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.

Continue Reading

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

This week’s High Five theme is, “Facebook is changing the game.”

#5: Nielsen: Facebook’s Ads Work Pretty Well

According to this Nielsen article, “The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.”  One of the comments regarding this study was “What it doesn’t do is give the cross-media understanding of how does this piece fit into overall marketing plans.”  The irony is that Facebook’s announcements this week provide the backdrop for those plans.

Link: Advertising Age

#4: Microsoft And Facebook Join Forces To Crush Google Docs

There have been hints from pundits and observers for quite some time about Facebook (and Twitter for that matter) challenging Google in the search space.  The announcement that Facebook is going to throw its hat into the document collaboration ring came a little bit out of the blue (at least for me).  Combined with the other announcements this week (see below), there is no doubt that Facebook intends to be the ultimate power in the universe.

Link: Business Insider

#3: How to Delete Facebook Applications (and Why You Should)

As Facebook takes bold, new steps to spread its influence across the web, users need to be aware of the implications new Facebook privacy policies.  One major change is that your Facebook friends can share your information without your knowledge.  Another change, discussed in this article, is a loosening of the restrictions previously placed on applications like Farmville and Photo of the Day.  These applications may now store your personal profile information whereas they previously had to retrieve it from Facebook’s servers every time they wanted it.  This opens up additional security vulnerabilities, which prompted this article that describes some sensible steps to audit your privacy settings.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#2: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet

If it’s possible for an eight hundred pound gorilla to fly under the radar, Facebook is doing it (did I just mix some strange metaphors?).  The announcements made at Facebook’s f8 conference this week could fundamentally change the way we use the Internet.  And that’s not hyperbole.  The social plugins and Open Graph integration have the potential to shift the balance of power from Google’s algorithms to Facebook’s social relationships.  It boils down to this… When you execute a search, what do you value more; the stuff Google thinks is important or the stuff your family, friends and colleagues think is important?

Link: TechCrunch

#1: Facebook’s ambition

If the previous article scares you at least a little bit, then that just means you’re paying attention.  This epic article from Robert Scoble provides a litany of benefits, concerns, dangers, and challenges associated with these developments.  Some people and organizations are jumping into the pool with both feet, while others are pledging never to subjugated.  ”May you live in interesting times.”  Indeed!

Link: Scobleizer

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

Continue Reading

The Guardian posted an article that provides eyetracking results, showing that users are ignoring the much hyped Google “real time” search results.  The article goes on to postulate as to why this is, and in doing so makes some clever references to hidden gorillas and characterizes the problem as one of “presentation.”

I beg to differ and would suggest, instead, that this is a problem of authority.

You Will Respect My Authoritah!

Any quest for answers, especially those involving Internet search, is entirely based on authority; namely, the authority of both the referrer and the source.  We have all grown to lend a certain degree of trust to the search engine of our choice.  That is, after all, why we’re using Google as opposed to Bing, or vice versa.  We understand that their respective algorithms or ranking processes have pre-qualified these results and judged them to be the most relevant to our search.  However, we also understand that the machines are imperfect and so we scan the results and try to judge for ourselves which of the individual sources appears to have high enough authority to warrant our attention.

In the South Park episode “Chickenlovr,” Cartman pulls over a speeding vehicle and discovers that just because he is wearing a uniform, it doesn’t mean that he has authority.

The problem with real time results is that the sources come from social networks that are decidedly outside our circle of trust.  If I see a list of Tweets from people I don’t follow, my gut reaction is to say, “I don’t follow that person, therefore what they have to say is not important to me.”  It’s a defense mechanism as much as anything.  On a certain level, we feel like we need to protect our social network by not admitting that outsiders have anything of superior value.  As Ani DeFranco sang, “God forbid you be an ugly girl, ‘course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”

And so it goes with so-called real time search results.  Since you are not in my circle of trust, you are either too ugly or too pretty – but either way I’m not buyin’ it.

Continue Reading

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

This week’s High Five is about protecting and promoting content.

#5: DMCA Muscle Kills DVD Copying, for Real

I’ve been covering several different lawsuits in which the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is prosecuting a scorched earth assault against its own customers guilty of piracy.  While those arguments are about the punishment fitting the crime, this story is much more disturbing because it deals a serious body blow to the “fair use” aspect of copyright protection.  This is the principal that makes it legal to make a copy of a CD (music, program, or otherwise) for your own personal backup purposes.  However, in this case a judge has ruled that the crime exists in the breaking or bypassing of any encryption.

Link: Wired

#4: Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation

This story is a preview of things to come.  In previous “High Five” posts, I’ve linked to articles about legislation that could threaten net neutrality by compelling Internet Service Providers to police their user base for copyright violations.  If forced to do so, it will lead to several undesirable side effects.  First, and most obvious, it will increase prices as these service providers will have to invest in additional resources to police their own customers (not to mention insurance policies for increased risk).  Second, it will lead to far more restrictive policies as their terms of use will no doubt give them final say in what is or is not acceptable – legal standards will not be applicable because they will be more concerned with avoiding litigation than their own users’ rights.  Finally, this story is obviously an example of an automated software application that is simply looking for digital footprints and stomping them out with extreme prejudice and no room for fair use.

Link: TechDirt

#3: Apple Stacks The Deck Against Amazon’s Kindle App

It’s no great secret that the true source of success for many devices is the “killer app.”  The most famous example is VisiCalc for the Apple II.  The real secret to Apple’s domination of the personal MP3 player market was the iTunes store.  This article discusses the potential impact of the iPad’s e-reader application being directly linked to the iStore, and how a couple of mouse clips could be a serious impediment to Amazon’s Kindle Reader application.

Link: Business Insider

#2: How The Newspaper Business Killed Itself

John Dvorak is no shrinking violet, and has been making bold assertions and predictions for many years.  In this article, he makes the case that the New York Times’ decision to begin charging for online access is another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot.  Like most brash pundits’ predictions, the vast majority of his predictions prove not to be true and I actually disagree with his opinion on this latest move by the times.  So why am I including it?  Because in describing the newspaper business’ past sins, he uses the simplest and single best metaphor I’ve read on the subject.  After describing how publishers reacted to declining revenues as a result of underestimating the effects of online classifieds by laying off beat writers, he concludes that “It was like attempting to fix a flat by letting the air out of the rest of the tires.”  Perfect.

Link: PC Magazine

#1: What The Heck Is Inbound Marketing (and how you can maximize it) With Brian Halligan

“Inbound Marketing” is the single most important concept that will determine the degree to which businesses, associations and individuals will be able to spread their ideas and gain visibility.  In this interview, David Garland speaks with Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan, who literally wrote the book on Inbound Marketing.  If you take the time to watch this video (and I hope you do), I encourage you to think about the concept of inbound marketing for your own personal online identity as well as that of your organization’s.

Link: The Rise to the Top

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

Continue Reading

Clifford Stoll displays the presentation notes scribbled on his hand.

I was watching a TED video of Clifford Stoll last week, during which he was asked to talk about the future.  He confessed that he didn’t think he was the best person to ask, saying “In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, don’t ask a scientist, a technologist, a physicist…  No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher.”  I mention this because earlier that very same day, I was paying attention to my four daughters, all of whom were in the same room and all of whom were consuming one form of content or another in a different medium on a different device.  What was running through my mind was the fact that these kids are not only going to demand content delivered on their terms, they will demand it.

Throughout this post, I am refusing to discuss a certain gadget announced by a certain company named after a certain fruit that will be released amid much fanfare next month.  The first reason for this is that everyone is growing weary of such discussions.  The second is that this first product release is only the beginning and will be opening the door to a new class of products that will heavily influence expectations and demands from upcoming generations.

And So It Begins

I bought my daughter the movie “Sitck It!” on DVD for her eleventh birthday yesterday.  The cover proudly hailed, “DVD + Digital Content,” which I thought was strange because a DVD is digital content, but I was pretty sure a knew what they meant.  And what they meant was that it contained a second disc with a DRM-signed file in iTunes and Windows Media Player format.  My daughter was beside herself that she didn’t have to sit in front of the television to watch it.  Instead, she could load it on her iPod, take it with her, and watch it wherever and whenever she chose.During the time when I was helping her download the movie into iTunes on our family desktop PC, her older sister was on a laptop watching videos posted to Facebook by her friends, her seven year old sister was watching an iCarly television episode on her iPod and her four year old sister was interacting with friends from across town on the Club Penguin web site.  Not a single person sitting in front of the boob tube.  No two people consuming the same content at the same time.

New Rules

Taking Dr. Stoll’s advice, I have combined my own habits and preferences for content consumption with observations of my own household to form these five rules that I think will dictate content consumption patterns five to ten years from now.  Kids growing up in the digital age will expect and demand that content have the following qualities:

1. It must filterable.  They will not tolerate having to spend their time reading through ten articles they don’t care about to find one they do.  This is another way of saying that content distribution is going to flip from a push model to a pull model.  If your content doesn’t have handles, it won’t be going anywhere.
2. It must be asynchronous.  Again, I don’t think people appreciate the parallel universe our kids live in these days with DVRs and iTunes.  We all grew up in a world where our schedules had to wrap around broadcasts (think not just television, but library and store hours, magazine and newspaper deliveries, etc…).  This generation is entering a world where the broadcast schedule wraps around them.  Content is downloaded now and consumed later, at their convenience.
3. It must be portable.  This is a mega trend I see that, despite what many feel is a large amount of hype, is actually being underestimated.  Most people think of portable in terms of taking content on to a plane or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.  I am talking about taking content into the other room or out on the porch – a few feet (meters if you prefer) away.  In a family with four children, I am watching the splintering of content consumption with great interest as, at any given time, you will see four or five family members reading, listening to, and/or watching different content at the same time in the same room.
4. It must be compelling.  Content production used to be expensive and time consuming.  Amateurs can now upload high definition video with integrated graphics and subtitles that exceed the quality of professional versions from just five years ago.  This can be uploaded to YouTube in seconds and viewed by hundreds or even millions in a matter of days.  All this for the cost of a $500 flip camera and an hour of time.  This democratization of content production and distribution means that, to a certain extent, all publishers are in the fashion business now.  It’s not enough to have technically sound content; it must be visually appealing and grab attention.
5. It must be interactive.  As a software developer, I know first hand how expensive a mouse click is.  It’s astonishing how rapidly human tolerances can recalibrate, and a few extra mouse clicks can literally destroy a product.  One inadvertent click might even cost you $150k.  This is all to say that people are having less and less tolerance for hunting for answers and it needs to be embedded, linked, or otherwise a single click away.  An article about cyber security, for example, may reference a particular news story.  Many people will inevitably want to pause reading the article to gain a deeper understanding of the incident by reading the full account of the incident.  Path of least resistance.  Instant gratification.  And so on.

Maybe publishers think I’m being an alarmist.  Somehow, though, I can’t resist a shameful attempt at borrowing from Dirty Harry: “I know what you’re thinking.  Will it take ten years or only five?  Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement I don’t know what to think myself.  But being that this is the Internet, the most powerful change agent in the history of publication since the printing press, and can blow your publication clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?”

Continue Reading