Momentary Lapse of Reason: A Quick Warning

The proliferation and ease of publishing content in the public domain throughout the web should also be considered too – a momentary lapse of tweeting can lead to some serious offence, such as Jimmy Carrs recent lack of judgement in making “car crash jokes” around the same time as a tragic event on the M5 near Taunton. The result of your own lack of judgement could be potential loss of business or even something more serious events such as investigation from the police as two seventeen year old boys found out recently when they added racially charged comments to their Twitter feed and were subject to legal action.

The examples given are fairly extreme but with the power of the web, and ease of access to it in the western world, comes responsibility to ensure that what you publish is in line with your own strict [or conciously liberal] policies on what is appropriate within the law and within your public image.

An Example: Simcoemedia Design Consultancy

Over the last 10 years Simcoemedia has built up a solid reputation and brand as a creative multimedia agency which both reinforces company values to existing clients and attracts new work. Much of the work in establishing this has been built up online through the use of the following media:

Portfolio or bloging websites

Simcoemedia runs several independent websites containing design portfolio items, design articles, audio-soundtracks and film reviews. The content on these sites are all original and generated by Peter Simcoe as part of ongoing creative output in one form or another. They are particularly valuable in that the direction, management and contribution to Simcoemedia branding are completely unique – there are no other companies with vested interests in sharing any revenue or search listings. On the downside, they take time to establish, optimise for SEO and populate with appropriate content and links before they are noticed by search engines as having any importance. Here is a list of these sites:

• Simcoemedia Design Consultancy – design portfolio items
• Design-Design – design articles for business and academia
• Audio-Echo – audio porfolio with shopping cart and film reviews
• Simcoe-Shop – photographic portfolio with shopping cart

Stock Websites

For creative people, uploading audio, video and images to stock websites to sell to the public [they may be other designers, video producers or publishers] provides another channel of exposure for your work. Being part of a large online shop in one form or another does group you with the rest of the creatives and community so it is harder to stand out amongst the crowd but with larger numbers of people involved comes larger budgets and more investment in advertising with a greater reach. iStockphoto has a worldwide reputation with creative networks such as The Envato Network gaining ground in popularity. As a contributing artist to these global network websites I am able to have a profile page with links to my other portfolios that provide SEO value through the ability to add a profile page and link to pages with a good page rank [and even if theres a no-follow tag disallowing 'link juice'*, external links are still important], increase in my digital footprint and provide reassurance to potential buyers by the fact that I have passed the rigorous standards of websites such as iStockphoto.com.

* Link Juice, in simple terms, is the value search engines place upon the recommendation or linking of an external site to another – eg if Microsoft or Apple were to directly link to my website without the addition of a ‘no follow’ tag, then search engines would think that I must be an important site because I ve been linked to by a very important site and will increase my Page Rank [importance on the web] and therefore my search engine rankings.

• Simcoemedia on iStockphoto.com
• Simcoemedia on AudioJungle.net
• Simcoemedia on Photodune.net

Social Media and Other sites

As we get closer to social media in our discussion regarding digital footprint, the lines between professional and non-professional activity can more easily be crossed and therefore more caution is urged. Just because something is freely available and can publish any thoughts you may have on any subject does not mean it should be used. I have a pretty strict policy on social media use – ie do not allow anything to be published that you would not be happy for your clients to read or view. The list of social media below is in order of priority and preference I place on it along with a brief summary of its use:

• Simcoemedia YouTube Channel – video portfolio
• Simcoemedia Twitter Account – design related tweets
• LinkedIn – online resume and updated business related news
• Simcoemedia Google + Page – interesting photos and basic company updates
• Simcoemedia Facebook Account – linked to twitter with less formal design commentary

Digital Footprint Diagram

Below is a diagram of Simcoemedia’s digital footprint – you can also download the Simcoemedia Digital Footprint Diagram in PDF format. Larger circles indicate priority in time and content whereas smaller circles are considered to be of lower priority. Twitter is linked to many of the sites and can be seen on the footer of Simcoemedia, Design-Design, Audio-Echo as well as being fed into Facebook, Linked In and other sites – you can see Twitter’s main stream as a dotted line connecting many of the sites together. RSS feeds are broadcast from WordPress based websites and are fed into sites such as Linked In – titles also appear in the footers of all Simcoemedia WordPress based sites.

Simcoemedia uses many different sites for different purposes and goals. Some sites require updates and effort put into creating content more than others – others remain static for longer. Design-Design, the blog you are reading is updated once each month at least and new articles require detailed attention and significant time to produce. Simcoemedia Design Consultancy website is updated when certain projects are completed that add to the overall portfolio breadth and depth – not all projects make it to the porfolio as some skills, design styles or methods are already covered.

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Constructing An Argument

If you read his article, “I Will Never Hire a “Social Media Expert,” and Neither Should You“, then you might be able to identify with the sentiment but if you describe yourself as one of the experts, then maybe not. The problem with the article is that Shankman has not spent time considering his argument in terms of intellectual content and it ends up sounding like a slightly insane rant:

…..Being an expert in Social Media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge [...] “It’s not about building a website anymore! It’s so much cooler! It’s about Facebook, and fans, and followers, and engagement, and influence, and…”. Will you please shut up before you make me vomit on your shoes? [...]

The irony is that part of me that thinks the guy needs someone who deals with social media [but not a 'professional expert'] to help him write his blog article because he tends to discredit anything useful he is saying by writing what appears to be the first thing that comes into his head. However, I do think Shankman is onto something and I can see where this article could have gone with a bit more care and attention to detail [and arguments sounding less 'foaming at the mouth' shall we say]. This whole issue could be broken down into the following arguments:

• Knowledge of the way Social Media works is not necessarily going to go hand in hand with the ability to apply that knowledge respectably or effectively in business.
• Understanding marketing power and the way social media can influence this should come from a sound level of research and experience in branding and user interaction within a company rather than allowing social media to drive a process because ‘everyone is doing it these days’.
• Experience and maturity should be applied to strategy and action taken when making yourself heard online. If you have something of value to offer customers then social media should be treated with delicate care and those who access your tweets, blogs or Facebook page should be under no illusion of how they can both ‘make’ and ‘break’.

My interpretation of Shankman’s dubious ranting is that he is enraged by the tidal wave of young, inexperienced social media ‘experts’ with little or no knowledge of business methods or processes. Where the article does fall down is that he does seem to dismiss any value to having followers on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or other. In some respects he is completely wrong – blogs, Twitter and Facebook do have value but the level of importance to the business, the time allocated using social media and appropriate use or tone are the issues. Maturity, knowledge and business experience will dictate how much value is assigned to this in increasing sales or strengthening a brand but it is the knowledge beyond the hype [ie understanding the real advantages and disadvantages of these tools] that many business owners struggle to see and end up giving credit, in a respect and financial sense of the word, to those who deserve neither because there’s limited or no guidance / benchmark made accessible to them. Where business owners will also struggle when making decisions on spending time using social media is in the statistics – it is difficult to accurately assess how many of these social media tools really do or could affect the income a company or individual product could achieve and like all web based ‘booms’ for every success story there seem to be many other examples of failure or wasted effort.

You’d never give the intern permission to write the corporate press release to accompany an earnings announcement, so why the hell are you listening to the 22-year-old who says “we’re going to do this social media thing because it’s cool?”
- One of the more sane rants from Peter Shankman’s article

Characteristics Of These ‘Experts’

In my own experience I’ve often read the output of these so called experts. They do not usually last that long on Twitter [where you can prove you've little to offer the world in less than 143 characters] before they are removed – but their dross and the overall weight assigned to it seems to thrive – with the ‘icing on the disappointingly demoralising cake’ being the tragic thrill that most newsreaders on the BBC or Channel 4 news seem to get by giving Twitter or Facebook a mention during their broadcasts. Those with little to contribute easily outweigh those with valuable input and the ability to hide behind their computer along with the immediacy of the internet when commenting or blogging brings out the ‘inner stupid’ and prejudice in many. The way to identify a social media idiot is that they usually have at least two or three characteristics from the following [and you know you've met them]:

• A career in social media promotion in one form or another is all they have ever known
• They do not understand the businesses they work with and propose ideas that are short sighted and superficial
• They have an over inflated opinion of their self importance and casually mix personal with business without thought
• Their contribution is weak or limited in value and lacks mature judgement
• They make recommendations that rate ‘rating’s over user experience eg number of followers vs quality of tweets

Similar Problems in SEO

In many ways the social media industry suffers from the same problems as the search engine optimisation industry. I have had a couple of experiences where my clients have employed a ‘search engine optimisation’ expert to assist them in gaining higher rankings and Using the 4 principles above the end results involved the following:

• Changes made to the website without discussing with the client
• The changes were unexpected and actually damaged the user experience [eg names of titles changed and lost their relevance]
• The SEO companies charged an amount that involved usually involved a quick hit with a high hourly rate and zero discussion with the client themselves to resolve or prevent the sort of problems indicated above.
• The SEO companies were really just agencies who then passed on the job to an external party [often inexperienced programmer types with no understanding of business etiquette, or even social etiquette at times].

Don’t get me wrong, there are experts out there and people who can help you. However, experience tells me that those people are hidden in amongst a ‘glut’ of people wanting to cash in or live a lifestyle attending ‘workshops’ and telling others how to improve their business with little or no business sense. They are in effect, living on borrowed time and it’s down to business owners to wise up and stop handing over money to ‘too cool for school’ fools who should be in jobs that they feel are below them [but to the rest of us are 'jobs'].

ps – here’s the photo from iStockphoto I did want to use for this article [but was too expensive]

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The fact is, I’ve just written about Joe Biden and his health reform – I’m not the only one by a long way and there are many t-shirt designs to prove my point – also, David Cameron and his comments about Twitter and Joy Division’s re-released single. These apparent faux pas may be genuine but maybe not. Remembering that these people have reached the top of their game and experience many different types of public presentation – verbal and written to the mass media audience, it SHOULD come as a surprise that these mistakes are made. After all, these people will have PR and marketing people working for them 24 hours a day and sometimes the only way to get yourself noticed is to behave outrageously or out of character because this is the sort of news that people are interested in – serious public figures acting in fallible or indiscreet ways.

Nothing happens by mistake?

The question is – were these actions planned or not? In most cases I would suggest that nothing happens by mistake and that these mistakes are carefully orchestrated to keep the agenda afloat or at least keep the web talking about it and therefore raising the online profile of the subject matter via YouTube, Twitter or other social media. There can be an associated monetary or political value to this raised profile in obvious ways.

So, how should this apply to you as a company director, academic or even designer? Well, I would suggest that you don’t immediately publish your own agenda, promotional advertising or university paper with a raft of strategically placed foul language, ‘in jokes’ or deliberate mistakes to shock your reader but see these as examples of curious events that lead to wider coverage because of their unconventional nature. That is all. It is all about the wider coverage and [potentially] the way some of these examples may or may not have been carefully orchestrated.

If a blogger wants to get noticed within their subject area then the challenge is to write something about a subject that goes against or intelligently challenges the understood norm. The key here is writing on a very sophisticated or intelligent level and yet presenting an argument clearly and accurately but then bringing the reader round to another agenda or point of view in more subtle ways – which may simply be by allowing user comments to reflect the other part of an arguement. A YouTube video that recently went viral is Mental Designers Graphic Designer Vs Client video that represented comments that every designer had heard from potential clients at some point in their career – this is not so much following the apparent mistake examples already given but is a clever way of shocking people to get the message across – a message that contains many levels of angst and truth.

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Simcoemedia: I love playing with my new giant rotating tag-cloud. I’m happy when its tag-cloudy http://www.design-design.co.uk/the-cloud/

Simcoemedia: The Drawing Research Network is officially live and we need to keep up the momentum on new members http://drawing-research-network.org.uk

Simcoemedia: Here’s a useful piece of free web-based software for creating a wiki – http://www.tiddlywiki.com/

Simcoemedia: It’s been two years since I got this little gem from Havana in Cuba – http://bit.ly/cCmYyf – definitely a favourite.

Simcoemedia: [ThemeForest] Dany’s Blossomsoft WP theme looks great for a wide range of design and corporates. Thanks for letting me know about that one.

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I will be looking at the uses of Twitter for business in the near future so watch this space.

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