Your Message is Your Message in the Medium

Laura Fisher posted this on Jing today.

This is a great example of how to utterly destroy yourself with social media. 

What we see here is a guy who, apparently, wants to be your (the plural your) personal brand strategist.  Insodoing, he has spammed everyone he knows at Twitter, not realizing that everyone who follows him sees his spam fly by in real-time.

The delivery of your message is key.  In this case, Hajj Flemings' message was that he was there to help people with branding strategy.

The medium he chose (Twitter) was apparently one he didn't know well.  Twitter, being a broadcast medium, broadcast a series of identical messages everyone subscribed to Hajj's feed.

While the specifics of this are interesting - more important here is the understanding that the Medium may not be the message, but it sure influences they formulation of the message.

When any business steps foot into the social media sphere, they need to understand the mechanisms being used and the structure of the community behind them.  I'm sure more than one person stopped reading Hajj's post after his spamfest today.

Technorati Tags: twitter,social media,laura fisher,mitten,focused social media

Comments

[Jay Fienberg]

Gosh, that's a great example of awfulness.

Personally, I am turning into a bit of a twitter purist, and am feeling that there are two somewhat common uses of Twitter that are, in fact, serious abuses of the medium. These are:

1) multiple twitters on the same day / in a row to convey developments of the same idea. In other words, they are blog posts from someone too lazy to post to their blog, and instead they are slapped up as 5+ twitters more or less in a row. Included in this: live blogging conferences on Twitter. Exception would be someone with a really unique view doing really unique things, e.g., the Mars Rover.

2) automated services that update twitter with people's locations, recent blog entries, etc. Included in this: BrightKite. Excluded would be a service that provides some kind of roll-up of what otherwise tends to be dozens of messages.

Basically, the Postel's law in this is that, on Twitter, people are choosing to receive complete, unfiltered, streams from others. And, for those of us who Twitter, we need to be more careful about what we're broadcasting.

That's all IMHO!

[Hajj E. Flemings]

I received a Google alert and thought it would be great to comment on your blog. Randomly, I say good morning to various people, no sales pitch, I don't add them on as followers or send them additional message unless they contact me.

I received the idea when someone randomly said, 'Hi' to me and I thought it was a great idea and I actually appreciated.

Everybody has an opinion and are entitled to express them. I will actually tweet about this post and see what kind of response I get. I appreciate the buzz.

Actually my followers have increased since I have started saying good morning. Feel free to post future blog post on what I am doing.

Hajj E. Flemings
Personal Brand Strategist

[Tracy]

That's hilarious! It kind of reminds me of when my mom first starting using IM. Every IM she wrote was a full paragraph long and signed "Mom," as if each IM message was a mini email.

She learned fast, though.

[joe gelb]

would it be ok to twitter every hour a different message to a different post because it looks like our friend did the same message is that the problem? what is the line between twitter spam and good marketing?

[Edward Vielmetti]

twitter zero, baby, twitter zero.

[Ben Tremblay]

Just for fun I'll seque from our Twitter DMs.

_Your_ message ... for 3 decades I've tried to loft subjective narrative by de-coupling it from rhetoric and sophistry. (A student of Habermas might from that know I'm headed for "discourse ethics".) Anecdotally, back then (workshops on GATT, "globalization" before Bretton Woods) I saw that even the most well intentioned expert panel had the effect of quenching discourse. No imputation of malice here; we're all of us ego-driven individuals. (Zen 101 ain't fanciful fluff!) So, being a technical communicator by inclination, and terribly driven to "fulfill the emancipation project" (I was back stage when we toppled Allende's democratically elected governments. "Karma" took on a special meaning.) I kicked the tires and slammed the door of every technique and methodology I came across. FWIW http://gnodal.livejournal.com for some time served as a working journal.

What I derived from all that, combined with such as Jurgen Habermas (see above) and John Willinksy (on OpenAccess to the product publically funded research), was ... well, does Hesse's "Glass Bead Master" ring bells? Glassperlenspiel ... a system whereby the production of truth is catalyzed by the subjective narrative. (http://groundplane.wordpress.com is where I sketched that out.)

But over the years I've found that, while mundane interests are usually enough to fuel conversation, when it comes to heh talking about talking ... folks' eyes glaze over pretty quickly.

K ... this after #debate08, so there might be more heat than light in this.

my best to those assembled here
and thanks
--bentrem