Social Media Top 5: Colonizing Austin and PRWeek’s Beauty Contest

It must be summer– I have been delinquent for two weeks in getting out a Social Media Top 5, putting me at risk of becoming a snark-fader. But there is quite a bit to talk about in the social media world, isn’t there?

1. Bryan Person moves from Boston to Austin. Well, there must be five reasons why one of Boston’s most likable social media evangelists is leaving our fair city for Austin, the West Berlin of Texas (think a cultural and political equivalent of the Berlin Airlift and you get the idea).

   Boston is colonizing Austin. First Kyle Flaherty, then John Johansen, now Bryper (yes, I still use his abandoned handle. I’m sentimental that way). Slowly, the good city of Austin will bend to our will. We’ll start with the Red Sox (what, you have Rangers Fans there maybe? I highly doubt that), and pretty soon you’ll all be dropping your “R’s.” Yes, it’s a conspiracy.

   Ok, I could only think of one. Safe travels Bryan, and we shall see each other again before long right?
   So what else has been going on?

2. What’s the deal with this Cuil search engine? They got a ton of hype (nice PR), but the search engine itself was terrible. I suppose they could recover as their service gets better, but for now they are covered with builen (plural of buil, Dutch for “bruise” – don’t you love it when someone makes a joke they have to explain?)
3. Well, Hasbro/Mattel finally killed Scrabulous and put up their own weak version of Facebook Scrabble– which, of course, they should have thought of in the first place, one of several ways they could have avoided this mess. I think I’ll sit on my ideas for Bogulous , Battleshipulous and Riskulous until this all calms down.
4. Tech bloggers hate PR. Actually, that’s horseshit; that’s not really what the “>bloggers were saying (for the most part), though it seems some PR people hate PR. Here’s an idea; be good at what you do and people will respond. I know, I already blogged about this but it belongs in the social media top 5.
5. Speaking of PR, PRWeek has initiated a PR blogger popularity contest. I don’t understand this at all, beyond the fact that beauty/popularity contests can be fun– for the contestants. How about a contest about the best content– the best blog posts of the year, something that would actually give me some content to consider, rather than wondering if the Edelman-associated blogs can be pounded into dust due to some contrarian backlash (which seems to be the case the one time I checked)? Feh.

   *I should give a hat-tip to Peter Kim; it was in conversation with him that the “content as a better contest” idea sparked.

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