At issue is a simple invitation to related to my high school, that appeared within the ad stream:

Look up high school profiles from the Class of 1987 now. Reconnect with old friends from the Class of 1987 today.

Apparently, the ad server pulls information from my profile with regards to my birth date, but somehow ignores the actual graduation year listed in my Education section.

Yes, I am picking nits, but if you (as Facebook or as an advertiser therein) are trying to feign a personal touch, then get it right.

Relevance is the missing link to the next age of the internet, because automated relevance that works takes social networks away from being an appliance that you actively engage, and into a passive extension of your intelligence. No, this isn’t Neo wiring into the Matrix, but it’s the serving of the information that you wanted before you knew it existed to want.

There are others exploring this space. Facebook has the most eyeballs attuned to the News Feed experiment, where the most popular and clicked items in your feed bubble to the top. As Peter Shankman likes to say, however, it ought to be populated with the people I am most connected to now, not with people who are popular but irrelevant to me today. (I would venture to guess that Peter is less than happy with the results he sees.)

AideRSS tries to attack relevance through PostRank, and algorithm that grades and pulls the very best of a feed. But that is only the best as rated by others, not by your tastes and discrimination.

Google Reader recently added a setting to Sort by Magic, which takes into account new items from the feeds you click on the most, or click on earlier in browsing sessions.

There’s a lot to consider in getting it right, and a number of approaches to the recipe. As there should be, because whoever plants that flag first stands a great chance of locking down the market for several years (or getting bought out handsomely by deeper pockets.)

But I won’t believe there are enough people working on it until I see invitations to connect with classmates who graduated with me in 1986.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Here’s Scott.

“You haven’t talked on Facebook lately. Write on his wall.”

Well, there’s a pretty good reason for that. He died almost a year ago.

At that time, I wrote about his passing, and about the small bit of peace Facebook afforded him. It was a vehicle for absolution, allowing him to pass knowing that old wrongs had been forgiven.

In the days and weeks after, his wall became a happy place, as friends new and old shared pictures and thoughts and memories. Scott’s profile became the scrapbook that he would have enjoyed, curated and moderated by his fiance and another close friend. Yet it is still more than a little haunting that he can suddenly pop up as active.

Willing the Virtual

At the time, none of us knew there was a way to make that transition to a memorial page. In fact, here is a great breakdown on what happens to your social networks and online accounts when you die. I never gave the topic much thought, until Adele McAlear pitched a proposal for a panel discussion at South by Southwest Interactive, called “Posts Mortem: Death and Digital Legacy.”

And even with that, I have been lax in “bequeathing” my accounts to my family, so websites and domains stay put if something were to happen to me. However, to be fair, many providers have no real provision for that, and it might not be possible to do in some instances. I’m glad that now some people are asking the right questions that stand to make the process easier on everyone.

Scott is gone, but he is certainly not forgotten. Not while Facebook continues to flash him up on the side of my screen.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

In other words, he got a whole lot of opinion, and very little useful direction. Even old adages such as “It’s not what you know but who you know” are getting debunked now.

My friend has decades of experience in television, and knows of a couple openings at Fox News Channel, where he happens to “know people.”  Despite the advice of his job gurus, the people at the network said “Don’t bother with a paper resume. Nobody reads them.”

This is true. Most big companies don’t bother with paper anymore, but not for the reason you think. They can sort and slice and dice the entries, and bring up only the ones that have certain key words. “Managerial” might be an important word, and “budget” would be another. It’s a smart way to get to the best candidates, but it brings a whole new set of questions to the mix.

The Machine Readable Resume

First of all, once SEO becomes mainstream in the resume business, then you’re going to see even more spammy buzzwords injected into narratives just to get notice. (It’s a great way to “leverage” the system, by showing how you can “optimize” “dynamic” situations, and “shepherd” the “results” that lead to “actionable” “success.”) This will be a wash, because we’ll just replace one set of contradictory consultants with another set. The replacements, with experience in SEO, will at least have data on their side. Allegedly.

The larger issue for me is that we end up devaluing a skill there’s precious little of to begin with: writing.

Even companies where communication is the livelihood will tell you there aren’t enough good communicators. You can’t calculate the loss of productivity that occurs when people dress things up in formal-sounding language, for no good reason. Or the clear and concise reports that mysteriously balloon from a single page to five pages, just to make it look more important.

Sure, there are safeguards built into the hiring process. The unqualified and the intolerable don’t survive very well in the interview, but good candidates get shut out more often than you would think. I have another friend who is in a hiring capacity, and she has a constant struggle with HR and recruitment. When she has job openings, she tells her ideal candidates about it expecting them to make the cut, yet HR will forward a batch of screened resumes that don’t include no-brainer obvious candidates. She is able to use this information, over time, to calibrate what she asks for, but this becomes more energy wasted on cat-and-mouse games.

The paper resume is dead, and my observations to the contrary it’s not coming back for one simple reason:

When you apply online, they can force you to fill out the Salary Requirement field. Those left blank get kicked back to the applicant. You might have the perfect qualifications, education, experience and moxie – but if you’re a few dollars over the budgeted ceiling, you’ll never get the interview, no matter what you’re worth.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I am a bit of a music snob, but I am grateful for the opportunities I had when I was in elementary school and junior high. In fifth grade, we learned to play the recorder, which provided a way to get a bunch of kids to learn note duration and simple sheet music while still remaining somewhat in the same key.

But nothing tops my experience in seventh grade, with the ukulele. That was fun, pure and simple — but only because we made it fun.

I didn’t realize how boring the ukulele could be until we did a joint concert with the other junior high in town. In theory, we had both learned the same songs, but you couldn’t tell. Some of those kids were strumming so slow you could hear individual strings being plucked 1-2-3-4.   1-2-3-4.

Meanwhile, Paul and James and I were engaged in serious exploration of the space, incorporating syncopation and other sorts of stop-time arrangements that would have gotten us bounced out of choir, if it weren’t for the fact that it sounded really cool. (Yes, we tried doing Yngwie Malmsteen, and it didn’t translate as well but we shredded it anyway.)

The uke worked for us, because it was simple enough to learn, and versatile enough for us (as a group) to do other things. With the right arrangement, “Tom Dooley” doesn’t sound so melancholy, but nothing could save “If I Had a Hammer.”

So… with the ukulele clearly in mind, I present four minutes of awesome.

Paul? James? This could have been us…

Doesn’t this video makes you want to throw more support into music education?

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Well, the web is ten times better than you are, and it has the advantage of collecting our aggregate wisdom in ways we’d never expect. In fact, if we did a remake of Family Feud, we could do it all with Search Engine results instead of spending money on polling.

This came to mind when I got one of those placeholder pages that you see when a domain name registration has expired. The temporary owner of the parked domain tries to make a few pennies by possibly getting credit for redirecting you to something similar to what you were looking for.

In this case, Geekedoff.com led to this:

Now, granted, the Dallas Cowboys aren’t exactly having the greatest decade in franchise history, but putting Cowboys next to “Tranny?”

Maybe there is something in Tony Romo’s wardrobe of which we’re not yet aware.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

There is no need for further linking, nor humiliation. Matthew has stepped up, and has eloquently apologized for acting upon bad advice.

The links have been removed, and the page redacted to be more representative of Mr. Duggan’s position and stance. (That’s not to say there aren’t weasels out there continuing to advocate for spammy tactics, but armed with new knowledge I am confident that Mr. Duggan will be a much better example of best practices going forward.)

When they are not genuine, be prepared. Especially when you try to game me.

This means you, Matthew Duggan.

I got the following comments from Matthew:

Very interesting. It’s good to hear the thoughts of an experienced media expert on a new media like Twitter.
The ‘community’ aspect is a very good idea and tools like TwitterFall are good for regional searches.

Posted on my Twitter Policy page.

Incredible! Those statistics are quite amazing.
Congratulations on the way you use Twitter Ike and on your induction into the Twitter Elite!

Posted on Global Dominance

Now, Matthew Duggan (matthew@buildyourfollowers.com) happens to run a site called BuildYourFollowers.com, and signs his comments with the very search-engine friendly name of “Twitter for Business.” Which means that he wants as many web pages as possible to associate the phrase “Twitter for Business” with his site.

Let’s just see what kind of site this Fake Twitter Guru runs, shall we?

‘9 Free Videos, 6 Free e-Book Chapters and an Exclusive Members Area Reveal How To Automate Twitter and Transform It Into A Marketing Machine For Your Business…. Even If You’ve Never Used Twitter Before’

Fake Twitter Guru, indeed. But wait… there’s MORE!

You’re about to learn little known tools and techniques to transform Twitter into a free and automatic way of generating targeted leads to your website and grow your business. All with little effort and no knowledge.

And I’m giving away part of the course plus another $97.00 in value just so I can show you that this works!

Yes I’m literally going to bribe you just to get you to give me your name and e-mail.

Why would I do that?

Well I know that the only way for me to show you who I am and to demonstrate the value I can add to your online business life is by the 2 of us getting acquainted, and in the online world the medium we use to stay in touch with each other is the e-mail address (here’s mine – matthew@buildyourfollowers.com)

BUT

There is A LOT of garbage out there, and because of this I know that I’m genuinely competing for your time.

So

I’ve decided to do the only smart thing that makes solid business sense. By offering you a 7-part course for free that’s filled with top quality training, I’m hoping that 2 things will happen:

1. You’ll get to know, like and trust me.

2. Later on when I’ve demonstrated my value to you by helping you get started you’ll possibly invest in my full e-book and video course on Twitter.

That’s the truth.

Others will tell you all sorts of BS but that’s what’s really happening.

In the free course, I’ll show you how to:

• Promote Your Business Automatically
• Maximise Your Twitter Profile like a Social Media Pro
• Show you a strategy that got me 1500 targeted followers in 2 and a half months
• PLUS: My free strategy for using little known methods to Maximise Your Business

This way you have zero risk and the onus is on me to impress you… which is, as it should be.

So shall we get started?

SEO is a two-way street

I know what you are saying. “Ike, this guy is a loser, and you’re just giving him free publicity and the link-love that will help him game the search engines.”

I would have just left this one alone and deleted the obviously spammy comments, but there were two things I could not leave alone:

1. He didn’t even bother to read the posts he was linking to. For instance, the “Global Dominance” piece was written last year to mock another Matthew, who trumpeted his own dominance of Twitter. I showed how easy it was to game the system to become the Number One Twitter User on Planet Earth. Apparently, Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan was too quick to post his spammy comment on my site to realize his overly-fawning comment was a joke (and a damned fine one, at that.)
2. Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan – in the process of posting spammy comments on my site – actually links people to this:
   

   

   You think that

   YOU hate Spam?

   (Try running an

   internet business!)

   I personally detest Spam and PROMISE that you will NEVER get an unwanted email as a result of signing up here.

Please help me make Matthew Duggan #1 in Google!

I am a firm believer in Search Engine Optimization techniques, but I am not a fan of being a shameless spammer like Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan. So let’s show Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan how SEO is done right.

If everyone uses the words Fake Twitter Guru as the anchor text linking to his site, then we can make him Number One with a bullet!

Please share the good news about Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan with as many sites as you can, and be sure to share this entry with your friends! Get them to help too! (There are a number of icons below to make it easy. Bookmark it! Digg it! Tweet it!)

Let people like Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan know that their Neanderthal nascent understanding of marketing is sleazy unwelcome and won’t be tolerated in a polite society. The business you save from getting suckered by his shenanigans might be your own.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

The Coach is different in a significant respect: one can teach in a sterile environment, but coaching is done dirty. Coaching happens during an activity (or the simulation of it.)

Imagine a basketball team walking onto the court with a stack of books, and playing a game with no adjustments. How well will that work? What happens when the team encounters a scheme or a tactic they’ve never seen?

Coaches adjust on the fly – akin to tweaking the engine of a vehicle that’s in motion. You can’t call “time out” indefinitely to fix the issue, you deal with it as best you can.

Getting beyond a single game, the coach is also looking long-term. You have a plan for where you want your organization at the end of a season (or a year,) and you take measured steps to get there. But you can’t break it down into just any curriculum – you have to build on what is working. (”Here boys, this week we’re going to work on formations, and after this weekend’s game we’ll work on snapping the ball.”)

Coaches have to be able to diagnose problems that may not be apparent, and make the necessary adjustments. And that goes for business, too.

Maybe that’s why in all the rush to be Gurus and Experts in Social Media, I tend to have more respect for (and recommend) those who exhibit the heart of a coach and mentor. Yes, I understand there is a need for those who analyze at the theoretical and academic level. And there are many people who excel in a particular activity who have no business showing anyone else how it’s done.

• Coaches can help you with today, next week, and next year.
• Coaches don’t care if the players are higher paid, they are paid to make others succeed.
• Coaches (if they are any good) don’t have a single template for success, and will build something that works with the available talent.
• Coaches leave their trainees better than when they found them.
• Coaches (if they are really good) aren’t known for just the players they boost, but for the other coaches they influence.

So… who is the Coach who influenced you, and what qualities have you managed to absorb? (If you’ve never thought about it, you ought to…)

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Two quick thoughts.

One is about the massive hoax perpetrated on the media yesterday. A group of activists spoofed the identity of the US Chamber of Commerce, and got several news outlets to bite on a phony news conference. Those outlets all reported the Chamber’s sudden (and non-existent) reversal of policy regarding climate change.

But hey – by all means let’s do a whole Fact Check segment on a Saturday Night Live sketch.

The second has to do with the legal system.

I remember covering the SEC asset forfeiture hearings for HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy. They were the beginning of his legal troubles, which culminated in fraud convictions and billion-dollar civil suits. (I wrote about Scrushy and HealthSouth quite a bit on my old blog, which remains as an archive.)

At the time, that federal judge was a stickler for technology. She was quite dismayed to find that reporters from Bloomberg, with new-fangled BlackBerry wireless devices, were able to send dispatches from the room. (Of course, in order to get a signal, they had to sit on the back row and sometimes place the device against the wall…)

Contrast that with today, where the federal judge presiding over the corruption trial of Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford issued a directive to the jurors:

It’s not just that the judge was specifically acknowledging Tweets – it was the resignation that we have a technology that can’t readily be stopped.

I’m certain there have been numerous judicial conferences and seminars addressing the changing communications landscape. It would be no more fruitful to ban Twitter than it would to tell jurors they can’t go near a newsstand. He simply warned them about mixing outside information with what goes on within the boundaries of evidence.

For what it is worth, the “tweets from others” doesn’t just refer to friends and family. In this case, there are no fewer than six media outlets Tweeting from within the courtroom. I created a page where you can follow the Langford Trial real-time if you want, including the occasional video from Birmingham Weekly’s Kyle Whitmire.

Update:

From John Archibald:

Judge is on his blackberry. I wonder if he’s following the trial on twitter. There are a lot of twits around here. #langford

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I promised another idea today.

Sonic Boom

The second idea is more specific, and revolves around the current campaign for Sonic. The premise for the ads is simple, based on meaningless front-seat conversations in the drive-through.

(Aren’t you glad I had auto-start turned off?)

The commercials work because they walk that fine line between the real and the surreal. It’s a situation we’ve all been in, and I’m pretty sure that my conversations with my wife and my brother have been no less alternate-universe.

So, here’s the opportunity for Sonic to step up with being Social.

Invite people to send in their own 20-second clips. Do it as an online audition. Let people vote. Then put as many of the ads to work as you can:

• The winning ad gets added to the television rotation nationwide
• Regional winners would be run on the air within their own hometowns
• Local spots that meet the standard would be run on the web.

Obviously, you’d vet the spots to make sure there was no hidden nudity, and no one throwing in gestures for “shock value.”

How exactly would those local spots work again?

Run them online. Run them on Facebook, targeted to specific cities. Run them inside your friend’s list on Facebook. It’s not as intrusive as those ads that associate your picture with a product without explicit permission – this is a clear case of consent. (No one goes to the trouble of putting together a :20 video, with all the editing involved, on a particular topic, and submitting it through a portal and then gets shocked when it is used.)

Put the rest on a branded YouTube channel, and let people watch themselves over and over, all the while reinforcing your delicious tater tots.

The opportunities are there. You don’t even have to be good at Food Math.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

That’s the sound of ordinary people unshackling themselves from traditional one-way media. And it’s going to get louder.

If you’re a business that relies on traditional advertising models, now would be a good time to figure out where those people are going with their newfound freedom, and maybe even make a buck or two as you make them happy.

What follows are a couple of ideas I offer to the business world, free of charge, after spending a few minutes thinking Social.

TiVo Judo

One of the great lessons a non-martial artist can learn from martial arts is the concept of using opposing energy in your favor. Judo – the codified sport version of Jujitsu – is all about taking your opponent’s momentum and force and redirecting it. Aikido (a beautiful art made famous as the “bits between Steven Seagal’s awful acting) accomplishes this in simple, circular movements. So how can traditional media benefit from the momentum behind TiVo and DVR?

One of the features I wish I had on my DVR is a bookmark. That way when there are touchdowns or key plays in the game I am watching, I can press a button and have a placeholder. Then I can go back and enjoy them faster.

Share the moments

Of course, Thinking Social means understanding how cool it would be to share those bookmarks with other viewers. The first DVR provider (Comcast, Charter, TiVo, DirecTV) to figure this out will have a huge leg up. We’re not talking about an expensive hardware update to make that happen, either.

But I am thinking even bigger. If the disruption of the DVR is a threat to traditional advertising, then why not redirect it? Yes, it would be problematic to share time-codes from DirecTV with Charter, and TiVo with Brighthouse. So let’s find a common platform:  YouTube.

Instead of simply bookmarking the index on my DVR hard drive, give me the option to have that :30 clip of the winning touchdown uploaded to YouTube.

Regaining control

(But wait, Ike… that’s insane!  In a popular sporting event, you’d have more than a million people uploading the same clip!)

Well, guess what? They’re doing it anyway. But if DirecTV is smart about it, when you click to bookmark and YouTube the clip they’ll handle it another way:

1. The clip will be uploaded only once
2. Instead of being tied to each individual user, it will instead be “Favorited” by your account
3. The Favoriting will trigger any additional pinging, such as notifications sent to Twitter and Facebook and the new flavor of the day
4. The clip will have a :10 or :15 ad built into the front of it.

DirecTV will only have to upload it once, and will have instant feedback about what is popular. It can also sell the interstitial ad (which is permanently “stitched” into the clip) and share revenues with the original broadcast provider. So, if it’s the SEC game of the week on CBS, CBS get’s 70% of the cut from those ad views. Or maybe CBS chooses to run a promo for its own programming in that slot.

Then, DirecTV (substitute your DVR provider as needed) gets to place ads around the video, and can even offer discounts and premiums to those who refer the most views. If you happen to come to my YouTube page and watch the video, there will be an icon you can click on to find out more about DirecTV’s super-awesome Social-DVR service (and if you buy through my referral I get a free month of programming, or something.)

Win-Win-Win-Win

There is a huge opportunity here, because they would be making it easy for me to share with the people who probably have compatible likes and dislikes. Content creators aren’t left in the lurch, because someone is paying the bills. YouTube will like it because it can make money on a single upload viewed 10,000 times moreso than 100 uploads watched 100 times. Advertisers will like it because it provides a real-time metric of what people will share, a buzz-worthy meter.

And I will like it because the (funniest happiest scariest) moments in (sports news entertainment) get shared as quickly and easily as possible.

So, DVR makers. Get to cracking.

Idea #2 comes tomorrow.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Culturally-speaking, that’s often seen as a statement of weakness – uttered by one who lacks the willpower to stick by their own rules. However, we tend to take that concept further than we should. And it has to do with our forgetting the difference between practitioners, teachers and coaches.

Practitioners get things done. They perform the actual tasks. They play the game from whistle to whistle, they run the track. And while practitioners can eventually become teachers or coaches, there’s no guarantee they have the skills to succeed.

Teachers exhibit a level of mastery, and their job is to bring their students to the bar. Whatever that bar of expectation is, the teacher must bring the student along. To do so, the teacher must demonstrate the same level of ability in performing the task. A math teacher can’t teach you the quadratic equation without showing you how it’s done on the board.

Coaches are a little different, because no one expects the coach to run every lap faster than the student. It’s the coach’s job to help practitioners figure out how they can improve, and set them on a path for that. Often, that requires a level of mastery in the theory of an activity, even if there is no longer the physical ability to carry it out.

Why do I highlight these distinctions? Because the failure to understand them is resulting in a lot of ill will in the communication arts.

When everyone is an expert.

I’m flabbergasted at the number of people who sell themselves as “Social Media Experts” or “Gurus” or whatever the title du jour is.

Being free to start and easy to learn, one of the selling points of these revolutionary tools is that “anyone can do it.” But how many can do it well?

• The ability to dribble a basketball doesn’t make you Michael Jordan.
• The ability to recite Dennis Hopper’s “run the ole Picket Fence at ‘em” speech from Hoosiers doesn’t make you a basketball coach.
• Neither does it make you Dennis Hopper.
• The ability to be a goalie in soccer won’t help you be a goalie in hockey, much less a forward.

We’ve got a lot of people who have proven they can do one thing, and they are hanging up a shingle to sell you on something else.

Choosing the right path.

Now, if you’re a business looking to get involved in a new endeavor, you have some options:

• Hire a big name and let them carry you to the top.
• Hire someone cheap, and hope for the best.
• Hire no one, and let best practices bubble up from your own people.
• Hire a coach who can bring the best out of your people.

Notice that I am not talking about Social Media here. This goes for anything, but let’s see how it applies.

Go hire that big name (like a Robert Scoble) and that person will bring you an instant audience and instant credibility. But when that person leaves, who owns the knowledge? Who owns the relationships? Who owns the accounts? Who is ready to step up and fill the shoes?

Go hire that affordable alternative. Why not? In the grand scheme of things, you can write it all off as a pilot project.

Don’t hire anyone. (Be prepared for very mixed results, and a very nervous legal team.)

Go get a coach, who has a proven ability to elevate your game. Build bench strength. Build for the future, by injecting the change comfortably into the culture. Granted, there are very few of these coaches around. Within Social Media, there are many people who are great at what they do, but it might have little to do with coaching ability and everything to do with their own knowledge of the industry they are augmenting.

Past performance is no proof of future success.

Here’s the dirty secret: there are several reasons why social media practitioners do well. Some are just born with the right attitude for personal and conversational communication. If they have that knack, you can take someone with a few years experience in your company and they might shine. But take them out of your company, and they will be hopelessly lost (like the guy who won every golf tournament, until he got on a real course and couldn’t find the Clown’s Mouth.)

That is the Practitioner - very skilled, but not necessarily versatile enough to change games.

Some have the ability to show you what they do and how they do it, and you are able to follow the steps and emulate their success. This can be a good thing, but it also deceives. The guy who shows you how to get 80,000 Twitter followers might not have a clue what to do with them. His strength is solely in acquisition, not in leveraging or in calls-to-action.

That is the Teacher - who can instruct you on how to do what they’ve already done.

How to spot those who can really help you:

• They have proven their skills in different kinds of businesses and business models.
• They don’t have immediate answers, but instead follow with more detailed and insightful questions.
• They create ideas, concepts and systems that no one has ever seen – because your challenge is unique.

That’s how you know you’ve found a Coach. The person who will push you to heights you couldn’t have reached alone, and will leave you better than she found you. The person who will draw indirectly from past experiences and directly from sound principles to craft solutions to your problems. The individual who can fade into the background after launch, confident those he trained are self-sustaining and know how to improve on their own.

You know when you’ve found a coach, when you hear his students calling their own shots.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

I liked the old look, but there was something about the old “old look” that was missing.

Yet, the “old” old look lacked several features.

This look will get some tweaking in the meantime.

©2009 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.