Twitter is a narcissism machine!
One of the first questions people ask about Twitter is “Why?” Why would I want to use it? There are a number of standard answers to that question. To meet others, to learn from others, to observe, to participate in conversations. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has described Twitter as being, “like a flock of birds choreographed in flight.”
Typically, the “why” is boiled down to the meaning behind each single tweet or status update.
My favorite example: “Do I really need to know what others are having for dinner?”
I’m suggesting that we take the “why” question even further and reflect on our internal need to have followers, friends, contacts, fans and the attention that social media provides in general. Roll with me for a minute. What if each tweet was really a deeper representation of your psyche? What if by communicating out into the Twitterverse you were demonstrating personal insecurities? The recent “flock” of novice celebrities such as Oprah to the Twitterverse I think speaks volumes, the reality is, we’re a “narcissistic society.”
Either you want a million followers to feed your insane ego or you want a million followers to broadcast large chunky, slimy tweets of spam, it simply cannot be about building meaningful relationships.
I started researching this stance to see if this were true. In fact, I now believe Twitter to be a real-time narcissism machine that just went mainstream. I’m stating this despite the fact that I’m a willing participant in the community. More than that, I’ve been building this social media business in part based on that participation.
With each tweet are we not saying, “look at me, think of me, respond to me, FOLLOW ME?”
When you get new followers or someone commenting, re-tweeting your brilliance doesn’t that make you feel just a little bit better somehow? Almost like you’re being heard. I think it does, and so I asked myself, does this mean I’m a raving, screaming narcissist? Some would say absolutely! Hopefully those in the local Edmonton Twitter community who have come to know me a bit better would say something different. As for myself, I know I have an ego, as to just how far that goes I’m unsure, I haven’t tested those limits yet. We all have egos, it’s in our DNA, and I think that most would agree that appreciation from peers generates a pleasant feeling of some sort.
Further, this whole discussion goes to the heart of my dislike for the use of the word “guru.” “Look at me I’m a guru, listen to me I’m a guru, follow-me because I’m a self-proclaimed Twitter guru.” I believe the word “guru” screams insecurity. I guess I do know the limit of my narcissism and it’s well before the use of that word.
Next time you go to send out a tweet, witness the effect the engagement has on your psyche and emotions. Nothing at all, a pleasant smile because someone is listening or the feeding of an insane desire to be like Ashton Kutcher.
Kutcher explains his competition with CNN was not about his “insatiable ego but the democratization of media.” Anyone else agree that’s a large steaming pile of dog #$%^?
Don’t think that Twitter is a perpetual narcissism-machine? See if you can stop using it. Go cold-turkey and NEVER TWEET AGAIN. I bet you can’t, you see just like me, you like the tweet of your own voice to some degree and far more importantly the relationships built with it.
By the way, would you like an example of the opposite of a narcissist? I give you the owner of the Edmonton Oilers, Daryl Katz. Billions of reasons to be in your face and instead he simply and quietly goes about his business and only speaks when absolutely necessary.
All organizations should apply these thoughts to brand impact and potential brand erosion, employee relations, effect on internal processes and efficiencies. Think I’m out to lunch? Want an example of how this social media “ego-effect” and the lure of potential web-stardom played havoc with a major brand recently? Observe the “dominos effect.” play out as we speak and consider if your organization is prepared for the impact of even one employee’s ego gone astray.
Written by Walter Schwabe
Wrapping up MacEwan BlogCamp: Success!
Friday April 3 was the culmination of a big project for fusedlogic: MacEwan BlogCamp. It was Edmonton’s and, as far as we know, Alberta’s first blog contest. It was a unique opportunity to combine business, social media and education in one cool package.
We’d like to congratulate the top three MacEwan bloggers:
1. Carla Putnam
2. Patrick Finegan
3. Peter Jaffray
The prize for first place was an Apple MacBook. In addition to the contest winners, we’d like to congratulate everyone who participated. Blogging for nine hours is not easy under the best of circumstances and blogging for nine hours in a busy cafeteria would be even tougher.
But, our bloggers persevered and we had a lot of interesting posts. We gave them a variety of topics to blog about and we were impressed with the results.
Judging
The winners of the blogging contest were chosen based on a number of factors. We had a voting system in place that ranked posts based on the cumulative net difference between a thumbs up and a thumbs down rating given by blog post viewers. In addition, we also judged the blog posts based on originality and quality of content.
Sponsors
Our sponsors came through for MacEwan BlogCamp in a big way. We can’t say enough about how happy we are that they sponsored our contest and made a huge contribution to the success of BlogCamp.
The team
We would also like to thank Jana Clarke, Sarah Parker, Laura England, Joseph DiFabio and the rest of the Grant MacEwan College team for giving us the opportunity to help put on this event. It was a lot of work but it was a blast! Grant MacEwan College really put on a good show for everyone involved.
And to the fusedlogic team, thank you as well: Walter did a great job hosting BlogCamp and all the other tasks he had; without Evan and Paul we wouldn’t have had the website or the video running virtually glitch-free; Genoa did a great job keeping everyone organized; Doug kept everyone on track with his project management skills; Krysta did a great job with her video as well.
Ultimately I think we succeeded in our goal of helping to raise the profile of the MacEwan School of Business and we’re confident that will result in more inquiries about the School of Business. MacEwan School of Business really is a good choice for a business degree in Edmonton, Alberta and beyond. We’re looking forward to the next BlogCamp!
MacEwan BlogCamp photos
If you’re interested in having a look at some great photos of MacEwan BlogCamp, have a look at Bruce Clarke’s Flickr photos. He has 166 photos there to look at. Bruce made my job tough to decide on the best photos to post here because they were all good.
Alain Saffel
Social contract vs. investment
A brand’s ability to reach consumers on an emotional level is obviously critical. However, as consumers continue to empower themselves through education and increased participation within various technological platforms, down goes the attention span and patience for 20th century marketing tactics. The downside of this trend suggests that the threshold required to first grab attention and then hold it seems to have evolved into that of the ridiculous spectacle.
When I speak to a client and use the word “bravery” in part I’m referring to this trend as a barrier of entry into the consumer’s psyche. Emotional engagement can only happen if both parties are willing and accepting participants, some feel that to get there a spectacle is required and there is definitely truth to that.
Social contract or social investment?
Some refer to this engagement between brand and consumer as the beginning of a “social contract,” I’d like to make the case for the use of the word “investment.” I recently expressed my opinion on well-known Forrester researcher Jeremiah Owyang’s blog and referred to a portion of our recent work with MacEwan School of Business as the example.
Owyang’s post was a higher level discussion about how consumers information was given out via various social network platforms and the ability of an agency such as ours to scrape that data, turning it into meaningful intelligence as the basis for the “contract.”
My point of view is that reaching an emotional level of discussion with prospective clients, consumers or partners is a key event in the relationship and can only happen with certain conditions present. Many efforts within the social web and across many industries do not accomplish this at all, at any level. Others do reach that level but unfortunately the emotion is anger on behalf of the consumer.
So which brands are more likely to embrace the concept of emotional centric “social investment?” I believe those who’s cultures are built on a foundation of mutual respect, giving and caring. More specifically, I think brands with women involved in key leadership positions are more likely to take these sensitivity and psychological issues into consideration when building out their marketing campaigns. This habit should serve them well when engaging the rest of us within the social web.
My personal social media journey started in 2004 and I’ve been studying these types of aspects ever since as well as participating. Certainly, I’ve made mistakes in the past; sometimes I can be a bit forward and offer an opinion when silence should have been my course of action. Having said that, I think that my grasp of the social web, and more importantly people, is stronger for these interactions, good and bad. This I feel, translates into a stronger customer experience here at fusedlogic.
Out of curiosity, a quick tally of all projects past has the number of ones with women as the key stakeholder in the lead. Further, fusedlogic’s best client experience ever (from our perspective at least and I hope theirs too) on all accounts is MacEwan and it was led by Jana Clarke, Marketing Manager for the School of Business.
We’ve been fortunate to have many great clients and this project was a ton of fun, very productive and went off with little to no issues. The organization was phenomenal to work with, as was her team, the majority of them women. Please don’t read anything into this discussion that isn’t there, I’m simply stating statistics. fusedlogic doesn’t specifically target women entrepreneurs or executives; it just seems to have progressed that way. For example, we have recently been asked to supply 3 proposals and 2 of the three are to organizations led by women.
Am I being stereotypical throughout this discussion? Probably. The more important question should be whether I’m off base with what I’m saying. Is my assumption that men are more likely to gravitate towards the term “social contract” vs. “social investment” in terms of general approach correct?
What about the flip side and my belief that in the above context women are more likely to approach business as an emotional “investment,” which I believe then provides them with an advantage over men regarding their social media marketing efforts? Do you think men are more likely to laugh at this E-Trade commercial and even go around calling their friends “shank-a-potumus” afterwards? I know I have, I think it’s hilarious, if you have research to the contrary I’d love to see it.
Ultimately, my experience has shown that the social web is an “investment.” If I forget that fact I’m promptly given my hat and shown the door. What about you?
Written by Walter Schwabe, have a wonderful Easter long-weekend everyone.
Another successful Social Web Meetup
We were lucky enough to have a couple of the guys from Touchmetric present their iPhone app, Surveyor, at Monday’s Social Web Meetup.
It’s an application that you can run on an iPhone or an iPod Touch and it allows you to do mobile surveys. It’s certainly cooler than the old pen and paper method and it tallies all the data automatically.
I’m familiar with the application as fusedlogic used it in a recent Edmonton social media project. It was cool that we were able to post real time survey results to the site. Who knows, maybe you’ll get more people responding to surveys because you get to plunk your answers down on a cool gadget?
Cool sites you’d have never known about
One thing I like about the Social Web Meetup is hearing about all the different projects people are working on and the different, cool websites they run across.
We had an opportunity to share our own site or a cool site we’ve been on, and here are a few:
East West Connect – Tait Lawton does Chinese translation and Chinese online marketing.
Community Intelligence – Tamara Stecyk’s blog. Congratulations to Tamara in her new job at Edmonton’s Foodbank.
Wefollow.com – This site, started up by Digg’s Kevin Rose, and is a Twitter directory organized according to interests. So, if you’re into #socialmedia @mashable is at the top of that category. Of course you should be following @fusedlogic as well! One thing to keep in mind is that just because someone is at the top of the list it doesn’t mean they’re an expert. Not by a long shot! These days I’ve noticed a large number of Twitter users out there who have thousands of followers and are following thousands but have a small number of Tweets. Numbers do not equate to knowledge, as much as some of these instant “experts” might hope.
Utils.me – It’s kind of a fun way to describe your utils, or relative satisfaction. Just add the hashtag #utils 50 or #utils -50 (or whatever number you like). Then check on the utils site and see the graph of your relative happiness over time. Doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose, but I’m sure someone will come up with one!
There were definitely more sites shared than I’ve listed and I probably missed yours. Let me know and I’ll put it up on the list, or just leave a comment with your site URL and a blurb about it.
Off to Brewster’s
After the last few Social Web Meetups we’ve headed to Brewster’s at Oliver Square where we’d reserved 20 seats. We’ve had no problem filling them either! We’ve always got to pull in a few more chairs. I had to laugh after reserving the tables there because they somehow had the impression that we were some kind of online dating service! I assured them we were not. I don’t know if anyone’s ever had a date because of a Meetup or a Tweetup in Edmonton, but you never know. Got any stories?
One thing that I have always enjoyed about the Social Web Meetup is the diversity of the group members. The experience level ranges from novice to veteran. There are some really interesting people who attend and I really enjoy hearing their stories. It’s great to be able to chat more at the pub afterwards too, and last night it seemed like almost everyone from the Meetup made it out to the pub. It’s the day after the Meetup and I’m already looking forward to the meeting next month!
Alain Saffel
MacEwan BlogCamp is now on!
MacEwan BlogCamp is finally on!
We’re in the Grant MacEwan City Centre campus cafeteria right now and the place is busy! We’ve got our bloggers up and running now.
We’ve also got a blogging contest for everyone else on the net too. We’re promoting it on Twitter, and here. So, if you are interested, you can win cash for a blog post. You just need to do one post! Easy as pie, isn’t it? Think you’re good. Give it a shot. You blog, post the link on the page and we draw the winner randomly. Later on in the day we’ll decide if we really like one post and throw some prizes at that person too.
Mike & Lenny videos
We’ve got parts one and two of the Mike & Lenny series up and running. Check them out and let us know what you think.
