A big hat tip to @acmackie for sending this over…absolutely hilarious!  If you work in agency land, this requires no further explanation.  If you aren’t in agency land, let me set this video up for you.

An RFP is a “request for proposal”.  People at various levels of responsibility that work at marketing and creative agencies get a lot of these, and they are usually at the last minute.  When multiple agencies are working in unison to try to piece something together for a client, well…it gets a little crazy.  Countless hours of phone calls and a seemingly endless stream of emails begin, all trying to put together a presentation deck (a PowerPoint), taking up dozens or hundreds of labor hours.  As this video mentions at one point, it’s likely that the client won’t even open it. I love the computer-voice line ”we may only send you one idea, since the decks we send you, you never even open”, hahaha!

If you live in a world of RFPs, please take a moment from the current deck you are working on and watch this.  You’ll thank me.

I’ve been thinking about the ever-increasing blurry line between public and private lives now that social media is mainstream.  I’ve personally been opening myself up to the world for about a decade; I started blogging by developing my own (very basic) blogging platform before the term “blog” was popular…and I haven’t looked back since then.

There have been a couple of times that I was alarmed by what people are capable of thinking or doing.  A few years ago I started getting anonymous comments on various videos of my children, asking me to pose them in certain ways or have them do certain things.  Naturally I deleted all traces of the videos online (yes it is possible) and became very aware of what I was posting after that.  Although I was always careful to never name them or reveal the location of my children even before this incident, I became very protective after that and have been quite conscious of what I would and would not publish.  Over the years I have become more widely known because of my marketing and social media work, and although I’m certainly a small fish in a big pond, I do have a lot of connections with people that I’ve never met face to face.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my social media life.  I’ve turned so many of my digital-first relationships into real-life relationships, and I love social media and the way it connects the world. But, and there is always a but…

Since I oversee or run large corporate social media accounts and the company I work for is responsible for dozens of Fortune 500 brands, stories like this make me cringe.

Earlier today, the very large, very well known UK mobile company Vodafone posted an incredibly inappropriate tweet on their official company Twitter account.  It said VodafoneUK  ”is fed up of dirty homo’s and is going after beaver“.

Ummm….

Needless to say, this is not something that any company would want published on their behalf.  I don’t know if Vodafone runs their social programs through an agency or internally, but either way it’s obvious that there was a breakdown of protocol.  I suspect one of two probable scenarios that would lead to something like this.  First, it’s possible that it is a disgruntled employee that was either on their way out the door already or was ready to be fired, because certainly somebody is getting disciplined for this.  Second, and what I think is more likely, is that a single dashboard was being used (perhaps something like CoTweet) to update business and personal accounts.

They responded in what I think is the best possible way: acknowledging it and apologizing profusely all day long on their Twitter account.  Many companies would be tempted to delete the tweet and then pretend it never happened, refusing to reply to anybody that pointed it out.  I’m glad Vodafone has taken this approach, but I also hope they will tell us how the “severe breach of rules” happened so that all of us can learn from this mistake.

Community managers take note: be extremely careful with your updates, and don’t mix up your personal and corporate updates!

Today we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr., and as such I intended to not post anything about social media, instead choosing to focus on the hope and vision that Dr. King believed in. That has changed after reading today’s blog post by Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist; I have now decided to write about both social media and racism.  After reading her inflammatory post about what she considers to be a “racist rodeo” I got to the kicker…her very last line incites her users to publicly lambaste the McDonald’s corporation on Twitter, telling them that we won’t put up with racism and hate. The obvious inference here is that McDonald’s does indeed support both racism and hate by supporting the All-Star Rodeo, and event that Ms. Trunk determined to be full of racist clowns and cowgirls that are only interested in threesomes. My big problem with all of this? She didn’t bother to fact check before calling up an angry mob. I brought this to her attention in the comments section, but she seemed to shrugs it off as if facts had nothing to do with it.

In this day and age of social media people can, and do, often write and publish opinion as if it were fact. As I write this, I still do not know if McDonald’s does officially sponsor the rodeo or not, but I have reached out to them for comment. Taking a step back, to so broadly describe the rodeo as racist because of one person’s obviously emotional blog post is, in my opinion, a mistake. Social Media allows anybody to publish anything at anytime. Most people that do this have small audiences, but some, like Ms. Trunk, actually get a pretty big following. I don’t know where the breaking point is, but certainly it must be acknowledged that at a certain point a person does have a certain amount of social responsibility when they have such a large audience.

If I were to ask you what social media is, you would probably pause for a moment then give me a pretty decent description of user generated material; you would use words like listen, engage and share…and more than likely you would mention (or at least think of) Facebook and/or Twitter.  Do you think it would be difficult to describe social media without these two services? Although social media is so much larger than any one company, there is no doubt that many companies make up a critical portion of this ever growing, ever changing landscape.

Imagine then what social media would be like if Facebook decided to keep their community confined to college students only.  What if Twitter really did make you answer the question “what are you doing?” and excluded external links, retweets and other crowd-sourced behavior? The reason that social media is the way is it today is because Twitter and Facebook, along with countless other services, adopted to the powerful voice of the crowd. They didn’t let pride or “what they knew to be true” hold them back from making smart, and undoubtedly difficult, business decisions.  Embracing the crowd is always challenging, it means you lose a certain amount of control…and to many that is a scary proposition.

December 1 is soon upon us, and that means that the FTC will be watching social media (I think bloggers particularly) very closely as it is related to disclosure of products and services. In a nutshell, don’t shill online if you haven’t disclosed that you got something for it, money or otherwise.  Good news for me, I am an open book and simply don’t talk about stuff that I don’t want to and really talk up stuff that I like…paid or not.  However, if I have not made it perfectly clear, just wanted everybody to know who has paid my bills at one point or another, or given me cool stuff to check out.  I am going to keep this list dynamic and current on my Disclosures page. If you want a good FAQ page for the FTC guidelines look here, if you really want to read the entire text, check out the PDF here.

I work with a lot of brands, running social media programs in all shapes and sizes. As such, I want to be perfectly open and clear about who I work for and who I do not. It would be impractical to list companies and brands that I frequently mention that I do not work for (there are far too many), but I will list those with in some capacity. Between my previous consultancy and my current position as Senior Director of Social Media Strategy at M80 I get to do some pretty amazing things with some really exceptional companies. Below is a list of organizations that I have (or had) a professional association with in some way.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for any length of time you’ve recently seen some funny updates like, “I’m at LAX Terminal 3″ or “I just became the mayor of Finnegan’s Wake on @foursquare”.  Some people know what this is, most do not.  These updates are being pushed over to Twitter from the new social network Foursquare, a service that I signed up with a couple of months ago.  I believe it is the next service to watch, and I want to tell you why.

First of all…I referred to Foursquare as a social network, but inside the business walls I’ve been calling it a “location aware ad platform”.  There are implications and advantages for both the average user as well as business, and I’ll break it down for both after a brief introduction.

I always get a lot of interesting looks from people when I wear a particular t-shirt.  It was made years ago by my friend Brad Abare who runs Church Marketing Sucks, a site dedicated to helping churches suck less in their messaging.  Brilliant stuff.  Brad’s take over the years is that The Church has a good message to share, but generally falls on their face when they try to deliver it.  They are overbearing and off mark, and tend to alienate those that they are trying to talk to. Does that sound like any company you know? I’m sure it does, just that statement “overbearing and off mark” makes me think of a half dozen organizations; I’ll let your imagination fill in the names, I won’t do so here.

As it relates to social media, I think a very common mistake that many companies make is doing things the same old way.   Especially with large brands, once PR, HR and a few corporate attorneys get their hands on the social media marketing plan it starts to look like…well, what they’ve always done.  Carefully crafted letters and press releases are posted in new mediums and are then called “social media”.  Let me make something perfectly clear: the use of a social media channel does not mean that you are in fact engaged in social media.

For social media to be effective, old ways must be shed.  No longer can you preach (pardon the pun, given the opening paragraph) to your audience about your product from a podium.  Filling your Twitter stream with an RSS feed that is only pushing content out isn’t enough, because the podium doesn’t exist anymore.  Instead you are in a social circle, with people all around, talking, questioning and interacting with your brand.  If you don’t engage in a personal and likable way, your brand is doomed to fade into obscurity on that channel.

“But that’s the way we’ve always done it”.  I know, I understand.  It’s hard to move into a new arena without HR, PR and William from legal looking over everything that goes out…but it’s going to be okay.  In fact, it’s going to be more than okay, it’s going to be liberating.  You will find that once you break the bonds of “that’s the way we’ve always done it” you will find new freedom with your brand and your messaging, and ultimately that will turn into a nice bump in revenue.

Of course there are guidelines for everything that is done publicly, but that is another post for another time.

Those of you that have been following my adventures for a while know that I put my heart, soul and mind into social media.  Since writing my own blogging platform a decade ago (the billion dollar idea that I never capitalized on…) to my almost-obsessive fascination with brand interaction on channels like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, I am constantly observing and strategizing ways to make the interaction and engagement between companies and customers better through social media. I have spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of years consulting businesses of all types and sizes regarding their engagement (or lack thereof) within these online communities.  From Fortune 100 companies that distribute hardware all around the world to non-profit agencies that are doing their best to make a difference in the world, I have worked with groups to lend insight, support, ideas and action to social media programs. Given all of that, I’m quite pleased to announce that I have taken a new role within the industry.

UPDATE: It seems that the artist in question, Lily Allen, has deleted her anti-piracy blog after getting too much heat about areas she had infringed upon copyright laws.  For a complete update, check out this article on TorrentFreak.

Two interesting items came to my attention today, both related to copyright issues on blogs and/or websites.   One relates to a new company formation using the acronym of a larger (but unrelated) organization in their name and website, the other is the seemingly hypocritical case of a musician that steals blog material to make a point about musical piracy.  After exploring both of these at great length, it became clear to me that most people (myself included) don’t fully understand copyright usage as it pertains to online publications.  I’m going to post some thoughts here, but please understand that I am not an attorney, so this is not legal advice.  Consider this your daily dose of common sense in social media.