Lydia Loveless at Golden Dagger in Chicago on December 30, 2022
A selection of things I enjoyed this month:
This paragraph from Grey Horse’s newsletter, written by fellow OG Chicago Twitter person Kate Gardiner:
It’s easy to look away from potential wrongdoing when you want to believe an optimistic story. The temptation is even greater if you want to emulate the protagonist. “I could be like him,” the thinking goes — and that thinking gets complicated when you take into account that getting to be like him might take some dirty work.
Yes, it’s about SBF but it’s also about why knowing your values can keep you from making mistakes.
Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra: I’ve been enjoying this for months, but it recently wrapped in a satisfying, if cautionary, way. It poses the question “how do you fight fascism in America when it’s supported by a professional PR campaign and reaches the highest levels of government?” It’s a complicated answer best summed up as “it takes all of us doing our part.” I found comfort in the idea that we have been here before and we know the way out, but also discomfort from knowing it’s a cycle. Our form of government allows fascism to rest beneath the surface. We are threatened by an invasive species we can’t ever truly kill because the roots are impossible to dig out of the soil. We can stop its growth if we have the resolve.
This 2012 oral history of Rainbo Club: A ten-year-old profile from Eater Chicago of the legendary Wicker Park bar told through stories from some of the artists who lived, worked, and created there in the 1990s (Dmitry Samarov, Tim Kinsella, Liz Phair, and others).
Nikki Morgan at Golden Dagger in Chicago on December 30, 2022
Lydia Loveless and Nikki Morgan: Last night, I saw both of these women perform at a sold-out show at Golden Dagger (fka Tonic Room), a tiny, warm room with good beer, great cocktails, and a stage just barely big enough to hold the flames coming off Loveless and Morgan (who opened). Lydia Loveless is from Columbus, Ohio with some Chicago DNA due to her complicated, former time spent on Bloodshot Records. Straddling the lines between alt-country, indie punk, and wry humor, she sets fire to sadness, death, and danger. Nikki Morgan describes herself as a girl from North Carolina, but says Chicago made her the woman and artist she is today – someone who mixes soulful vocals and Southern swamp. Lately, something new has often signaled heartache. But in last night’s show, both artists felt comfortable enough in the intimate venue to share new songs, which portended something more hopeful for 2023.
NASA’s Mars InSight probe goes quiet: Do you like to feel sad about anthropomorphized space vehicles? Well then this story (and the related Twitter account) is for you.
A thread of life advice from former Chicago Tribune writer/editor Kevin Williams: Unlike most “what I’ve learned” threads like this, which are often about showing how wise, clever, and interesting the poster is, Kevin’s is about how to improve the lives of others, starting with yours. He’s apparently moving to Portugal, which is good for him but bad for Chicago.
In the wake of James Gunn’s dismissal as director of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 due to some offensive tweets in his past, director Rian Johnson and political commentator Glenn Greenwald both have deleted tens of thousands of their past tweets.
I’m not here to litigate Disney’s decision to fire a Gunn (sorry), deconstruct why he became a target of a right-wing troll or defend what he said (much of it is indefensible in any context).
But as HuffPost points out and Johnson/Greenwald’s actions demonstrate, Gunn won’t be the last well-known person targeted by people with suspect motives. Even those who aren’t bold-faced names could find themselves in a similar situation when they apply for a new job meet a new acquaintance or simply change their point of view. And it should go without saying, but this type of targeting has been happening to women and people of color for years.
With all this in mind, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to explain why I decided last year to I delete everything I tweeted from 2007 through 2013.
Here’s why:
What’s a tweet?
What’s Twitter for? Does that answer change as it scales? Is it for broadcast or narrowcast? Video or text? Everything and nothing?
The company itself has long struggled to answer these question and create a business model to match. The answer today will be different in six months as new features fundamentally change it. There is no agreed-upon use, style guide or set of standards for Twitter. Some people or organizations apply journalistic ethics to their work there. Others use it for comedy or as a press release distributor.There are governments and the governed. Then there are micro-communities like Weird Twitter or Black Twitter. Some people speak to thousands or millions of people they’ve never met with each tweet. Some speak to tens or a hundred people they’ve known for years.
The line between public figures and private individuals was blurred a long time ago (thanks, Mark!) but we’re all using the same tools. How can we develop a set of rules or guidelines for their use when the experience is always in flux with a user base of broadly differing knowledge and experiences and make it open to new users, too?
Because of all this, Twitter of 2007, 2008 or even 2010 or 2012 is fundamentally different from the Twitter of 2018, specifically in the way media organizations mine it for #content.
We’re all in this together, unfortunately
Feeding this frenzy is what some commentators have called “context collapse” – the removal of a tweet, comment or post from its surrounding discussion, leaving it open to a different interpretation – and what is derisively referred to as the content industrial complex.
In 2014, The New Yorker compared this – while discussing the emerging problem of context collapse in relation to a tweet from The Colbert Report – to “delivering a punch line without its setup.”
The problem with calling this “context collapse” in this …er, context is the term already has a specific meaning when it comes to digital communities. Nicholas Carr defined “context collapse” as “a sociological term of art that describes the way social media tend to erase the boundaries that once defined people’s social lives.”
Whatever definition you apply to context collapse is part of the problem here whether we’re discussing presidents or private citizens. There’s no clear agreement on the rules of engagement though Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic uses the term “conversation smoosh” to describe the Colbertian type of context collapse and that’s about as good as anything.
Then there’s the problem of how tweets and the collapse of media business models have created a lower standard for newsworthiness. Shrinking newsrooms and “doing more with less” have meant that tweets are now the coal shoveled into the boilers of content management systems.
Congratulations, you’re the news
It was a safe bet that a 2010 tweet of yours would not be picked up by, say, Buzzfeed or a Gawker site then copy/pasted by countless other digital publishers and later broadcast on your local 10pm news show. The watershed moment for “someone said a thing!” mass media content was probably Valleywag tying Justine Sacco to a digital whipping post at the end of 2013.
Similar to the race to the bottom that occurred when local news sites found gold in mining Anna Nicole Smith’s death for #content, the Sacco incident proved you could easily create a piece of “Twitter reacts!” #content from a set of related posts on a topic and get people to read it even if you hadn’t added anything new. “It exists and now you have an emotion” is reason enough. “Julia Roberts joins Instagram” might be the worst, most recent example of this.
Like most technological advancements, the discussion of an ethical, professional or legislative approach lags far behind. We should probably call this The Jeff Goldblum Rule.
Should a person’s professional or professional background act as a guide for how we use their content in mass media? I dunno, it’s complicated. I’ll use myself as an example.
Does that make me a journalist, a marketer, a community leader or an activist? Yes?
Even though it’s not currently my job/career right now, I’ve tried to use the standards of journalism and informed commentary to guide the things I say on Twitter and this blog even when they’re grounded in my work as a community member or activist. The fact that 11,000+ people follow me on Twitter means I have a greater responsibility for accuracy and truth than someone with 100.
Have I been consistent in this? No, because sometimes it would make me less effective in whatever role I am in at the time. And, quite frankly, sometimes I’ve fired off a tweet that I should have thought the better of at the time.
I think about this stuff quite a bit and try to understand the implications around it all. Still, I was surprised when one of my tweets was published as a roundup of Twitter conversation about ABC7’s 2013 New Year’s Eve coverage by the city’s most prominent media critic. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I realized I couldn’t publish anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t say in a roomful of people or to the face of the person mentioned in that tweet. Again, I’ve failed to meet this standard from time to time.
Is this approach right? Wrong? I don’t know, honestly.
So it’s why I deleted seven years of tweets.
Why I deleted my tweets
From Twitter’s founding in 2006 to roughly 2012, tweets spoke to a relatively small number of people, many of whom were tech or media types. From 2012 to 2014, things changed dramatically. Meyer’s Atlantic article is a great exploration of this. Media changed. Conversation smoosh happened. Everyone became a “personal brand.”
I started tweeting in 2007. I was in my early 30s. I wasn’t a kid. But last year, I began a fool’s errand of trying to manually delete tweets I felt were dumb, overly reliant on swear words or otherwise inconsistent with my current worldview. After a couple days, I gave up. It was like trying to separate dirt from pepper. So I paid $12 to use TweetDeleter to get rid of everything I tweeted from 2007 through 2013 feeling confident that by 2014 I’d understood that anything I tweeted might end up in a news story with wide reach. (It happens.) I’ve also occasionally deleted recent replies to people which, devoid of context, might be read in opposition to their actual meaning.
I’m not saying everyone should do the same. I will say in the several months since I deleted all those tweets, I haven’t missed any of them or felt as if I could still have access to that work. So if you’re worried about that, don’t be. (I feel much differently about the loss of stuff I’ve written at previous employers thanks to website redesigns. Save your work locally, kids!)
How we move forward
Some have bathed in the delicious irony that Greenwald has apparently called people who delete tweets “cowards.” I understand that impulse, but expecting everyone to think of their tweets as the Library of Congress Archives misses where we are right now and where we’ve been.
We shouldn’t immediately think that someone who deletes their tweets has something to hide. We should consider that maybe they’re trying to become a better person and remove any harm they’ve committed. We should also consider that structures of misogyny and whiteness mean that women, people of color and others in oppressed populations are more likely to be ostracized for their expressions of thought because they challenge those structures. Deletion may be a means of safety and protection.
Moreover, we have to talk about moving conversation in the social space from “calling out” to “calling in.” We have to allow for people to experience emotional and intellectual growth and not judge them solely on their worst tweet. Confrontation, yes, but without a subsequent requirement for erasure.
With respect to my fellow white men, we also need to be ready to speak up and defend women and people of color who articulate something outside of what we perceive to be “the norm” and make space for conversations that don’t involve us, aren’t meant for us and don’t need our approval or contributions.
We’re getting there. Societal conversation has become much more intersectional than it’s ever been. There’s a deeper understanding of how racist and sexist institutions have driven our understanding of the world. Eyes have been opened. Hearts and minds have been changed. We have to assume a person in 2007 was fundamentally different than who they are in 2018. I know I am.
Personally, I’ve lost my appetite for Twitter fights. Not every @ is delivered in good faith. I’ve tried to spend less time being concerned that “someone is wrong on the Internet.” (My wife is thrilled.)
None of this should be read as a defense of truly bad behavior, actions or statements or arguing Twitter become a free-for-all. But we have to be able to reckon with the difference between, say, James Gunn saying stupid, deliberately provocative things about groups of people back in 2010 and Roseanne or Alex Jones singling out a specific person.
In the meantime, with context collapse and conversation smoosh still very much guiding how we view people and conversations, the “delete tweet” button is there for a reason.
UPDATE – NOVEMBER 2018: Since I first published this four months ago, I’ve deleted everything I’ve tweeted since October of 2018. It was something I’d meant to do for a while, but never got around to. I even tried to delete my likes using the same Tweetdeleter service. For some reason, it didn’t work. Then I tried to run a script I found online, but this had some unintended consequences.
Worried about @ourmaninchicago. He’s on a “mass like” on all my old tweets. Is this a midlife crisis?
Ugggggh. And then I was getting tweets and DMs from people wondering what was up. I stopped running the script because blowing up people’s phones wasn’t worth it. Apparently the only way to unlike old tweets is to do it manually. I have…12,000 or so. So that’ll be fun.
This feels like another example of how tech platforms don’t allow you to truly own your data, but someone else can write about that.
When it comes to determining what good content is, Facebook’s been acting a lot like Google.
In 2011, Google released Panda, an update to the algorithm which determines what users see and – more importantly – don’t see in its search results, particularly that crucial first page. The effect was immediate for some publishers and those that survived were forced to radically change their business models.
Panda was, in Google’s words, an effort “to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible.” Google’s subsequent algorithm changes only reinforced this mission to deliver high-quality content by making poor-quality content disappear.
With recent announcements that it would cut down on “News Feed spam,” and “click-baiting,” Facebook is essentially warning publishers not to create content for algorithms because algorithms could change tomorrow and wipe you out.
Sound familiar? This is what happens when we try to make content perform instead of inform.
STOP TRYING TO GAME THE SYSTEM
Whether it’s Google or Facebook, the big gatekeepers keep telling us it’s a waste of time to write to an algorithm that might change at a moment’s notice yet we keep doing it anyway. It’s an ineffective way to spend scant resources and, ironically, the tricks we’re using to get people to click, share and comment obscure the fact that most publishers do create quality content.
Facebook made two recent changes to its News Feed algorithm. The first targets clickbaiters, those nefarious pages that either trick you into clicking a link with an enticing headline that never really pays off or keep a key piece of the story behind a link. The second is aimed at clever community managers who route around the lower reach of Facebook’s link posts by creating better-performing photo posts with a link in the caption. Both tactics will now result in posts with diminished visibility in the News Feed.
For brands and publishers already facing down the era of zero organic Facebook reach, these changes may seem like another shot across the bow: a suggestion that paid efforts will be the only way to guarantee a certain number of eyeballs.
HOW TO GET FACEBOOK TO WORK FOR YOU
The good news is if social marketers created this problem, we can also solve it.
First, let’s stop writing content for Facebook’s metrics and go back to relying on content that relates to our overall business goals: awareness, education or engagement, to name a few.
Let’s create content that’s concise, understandable on a scan within the feed and rewards the user for the time spent reading it. We know many people don’t read past the headline so why deliberately write it to obscure what matters most in a story? If we give a reader something of value at the beginning, they’ll assume we have more to offer at the end.
Most importantly, let’s consider the unique role each of our social channels plays in the overall marketing mix and stop focusing all our efforts on just one. When we’ve optimized our best content with an informative headline and an engaging graphic, we can share that link on Facebook and use paid dollars there to increase its visibility and earned media traction. Meanwhile, those gorgeous photos can go on Instagram or Pinterest and the clever joke or meme will get published on Twitter.
If nothing else, let’s make sure our content reads like it was written for a purpose and doesn’t resemble a hyper-caffeinated, all-caps email from our aunt. Readers will reward us with organic clicks, likes and comments and we can all sleep better at night knowing we didn’t goad them into doing it by appealing to their lesser demons.
After all, having conversation with humans – not algorithms – is why we started experimenting with social in the first place.
This week, the guy who invented the pop-up ad apologized for making the Internet terrible. Here’s a roundup of people and companies who might be the next offenders or the next innovators.
Digiday: ‘Brands aren’t people. And if they were, they’d hate ads too.’ What’s the thesis? Brands should look for ways to be niche publishers, not broadcast advertisers. Talk to a smaller, more relevant and engaged group who will take your content, share it and integrate it into their relevant conversations on their platforms of choice for you. Why should I care? This is a variation on the larger pushback we’re seeing on brands using social (mostly Facebook) for scale and substituting impressions for engagement. And the re-examination of earned media’s value vs. paid media. Anything else? The YouTube Hero, Hub, Hygiene strategy he mentions sounds odd, but it’s how YouTube content creators formed a loyal subscriber base without big budgets. Who else is talking about this? See last month’s Newcastle item. What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? At this rate, I’m assuming you’ll see people falling all over themselves to name their SXSW talk “Facebook Is Dead.” Oh and then there’s this:
Quartz: Messaging apps are reprising the web’s business model, circa 1999 What’s the thesis? “The internet giants of the present era are rushing to…become the Google of mobile.” The old web portal model (Yahoo will find everything for you) has become a mobile brand model (YOUR FAVORITE INTERNET BRAND HERE will provide you with every conceivable mobile service – email, messaging, gaming, travel reservations, etc.). Why should I care? Theoretically, the more data brands have on consumer activities, the more customizable and effective they can be at marketing to them. Anything else? “What is your brand’s Yo! strategy?” went from a joke to an actual thing people are talking about in two months. And apparently, ICQ use is increasing again. <digression>I really miss the early aughts, you guys. Even if half the music was terrible.</digression> Who else is talking about this: I remain skeptical about broad use of new mobile apps as smartphone adoption plateaus. This Nielsen study says time spent using apps is on the rise, but people aren’t trying new apps. Emarketer backs this up with its own data. (Though this data might be affected as trusted brands like Facebook and others expand offerings in the space.) What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? Mobile data is probably the most personal of all (think about the content of the last email or photo you sent someone). With the Snapchat security breach still fresh in mind, upstart brands ability to compete will rest on their ability to prove they can keep user data secure.
Rolling Stone: The Presidency and the Press: A former Obama spokesman on the history of the toxic relationship What’s the thesis? “To communicate with everybody in this country at the same time and get them all wrapped around one issue – it’s very much an idea whose time has passed.” Why should I care? This piece isn’t really about content marketing per se, but the above quote and the details about how the Obama administration often goes around traditional media outlets (and matches their reach) to get its unfiltered message directly to the American people offers plenty of lessons for brands. Anything else? I never thought about how media cost-cutting led directly to more coverage of smaller stories but it’s pretty obvious in retrospect. Less money for more complex reporting means you spend time on gaffes and nonsense. Who else is talking about this? The Boston Heralddid a story on social media portals’ effects on the 2016 election. iCitizen is an app that helps voters track issues that are important to them. What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? The election is more than two years away and that’s forever in both politics and technology so anybody who thinks they have it figured out in advance of 2015 is probably full of it.
I’m a huge fan of of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It’s probably my favorite TV show of the last year with Inside Amy Schumer running a close second. LWT is funny, sharp, intelligent and complex. Exactly what you want out of comedy and TV. So when I saw Oliver’s take on native advertising pop up in my various feeds, I was sure it was going to be brutal.
Not really.
It’s disappointing that Oliver comes across as little more than a vulgar Bob Garfield here. Not that there’s anything wrong with vulgarity, mind you. But when you reduce native advertising to the worst possible version of itself then of course it will be terrible and something that should be resoundingly mocked.
Judging all native advertising by the standards of Buzzfeed’s native advertising is like judging all television by Two And A Half Men. If you use your editorial department to create native advertising or give it an ugly design or try to hide its origins, you should stop creating it.
Anyone who does what Oliver describes is doing wrong by both the editorial and business departments. You’ve basically created more Internet garbage and ethically compromised your work.
But when it’s done well? It’s informative or entertaining and supports a brand’s overall identity. It’s notable here that “but it’s still an ad!” is the only complaint Oliver can level against the Orange Is The New Black native piece from TheNew York Times. Honestly, I’d rather watch any of the videos that accompany it than Two And A Half Men any day. (I’d embed them here but it’s not possible.)
Sadly, there are probably journalists in newsrooms right now that have viewed the above OITNB native content – a 1,500 word piece on women in prisons with three compelling videos alongside it – and would love to be able to do work of that caliber as a purely journalistic undertaking instead of the listicles or aggregated content they’re told is the stuff that people really want right now and will fund the newsroom’s more lofty endeavors.
Frankly, that should have been the target of Oliver’s viral rant: the race to the bottom of online content. There are plenty of supposedly pure journalistic undertakings that are as disposable and advertiser-driven as any native advertising piece. Watching “real news” organizations all try to explain what went on in an elevator between Jay-Z and Solange is far more depressing to me that native advertising.
Finally, I’ll leave you with this:
That’s native advertising. Though I’d argue it should be disclosed better which is bad for Wren, the company that made it, because it barely mentions them and only right at the beginning. But 88 million people watched it.
Incidentally, that’s about the same number of people who watched the first six seasons of Two And A Half Men. Combined.
I’ve written about making native advertising more ethical and effective before. You can read that here.
I’ve started a monthly roundup of interesting articles about content marketing for work. Whether this becomes an ongoing thing here as well, I don’t know. But after a two-month run of personal introspection, it felt like time to get back into the business of media extrospection here.
What’s the thesis? “If you have no TV ad budget, would all-digital work? Newcastle Brown Ale would argue yes—digital content is just as effective if not more effective.”
Why should I care? Marketers are re-examining their Facebook strategy. Some are throwing more paid media at it. Others, like Newcastle, are taking an integrated approach that uses PR tactics and social analytics to get into more News Feeds and increase its earned media.
Anything else? Newcastle creates different content for its hardcore fans and drive-by fans. Add in the Conan appearances and this campaign doubles-down on customized content instead of repeating the same thing in different channels.
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? Advertisers will brag about how they’re not putting all their eggs in the Facebook basket and instead using all the owned/digital channels at their disposal.
What’s the thesis? “There is a great deal more value for advertisers in having a users walk into shops than ignore a blink-and-you-miss-it ad on the web.” With Google backing, Ingress might be the first but the jury’s still out.
Why should I care? As the banner ad turns 20, we’ve seen a renewed conversation about whether digital/social can drive sales. This also seems to be the latest effort to try and make fetch…er, augmented reality happen.
Anything else? There’s been a lot of controversy about shady mobile ad networks and Foursquare’s recent confusing split into two apps which says many publishers and clients are still trying to solve for mobile.
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? We’re about three months away from the “Google is evil and trying to track everything in your life” article.
What’s the thesis? It’s a classic story: Brand meets girl. Girl makes video about brand that blows up the Internet. Brand realizes it needs to experiment with digital more to fully engage its customer across all channels.
Why should I care? Creating a video that will “go viral” is a great way to make it not. Brands talking to people who already have great relationships with the audience they’re targeting and asking them to create content alongside them is better.
Anything else? A good example for brands hesitant to fully engage bloggers and a great mini-case study for a B2B brand that got consumers talking about it in social media (“Purchase intent registered via social media, for instance, has gone up…”)
Who else is talking about this? BrandChannel.com talks about the spot in reference to other toilet technology. Unrelated but important is this serious conversation about water happening in Detroit right now.
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? My read on this is it’s a great headline, but the text doesn’t really back it up. I’d be interested to see if Kohler really integrates social engagement or user-generated video in its future digital strategy or if all the insight from this just gets flushed down the…I’m sorry.
What’s the thesis? “Atlantic Media gets paid when people attend [its] event, when companies sponsor it, and also when brands pay its separate content agency to cover it from their perspective.”
Why should I care? Most brands are really uncomfortable with creating content streams that build a brand identity but aren’t expressly sales-driven. Atlantic has always done this for itself (as a magazine) and has now figured out how to do it for brands and create multiple revenue streams out of it.
Anything else? Despite the headline, the work discussed here is more campaign-driven than brand-driven; it’s a better model for publishers than agencies. Ironically, as publishers have become agency-like in their offerings, agencies have considered them more as an activation tactic for brands.
Who else is talking about this? Atlantic’s been cited as an innovative publisher since about 2011 but Digiday’s been covering the heck out of their events and web development platforms lately.
What’s the next thing people will be saying about this? If Buzzfeed doesn’t get into the branded events space within a year, I’ll be surprised.
“One thing that did cut through the exhaustion was a task I’d been anticipating for more than six years: writing the Facebook post in which I announce to friends, former friends, frenemies, ex-girlfriends, college roommates, future wives, and family members that I was not in fact an obscure failure but a new, minor footnote in the annals of Silicon Valley startup successes. Writing it was easy. I’d had six years to plot it in my head.”
Long before 1871 and all the talk about Chicago as a tech hub, Brad Flora bootstrapped his own startups, sacrificing sleep and his own basic needs – food, shelter, etc. – along the way. All of this led to the payoff described above. He does a wonderful job outlining the frenzied banality that made it happen.
And I love he admits thinking about the announcement for the entire six years of the experience.
There’s a lot of context here – it’s not just about Techweek and gave me an opportunity some other things I’ve seen in Chicago’s STEM communities in the last year.
The responsibility of inclusiveness is borne by everyone, not just Techweek. I’d love to see other Chicago tech events like Built In Chicago, Tech Cocktail and Technori create their own codes of conduct and describe how they will enforce them when they are violated. (The Geek Feminism Wiki offers some good open-source language as a starting point.) Writers and editors of lists featuring local tech luminaries should move beyond the VCs and the C-suiters (who are invariably older, male and white) and showcase the people in the trenches who have much more to do with the code that gets written and the products that get released. Funders should look for opportunities to bankroll women-led companies and incubators — 1871’s FEMTech is an example.
Finally, if you’re a man at a tech program, startup or publication that doesn’t demonstrate inclusion of women or people or color or deliberately uses policies, language or imagery that excludes, speak up.
A community determines what it will tolerate and creates policy to reinforce its beliefs. Now is the time for Chicago’s entire tech community to speak loudly about both.
UPDATE: A few links and events of note since I wrote the above:
* Techweek Chicago held a roundtable discussion about the controversy. They claimed to do so with “the support of Ms. Tech,” a woman-led tech/business group in Chicago but a subsequent story in the Sun-Times said the head of the organization “wasn’t briefed after Wednesday’s round-table despite Techweek organizers telling her she and her organization would be involved in the next action steps.” During the roundtable, the organizers decided to cancel the Black Tie Rave but still donate the expected proceeds to charity. They also created a “fellowship program” so that 50 women could attend Techweek Chicago without having to pay the admission fee. I’m not sure why you’d want to attend an event that doesn’t appear to have your best interests in mind, even if it was for free. At this point, Techweek appears to be trying to buy influence and align themselves with people – like Ms. Tech – who will make them seem interested in solving their problems.
* Melissa Pierce, a prominent figure in Chicago’s tech community, wrote an op-ed for Crain’s detailing how she was “duped” in her participation in last year’s Techweek conference.
* Huffington Post Chicago has a good roundup with commentary from local voices in Chicago tech.
* An app that sends you an alert when it’s the perfect day to eat lunch outside. (Version 2.0 could be customizable to your own preferences of temperature, sun and wind speed.)
* An app that periodically reminds you to drink lemonade during the summer. Because it’s delicious and sometimes you forget, especially because it’s not as widely available as, say, pop.
* A GPS-enabled app that tells you to bring a jacket/sweater if you are about to leave the house and the temperature is expected to drop more than 10-15 degrees within three hours of you leaving the house.
In my last post, I argued there’s more value in social media as its own content channel than in its ability to drive ratings or sales. The prime mover of that post was a quote in the Financial Times from NBCUniversal’s head of research Alan Wurtzel who said social media “’is not a game changer yet’ in influencing television viewing.” He also said “the emperor wears no clothes” which tells you just how much marketing people love a good cliche.
After taking another look at the articles written in the wake of his comments, it’s unclear how Wurtzel came to these conclusion but more on that in a bit.
If you’re going to draw conclusions about cause and effect, it helps to base them on the results of an actual study.
Here’s the latest: On Thursday, Twitter’s head of research Anjali Midha released a second batch of results from a study of 12,000 Twitter users that examined the effects of tweets on consumer action. Her first post focused on the relationship between the kinds of tweets consumers saw from/about brands and the type of action they took afterwards. It’s definitely worth a read.
Specific to this discussion is Midha’s second post which deals with the effects of TV-related tweets. In my post, I argued Twitter can be a complementary content channel all its own, but if you’re going to look to it as a call to action, it’s important to consider whether it affects awareness, consideration and brand education and not just ratings or sales.
