Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

Today I’m commenting on the current plague of companies looking to enslave college students and recent graduates in order to help them establish a presence in social media.

I subscribe to multiple Craigslist RSS feeds and every single day there is at least one advertisement from a company looking to bring in unpaid interns for various jobs.  Many of them are mundane, computer-oriented tasks but many of them look just like this one:

Do you tweet, blog and use social media like Facebook all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the event industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its’ social media campaign.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of social media; Facebook, Twitter, Blogging Platforms. Have exceptional writing skills. Proficient in MAC and Basic HTML. A passion for weddings is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Aside from the spelling errors and poor grammar, what’s so bad about this?

Crime Doesn’t Pay

That’s right, if your internship doesn’t meet six federal legal criteria you are violating federal labor laws.  Many employers mistakenly think that they can hire unpaid interns because they are providing enough value through the experience the interns gain.  However, this is the wrong perspective. They need to consider whether or not the person materially provides value to the company.  If so, they must be paid.  If not, why are you wasting everyone’s time?

Hobbyist Vs. Professional

Let’s try rewriting the advertisement listed above using a different profession and see how it may turn out…

Norm Abram is the seemingly superhuman master craftsman who has hosted the PBS television show, "The New Yankee Workshop" for some 20 years.

Do you caulk, paint and watch television programs like the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House all day, every day? Are you a creative individual who can take things to completion? Does the construction industry interest you? You may be the perfect fit for our next internship!

[company name removed] is looking for a detail oriented, knowledgeable and passionate person to help develop its residential construction business.

The perfect candidate will have experience in all areas of construction; hammers, nails, saws. Have exceptional painting skills. Proficient driving Fords and Chevys. A passion for subdivisions is a plus!

This is an unpaid internship, but has great potential to become a full-time position. Internship credit is available.

Please email resume. No phone calls please.

Sounds absurd, no?  Just because a person knows how to use a hammer or circular saw doesn’t mean they know how to build a load-bearing wall, right?  And watching Norm Abram every weekend for two years doesn’t mean you’ll be able to build a ten foot Clancy sailboat from scratch.  Knowing how to use tools does not mean that a person understands how to design, finance, construct, and sell a home.

Well, just because a student posts pictures of friends’ compromising antics on Facebook and has a few thousand followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they understand how to effectively architect, implement, and measure a social media marketing campaign.  That’s even assuming that the business already understands how the social media marketing strategy will fit into its overall marketing strategy, but they frequently do not.

What’s the Harm?

Here is a short list of some of the missteps that can lead to more harm than good:

• It is possible to attract the wrong audience. The first rule of search optimization is, “do no harm.”
• Blogging carries legal responsibilities including copyright infringement and Federal Trade Commission regulations.
• Facebook’s Terms of Use are complicated and even contradictory. Violating them can get you banned.
• Anything worth doing is worth measuring. Fan and follower counts do not tell the story.
• Creating compelling, engaging content is challenging and dynamic.
• Hope is not a strategy.

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Inbound marketing begins with creating content, optimizing it for search, and promoting it via social media.  Blogging is the Queen Mother of content platforms, but many companies are more intimidated by it than they probably should be.  Frequently, they focus on the task of creating original content. While this is certainly critical, it’s not the only type of content that can be leveraged.  Most organizations generate lots of other content that can be re-purposed.

That’s where the concept of a “content conveyor belt” can help.  This presentation introduces the idea and explains its advantages and how to set one up.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Amazingly, this week’s High Five largely ignores the iPad announcement.  This is a reflection of how important I believe it to be, since I’ll be blogging about that in the upcoming week.  Instead, this week’s links are focused on digital rights and net neutrality.

#5: Settlement Rejected in ‘Shocking’ RIAA File Sharing Verdict

I’ve been following this case for quite some time, and the defense team seems to feel like they have the courts on their side.  Having the judgement reduced from $1.92 million to $54,000 is still not enough for them, as evidenced by their decision to reject a settlement offer of $25,000 from the RIAA.  That the settlement was even offered seems to indicate that the RIAA is also concerned that the courts are on the side of the defendant.

Link: Wired

#4: iPad is iBad for freedom

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has organized an online petition named “Defective by Design,” asserting that Apple’s implementation of Digital Restriction Management (DRM) goes too far and will restrict the distribution of free software by disallowing applications to run on the iPad unless they are downloaded from the Application Store.

Link: Free Software Foundation

#3: Mozilla leader worries about Internet limits

Mitchell Baker, leader of the Mozilla Project, expressed concern over “the increase in laws that make it difficult to run an open network,” and especially over rules concerned with policing content.  She spoke at the opening of athree-day conference on digital innovation and creative ideas in Munich, Germany.

Link: Yahoo! Finance

#2: Netflix to FCC: scary loophole in net neutrality rules

While they generally support the proposed nondiscriminatory rules put forth by the FCC, Netflix‘s general counsel is expressing concern over a potential loophole. “In short, if left unchecked, the ‘managed services’ category could engulf the Commission’s open Internet policies altogether” and let ISPs end run any regulations.  This is no small matter given blurring between content providers and Internet service providers as exemplified with the sale of NBC Universal to Comcast.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Australia bans graphic games … sort of

The final story in this theme is a cautionary tale of unintended consequences.  Australia has passed a series of laws attempting to restrict adult content from children.  This story shows that the laws have, in fact, increased the amount of adult content reaching children age 15 and under in games like Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare.

Link: Global Post

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Alec Baldwin's character colorfully presents his selling philosophy, "ABC: Always Be Closing."

Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many.  It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech.  Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.

“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates.  This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure.  I’ve included 4 tips to help you get going.

#1 Intelligence

I am not referring to the ability to comprehend, but rather the collecting of information.  For me, intelligence is the oxygen that fuels my content generation.  These are my intelligence gathering tools:

• Barnes & Noble: I read, read, read, read…
• Google Reader: I subscribe to 210 RSS feeds and have read over 11,000 articles in the last 30 days.  However, keep in mind that “read” is probably an overstatement and it’s more accurate to say that I “scanned” those articles, looking for interesting content and then reading, bookmarking, and sharing as appropriate.
• Twitter: More and more, people are using Twitter as a source of “pre-qualified” information.  Because you are presumably following people you trust and/or in which you’re interested, then it stands to reason that links they share will be of interest to you also.  It’s becoming a real time news echo chamber that helps me stay on top of the latest tech developments and trends.

This is a shot of a hotel room I stayed in for two weeks that is still in the "hopper" waiting for a hotel room rant post that is coming.

#2 Raw Materials

Words are the foundation of all online content, but pictures and video constitute the paint, carpeting, furniture, etc…  Throughout the course of the day, I am mindful to be collecting pictures, screenshots, and video that may eventually be used in a post somewhere.

My BlackBerry Bold smartphone is absolutely indispensable as a raw material collection tool, as it is something I always carry and can take pictures and videos that are of perfectly acceptable quality for online use.

I use TechSmith’s SnagIt as a screen capture tool for grabbing screen shots of programs and web pages that may come in handy later on.  I also use Camtasia Studio for authoring and editing screen casts.

#3 Total Consciousness

Content collection needs to become a habit, which requires you perform the action at least 21 times.  Here are some tips to help ensure you remember:

• Write down the habit you’re trying to establish and post it in as many places as possible.
• Schedule your content collection ahead of time.  Obviously, you can’t really schedule something like this, but if you can put calendar appointments on your phone, then at least you are getting regular reminders that will help keep you in that frame of mind.
• Reward yourself every time you come up with a new blog idea.
• Concentrate on consistency rather than results.  In other words, don’t worry if the content you’re collecting is not of the quality level you’d like it to be.  The most important thing is to keep developing the habit and mindset, which will eventually become a habit that will result in more “aha” moments and better quality stuff.

My blogging tools of the trade

#4 Be Prepared

Assuming you fuel the content machine, collect the raw materials, and develop the proper habits, the last piece of the puzzle is being prepared to trap and keep that content.  I’ve settled on a system that relies on two tools; the voice recorder feature of my phone and a Moleskine notebook.

If you’re as scatter-brained as I am (and even if you’re not), then a voice recorder is a non-negotiable, must have tool.  I finally grew tired of ideas zipping in and out of my head as often as Tiger Woods… well, you get the idea.  I’d been telling myself for quite some time that I need to pick up one of those small voice recorder devices when it occurred to me that my BlackBerry had one built into it.  Now, I’m in the habit of carrying my phone everywhere, including some places that may be construed as a “too much information” moment, because you never can tell when your next blog idea will strike.  I had three in row occur to me when I was shaving the other day, and quickly dictated them to the phone’s voice recorder.

Eventually, the random thoughts and musings get transcribed off of the phone and into my blog notebook.  This notebook contains a diary of ideas for articles that is actually starting to grow quite fat.  I am gradually picking up the pace of my posts as a result of growing confidence that I’m not going to run out of content any time soon.  They key is to build up a healthy backlog of articles that can smooth the peaks and fill in the valleys.

These are just my ideas – let’s hear about your tips and tricks.  I’m not sure I’d recommend Dogbert’s approach:

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