Media in the New Millennium

Join PRSA Colorado and Doyle Albee, Metzger president and social media expert, on July 8, 2009 for a coffee talk on social media. Doyle will be highlighting current social media trends, sharing best practices and successful campaigns as he gives insight on how to stay on top of the social media game.

Coffee and a light breakfast will be served courtesy of Safeway and free parking is available. More details are below or visit PRSA Colorado for more information and to register.

Details:

DATE: July 8

TIME: 8:30 - 9:30 a.m.

LOCATION: Metzger Associates, 5733 Central Ave., Boulder, CO 80301

COST: $30

Posted by Elaine Ellis

Today was Bike to Work Day, a popular day to encourage everyone to get out and ride their bikes. Breakfast stations lined up all over the Front Range for everyone who stopped by on a bike. Free food and helping our environment is always a good thing. Two other people are doing their best to raise awareness for biking to work. Two cyclists, Carlos and Joe, who are also geeks are biking their way across the country  and “they hope to inspire (or potentially force) other geeks to change their commuting habits.” They’re behind Real Geeks Ride.

I don’t bike to work. I don’t even own a bike. So I might not be the best person to talk about this. But what I love is that they’re not avid cyclists. Their geeks with bikes riding across the country to encourage people like me to get bikes and ride.

My friend and all-around favorite, Tara Anderson of Lijit, asked me to assist with getting the word out as they’ll be doing a Boulder stop. We’ll be hosting them on Friday, July 3 at 4 to 6 pm at the Draft House. So come by and bring your bike. Or if you’re like me, park and get inspired by two people biking along the country in places ranging from York, PA to Griswold, IA to Boulder, CO.

See you on July 3rd!

Posted by Lisa Greim

Trying to manage an online forum, as my colleague Nate Warren noted earlier this month, is like herding cats. It’s no wonder some marketers still hesitate to recommend social media to clients. Under the cover of anonymity, some people will say unbelievable things.

Years of hosting conversations at the two-decade-old online community The Well have given me some insight. Well members post under their real names, but bad behavior still ranges from low-level cluelessness to shocking verbal abuse.

In 2001, I co-hosted a forum (on The Well they’re called conferences) about the 9/11 attacks. It turned into the personal toxic waste dump of a guy I’ll call Sludge, whose capacity to hate people on the Left made Rush Limbaugh look like Mister Rogers.

It looked to us like he spent the whole day flaming people in dozens, if not hundreds, of topics. He could get as ugly talking chiles in the Cooking conference as he did about terrorist-coddling liberals. If you crossed him, he would track you all over the system and, within minutes, spew venom after everything you posted: weather reports, birthday greetings, the cute thing your baby did.

Whole conferences went silent as people took their discussions private to get away from him.

Sludge held particular contempt for women, so I volunteered to draw his fire in the hopes that he would violate the Terms of Service badly enough to get him kicked out. I deleted something of his and came back to a long screed about “Lisa, the Town Skank.” He finally got booted for using his wife’s account to read women-only conferences, looking for dirt about me.

If you still believe what your mom said about names never hurting you, you’ve never read an email so hateful that your hands shake too much to type for a while.

Because I love online community, I’m a firm believer in active forum moderation to control the jerks and keep the conversation beneficial for the greatest number. Here are some recurring problem posters and what to do about them.

The Debate Club President: This person loves a good argument and doesn’t mind a bad one. They sometimes will take a contradictory position that they personally don’t believe, just for sport.
The Problem: Skilled Debate Clubbers keep conversations lively, but clumsy or overtalkative ones can kill a discussion, especially if they turn into Bomb-Throwers or Broken Records (see below).
Manage by: Hosting online discussion like you would a cocktail party, circulating to make sure everyone’s drink is topped off and no one feels left out. If forum participants are used to the moderator chiming in, you will be able to control topic drift or those who monopolize the conversation without looking heavy-handed. As longtime Well host David Gans – who made his bones wrangling Deadheads, never the easiest cats to herd – told me when I started, just be a good host. Create a pleasant space to hang out. Refill the pretzels and empty the ashtrays. Make sure people know you’re there and a lot of little issues will work themselves out.

The Bomb-Thrower: Will lob something incendiary into a discussion just for the fun of it. Truly virulent Bomb-Throwers will slam “breeders” on a parenting forum, refer to prayer on a Christian website as “talking to your invisible friends,” or rant about idiot Boulder liberals on the Daily Camera’s comment threads. They’re like trolls, only they come out from under the bridge more often.
The Problem: Bomb-Throwers are often the first to scream “Censorship!” when moderators try to mitigate the damage they do to a conversation. Classic control freaks, they divert attention by attempting to make you the problem.
Manage by: Setting rules and expectations up front, and enforcing them publicly and fairly. This give you the track record and tools you need to shut these guys down. Start with zero tolerance for name-calling, attacks or slurs, and an eagle eye for topic drift. For the sake of a healthy online community, you may have to remove posts or block users. Brace yourself for the inevitable abuse and just do it. Your rational readers will thank you.

The World’s Foremost Expert on Everything: There’s one of these in every crowd, isn’t there?
The Problem: They’re all on the Internet now, spreading misinformation. Worse: boring.
Manage by: Correct important errors of fact and let your users take care of the rest by either challenging or bozofiltering the World’s Foremost Expert. Some Bozos never understand why people don’t respond anymore. They just keep talking … to nobody. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

The Broken Record: You’ll be talking about rose gardening until somebody announces that illegal immigrants take all the landscaping jobs. They pop up in a thread about stomach flu at a summer camp to posit that illegal immigrants in the kitchen spread disease. Talking about cars? They’re right there griping about Mexican drivers. It gets old.
Note the similarities between Bomb-Throwers and Broken Records. Every topic on the Internet, from laundry to astrophysics, becomes a referendum on their pet subject.
Manage them by: Routing around them. Turn that eagle eye on drift into a firm rein. “Back to roses, is anybody else having trouble with Japanese beetles?” Again, your clued-in users will reinforce the message by refusing to take the bait.

The Bully: You’ll recognize this guy the first time he responds to someone with, “Shut your piehole, you fat Irish moron.” They snark and call names, and that’s just to warm up. More toxic bullies will dig up personal info about people or stalk them – online and even in person.
The Problem: Testosterone. Anger management. Childhood abandonment issues. Whatever. You’re just an online host, not a psychotherapist.
Manage by: This is the place for heavy-handed hosting. Delete, suspend and ban. In extreme cases like Sludge, who was practiced at skating just inside the lines, you may have to provoke the Bully into violating the user agreement. It makes for an unpleasant couple of days, but it works. Call the police if the bullying moves into meatspace. Life is too short.

Posted by Elaine Ellis

Last week I got to be on a panel at the Organic Trade Association’s All Things Organic Conference on using social media for marketing. Also on the panel were Nathan Rice of Haberman and Jennifer Rose of the Organic Trade Association. It was my first food conference, but hopefully not my last. Especially because attending the trade show floor is like attending a deluxe version of sample night at Whole Foods. Everywhere you went there was free food! Yes please. I got to sample Ezekiel’s cereal, this amazing brown sugar whipped cream, Salad Girl Dressing and Toats (a biscuit for you, your dog AND your horse), etc. Each product is unique with unique organic ingredients created by people committed to you putting better food in your mouth. There are serious stories behind these products, and social media presents an affordable way to tell the story about these products.

I wanted to share some of my favorite examples of organic companies using social media to tell a story.

• Monterey Bay Aquarium iPhone App - Built by volunteer programmers, this app lets you look up information about the fish you’re eating. Want to know if the fish is over-harvested? The app can tell you. It’s social media helping you making smart decisions about the food you put in your mouth.

• The Greensheets - My college roommate launched this blog recently to channel her passion for healthy food and wellness. Long committed to get others thinking about what they’re putting into their body, her blog serves as a way to educate others beyond family, friends and clients.

• Rick Levine of Seth Ellis Chocolates -Rick from a local Boulder, Colo., organic chocolatier, twitters about the chocolates as they are made. He includes pictures and tells snippets of a story on how his chocolates are made. Plus, he offers free samples to anyone who stops by. It makes the chocolate making process very open.

• Taza Chocolates - I’ve purchased these chocolates for my Godparents from Foodzie previously, and they were a huge hit. They are a true bean-to-bar chocolate maker, and the only maker of 100% stone ground chocolate in the United States. Unlike Hershey’s chocolates, they know exactly where their organic ingredients come from and use their blog to tell the story of their producers and product. They know the source of their chocolate in Mexico, and they know the source of their chiles. It makes for a more compelling read than if Hershey’s were to blog that they received a 1,000 pound bag of sugar shipment? Not exactly appetizing.

You can tell at booths who were the ones who were passionate about the food, and those who were just working. You can guess who elicited the stronger response. Just like booths, it is those who are passionate about the food that they’re creating who should be at the helm of blogs and social media.

Salad Girl Dressing

posted by Doyle

So, I’ve been meaning to rant about this for some time, and today is the day.

I’m walking through the King Soopers where I buy all my groceries in south Boulder, and I see this sign:

So here’s my point: of 10.5 inches, all but 1.75 inches was pretty much wasted. That’s 8.75 wasted inches. Let’s say that each of the 2,481 stores operated by King Soopers’ parent Kroeger has 500 patrons each day (I think I’m low, but go with me here). That’s a total of more than 171 miles of paper WASTED each day on crappy, poorly targeted advertisements. Put another way: that’s 62,500 miles each year.

Sorry… that’s not exactly sticking to a commitment to the environment in my book.

Posted by Melissa Vizcarra

The country of Iran held its presidential election last week and now is in a state of turmoil. The “theocratic republic” of Iran jammed text messages, cell phones, and Web sites. It shut down the Facebook page of its opposition, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister whose campaign hinged on Hope and Change, leaving its 5,000 fans without a communications resource.

Or, so they thought.

Because there was one platform that was able to withstand this hardline Islamic government’s crackdown: the increasingly popular Twitter. Throughout the upheaval and the chaos, Twitter was able to stay one step ahead of the government. As Iran’s new regime blocked one site, another hashtag would be created. And, the tweeting continues even today. As you read this post, it is likely that 10 new hashtags have been made. (For the newer Twitter users, hashtags act as a way to create categories, groups, or topics for tweets that others can use as well.)

Before the “Twitter revolution” began, Twitter was scheduled for a “critical network update,” Twitter would be down for ~90 minutes, but due to the breaking world news Twitter decided to reschedule their maintenance work; good move by Twitter! But, the battle wages on: because the Iranian government is more concerned with “cracking the code” than addressing the people’s voices, new proxies, clean IP address that forward a user to other websites so that they are hidden, are being created to divert them.

The median age in Iran is 27. It is great to see this country’s young population taking advantage of this new (internet usage in Iran is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the young and city-dwellers) technology and still continuing Mir Hossein Mousavi’s ideology even if he ultimately “lost” the election (an outcome that is being heavily disputed). Grand Ayatollah Ali Kharmenei, who is the supreme ruler of Iran, has ordered an investigation into the election and hopefully some resolution will come to this country soon.

Posted by Gabe Lee

Social networking sites have always been accessed from all over the world. Sure, most of them started in the US, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, but give any popular social media site a few months of steady growth and the international users will start to roll in.  Is this because other countries are simply following current Internet trends? Or can it be that people simply bring social sites with them when they move or travel to new countries? The answer to both is, yes.

As you may or may not know I have been in Bogota, Colombia for a few weeks now and I have been using social media while in Columbia to keep in touch with my friends and followers. My trip to Colombia is for the whole summer ,and I have decided to up my social media game while I am here, since I have a little more free time to further establish my online personality.  My medium of choice: Twitter, blogging and Vloggoing (video blogging).  It’s a little difficult to keep my “Tweeps” updated in the many areas without Internet access, but for the most part I am able to still stay informed on the happenings in the States and in Colombia.

Not surprisingly, the content of my Twitter and Facebook status reports have changed since arriving in Columbia. So far some of my tweets and blog/Vlog posts have been aimed at my travels here in Colombia and I have noticed some new US followers that are especially interested in Colombia. And, it’s pretty cool that now even some Colombians have even started to follow me. I have been focusing on Videos because I think that in a 2-3 minute video I can capture a lot of entertaining information while recognizing the need to provide short and to the point information.

It’s been - and continues to be - a pretty fun experiment, broadening my social media presence from South America. I’ll be exploring the ideas of social media in Columbia more as I continue my stay here, so stay tuned to future blog posts for more information on how Columbians are using Twitter, Facebook, etc. in their every day lives.

You can view my updates on Twitter (@gabelee) and follow my adventures at www.scoopthedirt.com.

posted by Doyle

I picked up a MiFi card from Sprint this past weekend. While the Palm Pre looks to be a pretty cool phone (no, as an iPhone guy I do not yet see a reason for device envy, especially with OS 3.0 just around the corner), it was almost too bad this device came out during the same week. I think Sprint can make some serious positive noise with the MiFi as well… it’s a cool new toy.

This device is Sprint’s version of a Novatel wireless modem also available through Verizon. Since I already had a Sprint wireless Internet account, I went with the Sprint device. Basically, this card — about the size of a credit card and as thick as maybe four credit cards stacked up — allows you to set up a personal hot spot and connect up to five devices via WiFi to your Sprint 3G Internet. So, that’s you and a few friends, or your laptop and your iPhone or… you get the picture.

In short, this thing is just a little box of awesome. After about a week, I love it. Here are some benefits:

• I’m frequently in client meetings with colleagues where the WiFi is behind a corporate firewall. I could always use my Sprint connection, but now I can share it with up to four other Metzger employees.
• I can turn it on and hook up my iPhone and have WiFi-like access anywhere. Even though it’s only 3G speeds, my iPhone thinks it’s using a WiFi connection, even walking down the street.
• It has it’s own battery, so it doesn’t tap my laptop battery.
• I probably shouldn’t say this, but I can sneak Skype on my iPhone on the Sprint 3G network, as the phone thinks it’s on WiFi rather than 3G.
• It’s got up to 128-bit security, so you don’t have to worry about jerks at the local watering hole jumping on your bandwidth.
• You can name the network whatever you like. In an homage to the movie “Hackers,” my personal hotspot shows up on everyone’s WiFi as “Crash Override.”
• On the downside, you’re still limited to 5GB/month before overage charges kick in, so you have to be a little careful about letting too many people on your card too often. In normal use, even with others on the card, I’m still far below the limit.
• I got one before Dave Taylor did, so I got major geek cred here in Boulder!

Seriously, I love this device. If you’re thinking of getting 3G access for a laptop, this is the only way to go.

Posted by Elaine Ellis

I attended the first Chicks Who Click in January in Boulder having no idea what to expect.  I wanted to support Denise, our event planner at Metzger. I ended up being blown away by the women who attended.

 I finally got to meet Aimee Greeblemonkey, a business women and Mommy blogger extraordinaire. Now someone I consider a good friend. I got to hang with Tara Anderson, a crowd favorite and one of the first people to do community outreach for a tech company (Lijit!). Now someone I got to go wedding dress shopping with (hers, not mine!). I met Amber Johnson of Crazy Bloggin Canuck and Mile High Mamas, a blogger I’d been “stalking” for a long time. I meet Amy Turn Sharp aka dooblehvay, who brought out masks for the after party and has one sharp wit. To me, Chicks Who Click enabled me to meet and be inspired by amazing women I already knew or might get to know through social media.  

 I can’t exactly put a finger on it, but the atmosphere changes when the majority of attendees are women.  It’s not that we’re not welcome at other social media or tech events, we are. But the atmosphere is so much more supportive when it’s women.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re starting at ground zero or if you’ve been a blogger for years. No one mocks or ridicules.

 So I begged Denise and Doyle to go Chicks Who Click Kansas City. Again, I left awed and inspired by the women I met. I loved how Rita Arens and Jennifer Bruenjes (aka Scout Finch) have this take the bull by the horns attitude. These women are no pushovers. I loved the vivacious trio from EMBARQ (a client) of Maria Fogliasso, Victoria Soares and Zena Weist. Zena is a personal hero of mine. If there is a women who is someone to aspire to be, it’s Zena. Celeste Lindell and Kate McKinney gave Tara and I a tour of the city of fountains. Every visitor to KC should be so lucky. 

I can’t attend Chicks Who Click Vancouver on June 27 because I’ll be in SLC for a wedding, but if you have the opportunity, I highly recommend you go. The women you’ll meet will ferment your passion in social media and inspire you in real life.