginal singing from one of the campaign participants and his father.

“A key component to this approach is the use of social marketing strategies to reach youth in particular, and spread the message about the resource,” says Tim Wall, Director of Counselling Services at Klinic. According to Janet Smith, Program Manager for the Manitoba Suicide Line, “using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube can play a critical role in suicide prevention and engage youth in conversations that promote awareness, understanding and help-seeking behaviours”.

The viral components of the campaign, designed for easy social sharing on Facebook and Twitter, include several powerful videos telling the stories of Manitobans whose lives have been affected by suicide. Watch for yourself; the first-person accounts are very compelling. Tactica’s social media strategy is already having an impact, according to program managers; with callers indicating they’d seen the message of hope online.

The challenge with this project was that it needed to have a social component, but there was no content to share. Tactica had to figure out what was the most compelling aspect of the Suicide Line’s work, which was of course the personal accounts of people who’ve dealt with suicide. Tactica decided to produce a series of videos, the most direct and easily shareable method of storytelling. If you want people to talk, you’ve got to give them something to talk about.

Here are my two reactions to the fundamental non-usefulness (for me, at this time; I reserve the right to eat my words) of Google Buzz.

1. Email does not necessarily represent friendships

Remember when Hotmail went all social? I logged in one day accidentally (I keep the account around so I get a desktop alert through Messenger when something happens on Facebook—how steampunk is that?) and I saw “social” updates like “Paul changed his profile picture” and such. And I was like “Wow. Who cares?”

Email is pretty much a business communication in my universe. I have the Xobni plugin for Outlook, so when I get an email (from anyone) it skulks around and pulls in whatever social data it knows how to find. Typically I see a  professionally appropriate LinkedIn photo grinning back at me. I feel like I’m invading their privacy, for Pete’s sake. It’s uncomfy, because email just doesn’t foster relationships I wish to pursue in that kind of detail.

2. Can’t we just do this through Facebook Connect? Somehow?

I was kind of hoping Google would roll out social search and all that without me having to create a profile. It just seems like surrendering the very last shreds of even the pretense of privacy to get naked with Google on purpose. Google already knows a lot about me. I have an uneasy relationship with their ever-so-slightly-Big-Brother brand. It just feels wrong to give them any more info than I have to. I’m more comfortable spreading my identity out and making Google work a little to profile me, however naive that might be.

Listen, Google, it’s not you, it’s me, : I just don’t email my friends, & I’ve got too much social inertia on other sites to create another profile. Thanks, though!

This is the kind of real-time, granular brand monitoring you can achieve with social media (Doritos is pictured here). Brand Bowl 2010 demonstrated the percentage of positive and negative reactions on Twitter to Super Bowl ads and extracted people’s reactions down to the most frequently-used words, as the reactions were happening.

Twitter may not be where your audience is talking about you—I’m still blown away by the recent stat that only 1.45% of Canadians tweet, as opposed to almost 20% of Americans—but this shows the level of sophistication available to brands interested in monitoring their influence & measuring their social media ROI. As a marketing nerd, I’m inspired by this.