Violet Mae Lim

I haven’t been around these parts of town lately. I’ve been spending a lot of my time over at my Yahoo! Social Tumblr where I blog about social media news as it relates to publishers (as brands) and some of the cool social things that I’m working on.

http://yahoosocial.tumblr.com/

What is it about elevators? Is it the stale smell? The discomfort of being stuck in the same space with a stranger (or a couple strangers) with no escape? The awkward conversations about the weather, how you spent your weekend or plans for the upcoming weekend? Perhaps it’s the silence and the way people go out of their way to avoid eye contact.

Whatever the case, Chris Baker has relabeled the open/close buttons on elevators to more accurately reflect their day-to-day use:

In which I was reminded of this Wired piece: “Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting:”

So, if you are a rhesus macaque and find yourself trapped in a small cage with another macaque, you know what to do: Bare your teeth and start grooming. If you are a human and find yourself riding in an elevator with a stranger, I recommend you do the same: Smile and make polite conversation.

Ponder for a moment: Facebook could either be an elevator-conversation-starter or an elevator-conversation-killer (by way of perhaps making us less likely to engage in offline conversation).

Mostly, I just liked the juxtaposition of the stickers.

[Photo by: Chris Baker; The Elevator of Discontent]

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there are real people being Facebook pages. It’s easy to read posts, click like, share them, or even ignore them all together but every once in a while, something happens that makes us remember that there is someone (or a team of someones) sitting behind the page, carefully selecting what will appears in a Facebook stream. Sometimes that “something” is a quirky little mistake…

Yesterday, I noticed a post from the NPR Facebook page that looked a little different. Instead of the usual link to a story that they normally post, there was a block of text:

It turns out, people didn’t mind. And a quick scan of the Facebook page shows that this post is pretty active and engaging compared to some of their other posts.

This post stood out to me because it is personal, friendly and conversational… much like a note that a friend would send. Additionally, it’s pretty transparent. Somebody made a light, honest error and they fixed it. Fortunately for the producer, the picture wasn’t anything racy, pornographic or inappropriate! (If that were the case, it would be a different story!)

The moral of this story is that it’s ok to be “off-brand” and show a little personality every now and then. I wouldn’t recommend posting off-brand messages often but every once in a while, it helps people remember that there are people behind the pages.

Late last year, hoards of media brands jumped on the Tumblr wagon after reading this NYT article. Since then, media orgs have experimented with, tumbled, reblogged, liked and replied to breaking news, funny pictures, media insider jokes (with a dash of snark) and everything else under the sun. At Yahoo! News, I decided that our Tumblr would be used for videos, pictures, and buzzy stories rather than hard breaking news. Here are some of my observations so far (your mileage may vary):

The viralness of Tumblr
I’ve personally had a Tumblr account since June of 08 but I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr for Yahoo! News since November and today, one of my Tumbles (?) particularly stood out because it spread very quickly. I posted this picture of protestors holding up a banner during a demonstration against Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi outside Downing Street, in London. Within an hour, it was reblogged on Tumblr about 100x. As I write this post, it’s been about 9 hours and there have been 1000+ notes (notes = Tumblr ‘likes’ and ‘reblogs’ combined).

Understand the Tumblr community
Maybe it’s my background in marketing, but I firmly believe that you should always know who your community is online. Follow them, check out their profiles as you grow and most importantly, check out your stats if you have them. (Unfortunately, Tumblr currently doesn’t supply any demographic breakdown or audience stats so I’d suggest paying close attention and eyeballing it). Another basic tip: study the platform as a whole and understand its demographic. Experiment with content and you’ll start to understand what does well. What does well on our Facebook or Twitter account doesn’t do well on our Tumblr account.

Timeliness
The hot topic in social media right now is Libya and the deadly anti-government protests. From what I have observed, Tumblr is very trend-driven community — creating trends, spreading memes and driving them. In my experimentation, I’ve posted snippets of news that were interesting but not trending and those updates receive a luke-warm response. My tip here would be: know what’s trending on Tumblr and ride the wave.

Tumblr’s shift into news
Last July, Tumblr hired Mark Coatney, former Editor at Newsweek. Coatney was the voice of Newsweeks’ Tumblr account and now helps media companies understand and embrace Tumblr. Tumblr has also rolled out tags, editor guidelines, a news leaderboard & topic discovery. These features are small steps towards engaging the Tumblr community with media orgs and surfacing the most engaging news of the day. Yahoo! News is currently featured on as a top contributor to #Libya tags which brings visibility to our account and post:

Those are my observations thus far and as I previously stated, your mileage may vary. Every news org or brand will have a different community and rates of audience engagement. With that being said, Tumblr is proving to be a robust platform for curating and discovering the news in real-time and I am excited to see what other goodies they’ll be adding for media organizations. One thing I’d really like to see is some kind of analytics dashboard that measures impressions, engagement rate, click through and sentiment. Until then, Tumblr “notes” are a good indicator of how content is received.

Here are my 5 interesting reads of the week:

Social media plays role in Egypt some expected in Iran
Today, Hosni Mubarak stepped down as the president of Egypt, after nearly 3 weeks of anti-government protests. Michael Calderone, media blogger for Yahoo! News writes about social media’s role in the country’s democratic uprise. There’s a lot of background behind the “social media revolution” debate but I think he sums it up quite nicely when he says, “dictators are toppled by people, not media platforms.” (Disclosure: Calderone and I both work for Yahoo! News)

Cracking the scratch lottery code
A fascinating read on how a geological statistician figured out how to crack lottery scratchers and a peek into the lottery business.

What stops female founders?
Jessica Livingston, founding partner of seed stage venture firm, Y Combinator, gives her thoughts on what’s stopping women from founding their own companies. She also talks about what stopped her from starting a company when she was in her mid-20′s. Though Livingston is writing specifically about women, I think her insight would be helpful for any aspiring entrepreneur.

The 4-hour startup: marketing it
Loren Burton writes about how he capitalized on the Snowpocalypse 2011 through internet marketing and riding a trend… all in 4 hours (according to him). Not too shabby.

20 SXSW Interactive panels that journalists should attend
I’m really excited to be going to SXSW this year (third time) and I’m also looking forward to hearing more about social media, journalism and news. This is a long list of panels so I’ll be pruning down and listing out some of the panels I’d like to go to very soon.

photo credit: MoneyBlogNewz

We all know work relationships go both ways. As an employer, you want to find the best fit for your business. As an employee, you ought to want to work at a company where you will innovate, thrive and succeed. There are a lot of blog posts on what to look for when hiring someone to over-see or execute social media — whether it be someone in-house, with an agency, a consultant, a freelancer, etc. But I’ve yet to see a blog post that addresses what someone involved in social media needs to look for when they want to work with a company who is looking to integrate social media into their business.

In terms of digital marketing and media, I’ve worked both in-house and at an agency and with small startups and big brands. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot and I hope to keep learning. Here are a couple things I think are important to think about before working with a company interested in social media.

1. Culture
Are they innovative and willing to try new methods or are they more conservative? Do people there tend to work in small groups or larger groups? Do they celebrate successes and learn from failures? Understanding the culture of an organization may help you understand how a business embraces social media.

2. What department is social media in… also, the age old question, “who owns social media?”
Understanding what department or team your potential position falls under will help you understand social media’s role and how you should navigate around that. Does the business consider social media a PR role? Customer service? Branding?  marketing, other? It also helps to know which teams you’ll be working with. Will you have support from other teams? Which teams? Engineering? Marketing? PR?

3. How does the company define social media?
A lot of companies love the idea of social media because it’s new, shiny and they’re competitors using it but may not understand the basic principles of social media or how social media fits into their goals. Do they see social media as a way of broadcasting information or are they eager to listen, monitor sentiment, engage and be creative with their campaigns?

4. What were their past processes for social media if any?
Have they run any campaigns in the past? What were the wins or failures? Was there a break down in communication between departments? What was the workflow like? Knowing this will give you an example of the kind of challenges you might run up against.

5. How do they define success in social media?
This question is complimentary to “what are they hoping to achieve with social media?” Are they looking to increase brand awareness through social media or are they looking for social media to impact traffic? Do they want to engage with customers? Are they looking for social media to become a channel of customer service? Granted there will be more specific goals for every role but understanding how a company defines success (especially with something as new as social media), will be helpful in understanding what they might expect of you in a social media role.

Social media is new and changing very quickly. What applies one day may not apply the next month, week or even day. What’s important is being able to gauge expectations so you can thrive in your role. Everybody wants a piece of social media but not everybody understands how to get it or what it takes to get it.

What makes something “go viral?”

That may be a question for  “Jenny,” an attractive girl who quit her office job through a series of photos with messages on a dry erase board. The photos were originally posted on theCHIVE.com (known for their viral hoaxes and pranks on the media) then spread like wildfire throughout the Internet, taking down almost every Twitter-er, blogger and Facebook-er on the web. By the end of the day, it was settled that the whole thing was a hoax. But, the brothers behind theCHIVE.com will be clearing the air and revealing more details about Jenny tomorrow.

I’m not so much interested in whether or not the story is a hoax but rather the marketing virility of Jenny and her whiteboard – the idea, components and execution that not only got the attention of tons of people on the web but is, what I believe, a beautifully executed viral campaign. Here are some of the components that I think made this story so viral:

1.  Attractive girl: This one is a no-brainer. Jenny is an attractive girl. Who doesn’t like looking at attractive girls? Next.

2.  Relatable: Almost anyone can sympathize with Jenny. She had high aspirations of being a broker and put up with her obnoxious boss’ temper, bad breath, and [insert any negative quality here]. Who hasn’t been in this position or at least had to listen to a loved one moan and groan about being in this position?

3.  Riding the trends: After yesterday’s theatrical JetBlue flight attendant meltdown, dramatic job exoduses are top of mind. Jenny was the cherry on amongst the sprinkles on top.

4.  Targeted seeding: In one of Jenny’s pictures, she notes her boss spent 5.3 hours a week reading TechCrunch, one of the most popular blogs about technology and startups. It’s only natural that TechCrunch would blog about it, which would lead to related blogs picking it up.

5.  Shareable: One of the most obvious components of viral videos but often overlooked – Jenny’s pictures on theCHIVE.com were highly shareable. Anybody who came across this blog post could seamlessly share it within a second and never look back.

Not only did those components make headlines today but they’re also a perfect example of any successful marketing campaign. It should be noted that the two other companies in Jenny’s slides were Farmville and Scottrade. Did the two companies have anything to do with Jenny and would I be surprised? Maybe and no.

Stay tuned for an update!

Mark Cuban wrote a very interesting blog post on what he calls “the future of the Facebook Like Button.” He proposes Facebook color code Like buttons to signal intent from the user… intent or action of buying (green), permission to send more updates to the user (yellow), or no action at all (red).

It’s an interesting idea which got me wondering about two things:

1. Can every user’s intent be captured through a color?

2. What about news updates?

Answering my own questions:

1. No, I don’t believe so. I know I personally go on Facebook Like button sprees, where I’ll click it on things I’ve bought, things I want to buy, things I don’t ever want to buy but I think are funny, things I may want to buy in the future, things that I’m just not sure about, news articles that I agree with, news articles I don’t agree with at all but enjoyed reading anyway, news articles that are just plain silly, and the list goes on. Though Facebook gives the option for publishers to let users add comments to whatever they “LIKE” (therefore, the ability to explain to people why they LIKED something), unfortunately, not all publishers/websites have implemented this. Could all the Like buttons I click on Facebook be categorized under 1 action? Not necessarily. Maybe I want more updates but I just don’t know it. Confused yet? Exactly.

2. What about news websites? For example, say I read a news story about an incident that happened on MTV’s Jersey Shore and I click “LIKE.” Should this signify I want more updates on Jersey Shore or does it mean I just “liked” the incident and want to share it with my friends? Should I click green to get more? More of what? Jersey Shore? Developments of the particular incident? More from that particular blogger or journalist? Also, as the media isn’t “selling” anything, per se, here is where the ability to publish back to a user is invaluable.

My Facebook Like button wishlist:

• CMS back-end for publishers, brands and media with the ability to categorize people into certain groups, to be determined by the publisher. Understanding the user’s intent here would be up to the publisher. (Example: Let the user know he or she should click “LIKE” if they want additional updates on products or developments on the particular news story or if they just want to share with their friends).
• Ability to seamlessly publish to those groups based on said groups. Note: Facebook has already announced the ability to publish back to the people who have clicked “LIKE”(through what they call “dark pages”), but they’ve yet to clearly explain HOW publishers can do this. As a side note, I’ve tried this on my own with no avail – ‘tis another post for another day.

So what’s all this mean? Who knows. Facebook is complicated and the interactions users have with their friends/network through Facebook are even more complicated. There’s a lot more that could be said about the future of the Facebook Like button.  I’m eager to see what they will build out; in my opinion, the Like button is just the tip of the iceberg. I’m also eager to see how universal it will be.



Photo courtesy of: quinn.anya

I’m publishing this at about 11pm so it’s not really happy hour… but doesn’t the title of this post sound fun? Humor me.

Here are 5 things I found on the internet this week that stood out to me. Hopefully, you’ll find them just as interesting.

[Balance]: The Secret to Happiness? Routines

[Business]: What I Learned from Anna Wintour

[Leadership]: Why Good People Skills Matter in a Recession

[New]: Oh, the things people will do for $5

[Visual]: From The New Yorker, Finger Painting: Evening Walk

Cheers!

photo credit: Bermico

People who don’t understand social media often think it’s just a bunch of “stupid status updates.” Well, sure… I guess you could look at it that way but it’s also a huge change in the way we read, understand and communicate with each other. It’s a change in the culture of content consumption.

Two parts of Cory Doctorow’s “How to Say Stupid Things About Social Media” reminded me of two things. First, the underpinnings of social media as linguistic anthropology. In other words, the internet, social networking and social media have changed the way some of us talk to each other and  switch between our online language and offline language. In the same way some people are bi-lingual, the switching of languages reflects and emphasizes identity. By this, I don’t necessarily mean acronyms like LOL or WTF; I mean words that are specific to social networks like “tweet”, “retweet”, and “OH:” (overheard) on Twitter.

Secondly, the “banality” of our online conversations as they relate to small talk in the office or an elevator. On the surface, awkward small talk. As a greater whole in the American culture? A way of building networks/alliances through recognizing personal details and emphasizing casual solidarity. Small talk is a huge part of how people understand and perceive each other.

People who are perplexed by how social networks often completely overlook these points. The points of social networking and small talk are so seemingly simple that they’re complex.