thejakers

This is a great video on the latest numbers behind Social Media. If you’re in any kind of communications or marketing position, the information here is not only valuable but will also change the way you do your job in next five years. The biggest change I see coming: More subversive campaigns that infiltrate your daily online interactions in subtle and subconscious ways. Check it out:

Your thoughts?

Twitter is free, right? Not exactly. As we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

When I logged into Twitter this morning, I saw that I’d posted an astounding 5,061 Tweets. That’s a lot of little posts. And I wondered, how much did that cost me in time…and money.

Let’s assume that each Tweet represents a minute of time on average. That’s 5,061 minutes of my life in the last year or so spent on Twitter in one form or another.

That breaks down to 84.25 hours…3.51 days!

That means I’ve spent a little under 1% of the year on Twitter. And given my hourly consulting rate, my time value is around $100 per hour.

In essence Twitter has cost me $8,425.

Or has it?

Here’s where the exercise gets a little fuzzy. I’ve definitely received business both directly and indirectly from Twitter. There are many intangibles that social media affords that are hard to measure. In fact, I can think of one particular contract that came indirectly from my Twitter use that nearly doubles the amount it cost me in time value.

So, besides the immeasurable value of relationships I’ve developed on Twitter, the actual time and “money” spent, has been more than worth it.

Thanks Twitter!

How about you? What’s your Twitter cost? Have you ever thought of it in such a way?

[Photo by Shovelling Son]

Stumbled across an interesting article by Umair Haque over at the Harvard Business Review, “The Social Media Bubble”. Haque wonders if the rise of social media isn’t unlike any other cultural or economic bubble that creates inflation and then rapid deflation. In this case, the social media bubble creates relationship inflation:

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as currency inflation debases money, so social inflation debases relationships. The very word “relationship” is being cheapened. It used to mean someone you could count on. Today, it means someone you can swap bits with.

Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. Real relationships are patterns of mutual investment. I invest in you, you invest in me. Parents, kids, spouses — all are multiple digit investments, of time, money, knowledge, and attention. The “relationships” at the heart of the social bubble aren’t real because they’re not marked by mutual investment . At most, they’re marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there.

He then goes on to list 5 factors that he belives lends credibility to his hypothesis.

Trust

Even though the rate of relationships has grown exponentially, the level of trust, Haque argues, hasn’t. How many of your social media friends would you trust to watch your children?

Disempowerment

Far from empowering people, Haque argues, the Internet is becoming a tool for the old gatekeepers to manipulate in a fresh new way. We aren’t free of PR tyranny, we’re seeing thousands of new PR opportunities coming our way. Governments aren’t being undermined by social media, they’re using it to suppress people.

Hate

I’ll just go ahead and quote Haque here: “Far from fueling meaningful conversation, today’s ’social’ web is a world full of the linguistic equivalent of drive-by shootings.” Might be the truest thing he wrote.

Exclusion

People aren’t actually forming new relationships with people of varying backgrounds, but rather experiencing the ultimate realization of the old adage “Birds of a feather flock together”. Haque writes, “But rarely are the gaps between differences bridged. Yet, that’s where the most valuable relationships begin.” Not sure I believe that the most valuable relationships begin at bridging gaps of difference…but then again, maybe my viewpoint will make Haque and I great friends.

Value

Finally, Haque postulates that if our online relationships were really that meaninful to us, we’d be willing to pay for the services that provide them. Instead, the social media entrepreneurs are forced to find intrusive and often unwanted ways to “monetize” their services apart from charging the end-user.

Interesting points, but not sure how I feel about them.

How about you? What value do you place on your online relationships? Where do you agree with Haque? Where do you disagree?

You can read the rest of the article here.

[Photo by aeioux]

Social media can take over your life if you’re not careful. Personally, I fight a constant battle to keep my social media activities in check and a healthy, balanced part of my life rather than a monster that consumes my free time, energy, and steals from my family.

I found this great little video over at Fast Company on how to master your social media monster:

These are great suggestions, no? I’m curious as to how you’re coping with the barrage. What are some tactics you employ to tame the social media beast?

A few years ago the concept of personal branding would have seemed silly. Sure there were people who could get away with it–the Donald Trumps and Bill Gates of the world. But that was only because they had worked hard to build a business in a traditional way that gained them notoriety.

Nowadays it seems like everyone is talking about personal brands–and everyone is trying to build one.

As a recent article by Tom Peters in Fast Company puts it:

You’re branded, branded, branded, branded.

It’s time for me — and you — to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

It’s that simple — and that hard. And that inescapable.

Peters is probably right. But as pastors and Christians, the concept of personal branding brings up some prickly problems. Here’s just one question I’ve thought of lately:

Would Paul have participated in self-branding?  Did Jesus self-brand?

I’ll argue the answer is unequivocally no. Both continually pointed to God the Father and sought to give him glory. Paul, after all, wrote this to the Corinthians:

1And I, when I came to you, brothers,^a did not come proclaiming to you the testimony^b of God with lofty speech or wisdom.2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (I Corinthians 2:1-5).

The biblical admonition is to find your identity in Jesus and to count yourself as nothing. I’m guilty of falling into the trap of the personal brand (after all, my blog is named after me…). Are you? How do we reconcile the world’s continue pressure to self-brand with the Bible’s teachings? Or do we at all?

Just when you think you’ve seen it all in social media comes Twoddler, an interactive toy that allows your language challenged baby to tweet you via a Fisher Price Activity Set. You think it’s a joke, but sadly it’s not. Check out this video.

INCA Award 2009 WINNER: Twoddler from IBBT on Vimeo.

Yet another “pioneering” event has happened in the digital world. A Japanese man named SAL9000, married his longtime virtual girlfriend, Nene Anegasaki, a character from the digital dating simulator Love Plus. Yes, folks. This is a real person with a fake name, marrying a fake person with a real name.

Here is a video of the “ceremony”:

Unless you think this is a fluke event, it’s not. In fact this is a growing trend in Japan. Here’s a quote from a New York Times article that details this peculiar cultural phenomenon:

In Japan the fetishistic love for two-dimensional characters is enough of a phenomenon to have earned its own slang word, moe, homonymous with the Japanese words for “burning” or “budding.” In an ideal moe relationship, a man frees himself from the expectations of an ordinary human relationship and expresses his passion for a chosen character, without fear of being judged or rejected.

I think this is a prime example of emergence of digitalism and digitalist culture, which I wrote about here. The inherent narcism of the Internet and digital media is leading to men who are unable to love anything that requires a pouring out of self. Worst yet, they justify it by blaming society and other women for wronging them! And worst of all, the culture in Japan revolves around pre-pubescent anime depictions of girls, often in the nude – inanimate depictions of helpless girls.

As one Ken Okayama explains it:

“I was steps away from getting married,” he explained earnestly when prodded about his experience. “You have to make sure you don’t hurt a real person; you have to watch what you say, and you have to keep your room clean. In Japan, it’s not O.K. to like another person if you’re already with somebody else. With an anime character, you can like one character one day and a different character the next.”

Many might think that something like that wouldn’t happen here, but American advertisers are already setting up technology to replace relationships as the primary value providers in our life. In what I wish was intentional irony, this ad was prominently displayed at the top of the New York Times article.

Great quote from Packer via Justin Taylor’s blog on the use of the Internet.

“I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.”—J.I. Packer, in World Magazine

Justin Taylor shares a devastating quote from Peter Kreeft’s notes on Pascal’s Pensees:

“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .”

This is a theme I’ve been more and more interested in. I especially appreciate Kreeft’s connection to our business and our desire to avoid introspection.

I’m no Pascal, but I’ve mused on this in a more low-brow form here while reflecting on this quote from Paul Carr:

“And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.”

[Photo courtesy of cofano]