Social Media Top 5: April Fools Party Pooper

April Fools? Bah, Humbug!
for some reason I got all kinds of grumpy this year during April Fool’s day. Traditionally, companies and publications put out all kind of fake announcements. Some of them are hilarious, such as Allen Stern of Center Networks’ rip on the TechCrunch 50 by announcing the “CN51,” and Awareness Network’s hyper-micro-blogging service “Grugging.” But a couple of things bugged. One I didn’t realize was a joke at first, I can be that oblivious; Slideshare.net sent me and many others an email saying,”

Hi ___,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team

When you went to the site, you were shown that some of your stored presentations all of a sudden had hundreds of thousands of views. I’m so thick I had no idea how many views my two-year-old presentation from PodCamp Boston should have, so I passed on Tweeting the results. Others did Tweet it, and were very angry to have been manipulated. After being hipped to the joke, I got as miffed as the people who really fell for it. Interesting though, that SlideShare’s Daniel Lu spent much of the next day apologizing to folks on Twitter, and basically taking his medicine. Good for him.

The other thing? I just wondered:

“As the online April fool’s day jokes proliferate, one thought: These things live on in google- will ppl know yours is a joke come August?”

Something to think about.

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Tweet
One of my favorite marketing bloggers, B.L. Ochman, finally followed up her “10 Reasons Your Company Should Not Blog” posts with a similar one about Twitter. It’s not anti-Twitter, as some Haters might like to think, but it is designed to make sure companies are on Twitter for sensible reasons. The list is a lot of comon sense, though not really black and white in some cases (ask Dell Outlet about treating Twitter as a giant RSS feed), but then again I’m lucky enough to hang around with the Queen of Twitter, Laura “Pistachio” Fitton. Here are the ten- you have to read the post to get B.L.’s full commentary though:

1. every Tweet has to be approved by legal
2. you plan to use Twitter like a giant RSS feed, broadcasting nothing but headlines, deals
3. you think using Twitter is a social media strategy
4. you think it’s a good idea to have someone tweet as if they are the president of the company
5. you are not going to respond when people direct tweets at you
6. you think paying for followers might be a good idea
7. you think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you
8. you want to protect your updates
9. you plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics
10. You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship

A Master’s Degree in Social Networking

?

!

I love social media, but that just sounds weird. I’ll shoot for an honorary doctorate (or I could be a social media nurse, but that also sounds weird).

Does This Mean the NBA “Gets” Twitter?
Dallas Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban complains about the officials live on Twitter during a game, and gets fined. Priceless. And true to Mark Cuban’s m.o.

Why the “Social Graph” is like “RSS:”

Because most people you want to explain either term to don’t understand what it means. Not because people are stupid, but rather the terms are meaningless without a simple explanation. “RSS” is too obscure: better to just let it be and explain content feeds in terms of how one is getting them. “Social Graph?” It’s almost too broad a term. The graphic Ed Lee borrows from Dion Hinchcliffe for his post does a good job of describing the concept, though.