Matthew T Grant

In a recent interview with the Googliest leather-clad author around, Paul Coelho, Napster founder Sean Parker called The Social Network “a complete work of fiction.”

While I could write a book about that last statement, the thing that jumped out at me in the Mashable write-up just referenced was a quote attributed to Mark Zuckerberg.

Apparently, when asked if he liked The Social Network, Zuckerberg responded by focusing not on its fictionalization of a reality that he has supposedly lived but rather on the size of its audience saying, “We build products that 500 million people see… If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter that much.”

Let me just repeat that last line: “If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter much.”

Is that true? Can it really “not matter much” if 5 million people all engage in the same activity? Of course it could be true given that 7 billion humans live on this planet. I mean, how much can the isolated actions of .07% truly matter?

If human beings are merely ciphers—numbers, eyeballs, data points—then I guess we can play a purely quantitative game and determine what really matters by simply doing the math. Billions of people have looked at McDonald’s hamburgers (most following this period of observation with the act of consumption), so they must matter more than the hundreds of millions who have looked at Facebook, right? In fact, the Facebook-seers are basically a subset of the hamburger-seers, so, if we want to understand the world and how it works, we ought to by rights spend more time focusing on the latter instead of the former.

Of course, numbers are themselves merely ciphers. They don’t have a meaning in and of themselves nor does the comparison of any two numbers have any particular meaning in itself. What meaning might be had from such comparisons depends less on the counting than on what got counted.

As far as the what behind the numbers goes, how much sense does it make to compare the number of people who have “looked at” Facebook to the number of people who have looked at a particular movie? Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare it to the number of people who have looked at movies in general? I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I would wager that many more people have seen movies than have looked at Facebook (and that all people who have seen Facebook have seen movies, while the opposite certainly does not hold). Does that mean that Facebook “doesn’t really matter that much”?

The answer to that question has to be, “No.” Facebook is more important and will have a more lasting impact on our culture than the relatively well-made feature film on its origins (which is not to say that Facebook will have a more lasting impact than movies, generally speaking). Why? Because Facebook is a medium, like film, and not a mediated object, like a movie (though, to stick with a strictly McLuhanesque taxonomy, we’d have to acknowledge that Facebook too is a mediated object insofar as it is accessed via a meta-medium like the Web).

For the same reason, I believe that the printing press has had a more lasting impact on human culture than any book printed on it, even though many more people have seen said books than have ever actually seen a printing press.

Image Source: Mathieu Thouvenin.

If you don’t have time to blog then don’t. Ghost blogging is inauthentic & the antithesis of everything social. #dontbeafake cc @mitchjoel – Avinash Kaushik

When I was in graduate school, there was a lot of talk about the “death of the author.” Such talk was driven primarily by French, post-structuralist thinkers like Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan who had an intensely nuanced and complex notion of writing and authorship that tended to highlight the supra-personal in any putatively “personal” utterance or authorial gesture. Steeped in such thinking, I became very skeptical of attempts to say with certainty who the “who” is when we ask, “Who wrote this?”

Barthes et al. were responding to various French philosophical currents of the 20th century but especially, I believe, existentialism. Whereas existentialism had put the individual human being at the center of (an ultimately meaningless) existence, thus hoping to establish a new moral center following the death of God, the post-structuralists chose instead to show that the individual was not the center of anything but, rather, the effect of many things (language, culture, discourse, the unconscious, etc.).

The French were not the first or the only critics to suggest that the individual (sometimes called “the subject”) was epiphenomenal. Freud had certainly pointed in this direction when developing his psycho-analytic theories as had Nietzsche a decade or so before him, Marx a decade or so before that, and Hegel at the very outset of the 19th century. But even these gentlemen were not the first to insist on the essentially contingent nature of individual identity which, in one form or another, can be traced back to the teachings of Buddha and even the Vedic authors before him.

Which is all to say that when I read things like Mitch Joel’s recent blog post on “ghost blogging,” my philosophical buttons get pushed.

Conceding that there may be practical value to ghost blogging (“I get that people Ghost Blog and it works”), Mitch shows that his opposition to it is, more than anything else, a matter of faith. Like a Luther for the Twitterati, he writes, “I believe this one thought (and I will stand by it): corporate Blogs being presented as a personal space to share insights have a predisposed and inherent understanding that the person whose name is on it is the actual author.”

You see, Mitch is less concerned with the value of ghost blogging than he is with values or, as he puts it, “ideals” (“I do think that there are some commonly held ideals within Social Media”) which he also refers to as the “pillars of what makes something ‘social’.” These pillars being, “transparency, openness, honesty, human and real voices (not corporate mumbo jumbo) and a culture that embraces sharing between these real voices.”

In other words, Mitch is a moralist who even indulges in the classic rhetorical move of the moralist, the value-laden leading question: “Why is everyone who defends ghost blogging so afraid to state that ghost blogging’s first act is one of deceit and misdirection?”

The philosopher in me wishes merely to point out that expressions like “actual author,” “real voices,” “human,” “social” and so on are not unproblematic.

What, after all, is an author and how does an author, generally speaking, differ from an “actual” author? What makes a voice “real,” particularly when we are talking about written texts (blogs) where the notion of “voice” itself is metaphorical? What attributes belong to the category “human” and what happens when “humanness” is invoked as an ethical category? Since when is the “social” defined by “honesty, transparency, and openness” rather than by concepts like “convention” or “conflict”? Etc.

I’m not sure that Mitch Joel is interested in the history of philosophy, let alone the history of the “ideals” that he invokes. Indeed, I’m fairly certain that he would dismiss my argument—that, in essence, concepts like authorship, or authenticity for that matter, are over-determined, social constructs which in no way represent uncontested, universal values—as equivocation. I am, after all, a ghost blogger whose work goes undisclosed by my clients. Thus, in the eyes of Mitch Joel, Avinash Kaushik, and others, I’m an aider and abettor of unreconstructed frauds and deceivers.

In my “defense,” and in answer to Mitch’s inherently unanswerable question (shades of “How frequently do you beat your wife?”), I would say that, if I am afraid to state that my first act every morning is one of deceit and misdirection, it is because I fear saying something that I do not consider to be true. Rightly or wrongly, I actually believe that the people whose bloggings I facilitate are the “actual” authors of the posts that I produce. The ideas are theirs, the “voice” is theirs, the blog is theirs, etc.

That being said, on a “human” level I resent the jargon of authenticity which pervades social media. When someone says, in the imperative voice, “Don’t be a fake,” I bristle. Why? Because I find the division of human actions into “real” and “fake” itself dehumanizing. Where does the notion of “authenticity” come from anyway? It is a term of trade driven by the desire to differentiate the genuine from the counterfeit so that an item can be assigned a monetary value. “Authentically human” is just another way of saying “Genuine leather.”

When we demand that humans be “authentic,” or criticize them for being fake, it’s because we have reduced them to the status of commodities. In fact, I believe that the social media, rather than humanizing marketing, as Mitch Joel and others have long hoped, have in fact completed the total colonization of human thought and affect by market forces.

Given the absolute assimilation of our lives by the new media, down to the most trivial whims (“I just ate a donut covered in bacon!” “I hate Justin Bieber”), isn’t it possible that the only way to hang on to our humanity is through masks, personae, and “ghosts”?

Or, in the immortal words of Robert Plant, “When you fake it, baby, please, fake it right.”

Image Source: Nick Wheeler.

I spend more time tending my Twitter garden than I do planting bulbs here in my own backyard.

To remedy this, I’m attempting a little cross-pollination and invite you, dear reader, to drink deep from my Twitter well. Just look at the precious coins I’ve tossed therein:

• “How to Train Your Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” #ijustsaw Sat May 1 22:38:34 2010
• I just realized: Plaid is the new paisley 10:35 PM Feb 4th
• i think i crashed Google. #sorry! Wed Feb 10 23:25:44 2010
• It started with a shout-out, and ended in a shoot-out Mon Feb 22 14:24:43 2010
• um, because you’re psychotic? RT @warrenellis: I do not understand why I have not been approached to run the UK Space Agency. Tue Mar 23 12:55:30 2010
• @tallbonez I like wearing hash browns too but they leave grease and ketchup stains everywhere I sit Wed Mar 24 08:42:07 2010
• Are humans the only species with the proven ability and willingness to hunt other species to extinction? #justcurious Sat Apr 10 09:57:35 2010
• Don’t hate the player, hate the instrument Sat Apr 10 19:34:31 2010
• “divine” is just another way of saying “inhuman” Tue Apr 20 08:37:22 2010
• I wanna be part of a global teeny-bopper trend I don’t understand! “Older Girl, You’re So Pretty” – #happy700thdayshinee Sat Apr 24 10:10:06 2010
• Somebody asked me for a “realistic estimate” of when I could do something. I told him, “Realism isn’t exactly my bag.” Fri Apr 30 11:31:33 2010
• If you’re trying to figure out if something is a good sign or not, it’s probably a bad sign. Sat May 1 22:39:47 2010
• I knew the focus on ROI was just a fad: http://adage.com/agencynews/article?article_id=143644 Mon May 3 09:12:22 2010
• Maybe global warming is just God’s way of boiling the ocean. Tue May 4 06:42:41 2010
• As anyone ever actually said, “Here, let me Bing that for you?” I thought not. Tue May 4 07:15:36 2010
• People always say “re-invent” yourself. Is this tacit acknowledgment that we are inventions to begin with? Tue May 18 09:52:32 2010
• I have nothing to add to the “conversation.” Pls RT Fri May 28 16:07:18 2010
• The remarkable power and portability of some euphemisms: People say “I have to go to the bathroom” even when they’re out in the woods. Tue Jun 1 17:14:01 2010
• Some complain about our growing inability to read anything of length online. What do they expect from people using “browsers”? Thu Jun 10 23:55:07 2010
• Hemingway called the blank page “The Great White Bull” – Does that make Twitter’s “What’s happening?” box “The Little White Bull”? Thu Jun 17 22:44:12 2010
• The hint of androgyny that suggests a kind of decadent villainy in American popular culture. Tue Jun 22 14:43:53 2010
• The lump on his neck pulsated as though it were full of bees. Tue Jun 22 15:32:16 2010
• Sea-foam on beach-breaking waves always seems to be galloping to boil and feather on the shore. Thu Jun 24 12:58:42 2010
• Every life is a word and every horoscope it’s false etymology. Fri Jun 25 09:30:58 2010
• Backlit leaves, sunlit ghosts Fri Jun 25 14:11:21 2010
• The real question is, “Wozu Twitter in dürftiger Zeit?” Fri Jun 25 14:49:30 2010
• The truth will set you free, but first it will make you throw up. Tue Jun 29 10:02:20 2010
• “The only thing our society rewards is potential. Accomplishment actually counts against you” Mon Jul 12 09:34:56 2010
• One sip of Pilsener Urquell and I’m back in Mittteleuropa. This beer is my Proustian madeleine. Mon Jul 12 23:46:09 2010
• “403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.” – Servers are basically like teenagers Wed Jul 14 11:09:07 2010
• Me: Listening to Jimi Hendrix makes me want to get a Stratocaster. My friend: It makes me want to get a hooker. Thu Jul 15 20:41:03 2010
• I wish I got “Frenemy” requests on Facebook. Sat Jul 24 15:18:02 2010
• We need WikiDepends to prevent WikiLeaks Mon Jul 26 13:18:35 2010
• I’ve never counted my chickens before they hatched, but I have counted them right before they got gobbled up by the fox 4:32 PM Feb 1st
• I think I may have just violated the Prime Directive. 11:18 PM Jan 21st
• When I grow up, I want to be an unindicted co-conspirator. Mon Jan 11 12:27:05 2010
• OMG! LOL! WTF? 10:07 AM Jan 5th
• EYE OF THE TIGER!!!!! 2:27 PM Dec 17th, 2009

Pretty good, right?

John Battelle recently pointed out that Google is compiling a Database of Intention (strictly speaking, he pointed this out back in 2003).

Said database is comprised of every search ever entered, every list of results every tendered, and every click-path thereafter taken. Referring to AdWords, AdSense, and Omniture, he additionally pointed out that an ecosystem had blossomed around this pure, though recently attenuated, signal.

One implication/assumption of his insight: Wherever we feel that humans are expressing intent, business(es) will grow.

To put it another way: When I know what you want to do, I can make money by facilitating the accomplishment of that need.

Although there were some who disagreed with Battelle, the many comments on the post demonstrated the concept’s potential primarily by playing with it. For example, some said the Web also constitutes a database of “What I’m listening to” or “What I’m eating” or “What I just saw.” Furthermore, someone also pointed out that all the commercial information on the web – “What I actually bought” – significantly completes the intention picture by capturing which intentions actually led to thing businesses care about most: realized revenue.

This all took me back to 1995 when I was teaching Hegel to Middelbury students and told them that the world wide web was the true realization of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” because, in the totality of the web, Spirit (“Geist” or “Mind”) represented itself to itself in an unprecedented manner. (In his characteristically grandiose fashion, Hegel had implied that this self-representation was happening in his book.)

The web is the medium of our lives and increasingly a medium where fusion overcomes immersion. As such, the Web doesn’t just archive what we’re looking for; it archives much of what we actually do. Not just, “This is what I said,” but, “This is what I’m saying.” Not just, “This is what I saw,” but, “This is what I’m seeing.” Not just, “This is what I thought,” but, “This is what I’m thinking.” Etc.

Many years ago, I saw some German dudes talking about how private videotapes constituted the greatest recorded catalog of everyday life ever assembled. The web has absolutely superseded that by creating “not just” a database of intention (in addition to a database of videotaped qoutidiana), but a database of consciousness itself.

Any idears how we could make money off that? Wait, somebody already has!

Image Source: quapan.

Ron Casalotti of Bloomberg Businessweek kicked things off talking about their Business Exchange social media platform: a people-filtered resource for business people. In order to encourage users to participate, he instituted a rating system for submissions, among other things. With over 40K registered users, BX serves as a folksonomy of topics that are of interest to Bloomberg Businessweek readers and gets used as a source of stories for print publication. It also helps direct content focus for the marketing department since they now know what readers actually care about.

Top Tip: Don’t get caught up in the numbers. 200 active participants are more meaningful than thousands of passive followers on Twitter, for example. What really counts is building engaged relationships.

Deirdre Walsh, self-proclaimed “geek matchmaker” and Community & Social Media Manager for National Instruments was up next. The cornerstone of National Instruments’ community strategy are their support forums which have over 140,000 participants and 50% of all questions posted are answered by community members. The community is used extensively by the organization for product feedback, R&D insight, etc. National Instruments also puts a big emphasis on recognizing and engaging with community “rock stars.” One interesting point of measurement for Deirdre are “actionable conversations.” She also measures community growth and number of posts per community member.

Top Tip: Don’t get overwhelmed by the technical options (Facebook vs. Twitter, etc.) but utilize something like the P.O.S.T. method to develop your plan. In other words, treat social media as any other marketing communication function.

Next up was Mike Travis of Equat!on Research who spoke about the process involved in producing their “2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report,” a research study “by marketers and for marketers” which relied on crowdsourcing to determine survey questions. The strategy was to use the survey methodology itself to engage a community where Equat!on wanted to be better known. These efforts resulted in greater exposure, site traffic, and a five-fold increase in leads generated.

Top Tip: Crowdsourcing is a good way to get in touch with a community and actually become part of it, as long as you have something of value to add to the conversation.

Kirsten Watson, Director of Corporate Marketing at Kinaxis, then spoke about her efforts to create a supply chain expert community. One key element of their strategy was to build a highly engaging, content-rich “home” for supply chain experts to learn, laugh (yes, there is comedy in supply chain management), share, and connect. Another key element was to leverage content to achieve SEO goals and beat out much larger competitors like SAP and Oracle. These SEO efforts pulled people primarily to the community and the Kinaxis blog, and only secondarily to the Kinaxis website. [Quotable quote: “You can always buy traffic.”] Note: 20% of community members are customers and 80% are prospects.

Top Tip: Repurpose and reuse content whenever possible (“Create 10 things out of 1 thing”) while always thinking about SEO.

What followed was a Q&A session. Here are some insights and tactics that came out of that:

• Keep communities open, even to competitors.
• Post content to relevant LinkedIn groups (but don’t play where you’re not welcome).
• Link editorial content to keyword strategy.
• Involvement in social media sometimes means “listen and don’t say anything.”
• Use the many conversations happening around your brand as a driver of internal collaboration. (Deirdre called this part of her “Social Media Pangaea” vision.)
• If you have people in your organization interested in blogging, send them to “Blog College” like the folks at National Instruments do. Give people guidelines and frameworks and let them go.
• “Social media” is not a campaign or a program; it’s a tool.

Christina “CK” Kerley moderated this session extremely well keeping things focused and the whole thing highly information-rich.

The way I see it, there are three paths to social media success.

1. Invent a Popular Social Media Platform

Marshall McLuhan once said something like, “Media owners don’t care what’s on TV, as long as everyone is watching.” To put it another way, the people who own what everyone uses, are the big winners. Unfortunately, becoming an owner is easier said than done and it just gets harder over time.

Facebook, for example, may have displaced MySpace – as MySpace displaced Friendster – as the center of the social media universe, but it’s hard to imagine what will displace Facebook. It’s user base just keeps growing and it really has become part of everyday life for millions. Same goes for Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn,  and YouTube, among others.

One possibility, I guess, is creating a meta-tool that allows people to aggregate their disparate online personalities and communities, but that didn’t exactly work for FriendFeed (and plus Facebook is kind of headed in that direction already) though it is kind of working for Apple (if you know what I mean).

2. Become a Social Media Celebrity

Mass media like television and radio have always been platforms for celebrity and the social media are no different, to a degree. Certainly people you have never heard of, such as Fred, have become “famous” by launching programs on YouTube, but that’s because YouTube is basically an open, explorable space.

You can explore Twitter but, generally speaking you are only paying attention to the folks you’ve chosen to follow and only really get noticed by them what follow you. In any event, it’s a lot easier to be a famous person. such as Oprah, Ashton, or Conan, who chooses to use Twitter than it is to become “famous on Twitter” (not sure who counts in the latter category aside from maybe Brogan and Vaynerchuk).

Finally, the rules of engagement on Facebook make it so utterly closed that, at best, it may allow you to become “better known” to your friends and acquaintances. You will never, however, become “well known” via Facebook.

3. Use Social Media to Do Something

Aside from being the easiest way to achieve “social media success,” this is the only way that the words “success” and “social media” ever make sense together in a sentence, as far as I’m concerned. The social media are tools and tools are only meaningful in their application to this or that situation.

This is one reason that I don’t believe it makes sense to have a “social media plan” for your business or one person there who is “responsible for social media.” Social media will only help you achieve your objectives – that’s what “success” means, right? – if it is integrated into the plans and programs you’ve undertaken to achieve them.

So incorporate social media channels in your PR strategy or figure out how to leverage social media in support of a product launch or make social media an important component of customer service. That way leads to success and, specifically, success via social media.

Everything else is just pipe dreams and pyramid schemes.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33142058@N06/ / CC BY 2.0

Two years ago I attended the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston and, frankly, it changed my life.

Aside from finally getting to meet the fabulous Ann Handley in person, I found myself connected to a community of smart, interesting, and engaged marketers that constitute the core of my professional network to this very day.

Well, guess what? MarketingProfs is hosting another B2B Forum May 3-5 at Boston’s Seaport Hotel. The emphasis on practical, actionable learning is one of the things that I’ve always valued about MarketingProfs events and, once again, they’ve assembled an impressive roster of speakers who will bring a ton of real-world experience and, more importantly, useful advice to the sessions they lead. I’ve met a number of these folks – Amy Black, Rachel Happe, Christina Kerley, David Thomas, Laura Ramos – and must say that they are smart, thoughtful marketers that, frankly, you can’t afford not to meet.

But wait, there’s more! MarketingProfs also does a great job lining up keynote speakers and this year is no exception. First, there’s David Weinberger, co-author of the runaway business hit, The Cluetrain Manifesto, who will be talking about what marketers are still missing about the digital economy. Secondly, attendees will also get a chance to hear Mitch Joel, who I saw at PodCamp several years ago and who remains one of the most humorous and thought-provoking speakers I’ve seen.

And if that’s not enough, I will be there in the role of Blog Therapist. Seriously.

It’s not to late to register and if you use the codeword “BLOG” then you’ll get yourself a $200 discount.

See ya there!

Did you know? “[Infected] URLs have really and truly become the most dangerous force in the world of cybercrime.”

Well guess what? One method used for corrupting them is called “SQL Injection.”

I learned about SQL Injection while exploring the weird world of botnets: vast networks of “zombie” computers used to produce spam (“90 percent of all e-mail worldwide is now spam“) and steal information from people. Turns out computers are enlisted into these vast zombie armies via websites that have been infected with malware (sometimes called “badware“) using technique’s like SQL Injection.

(On the continued use of this rather mature hacking method, Matt Hines wrote, “Once again we’re seeing that when it comes to online malware and data theft, attackers seem to have little motivation to create altogether new breeds of assaults, as well-known practices such as SQL injection remain so effective.”)

I did not realize that there were people on Earth known as botnet masters (as in the phrase “the topologies used today by botnet masters“). Nor did I realize that there are competing botnet developer kits and that descriptions of them, such as this one from Damballa‘s Gunter Ollman, read surprisingly like rather typical techie on-line reviews:

Zeus is an interesting DIY malware construction kit. Over the years it has added to its versatility and developed in to an open platform for third-party tool integration – depending upon the type of fraud or cybercrime the botnet master is most interested in. Along the way, many malware developers have tweaked the Zeus kit and offer specialized (and competing) major versions of the DIY suite (for sale). As such, the “Zeus” kit has morphed and isn’t really even a single kit any more. You can find Zeus construction kits retailing between $400-$700 for the latest versions – dropping to “free” within a couple of months as pirated versions start circulating Torrent feeds.

I think I understand how the sales process works for these kits (which go for between $400-$700). What I don’t understand is how the marketing function works for them.

For example, is there a hard division between sales and marketing in these organizations? Do the kits have product managers? What kind of market research leads to the final decision to go with this or that set of features? Is there after-sale support or is that all community based? And so on.

Can anybody out there give me some answers (without, you know, assimilating me into a botnet)?

BTW: The botnet masters have found a novel business benefit for social media: they use it to avoid detection. Marketers take note.

Checked out a story on the New York Times site. It looked like this:

I know you can see Ford’s prominently displayed banner, but you’ll also notice a wee-little banner up in the right-hand corner.

If you can’t really tell what it’s for, here’s a closer look (more or less actual size):

I don’t know how much the distributors of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus paid for that (it was undoubtedly part of a package deal), and maybe a banner ad that obscure gets some clicks (can anyone out there provide stats on the effectiveness of something like this?), but I can’t help seeing the decision to sell that tiny bit of white space, let alone the willingness to buy it, as an act of desperation and a harbinger of worse to come.

At the beginning of this video, captured by the ever ebullient Mr. Sonny Gill at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer back in October, I explain what I do as a “thought ronin” (and talk about what I was digging at the Mixer):

Apropos of MarketingProfs, I’m currently editing the official pre-game blog for their SocialTech 2010 conference to be held in San Jose on March 25.

This conference will focus on how B2B marketers in the hi-tech space (think: IBM, Intel, Cisco, SAP, etc.) are actually using social media to achieve a wide range of business goals. If that’s your bag, you should check it out (it’ll cost you around $500 but there is also a less expensive “virtual attendance option“).