Mike Flacy

I’m a fan of new social networks; I really am.  I’m the first to jump on the bandwagon of an innovative social network.   About 6 months ago, I played around with FourSquare.  (For those that are unaware of FourSquare, it’s a social network designed around geo-location; basically informing your friends where you are at all times.)   Beyond geo-location, FourSquare is loosely based around Microsoft’s achievement system for the Xbox 360.  The more times you check in, the more badges you earn.  About 6 days after I downloaded it, I deleted it from my iPhone.

Part of my job is to manage a handful of company brand pages, some more successful than others due to the demographic of the readership.  As I work with Facebook brand pages all day, it has become very obvious to me that the majority of brand / fan pages are clueless when it comes to attracting more fans effectively and efficiently.  Here are 5 reasons why those pages aren’t as successful as they could be.

I manage six different Twitter accounts.  While that may seem like an overload of tweets, it’s actually quite simple.  Five are related to the websites I help manage.  (In all fairness, I can’t lay claim to the nickname inception of Twitmaster General.  It was coined by a couple guys at work in jest to all the Twitter accounts.)

Are you familiar with Ping.fm?  It’s a service that allows you to update all your social networks with one click of a mouse.  I thought this was a brilliant idea when I signed up a year ago, but it’s becoming more evident each day that my “lifestream” is molded differently for every social network I belong to.  Occasionally there’s a smidgen of overlap, but I’m typically writing to very different audiences.

• 30 days ago, I was driving from South Carolina to Los Angeles without a full time job.
• 20 days ago, I was on my first interview at a social networking company in Westwood.
• 10 days ago, I was on my third callback interview with a tech company in El Segundo.
• 5 days ago, I had three different job offers in my lap.

I rarely post about politics, but something intriguing on the campaign front caught my eye today. A presidential candidate is advertising in Burnout Revenge. For those unfamiliar, Burnout Revenge is a car-racing video game owned by Electronic Arts.

I discovered TweetDeck yesterday.  The design is ridiculously productive, yet the web keyword feature can easily suck away hours of your life.  I watched the iPhone feed and started firing off helpful replies incessantly.  The outcome is another handful of Twitter followers.  It’s a fantastic tool to find Twitter users with similar interests.  It’s not bad for local connections, but Twinkle is still the king in that respect.

I also came across two moderately funny web items today. The first is Where is Bob? It’s supposedly the tale of a absentee IT manager.  It’s likely a viral marketing campaign of some sort as the writing is a bit too good and the stories are just slightly outlandish.  It’s still worth looking at for a laugh.

The second is a Hulu video of a short comedy called The Line. It’s about a group of crazy fanboys that sit in a line 11 days before some sci-fi movie opens.  There are a couple guys from SNL in the mix.  Jason Sudeikis is particularly funny as the movie theater operator.

I’ve been listening to Chopin all day for some reason.  Dead Polish piano players seem to increase my productivity on the writing front.

I took Chris Brogan’s advice today and beefed up my LinkedIn page a bit.  I added a bit of a summary and linked out to the RSS feed on this blog.  I also wrote a recommendation for a fellow writer.  I’ve really started to notice an increase in networking lately and I’m attributing it to LinkedIn, especially after adding so many contacts.

I’m happy with the blog design for now.  I keep tweaking it every day just a little bit, so expect to see small changes.  I’m also looking to add something new to the sidebar, but I’m trying to figure out what I should toss in there.  I’m really digging the minimalistic look right now, but I’m still missing something.

I also completed a quick video preview of Friend Book for the iPhone this afternoon.  It’s not out on the App Store on iTunes yet and it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits the digital streets.  Click the picture to the left or the Youtube link at the top of the page to watch the 3 minute preview.

I saw a man pushing a baby stroller with a toddler down the road today with his left hand and carrying a running weed trimmer in his right hand. He was either nuts or some sort of Nanny / Landscaper hybrid. Crazy or not, I drove away blissfully indifferent of the Cabbage Patch Kidnapper.

I tend to embrace my apathy. It’s especially fun to invoke during conversations. I’ve noticed that people automatically assume that you are of a differing opinion when clamming up; political and religious conversations in particular. For instance some liberal co-workers at my previous job thought I was a staunch conservative; all from adopting an apathetic stance. Truthfully I’m probably somewhere in the middle, but I don’t see the point in talking about something that I’d have to pretend I had the ability to change.

That’s the real beauty of apathy.  I don’t have to lie to myself about how much I should care about matters of supposed importance.  I get to focus on stuff that’s important to my little egocentric mind instead; work and play perhaps.  Everything else gets deleted from my brain after conversations end.  But on to more social topics…

I added a LinkedIn profile recently for networking purposes.  Seeing how my previous jobs weren’t exactly tech-related, I couldn’t beef up my contact list.  I strapped on my creativity hat and sent a mass-mailing to VGT contacts about adding me.  It will help me keep track of their job-hopping movements anyway.  I got about 60% to add me.  Not too shabby!

I also got in on the Ping.fm beta finally.  For those that don’t know, Ping.fm allows you to send the same status up to mutliple accounts.  For instance, I have it setup to send my status update to Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and LinkedIn.  It works with tons of other services as well (FriendFeed, Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, WordPress, Pownce, etc…).  I have a beta code if anyone wants to sign up.

I’ve may have fallen into a Mobius Strip of writing endlessly until it’s time to sleep again.  I’m content to repeat that cycle over and over while my bank account gleefully greets the array of dead presidents being added every day.  The lucrative lifestyle makes me want to move again, perhaps up north for a few months.

I’ve been receiving an inordinate amount of Facebook friend requests lately; many from complete strangers.  No matter how many times I passively hit Ignore, they keep firing pleas at me.  Facebook desperately needs to add more options for my possible response.  Speaking of Facebook, the new look absolutely stinks.  It’s slow to load and I have to browse those stupid tabs to read someone’s page.

I’ve been playing around with the Flip Mino for a week now.  The video and sound quality is really excellent for the size of the camera.  It’s about the height of my iPhone, but skinnier in width.  I wish I had the camera when my sister and I filmed our Rock Band session a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately Mikey and Gerbil broke up after our three day World Tour in Rome, London and Paris.

I picked up my 3G iPhone last Friday.  The consumer madness was in full swing at the AT&T store.  They had 40 iPhones in stock and about 60 people in line.  I snagged the 8 gig model and spent the rest of the day checking out the applications on iPhone.  Here are some of my favorites:

Shazam: This music app is great for people who are clueless to the names of songs and artists.  It can listen to any song playing on the radio or over a loudspeaker and identify it through the iPhone’s microphone.  You can mark the song for download on iTunes, watch any Youtube related video about it or send a link of the song to your friends.

Box Office: This simple app takes your GPS location and finds all the movies / theaters in the area.  It offers the Rotten Tomato rating for every movie and can be organized by rating or title.  Most importantly, it offers fast access to the showtimes in all the nearby theaters.

NetNewsWire: This is the fastest way to read RSS feeds on the iPhone.  I can rummage through posts on 15 sites when I wake up in about 10 minutes.   Just be careful to keep up with the feeds otherwise there will be a huge number posted on the icon all day.

AOL Radio: Turns the iPhone into a radio with 200 stations of music.  You can bookmark stations and mark songs for download on iTunes later.  The sound quality is extremely good for a web based radio.  Pandora is also pretty good for specific artist preferences.

Tap Tap Revenge: It’s Guitar Hero for the iPhone.  It’s only 3 buttons and four songs, but there are four levels of difficulty and the possibility of downloadable songs in the future.  You can also shake the iPhone to hit the right beats instead of tapping the screen.  Lots of fun and it’s free!

Graffitio: This app uses the GPS to figure out where you are and looks for nearby restaurants, bars, stores, parks, events, etc.  The apps creates persistent online graffiti walls for you to write notes about the business.  You can also read notes from people who have been there before.

I was chatting with a friend about the upcoming 3G iPhone and we got stuck on the topic of GPS for a while. Obviously GPS isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with their in-car GPS systems or even the current capabilities of their GPS enabled phones. There’s no real added value for current GPS owners to switch over to the iPhone specifically based on the hardware.

Apple’s strategic advantage will be in the applications that are created with live tracking GPS in mind. Apple already demoed Loopt.com; an app that tells you your friend’s exact location, recent pictures, little messages and alerts you when they are nearby.

The possibilities are so ridiculously intriguing. For instance, imagine twittering, blogging, or updating your Facebook / Myspace status with not only a message, but also your current location automatically.

Locating nearby restaurants is nothing new for GPS, but imagine a one click Yelp.com application that automatically recommends the top 3 nearby Italian restaurants based on user reviews and according to your GPS location.

Imagine a music application that offers a list of upcoming, nearby concerts based on the type of music you keep on your iPhone (or your Pandora.com likes / dislikes) and your current GPS location.

Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and desperately needing to find a public restroom. One button click on the iPhone, your GPS location could be sent to Mizpee.com and a list of the closest toilets (along with reviews if you are a clean freak) would pop up along with directions to each.

Imagine not only all of your pictures being geo-tagged with locations due to GPS, but also tossed into a map-like trip diary documenting vacations as you travel or even the mundane details of your life; all via a one click social networking app on the iPhone.

Imagine sitting at work and hitting a one click Craigslist search that allows you to find nearby apartments (obviously to save on $4 a gallon gas) based on your current GPS location.

The point I’m trying to make is that the iPhone is going to make this type of techy GPS stuff incredibly easy to do. Blackberry already has plenty of GPS apps, but they aren’t for the casual phone user; they are mostly for the tech-heads. Ideally, iPhone users will just load up the App store with one click, download & install a GPS application within a few seconds and away they go. The streamlined process will ultimately increase the number of users and bring these sort of live tracking applications into the mainstream very quickly.

I love stories like this: Link

To sum it up, a Yelp user wrote a negative review for a Mexican restaurant in Saint Louis and the restaurant owner threatened her with a lawsuit if she didn’t remove it. For those that don’t know, Yelp is a social networking site for people that like to eat out. You can sign up to write reviews of your favorite restaurants and browse other opinions via a city breakdown.

Getting back to the story, she received a threat of a $100,000 lawsuit if she didn’t remove the review from the site. Being the social networking butterfly, she responded by using Twitter to pose a question to the collective internet about what she should do. It spread to Digg and the restaurant’s Yelp page is now being bombarded with bad reviews.

So instead of watching the negative review slip away among the positive ones (assuming the food & service was consistently decent), the restaurant owner effectively destroyed his restaurant’s rating in the online world. Not only is the Yelp rating getting trashed, but internet users are spreading the word to any publication that mentions the place; St. Louis blogs, newspapers, forums , etc… I wouldn’t be surprised to see local news coverage eventually.

Digsby added Facebook Chat as a supported client last week, frankly shocking considering Facebook Chat only went live for the entire Facebook community a week previous. I’ve been evaluating the service for a week and have grown to prefer it over the Facebook in-browser chat screen. Using the Digsby interface is easier on the eyes and messages pop up instantly. I often miss messages from the in-browser screen due to lack of attention. It also seems to update friend status faster than the Facebook Chat window in addition to providing notification windows.

Digsby’s blog indicates they will eventually add the ability to move FB Chat users into groups as well as syncing IM status to FB status. Very cool moves for the IM / Social Network power users. Digsby just keeps getting better.

While I have always found American politics to be incredibly tiresome and out of touch with my interests, the internet’s collective latching onto Barack Obama’s campaign fascinates me from a social networking standpoint. It’s blatantly apparent on community-based news sites such as Digg, carries over financially to benevolent sites like DonorsChoose and grows exponentially faster on social networks like Facebook. Why have the majority of internet-savvy users latched onto the young senator from Illinois? The most obvious clue is the difference in technological understanding in the Obama / Clinton camps, most well defined by their web presence.

Social Networking Integration:

While Cinton’s campaign finally emerged from their social networking slumber to add links to official Myspace, Facebook, & Twitter groups this year, Obama has had 16 web relevant social links on his page including links to Digg, LinkedIn, and Eventful. He also has the clear edge when it comes to number of supporters within social networks. 600,000 more on Facebook, 150,000 more on Myspace, 35,000 more subscribers on Youtube, 22,000 more followers on Twitter, etc…

Additionally, Obama’s site launched a built-in social network to join people on a local level. It essentially organizes the most passionate Obama supporters to handle volunteer projects like phone banks, rallies, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Clinton added a similar system on her site at a later date, but it feels isolated in terms of communication and building relationships on a social level. The design of Obama’s network encourages online communication on an internal basis as well as self-designed organization of events with newfound, politically like-minded friends.

Neither candidate uses their site blog to personally write about each day’s events, but rather the campaign staffers handle it. Obama’s blog is more rapidly updated by comparison and offers more content on a daily basis. It also has an edge on number of commentors. There are slight differences to their social sharing choices of blog posts as well. Both sites include sharing links to Digg and del.icio.us, but Obama’s blog includes sharing links to Stumbleupon, Facebook & Newsvine. Clinton’s blog only extra link is to Technorati search which is a really strange choice and doesn’t seem to be used by her comment contributors.

Candidate Branding:

Obama’s web site is very much designed to brand his candidacy. Note the soft white light emanating from the background to reflect a feeling of hope in coordination with his message. The “Gotham” typeface as the graphical font default is clean, understated and well defined. The font also matches every single piece of Obama campaign swag that’s distributed; pretty damn impressive from a large-scale standpoint. Highlighted graphical links light up as if they were alive and full of energy. The color scheme, while predominantly blue, has light undertones of white & red to subtly create a feeling of patriotism.

Strangely Clinton’s site is oddly similar in format to McCain’s web presence, both of which look like free web templates. The sites are static, utilitarian and lack any uniform artistic design elements. Clinton’s web admins keep adding features similar to Obama’s site, but they don’t cohesively contribute to any type of branding for Senator Clinton. What’s left is a stale website that distracts or confuses the viewer with a link-crammed home page rather then engaging them with proper design.

I find Obama’s branding to be similar to companies like Apple and Target who entered the market as underdogs. These companies are very accessible to the American public, but with tremendous elements of heavy design involved. They target consumers by creating a feeling of stylish comfort with their products and market their design choices as an important purchasing decision. Similarly, Obama’s web presence, among other things, shaped a politician with less political experience than his rivals into a well designed brand, more effectively selling the possibility of change than Senator Clinton.

Regardless of my opinion on Obama’s politics, there is something comforting in the fact that he, or at least the people within his campaign, understands the Web 2.0 generation. It’s reflected in his website, his position on net neutrality as well as his relationship to young voters. In turn, that creates hope that he will surround himself with tech-savvy opinions on policy, assuming he wins the nomination and becomes President. That’s the most identifiable reason that social networking internet users seem to be attracted to his candidacy.