I’ve decided to play a fairly simple game on twitter. If you follow me, then I’ll return the follow, i.e. I’ll follow you (this will probably get me more than a few spam bots). As soon as I follow you the game begins. The basic premise, you get points for how long I follow you.

As soon as you do something that I find annoying — you’re out.  Such actions might include; linking to items that you find on <insert social news site here> constantly, constant chattering without thinking,  advertising products and/or anything else I deem particularly annoying.

I will let you know that you’re out (regardless of whether you want me to or not). I will also put you in a hall of fame (if I ever get around to it). I will accept appeals, with relevant case argued or the equally funny begging and grovelling, I will NOT be accepting bribes at this time.

Finally sending an *auto* direct message when I follow you WOULD be a really bad idea if you wish to stay in the game (and the list of people I’m following)  for more that 5 minutes.

TO GET STARTED: Create an account at http://www.twitter.com and follow @vertis

NB: This post/game is inspired (in part) by randsinrepose(@rands) and @zaibatsu, the later of which has to honour of being the first person unfollowed (though the person part is questionable)

I’m back from leave this morning with mixed feelings. I got paid today which put me in a good mood (I get paid monthly so its a bigger deal). I’m not usually a rollercoaster of emotion, but I find myself both loving and hating the place that I’m contracted to work today. On the one hand I returned to find voicemail messages from the managing partner (sent firmwide), expressing the fact that they we’re moved by the tragedy that had struck Victoria in the form of the bushfires.

More importantly promising money from the firm and exhorting partners and employees alike to contribute to the appeal. I felt moved. I know that there is a certain amount of publicity in giving and responding like that to the bush fires, but in real terms they’ll be unlikely to rate a mention on the news. There has been a flood of support for the bushfire victims (as there should be), and the firm responding to that need is touching. Indeed one of their Victorian employees died in the firestorm that has engulfed Victoria, so it is personal on another level for the managing partner who spent time talking to the mother of the employee.

What I don’t understand is how they can be so caring on one hand, and so callous on the other. It wasn’t long after I got in that I spoke to my project manager, to catch up on everything that’s happened while I was away, and discovered that an Executive Assistant had been made redundant. It would not have touched me so much had she not been involved with the project.

To be fair the person that she was working for had relocated to Hong Kong? as part of a strategy where he was to play a bigger role in the Far East as well as being the CIO for Oceania. So her role may well have been redundant considering her boss was no longer close. The question I have though is *so what*. People != Roles, you can make a role redundant, but does that mean that you need to kick the person out the door? No.

Sure there are times when employees need to be let go, if they’re not performing for instance. Truthfully though, there is no reason that the employee in question couldn’t have been moved sideways. I think, I believe from the brief time I spent working with her, that she was competent. She was certainly pleasant to work with, and had a wealth of knowledge. So why let her go? The firm is tightening its belt with the financial crisis being in full swing, an understandable descision even though its more proactive than reactive action.

Truth time; at a certain level businesses don’t care about people. The actions inside the business speak truer than the public actions that the business takes. You can give all the money you want to people that are suffering, but when your employees become nothing more than numbers, and what you do is about making money and nothing else then you’ve lost your way. Money is great, money is neccessary, but its the people and relationships that count. The dynamics of the people I’m working with at the moment have changed, and not necessarily for the better.

I feel slightly dirty for being so happy about my pay.  I’m not happy to be dependent on it. In some ways the company that I work for is better than the business that I’m contracted to. It’s smaller, they haven’t fired anyone, or let anyone go since I’ve been there. I need to remember that while I know the name of everyone that works at my company, they’re still in the business of making money first.

There are several ways to use social networking and social media:

* To help you connect and interact with people that you know.
* A catalyst to enhance your own thinking.
* A way of broadcasting your products and brand to a captive audience.
* There are probably other uses as well, but how long do you want this list to be?

I’ll get to what is wrong with users pushing products through social networking in a moment, but there is another group of people that use social networking: self styled experts and consultants. People that claim to know how to utilize social networking and social media, people that would be otherwise unremarkable in their careers but have garnered a following of people.
I started following @keyinfluencer and @skydiver after the former made a comment on twitter that blew up in his face, a horse which has been beaten to death on blogs/comments and twitter.  They haven’t had a great amount of interesting updates to read since, but @skydiver aka Peter Shankman has some interesting projects, not the least of which is HARO. So they both stayed on the list of people I was following, even after the drama died down.

Around the same time, my official twitter honeymoon period ended. While people are initially interested in someone new, that doesn’t last long unless you are relevant , such as the work they do or the values they represent, there is very little connection that causes interaction. I was sitting at about 25 followers, none of whom actually interacted with my tweets for the most part. I wanted to be relevant and included, and I really really wasn’t. It’s enough to make you pull your hair out.

Then I added @guykawasaki after @keyinfluencer retweeted something from him. Over the next 15 to 20 minutes I picked up another 5 -10 followers, all of them matching the above stereotype. Lots of followers, about an equal number of people they were following…social media experts. People trying to use the medium to their benefit.

I’ve been to a few presentations in the past that these people remind me of. The sales pitch, the angle:

“You too can be *RICH*, if you do what I do.”

With slicked down hair and a suit that they hope I’ll recognize is expensive, (which of course I don’t – I know absolutely nothing about suits), the presentation is a money making effort all on its own. The person up the front has no interest in making anyone else rich, or adding value to your life. And who can blame them, why should they care about you? But why should you respect them either? Aside from the fact that they’re doing well financially (assumedly) there is nothing else outstanding about them. They’re not making the world a better place, just trying to get ahead themselves.

If any of the people above feel that this isn’t fair then speak up. I certainly don’t know everything about you. Peter Shankman certainly has something that helps out a lot of people, what about the rest?

I was having a discussion about SEO and social media the other day with my dentist. We talked about a lot of things, not the least of which was the fact that businesses were increasingly trying to utilise this new platform to push their agenda. That may be effective to an extent – but it’s not real. The essence of social networking and social media is that we don’t want to be spoonfed and forcefed what we consume. Twitter is all about finding people to follow that are interesting and useful, but at what point does it become just another billboard that can be used to get your money?

A perfect example of the corruption of social media is the spamming that goes on. Because of the explosion of available services (there are now several twitter clones for instance). It has become common for people to spam ALL the available services, in an attempt to get your name out as hard and fast as you can. A recent issue on Etsy.com highlights the problem that comes when you force an advertising campaign into a format that is designed for personalities, not products. Timothy Adam Designs was recommending that people use a service called socialmarker.com. SocialMarker is a service which lets you post the same URL to up to 160 social bookmarking sites instantly. Timothy’s instructions were embraced by the Etsy community, and subsequently all linking to etsy from propeller.com was banned as it was considered a spam site.  He was at a point the social media expert on the Etsy forums. The kicker is, Timothy’s instructions were posted to the Etsy forums as his method of getting blog hits, which would increase his popularity, which would sell his product. His angle: “You too can be rich, if you do what I do.”

Social media is not designed for products. If you are pushing your products by announcing them on twitter, or bookmarking them on the plethora of social bookmarking sites then you’re not doing the right thing. Another interesting forum post on Etsy deals with the fact that a lot of these sites have rules in the Terms of Service against this very action.

There is a place for /Social Products/,  but don’t misunderstand me. Social Products should not be mistaken for self promotion. Social products(or services) are when someone else recommends your product or service. Social products are more commonly known as word of mouth, someone buying your product or using your service and feeling so strongly about it that they have to share it with other people. There is only one way to get into that category; be outstanding in what you do.

Stop falling in with the wrong people. I’m still being ignored on twitter, but I’ve had this realisation that it doesn’t matter. On one level, I’d like to be relevant on twitter and have people read my blog, because that may help me get more consulting work long-term. But what I really have to do to get work is follow my own advice. Be outstanding.

I don’t pretend to be a marketing expert, but every so often when I’m watching the TV in the evening I get a sickly taste in my mouth. A tragic advertisement will flash briefly across the screen pushing me to buy something or trying to enhance a brand name. Currently, that ad is one for a new range of pasta from Pizza Hut. I’m going to break my objections into two halves; the advertisement & the product.

The Advertisement

The ad starts with people eating dinner at a restaurant called ‘Tuscani’. They have hidden cameras much as you would find in a restaurant show like Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. All to make it seem like it’s a real restaurant. After the people have discussed convienently enough how creamy and excellent the pasta is, the chef(?) comes out and announces that he has a confession to make; He didn’t cook anything tonight it was all delivered by Pizza Hut. At this point the Pizza Hut people have appeared with ‘The Product’. There is delighted surprise & and applause. You can find the copy I found on youtube below (NB: The version below is slightly different than the Australian version, with a different chef & people, and different restaurant location).

Here is how the advertisement fails:

1. People don’t like being deceived – The restaurant is not real and therefore your ad is based on a lie.
2. People don’t react like that when deceived – Pull that kind of stunt in real life and people would be walking out and/or demanding the meal for free. *If* the ad were based on real events you’ve just defrauded 20-50 people out of their money.
3. No self respecting chef would (a) allow that to happen in his restaurant and (b) confess that to his customers – it would be a sure way to bankrupt your business.
4. You don’t have enough range for people to believe they are ordering from a restaurant menu (3 types over there, 2 here) – You can’t honestly make me believe EVERYBODY in the restaurant just happened to want the type of pasta that the tuscani range offers.

On the above note let me move on to ripping a hole in the product itself.

The Product

1. As mentioned above there are only 2 to 3 different options when it comes to the pastas you can get from pizza hut, this is a pitiful offering considering the fact that there are half a dozen ‘Pasta Pantry’ franchises sprinkled across the Sydney CBD and the range offered is outstanding(~20 different pasta dishes + salads, soups & other items).
2. A recent study found that pasta is the commonly eaten dish, fine, I can see how someone high up in pizza hut could want to include pasta in the menu – which results in a big FAIL for you my friend. Pasta is a common dish because it is probably the easiest thing in the world to cook short of boiling an egg or putting bread in the toaster.
3. Besides being super simple to make, it is also a staple in most diets because it is cheap enough to be affordable even on the tightest of budgets.
4. There is no vegetarian option. How FRACKING hard do you think it is to offer a vegetarian option (sorry, pet hate)

Conclusions

The Tuscani Pasta commercial is an epic fail.

The product: not cheap, not flexible and has a lousy range.

The commercial: dishonest, unrealistic and poorly conceived

EPIC FAIL