Social Media Top Five: Monty Python, Personal Branding, Ghost-Blogging…

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em – and make ’em laugh until they buy your stuff. More entertainment companies should follow this “treat your customers with respect and trust your product” direction. The Monty Python Troupe have put a number of popular television and movie clips up on YouTube and winkingly acknowledged the “Theft” represented by unauthorized uploads. Of course you would expect these gentlemen to have a sense of humor (sorry, humour), but it’s still a lesson in “free.”

I’ll be a full-time believer in this endeavor when they add “Scott of the Antarctic.” giant penguins with tentacles!

(Perhaps this video will get pulled in favor of a high-quality “official” one- please?)

TypePad’s “Journalist Bailout Program” – A hat-tip to Chip Griffin of Media Bullseye for this one. TypePad is offering laid-off journalists (and working ones fearful of a “re-organization”) free “pro” accounts, along with enrollment in their advertising program and blog promotion. Is this a crass exploitation of an industry of workers feeling a lot of pain right now? You bet! In fact, there is some reported skepticism about the offer. But they are offering a service, keeping writers’ work in the public eye. It can’t hurt, and it’s a nice gesture.

Hiring in a 2.0 World – I think – I hope – we’ll be hearing more stories like David Murray’s (as related by David Meerman Scott). He needed a job, and found one by using Twitter to search for relevant messages and people. In the meatspace world, we call that “networking.” Well done! Of course, “Hiring in a 2.0 World” is nothing new, as Aaron Strout will tell you. Oh- and I should mention that part of the process by which I found my current job at SHIFT Communications was Twitter. Like I said- networking.

On that note, people have been kicking up dust about “personal brand” lately (see Steve Woodruff at MarketingProfs and Geoff Livingston for two of the better examples). Geoff’s posts in particular seem to take aim at people who use their personal brand for business. Personal brands may or may not help companies close business, but I would point out that it often opens doors. I’m less interested in personal brands that are the faces of business- that’s is a cultivation that must be deliberate and careful. I am interested in personal brand as just that– personal. It helps us get jobs, our employers can latch their reputations onto ours- and therein lies great responsibility to behave ourselves- but it belongs to us. Like with any social media project, define what brand will do for you, and lay out your content in pursuit of those goals.

Ghost-Blogging- didn’t we settle that issue? Simon Wakeman brings up the issue thoughtfully on his blog, raising the *gasp!* possibility that ghost-writing is going to happen, and perhaps, if done right, it’s not so irredeemably evil. That, of course, is a big “if,” but my observation: the arguments against ghost-blogging tend to focus on ghost-blogging itself as the sin, but it’s not. The lack of transparency is. If you can have people ghost-blog and somehow pull it off, I’d like to see it; perhaps admit it’s ghost-written, dare people to care, provide good content and engage openly in conversations. Just a thought.

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