Social Networking, Personal Branding, MC Bias

(I had a typo doing a search for the explosion in this creation to your right, and typed out “oxplosion”. I’ll let you decide what one of those might be.)

I know some of the more vocal of you hate all the Twitter/social networking stuff when I bring it up, but I firmly believe it’s an essential representation of the next phase of the net, and the net as a whole is too large a part of how the world functions and communicates to just blow off as stuff for nerds.

Being the proponent of it that I am, old sports blog friend MC Bias wanted to take issue with me about the whole thing, since he feels it’s some kind of trendy fad for Generation Y on down.

He posted Part 1 of our IM chat yesterday. Today he’s posted Part 2, in which I lay out a very plausible scenario for what might be called Private Cleveland-Tokyo Party 2020.

If you’re at all interested in this stuff and where I think it’s headed, I recommend going over to look at it. (You may remember that I called “online video” a year before YouTube existed.)

Wow, today is so serious on the Fake Action Dot Com Website, isn’t it? That’s okay, because I’m building up to my full summary of Saved By the Bell Begins, which is the greatest movie not yet made, after Brad Radby’s The Exploders.

What are your thoughts on my thoughts? Would you like to attend something like the Private Cleveland-Tokyo Party 2020?

(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here – it’s available in paperback, or iPhone/Kindle for only 1.99.)

Go put this in like other places:

Boney

Whenever I see that picture of McBias I always think "BOOM! goes the dynamite"
tootallbetty

:/
Brian

:@
mcbias

Question no one has ever asked--who is that man to the right of me in that photo? And why have he and Mamba never been photographed together?
Boney

wtf
Brian

brb
TVBrain

BOOM!

(Just thought the place needed an explosion.)
Kingsley Le Corbusier

Damnit, I did read that confusing chat, and have a response to this:

Joe writes a book with a very narrow target audience. Let's say only 10,000 people on earth would like Joe's book. Joe now has the capability to go find those 10,000 people, connect with them on a real level, and eventually they may read his book.

You're making a huge assumption that I don't think we're anywhere near ready to operate under at this point. Meaning, of those 10K people, most are not likely to be on Twitter.
Brian

Of course not, but I think looking ahead 1, 2, or 5 years in terms of what this all could mean is warranted.

I'd stress that the focus needs to be on the theories of connecting in this widespread manner as opposed to the individual tool. "I don't like Twitter" doesn't fit into the point I'm trying to make.

Twitter may not exist 3 years from now, but the platform of communication online as a natural extension/version of communication offline is key, and the idea that you're not limited by anything in terms of who and where you can connect.

TODAY Joe maybe can't find those 10,000 people, but I'd venture that within five years, he'll be able to.
Kingsley Le Corbusier

And I get that...my general complaint with the hand-wringing people at companies seem to be doing is that they're not considering ways in which they could be doing it themselves, without a third party. Why not just overhaul the way marketing is done in general, you know? Take The Most Interesting Man in World, for example. It's ingenious, truly an amazing campaign that feeds into the potential markets intelligence and sensibility perfectly. And you know what, it works. I now get Dos Equis over just about every other beer in that price range.

I was at a baseball game last week and Edi Falco threw out the first pitch to promote Nurses. Really? A major league baseball game on a Tuesday night is where you want to promote that? Just think things through and do something smart instead of doing the old way over and over again. Publishing is certainly guilty of it, and so is most of Hollywood and the music business.

Then again, that old way (at least in terms of spreading word of mouth and generating other publicity) is important, and always will be. I don't think jumping ship for online outreach via communities is very smart either.
Brian

I'm not saying there are concrete answers by any means - there aren't, and probably won't be for some time. That's why it's a shift - my difference with MC is that social networking is some kind of fad.

The truth is, it's just regular networking via new tools.
Kingsley Le Corbusier

I'll concede that, yes. He's wrong on the fad front. It may morph, but it's not going away.
nrojb

how does one promote "nurses"? have nurses not been getting their props?
orange5o

what if Joe wrote a book about how awful social networking sites are?
Kingsley Le Corbusier

Well, there you go. Limited scope books, sure. Brilliant novels about hardscrabble life in the New Mexico border towns? Probably not the twittering fanbase.
Kingsley Le Corbusier

I'm going to ignore your thoughts on the net.

Instead I want thoughts on a couple commercials I see over and over. 1) The hamsters driving that little car, whatever it's called. How cool are they? I'd hang out with them. 2) The new Lexus convertible commercials: "Live a little...a lot." The girls chasing each other. What exactly is going on? Why is one chasing the other? I'm so confused.

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