BeMyGuest, the month of mutual blogging seems to be going swimmingly and my first guest spot has just gone up on Paul Sutton’s Tribal Boogie blog.
As the regular reader will be aware, I’ve got a hang up about privacy this year and therefore it’s not surprise that it’s the topic of my post, which questions what is more important, truth, privacy or veracity. Got read the whole thing over on Paul’s blog and then go read his stuff, it’s rather good.
This time from the rarest of creatures, a shy person on Twitter, who doesn’t seek the fleeting fame of creating a tweet worth of repetition far and wide.
Fortunately for them the answer, if they truly don’t want anyone to retweet their 140 characters, or less, of wisdom, the answer is simple(s).
Don’t tweet.
I attended the inaugural meeting of the Social Media Group for the Direct Marketing Association yesterday. It was generally a gathering of the great and the good from various social media and digital agencies, along with some software houses and a few other (useful) odds and sods. It’s early days but initial discussions around what we might achieve as a group were good and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can build.
As ever when you get more than two people involved in social media together, there was a brief discussion about what we meant and what the key issues were, one of the many that cropped up was privacy. In particular, what right do we have to approach the person via their online homes? The note I scribbled to myself to explore later said ‘is it up to companies to seek the individual or the to be there when the individual comes looking?’. Obviously the answer is both, the tricky part is getting the right balance.
Some individuals will be happy to be sought out. Though we shouldn’t assume that just because a consumer makes their data publicly available that they actually think, want or desire that a business, of any size, will use it to market to them. Of course some individuals will make it difficult to find that information, they are the ones who value their privacy. We also shouldn’t assume that just because a online user is sharing data that it is actually the truth. For example, do you really think I’m actually going to do the Tough Guy?.Seeking out the individual via online channels cannot be done lightly. One fleeting thought I had was that perhaps, in a few years, we will see a Social Network preference service which people can use to opt out of being pro-actively targeted.
The other side of the coin, is making sure that you are there ready to answer the questions that a consumer may have that you can reasonably answer. Knowledge of search is going to be vital for PROs in the future, you’re already missing a trick if you’re not considering it as an integral part of what you do right now. And by search I don’t just mean optimising press releases and distributing them over the wire to help build link love.
Do you ever get the feeling that some of the spammers are getting a little bored of their job?
Social media is often praised for opening people’s boundaries and introducing them to ideas and content that they might previously missed. In reality, we tend to use social media to build a series of finely layered filters to ensure that we only see the information we’re interested in. From RSS, which allows you to ignore all the content on a website you don’t think you fancy. all the way through to Twitter which enables you to follow just the people you find interesting and ignore the rest. It’s similar in the blogging world, it’s easy to get into a blog reading rut, and not to seek out anything new and exciting once in a while. Which is why Adam Vincenzini and Emily Cagle’s idea for a mutual blogging month in March is such a stormer.
The idea is simple(s).
It’s pretty simple. During March 2010, anyone taking part will aim to:
1. Write at least one post for someone else’s blog, and
2. Feature at least one guest post on their own blog.
Anyone interested in taking part just needs to tweet their intentions using the #bemyguest tag or using the tag to search Twitter for people to swap with . You can also keep up with who is swapping with who at the #BeMyGuest Posterous blog.
I’m quite excited as I’ll be swapping with one of the BeMyGuest originators, Adam Vincenzini at The Comms Corner and also Paul Sutton over at Tribal Boogie. They in turn will be posting here, which is nice, obviously. I reckon I can handle one or two more guest spots so if you fancy strutting your stuff on Niff, Naff then leave a comment, drop me a line or catch me on twitter, not forgetting to use the #BeMyGuest tag.
Way back in August 2008 I posted my intention to take part in the 2009 Tough Guy with my brother and sister-in-law, Sean and Fiona, after failing to take part in the July 08 race. For many reasons, we didn’t do it but this year our money has been paid and entry has been confirmed.
Gulp.
For those of you that don’t know about Tough Guy, it bills itself as ‘The Worlds safest, most dangerous taste of mental and physical pain, fear and endurance’. Running it, or in my case crawling it, can involve some or all of the following: barbed wire, cuts, hypothermia, scrapes, burns, acrophobia, claustrophobia, sprains, twists, joint dislocation and broken bones. To help with health and safety, a time lime of four hours has been placed on the course which means, for a change, we can’t turn up having done minimal to no training, which is my usuall MO. This time I actually need to be fit.
Hence, this post, there’s also the inevitable blog – Tough Gaffs for the team to track their training progress and post photos of the various events we’ll be doing in the run up to July and from the event itself. They’ll also be a request for sponsorship to keep an eye out for. But for the moment, I need people to nag me about training.
Updated: Just to clarify, it’s me that is poor at the training for races. Sean is almost as poor and both of us would do well to follow the shining example that Fiona gives us.
*Apologies for the slightly profane title, I’m just attempting to beat my brother to punch when he inevitably comments on this post.
My spam has got quite dull recently but search is getting more interesting, actually in more ways than one, but for the purposes of this regular(ish) series we’ll just be looking at what brings ppl to my humble online home anf not how increasingly important it is for PR.
Ignoring ‘dwarfs infants pictures’ because that’s just a little too weird, even for me, although in case you’re wondering I think it was this post on how people hacked Getty images. Instead we shall look at ‘Why do we need to know about nouns?’
Must admit I don’t know, my education fell into that period when grammar was deemed old fashioned. However the top result from Google for that search,Daily Writing Tips, suggests that we need to know such things to communicate effeciently, which seems reasonable.
Incidentally, it took me a while to work out why that search had landed someone here. I think it’s due to the page explaining what Niff, Naff n Triv is, whuch if you haven’t read, I suggest you do. It’s penned by my brother and is a rather cracking read.
