June, 2009

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Jun 09

Spymaster makes fun of Twitter

Spymastert Spymaster makes fun of Twitter, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.

“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.

Did we really get so attached to this service in our day to day lives?

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1
Jun 09

The age of social media is almost at an end

I’m sick of people asking me to make things go viral. Here’s what’s next, friends and critics: a return to the desk. That’s right. A real job. Social media as a tool and not as a fancy shiny object.204871808 1bdf97579b m The age of social media is almost at an end

What are people doing taking titles like “Social Media Manager?” To me, this is a scary thing. Why? Because it’s like being the fax manager or the email manager. You’re naming yourself after a tool.

The jobs where you might use social media tools exist in the marketing department, in the PR department, in customer service, and in several other parts of the company. Maybe this sounds wired. Maybe it is. I guess my big point is that we’ve got to shift this from “gee whiz” to “this is what we do to build business relationships.”

Push away from meaningless metrics and point your efforts towards moving the bottom line. It’s absolutely imperative that this become a “real” job instead of something cool.