Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Social media: Isn’t there just some #%@& button I can push?

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This morning, robocommunicator Neville Hobson, who keeps everyone awake by tweeting in his sleep, shared the headline, "Sky News Closes Second Life newsroom," and remarked wistfully, "The end of an era."

Doncha hate it when an era ends before you knew the dadgum thing'd begun?

Well, I figgered this was as good a time as any to blurt out a hillbilly question that has nevertheless been nagging at me for some time:

When is somebody going to organize social media?

Why I Ask: Every time I write something that I think is cool or do something on behalf of a client that I want to draw attention to, I spend several manic hours dashing around Internet 2.0 like a stoner in a Mexican grocery store.

I'm posting the thing on my blog, on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups, on Facebook. If there’s a video, I gotta do YouTube, if I’ve got some pictures, I’ve got to FlickR, and if I’ve gotta pitch bloggers, I’ve got to dicker. And we're not even talking about social media press kits about which Shel Holtz has had roaring debates for years, but which I still have never received, let alone sent.

No doubt, I should be more organized. I should have all these potential promotional possibilities in a spreadsheet somewhere. Or just a checklist, scrawled on a piece of paper and taped to my typewriter. But who has time to get organized between these desperate and increasingly regular attempts to achieve critical mass in hopes of going viral?

Every time, it’s a wild morning spent pitching all these knuckleballs and then a wild afternoon spent catching them—and meanwhile remembering all the networks I should have sent it to. How could I have forgotten Communitelligence.com? And knowing in the darkest chamber of my heart that I failed to do some crucial search-engine optomization bullshit.

Why doesn’t someone take pity on people like me—no, take advantage of people like me—and invent a single site that walks you through all the social media possibilities in a systematic way, the way a travel website helps you book your travel—flights, rental car, hotel, etc.—and actually lets you do the whole shitterroo from there?

Not that this electronic worksheet wouldn’t be cumbersome and tiresome. There’s no getting around the fact that there's a lot of different stuff to say to these different groups and on these different forums, and you have to say it differently to each. And of course no automated site could tell you which niche audiences to pitch. (Or could it actually remember your preferences and prompt you not to forget Communitelligence.com? Oooh, who's the robocommunicator now, Hobson?)

What we need is something to walk us through the social-media self-promotion process, so that the whole thing is just a little more organized, a little less frantic.

The job of launching an idea or a product would probably still take all morning, and the resulting dialogue would probably still take all afternoon. But at least with a system, a social media launch would have a beginning, a middle and at least a simpering excuse for an end.

I’d pay five dollars per promo for that modicum of peace of mind.

More likely: I will buy Shel Holtz or Neville Hobson dinner next time they're in town if they'll only come here and point all of us straight to the site that does exactly what I'm talking about.

Or that did for the last five years, before it recently closed down because it ran out of customers still as stupid as me.

Couldn’t you just thank God for leadership like this?

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After behaving like an an arrogant, vulgar asshole from the first day he purchased the Chicago Tribune in 2007, CEO Sam Zell admitted today that he made a mistake. 

Well, you paid a grillion dollars for the company two years ago, and now it's bankrupt. Big man!

Then, asked whether there might be a buyer for the company, Zell said:

"That's like asking someone in another business if they want to get
vaccinated with a live virus. There's not a long list of
people who want to buy newspaper companies today, and for sure it's not
likely to be the case until we reach some kind of a new bottom as to
what the newspaper's role is going to be in our society going forward."

Now, here was Zell a year or so ago at an employee town hall meeting at the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel.

Hey Sam: Fuck you back.

Why employee communication is as important to American democracy as public education

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Books Employee communicators who have questioned the importance of their own work or suffered the slings and arrows of others who do—which is to say all of us—should have the following laminated for our cubicle walls.
        These excerpts come from the third chapter of Sharing Information with Employees, the first book ever written on employee communication. Written in answer to author Alexander Heron's plaintive question, "Why not tell them?" these words amount to an employee communication manifesto whose truth I've long understood but never seen put this strongly.
        In the next chapter in our series, we'll get into what good employee communication looks like according to Heron, and I'll take an increasing role in the conversation. But I'd like you to read and react to this section without any more intrusion from me. If we can get agreement on this, we're working from a strong intellectual foundation.
        Heron begins by acknowledging that there are "honest objections to sharing information with employees." The first is that "in spite of the fact that most executives in American enterprises have risen from the ranks, many of them secretly believe that there is a difference between their own mentalities and those of the men today who are in the ranks. They feel vaguely, and sometimes say definitely, that the rank and file cannot understand the information which management can give them."
        Heron, from here on:

This belief can neither be ignored nor denied. It may be sound as to a great portion of the men and women who work for wages. But most of the executives with the superior minds will not argue that things should be so. They will not assert that this general inability to understand is a good foundation for the structure of our democracy or a healthy condition among people who are trying to govern themselves. They will say it is too bad, but it just happens to be true; that we may not like it but cannot alter it; that some people are just born that way. …

Are some people just born without the ability to understand? Some people? All of us were born that way. We were also born without the ability to walk; but we learned by trying. We were born without the ability to talk, or read, or write; but we learned, by trying as we were given the chance. So did the employees who now work for us. Incidentally, they were born without the ability to do the work for which we now hire them; but they learned that as they were given the opportunity. …

… in addition to those who believe it true but regrettable that employees cannot understand such information as we are discussing, there are others who believe it true but not regrettable. They say that some people are just born that way, and they will go on to imply that this is in accordance with some divine plan. It seems to them inevitable that human society be classified and stratified, in the same manner as a hive of bees: If all bees were workers, there would be no organization under qualified leadership. If all were queens, there would be no honey. If all human beings were endowed  by nature with keen, alert, understanding minds, none of us would be satisfied to work for wages or at manual tasks; we would all want to be bosses.

This attitude has a lot of history behind it. It is the idea of both ancient and modern tyrannies under which conquered enemies became the slaves of the conquerors. It is the idea of the medieval aristocracies with their ruling classes ….

Every social order in history which has been built on the foundation of such an idea has collapsed because its foundation refused to remain stable very long. The supposedly predestined working class has successively won the right to bear arms, to own land, and, finally, to rule its nation by votes. We have long since learned that the proper exercise of the right to rule by vote involves abundant opportunity to know the facts and conditions with which the ruling and the votes must deal. The deliberate effort to share business information with the great majority who work for wages corresponds closely to the deliberate plan to make education, basic and continued education, freely available to the people.

… we have all of us, every adult citizen, been jointly and equally entrusted with the government of our nation, state, and city. That government is increasingly engaged in the protection and regulation of the economic interests of all of us. It is inconceivable that the forty millions of us who work for wages can do a good job, or even a safe job, of governing by votes, without knowing more and more about our economic interests.

The American idea has no place for a class predestined to be wage earners incapable of understanding a world beyond the workbench, no place for a class which is denied the opportunity to reason its conclusions on facts which it helps to create, no place for a class which is happier because ignorant of anything beyond the daily task. And those whose sense of superiority leads them to believe in either the necessity or the desirability of such classes are themselves enemies of the American idea or ignorant of its genius.