5 Ways to Get Yourself Unfriended and Unfollowed Fast

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has a list of social networking pet peeves — that  mental list of "Oh, did he/she really say that?" items that tend to annoy.

Here's my list of five social networking faux pas, shared to keep the peace, and when avoided, to help you keep your followers and fans, well, your followers and fans, instead of a string of exes.

1. Never spell check or double check before posting
   Go ahead. Always use "women" when you're talking about just one. Spell quiet as quite. Use your and you're interchangeably or incorrectly. Mix up their, there and they're, and too and to. It's not just the grammar ninjas who notice. It could be your boss, potential employer, or a client who is rubbed the wrong way....


2. Retweet and share without checking the content first
   You see an interesting tweet or Facebook post, and you immediately RT or share it without reading it. And it turns out to be a scam, or an out-of-date/inaccurate article from 1990. Ouch. We follow you for a reason, and while RTing and sharing content doesn't mean that you endorse that point of view or content, it does imply that you've at least read what you're sharing and find it of interest, which means that we might find it of interest too.


3. Drop the f-bomb and other expletives frequently and indiscriminately in your online communications
   So let's just be blunt here. I know a lot of swear words. I use some of them occasionally when I drop something heavy on my toe or someone is chatting on the cell phone and cuts me off on the freeway, but I don't share them with my social graph. Everyone over the age of 11 knows the majority of these words and phrases too. What I don't want, and I'd bet the majority of your fans, followers, friends, colleagues and relatives don't want, is to see them in "print" in your tweets, Facebook updates, or blog posts.  Unless you're writing some gritty dialog for your novel, or directly quoting someone, it's distracting. Drowns out your message. Swallows your voice. Makes people wonder if your vocabulary is so limited that you can't come up with some meaty synonyms. Is that really what you want?
   
   
4. Start flame wars
   Everyone has opinions, and we're free to share them in much of the world. But part of that freedom, is, or at least should be, the responsibility to let others share their opinions, respectfully. You don't have to agree, but let's move past the name calling, okay?


5.  Share your prejudices with your social network
   If you have them, keep them to yourself, okay?
   NPR just posted a disturbing article, Haters Gonna Hate, As Shown On A Map. California State University, Humboldt, geography professor, Monica Stephens, and a team of undergrads spent a year sorting through and mapping racial slurs on Twitter by location. You can argue with her team's conclusions, but the ultimate lesson doesn't change: Don't do it. Ever.

The Internet never forgets, and your digital footprint will exist forever.  Are you presenting yourself the way you want to be viewed and remembered?

Image courtesy of Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Social Is About Connecting: Person to Person

You've heard it all, right? The detrimental effect social networking has on our world, including, but not limited to:

• The steep decline in conversational skills. 
• An increase in teens who don't know how to talk to adults.
• People who no longer belong to their local communities; not volunteering, not mowing their lawns, not helping little old ladies across the street....
• People who no longer care about personal grooming or bathing; staying in their homes and never coming out; only connecting virtually.
• The end of civilization as we know it.

It's all hooey, to use a polite term. Civilization is not going to end because of social networking. Even telecommuting employees like me come out of our houses, often quite frequently — you're just not seeing us commuting on the freeway in the car next to you. I've not noticed a decline in conversational skills, except for perhaps a reduction in the meaningless "small talk" that isn't exactly scintillating to begin with. And teenagers? Please, when have the majority of them ever wanted to talk to adults? Did you? They have no trouble talking with their peers, and eventually they'll be adults and have to talk to the rest of us.

I'm sure you've seen this quotation, often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt:

My experience with social is that it is creating an immensely exciting new form of communication enabling the discussion of ideas, all kinds of ideas, with like-minded people, regardless of location. Since you're no longer limited by proximity to communicate only with your neighbors, your office mates, or your immediate social circle, the connections you can make are almost unlimited. I think about the people in my virtual social circles, and they include:

• Classmates, colleagues and friends I've not seen for a while or had entirely lost touch with before reconnecting on a social network.
• The friends and family of my friends and family. 
• This one is cheating a bit as an example because I do work for a large multinational corporation, but I collaborate daily with colleagues from all over the US and the world with our internal social tools. Today, for instance, just a few of the interactions I had were with colleagues from New York, Colorado, Massachusetts, Florida, North Carolina, The Netherlands, Italy, Mexico, and India.
• People from all over the world who share my interests in philanthropy, social activism, books, design, technology, social networking, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, art, accessibility, writing, blogging, all things digital and my other 999 interests.

Does all of this virtual communication prevent me from being active in my community? Not in the slightest. In fact, I think it makes it easier to get involved by exposing me to new ideas.

So the next time someone tells you social networking is changing our world for the worst, you know what to say. :-)

Recent Innovations for People with Disabilities

There are amazing technologies being developed daily by incredibly talented people. Some of them are created to enable people with disabilities to participate fully in social networking. The development of these technologies often aren't covered by the mainstream press because they're considered of interest only to a small audience — a definite misconception.  When you consider that more than 1 billion of the 7 billion people in the world today have a disability*, and the world population is aging at the fastest rate in history** — these are not niche technologies by any stretch of the imagination.

Here are two technology innovations I found today, surfaced by Smart Planet:

• Dyslexie font designed to help dyslexics read, write: Not your typical technology innovation, but for those with dyslexia, a cognitive disability that makes reading and comprehension difficult, this font could help them read for a longer time and with better comprehension, compared to other fonts. Dislexie was created by Dutch graphic designer, Christian Boer, who is dyslexic. The letters in Dyslexie are more widely spaced and distinct from each other, and "tied down"  — making dyslexics less likely to flip them, mentally.

• New smartphone app lets users text ‘eyes-free’: Designed by the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this new iPhone application enables visually impaired users who are proficient at typing in Braille to type up to 32 words per minute at a 92% accuracy rate. Based on the same model as the Braille keyboard, the software, called BrailleTouch, employs gesture-based texting and uses only six keys, which are displayed as dots.

The researchers at Georgia Tech have been busy. I also found this article in Disabled World today:

• Tongue Drive Wireless Device Operates Computers and Wheelchairs: This innovative device enables people with high-level spinal cord injuries to operate a computer and maneuver an electrically powered wheelchair by moving their tongue. The newest prototype of the system allows users to wear an inconspicuous dental retainer embedded with sensors to control the system. It was demonstrated at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on February 20, 2012.

Many technologies created originally for people with disabilities have worked their way into the mainstream, making applications more usable for all. According to The Center for an Accessible Society, experts in the telecom access engineering field call it the "Electronic Curb-cut Effect", and have an extensive list on their website of IT (information technology) innovations, originally developed by, or in support of, people with disabilities that wound up benefiting everyone.

*10 Facts on Disability from the World Health Organization
**More than 600 million people are over the age of 60. By 2050, that number is expected to rise to 2 billion; more than 20 percent of the world’s population. World Health Organization

Image: Damian Brandon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Five Ps of Marketing

When I was in college, Intro to Marketing was taught from the marketing bible, Principles of Marketing, written by "the father of marketing", Dr. Philip Kotler. According to Dr. Kotler, the marketing mix was composed of the four Ps, a classification proposed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy. As 40 years worth of marketing students can tell you, the four Ps are:

• Price
• Product
• Place
• Promotion

Dr. Kotler has released the 13th edition of Principles of Marketing (I know I'm dating myself, but my copy is the 7th edition), and we can see how quickly marketing is evolving to keep pace with changing customer expectations and new technologies emerging to both fuel and fulfill those expectations.

In recent years there has been discussion of adding a fifth P, and I've seen a multitude of possibilities proposed, including: Participation, Process, Physical Evidence, Passion, Post-Purchase Service and Perception. I don't see how the fifth P could be anything but People, and I'm surprised it has taken as long as it has to surface as a potential component of the marketing mix.  (There are some who would increase the number of marketing mix components to seven, but I'm not convinced it's needed.)

The birth, adoption and rapid growth of social networking has increased the relevance of People in the marketing mix significantly. I see that playing out in two ways:

1. People have always been the face and representation of your brand;service reps, sales people, clerks, waiters/waitresses, consultants, instructors, baristas, call center reps anyone with whom your customer has contact. And now, thanks to social networking, there is the expectation that to be credible, marketers can no longer hide behind impersonal mass media advertising, direct mail or email, but need to publicly self-identify as subject matter experts via blogs, web pages, social media pages, emails, Twitter, and videos to communicate personally with their current and potential customers. Customers are overwhelmed with and and ignoring advertising and traditional one-size-fits-all messages that bounce off into the ether unnoticed. In today's global and flat world where social networking connects us all, customers want to know who is behind the curtain, writing and sending those messages.
2. Customer testimonials have always been the most effective selling tool available and that hasn't changed. Social networking has elevated the importance of your customers talking to each other —  sharing opinions, recommendations, and experiences. As a marketer, you need to use your social networking tools to build communities of connected, communicating and satisfied customers. It's critical that you respond very quickly and publicly to complaints or issues to show that you are listening, responding, and resolving.

As you build you marketing plans for next year, remember to include your customers and yourself as the 5th P of the marketing mix. Your competitors won't forget.

Twitter for the Casual User — How to Make It Work for You

It's probably not surprising that I view and use Twitter as a business and professional communication tool, based on what I do for a living. It can clearly be advantageous to tweet professionally and/or about your business, as I wrote in a blog post a few months ago.

Recently I've been asked what value Twitter has to the more casual user — someone who's not promoting a business or using it professionally. Twitter is one of those experiences in life that is hard to explain (even though I'm going to give it a go here), but becomes amazingly clear once you understand the ground rules and try it out yourself.

At its most basic level, Twitter is a social networking channel. Because there is a 140 character limit, it's ideal for sharing small bites of information and links. Twitter's reputation — while not totally undeserved — as nothing more than the latest way for the self-absorbed to overshare the mundane details of their lives ignores how well it enables the communication of relevant information quickly and succinctly. Are there people tweeting about what they ate for breakfast and what color shirt they're wearing today? Most likely. A communication channel is only as good as the content filling it. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.

But when you ignore the garbage and focus on the "communication of relevant information quickly and succinctly" then that is when Twitter reveals its value. You can customize Twitter so that it delivers exactly the information you're interested in, and you never have to send a single tweet (40% of Twitter users don’t tweet every month but watch others tweet*). To create a road map through the approximately one billion tweets created every five days*, I've categorized tweets into six groups, with examples, to help new Twitter users navigate their way:

1. News
   Every media outlet tweets. Follow BBC World News, the New York Times, CNN, CBS News, or your favorite news source. Most magazines also tweet. Usually you'll get the headline and a link to an article if you're interested in finding out more.
2. Favorite celebrities, authors, actors, photographers, musicians or sports teams
   So many of them tweet. Anderson Cooper, Coldplay, Robert DeNiro, Annie Leibovitz, Maya Angelou or the San Jose Sharks hockey team are just a few examples. You can use the Who to Follow function in Twitter to search for the people or groups who interest you.
3. Elected representatives
   Members of Congress (Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren in my case), governors (Governor Jerry Brown in California) and even the President of the United States all tweet to communicate with their constituents.
4. Local businesses
   One of my favorite social networking success stories is about the catering trucks who tweet their locations so that their customers can find them. Mashable covered the trend in an article titled How Social Media Is Fueling the Food Truck Phenomenon. One example cited in the article, Kogi BBQ,  has 87,000 followers who follow five trucks.
   I can follow one of my favorite French restaurants, Left Bank, keep an eye out for sales and new merchandise at Nordstrom, or find out what local events are taking place with tweets from the San Jose Downtown Association.
5. Favorite causes or hobbies
   Whether it's disability advocacy, organic gardening, nature conservation, micro lending, running, hiking or trumpet playing, you will find someone who is tweeting about topics that interest you. A few examples include the Harvard Art Museums,Yosemite National Park, or Knitting Network where knitters share patterns and information.
6. Trending topics
   This is a daily Twitter feature that tracks the most frequently used hash tags. Including a hash tag in a tweet makes that tweet appear in topical searches, such as #Egypt, #Occupy or #accessibility.

And here's the amazing thing about Twitter. You choose how you want to use it. You can set it up as a simple feed, where tweets on the topics you're interested in come to you, via your computer, tablet or smart phone, or even as cell phone texts. Or, if you want to connect with others who have the same interests, Twitter can help you do that too. You can respond to that person who has the perfect non-toxic aphid spray and ask for the recipe. Or you can tell the governor that you are opposed to the bill she is poised to sign. (Twitter has a very good Basics page to tell you exactly how.)

With Twitter, you define your experience — engage as much or as little as you want, and as frequently or infrequently as you like.

* 11 New Twitter Statistics