CrapHammer

The end of craphammer

A little over a year ago I set out to launch a project.  For months I would do everything in my power to work on anything else under the sun. The project scared me. There was no client. There was no one else to blame if things went wrong. And frankly, it was too close to my heart and my purpose.

Friends and associates stepped forward on every front. Without them I never would have been able to make this project see the light of day. Some designed logos for me. Others built the back end. Some stepped forward to help me on my first mini doc for the new site.

I wanted to document, speak with and understand the most passionate people I could find, whether they be artists, parents, circus performers or gardeners. I wanted to find and understand these people. I wanted to know what it was like to be them and share their motivations, tools and outlook with the rest of us.

Craphammer was a fun and key part of my professional life that has been dormant for far too long. So now it is time for me to let go and turn my attentions to the mostpassionate.ca.

I hope you will take a minute to stop by and check it out. I'll save a place for you there.

 

Passion and Content Creation (Red Nation)

 

I talk a lot about passion and "the most passionate."

I do so because I believe it is a critical component to building vibrant and healthy communities, brands and movements.

And by studying the most passionate, we can learn things about our products, our organizations and our communities that we never considered possible.

But it requires us to rethink how we define our audience.

It's no longer about demographics, no matter what the research company says or how many technographic reports we run.

Which is not to say demographics don't matter.

Demographics tell us not to be surprised that a bunch of middle aged guys love sports.

What it doesn't tell us is who is likely to become a passionate producer of unique content.

It doesn't give us any insight into who is developing authority or a growing audience of their own.

A couple of weekends back, I spent a few hours with 3 guys who spend their free time railing against the Toronto Football Club.  

It's hard to spend more than 5 minutes with them and not think they are anti-Toronto FC.

But I'd say that these guys are actually just really passionate about great soccer.  

And they are frustrated that their local team is not being setup to win.

So they started recording their drunken rants post game.

And something happened.

Other people shared their views and started subscribing.

They recently broke the 2,000 subscribers mark and have over 20,000 listens to date.

I was given a free seat for the game.  The seat they reserve for the writers they get to do the blog post writeup for each episode of their show (in trade for a seat to the game.)

These guys are no longer just a bunch of guys venting about the game - they are now trusted personalities on this subject.

I'd go so far as to say they have blurred the line between consumer and professional.

When I arrived at their "house of operations" post game for a beer and for the podcast recording, I could only gawk as they set into well-rehearsed motion.

A spare bedroom was quickly transformed into a full blown recording studio with giant folding baffles they made themselves, wall art that upon closer inspection is actually a set of hanging sound reducers and two Audio-technica mics hacked into Garage Band.

Here's a link to the podcast.  If you are into the content and stick around, you'll hear me around the 8 minute mark and then yelling in from time to time as I get drunk in the background.

Dark Clouds over Toronto

Stephe Perry, Ian Clark (Sparky), Tim Vickery (and on this episode, moi).

 

[Image credit: wvs (note that wvs is my FAVORITE Toronto photography.  Bar none.]

 

 

What we REALLY know

Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.

I can't say any more or less at this point about the following presentation.

Other than to say it is filled with more nuggets per pound than anything I've read in the past 2 years.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

What Spammers Know That We Don't

We are all working like mad to develop location based services and technologies. Phones that know where the nearest cool coffee shop is, discount coupons that apply to a store you just snubbed and walked past.  I believe it is considered to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity and the salvation of the mobile industry.

But frankly, we are sucking eggs and doing next to nothing while a few key individuals are proving you can mine for location based gold today with free or near-free resources.

Spammers Innovating Faster than Hi Tech:

The Real Estate, Online Pharmacies and Porn Spammers have once again proven they are leaders in adapting new technologies to their annoying purposes.

I tweeted the following:

And within minutes I received a follow from KatyFStewart.

She offers one link on her page.  To this site:

 

Should I be promoting her Twitter account?  Should I have clicked through on a link from a semi-naked nubile photo?  No.  Of course not.  But will I be alone?  Nope.  Guaranteed.  Not only that, I would bet that many a media person would cry to get even 1/10 of the clickthrough and conversion rates these people are achieving.

Not Just Porn:

Tweet the name of a city and you will undoubtedly get a sudden increase in followers.  Why?  Because the real estate industry is not about to be left behind by the porn industry.  Quite a few real estate agents appear to be using auto-subscribe services to add you as a friend in cities they do their work in.

These are services that listen for a set of keywords and once it finds a match with any twitter user in the world, it sends that person a follow request on your behalf.

Let me be clear. I hate auto-subscribe services.  It's like paying someone to get you more friends.

That said, it does make me wonder.  Do we really need fancy and expensive GPS and high tech solutions or could we just better monitor and respond to the contextual content people are providing in their tweets and status updates?

Brilliance:

What I love about [what] Ms. Stewart is doing (real name likely Amanda Hogsbottom) is that they are using simple, free and contextual tools to mine twitter and facebook.  Then they are doing simple (and free) IP sniffing from their website to provide an end to end contextually relevant and highly personalized (location based) solution.  Something the big brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve with likely far less success.

I am not an influencer and we are not friends (try 2)

 

I would think that writing an article titled "F*ck Influencers..." would have halted some of the SPAM PR email I receive every day, but alas, just last week I received yet another in a steady stream of such emails.  This one stood out as it actually referenced the "F*ck Influencers..." post. 

All of these emails tend to follow a very simple format.

Dear Mr. Howard,

[Introduction on how they love and follow my blog.]  [Crafty little segue into their new product and service they are launching.]

[Calling out a post they liked by its title] [Some reference about how their service may be of interest to me (call to action)]

[One or more paragraphs on their service/offering that appears to be cut and pasted from a press release.]

Signed,

Name, Phone, Email, etc.

The email I received last week actually appeared to be written by hand and not by a PR firm.  I can only assume this individual had been told "how" to email blog owners, had paid someone to do this on his behalf, or is perfectly harmless and just stepped into a hornets nest.  So in an effort to help this individual out...

I AM NOT AN "INFLUENCER" AND WE ARE NOT FRIENDS.

That's not to say I don't have influence.  And that's not to say we couldn't one day be friends.  It simply means I am not a vehicle sitting around idly waiting to SPAM my friends no matter how "awesome" this piece of PR news is. 

Let's talk about what influence I have and how to get me to one day care enough about your service to potentially share it within my circles of influence.

It's amazingly simple.

1. Have a conversation with me.

Don't call me and don't email me.  So where can you have a conversation with me?  Well, here's a crazy idea, how about on the very blog that brought me to your attention?

2. Have a conversation with ME about what matters to ME. 

Every article on my blog has a wonderful little comment feature.  Here's an "out of the box" thought.  What about leaving a comment on the very post you were about to say your really liked in the spam email?

But there's a catch, you have bring some value to the conversation or I'm going to assume you are a spammer and press "mark as spam."

But that's a lot of comments you have to leave and monitor.  What is a PR lackey tasked to incent and measure massive viral reach via SPAM emails to do??? 

Die, hopefully.

3. Create a Relationship

Relationships are two way streets. They are touch and go.  They take lots of time and enormous amounts of effort. Which may be why everyone, including PR firms and agencies who should know better, spam everyone by email.

But it's only when we have a relationship that you are then able to leverage my influence. It's only when we have a relationship that we are able to determine what is of value to each other.  The relationships that bring value to each of us as well as our extended circles of influence become stronger and open up new opportunities.

4. Relationships are complex

Here is the good news about relationships: they are not an on/off switch.  There are more contexts for relationships than I think can be defined or addressed.  I may think you are cute.  You may think I'm nice but too big for my boots.  I may disagree with everything you say but admire your transparency and openness. We might see the world the same way or from radically different perspectives.

Or we may only have a relationship built around a topic or area of interest.  Something I'm interested in and you are able to provide insight or access to.

I am 100% in the Herd camp.  Influencers don't exist, only influence.  Step 1 is to have a relationship.  I'd go so far as to say that the person with the most relationships wins.

[Image Source: Xurble ]

F*ck Influencers (or Influencing Conversations)

I've recently been asked to work on an Influencer strategy.

I have to admit that I had a bit of a negative initial reaction to the task.  So much of what I read online about "influencers" seems to assume that people live to spread messages.  While there is some "status" truth to being the source or the first to report something, this rings naive and hollow as a prime motivator to me.  My personal sense of my own motivations is not that I desire to spread messages, but rather that I want to be part of a larger conversation or participate in something meaningful.

My first thought on how to approach this task was to expand influencers beyond a select group of "key" people.

In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure.  So to focus on just "A listers" or big names is to severely limit the potential for what can be achieved.    That's not to say I don't want "A listers" (if they even exist) to join in the conversation, rather it says that I always prefer to not put all my eggs in one basket.

My next step was to redefine influencers from people to nodes of influence. 

A node can be a major platform or property such as Twitter, Facebook or MTV.  A node can also be a community of interest that has gathered around a topic.  I spent some time defining all the different areas of influence (around the topic at hand) and then narrowing down into the nodes that make up each ecosystem or circle of influence.  These grew into some rather intricate maps that opened up all kinds of new opportunities I had not considered when I first approached this task, and it shifted quickly from finding a handful of influencers to looking at how to reach hundreds of thousands of individuals.

Next I pulled back to revisit the purpose of any influencer strategy, which I am currently defining as "to encourage conversations around the brand that are shared by individuals across their networks of influence."

Key stress is placed on individuals and the fact that each has unique networks but with lots of duplication between these networks. 

All of this thinking led me to some key questions.

Why do people share links or retweet on platforms like Twitter?
What types of things do people share and for what benefit?
How does how people see their networks affect their decisions on what to share?

I don't have any solid answers yet but I was brought to some wonderful resources by some great people within my network.  I look forward to other thoughts on this matter.

Dana Boyd's Analysis of ReTweeting activity on Twitter (h/t to Karen Quinn Fung via Twitter)

Segmenting and Targeting Users by Their Level of Interaction

Behavior First, Design Second (attention, to collect, status and vanity)

Image Source: FAS.research

Every Website Should be Social

Found this presentation over on the Frith'sters rantbase.  ;)

View more documents from shivsingh.

To date, most Facebook Connect sites make very limited us of the Social Graph information available.  So in the presentation above, the authors ask if the real value of something like FB Connect is in its being the window into things like collaborative commerce.

What if we logged into a retailer and reviews from our friends or our friends' friends were listed at the top?  It's one of the reasons I love services like GigPark because I'm able to get reviews from people I trust.  I'm quite fed up with reading highly emotional reviews that turn out to be bogus or misleading. Something tells me I'm not alone.

We are all building trusted networks online.  The question is how to tap into these.  Perhaps its less about how many clicks a person takes to get to a product and rather how many clicks it takes them to find out from THEIR network just how good or bad a product is.

I've long been interested in social shopping and while there have been a few attempts by some retailers to move into this area, they were hindered by the fact that your friends were likely not participating in the site.  So adoption became a significant barrier to entry.

As we move down the road of Facebook Connect microsites and promotions, it would do us all good to start thinking of this as a new opportunity for connecting everyday tasks with the uniqueness of our social connections.  In other words, to make the sites we visit far more relevant, helpful and of use.

Wayne knows what many Word of Mouth experts don't

I was asked [for] a LinkedIn answer on how to build Word of Mouth for a new Montessori school (www.montessorinl.ca) that Steve Bannister and his wife  are starting in St John's Newfoundland.  Here is a reprint of my answer.  There's a cool story about an amazing man Wayne buried towards the end...

  A lot of what I recommend can generally be equated to common sense.  This is because I believe that people are social beings and we desire connections, comfort and to feel valued.  The idea being that it takes a community to make an individual.  So if we behave in ways that are socially relevant and bring value to the individual, then I believe word of mouth will prosper.

  At the risk of being flamed by WOMers, I feel it takes anything but an expert on Word of Mouth campaigns to get Word of Mouth.  Rather, it takes a hard fought for awareness and commitment to caring and forging connections.  You need to align your passions with your values and create the most valuable and humane service possible while recognizing and being honest about your limitations and failings. ie: being open to input and conversation.

  I'm adding some links to services that could be very useful but they assume you are starting your centre here in Toronto.  Whether they are working/adopted where you are is a critical factor to be determined. 

  Namely: Gigpark, LinkedIn, Facebook

  Certainly no shocks in the above list.  These services can foster increased activity, but what creates the desire for people to share your service with friends and family?  I'd post some additional questions.

  How do people make recommendations now?
  Who are people in your community listening to today about schooling/education for their kids?
  What makes you stand out in a sea of noise?
  What values are at the centre of what you are doing?  The "What and the "How" are weak cousins to the "Why".

  I'm going to tell you a story about one of the greatest word of mouth examples in the city of Toronto.  A story very few people know about, but those who do will jump up and down in support.  And this individual has most likely never hired a WOM consultant, nor has he focused on WOM.

  Wayne runs a laundromat.  My google maps search leads me to estimate that there are potentially more than 1900 dry cleaners in the city of Toronto.  So how do you make one outfit stand out?

  Historically, I have always chosen my laundromat by location.  Then when a piece of clothing gets ruined or improperly cleaned, I often select the next best candidate that is slightly less convenient to where I live/work/travel.  This continues infinitum as I never run out of laundromats. 

  Only this all changed when I bought my first Hugo Boss suit and a couple of $200 dress shirts. I suddenly realized that it's one thing for an $80 shirt to get improperly pressed and glossy, but I didn't want this to happen with my much more expensive items.  So I walked into the agency where I was working and asked if anyone knew of a decent laundromat in the area.  I use the word "decent" here because in my brain I had no idea that excellence could occur in the realm of the sweaty, disinterested dry cleaning world I have witnessed every week of my adult life. (I believe an analogy with education could be made here.  ;-)

  I was accosted by a good friend at the agency who literally shook me until I agreed to save my soul and visit Wayne at King West Village Cleaners (1000 King West, 416-596-0559).  I thought it a bit strange that my friend knew the guy's name let alone that he was so emphatic and excited about me visiting him. This makes me chuckle because I now find myself doing the shaking and empathic gestures when asked about dry cleaners.

  It should be noted that I now live over 10 miles away from this laundromat.  I no longer work nearby, I don't have a car and I rarely travel to that end of town anymore.  I'm an East-ender and he is far on the west end.  (For my NY readers, this is like my living and working in SoHo but visiting an laundromat in the high 40's.)

  But every two weeks I rent my Zipcar and "fly" across town to meet Wayne.  And every two weeks he greets me by name, discusses any issues I have and personally picks out the shirts to be hand finished.

  And every two weeks I watch in amazement as someone else walks in before or after me and receives a level of service I've never witnessed elsewhere.  On my last visit, I watched as a woman bashfully handed Wayne the most destroyed pair of jeans on the planet and explained that they were her "special jeans".  She was in front of me and he apologized once to me and then turned his full attention to her.  It took close to 5 minutes for her to explain which rips were not to be repaired, how she wanted other things done.  This pair of jeans must have been 10 years old and he treated it with extreme care, listened to every point and ensured he understood what to do.  He treated this horrible pair of jeans as she intended - as her most prized possession.

  The last time I was in the shop, I asked Wayne what he does.  I wanted to know how he creates something so unusual in a space so crowded.  He told me a very simple thing.  "I just treat every piece of clothing as if it is mine."  I think there is more to it than that.  He acts with respect and integrity.  He fully shows up every day and as a result, his entire staff follow his lead to a level of service I am privileged to receive.

  He told me they were just selected by NOW magazine as the best dry cleaner in the city.  Rightfully so. 

(reprinted from my LinkedIn Response)

Image Source: pbo31

An American Prayer

I've gotten to where I can't watch YouTube.

It's full of clips of people saying horrific things of an American Presidential candidate.  The fear.  The mongering.

So I give you this.

Connecting more than information...

Brilliant video: an anthopological introduction to YouTube.

For anyone looking to understand the growth and role of YouTube (and other social media technologies) in our world today.  From the guy who brought us "The machine is using us" video and one of the earliest to run a digital ethnography study of YouTube.

"I think of [media] as mediating human relationships... when media changed, human relationships changed..."

Hat Tip: Johnnie Moore