Random Thoughts of Justin Lowery

Stop Using Social Media as a Sales Floor - A Commentary on Social Media Marketing Methods.

2009-11-03T15:08:00.001-08:00

If you listen to the hype on the web these days, you’d think that everyone and their mother lived on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. Marketers everywhere are pimping their latest eBooks and blog articles with titles like, “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Company Needs Twitter,” or “5 Ways to Utilize Facebook in Your Next Marketing Campaign.” The real question is, who is really seeing all this marketing, these cheap sales pitches? You would also be quite justified in asking, “Is this marketing actually effective?”

I don’t think so.

Marketers are a penny a dozen on Twitter. It is becoming quite ridiculous. Chances are, if you have 100 followers on Twitter, 15-20 of them are spammers, another 20 or so are marketers, and the remaining 60 or so are your real friends. Recently, I was looking for some people to follow on Twitter who were from my local area, so I used a Twitter search to find people who were listed as being from any of the towns in my area. Guess what? As I read through the bios, I quickly noticed an emerging trend. “Joe Social, internet marketer, social media consultant,” one would read. “Sally Tweeter, helping you make money from social media,” another would read. Still another would say, “Jim Marketer, helping companies reach utilize social media to increase profits.” Now, I could understand seeing 2 or 3 of these, but 9 out of 10 of the people on Twitter in my local area were social media marketers. I’m guessing they all thought they were marketing to everyday people, who were just jumping up and down waiting to buy whatever the marketers were selling.

How the Average Joe Perceives You

Now, I read Twitter all the time. I’m a geek — as in I’m not in the average 99% of people. I use Twitter all the time. This is no representation of the average. For a look at the average, let’s look at the average human being. My Mom has probably never heard of Twitter, barring overhearing the buzzword mentioned in a conversation between myself and someone else. My Dad is a successful contractor who has been in business producing high-quality craftsmanship for over 30 years. Now here’s where it gets interesting. He is tech savvy. He has a regularly updated blog, which he uses to promote his business. He actually has a Twitter account. However, he never uses it for anything. When he does, it’s only to tweet. He rarely reads other people’s tweets, and when he does read Tweets, it’s only those from people he already knows in real life. My sisters are also very tech savvy, for the average person. They send literally thousands of text messages every month. They literally text until the keys fall off of their phones, at which they grab a new phone from eBay, drop in their SIM card, and repeat the process. Two of them use Twitter, and rarely at that. Once again, they use it only to communicate with their real-world friends. In other words, they never read Tweets from people they don’t know, and if they did, it’d be those from a celebrity or someone similar. It would not, I assure you, be those from any internet marketer.

How the Tech Savvy Crowd Perceives You

Back to the subject of Geeks. Jeff Croft wrote an excellent article entitled, “Don’t tell me about your product.” His point is simple, and the article is well worth a read. He essentially says what the average person is thinking when they are contacted by an internet marketer. “Don’t tell me about your product!” Jeff is a techie. He makes websites, and does consultation work. Even he hates it when some marketer uses a friendly, social medium to try to sell him a product. When people are on Twitter or FaceBook, they are relaxed. They want to chill out, chat with their friends, and have fun. They want the communication to be real, down to earth, and friendly. Marketers try to capitalize on this environment, thinking they will ‘catch people off guard’ and get them to buy some crap that they are selling. It won’t work, and it’s annoying. In my mind, marketers who use Twitter are akin to overzealous college guys crashing some family reunion to hook up with girls. If that’s to weird for you, think of an insurance salesman walking into your wedding, pen and business cards in hand, to ‘get some killer leads.’ Social media is a medium with which people build relationships with their close friends, share their thoughts, and communicate openly. In this relaxed, open medium, people do not want to be sold to. They don’t want to hear your pitch, and they absolutely have no interest in giving you any of their money. Social media is not a sales floor. Stop hijacking it and using it as one.

Counter Points

Now that I’ve probably ticked off half the people reading this by simply admitting reality, allow me to make some counterpoints. There is a place for companies in social media. Companies who are savvy and know all of what I’ve just explained use Twitter every day, and get results. They don’t use it to pitch, and they aren’t trying to sell. Fathom this. They use social media to build relationships. Instead of selling to clients, they use their Twitter and FaceBook accounts to answer their customers questions, respond to their concerns, and engage them in everyday conversation. This brings me back to Aaron Newman’s point, which I mentioned in a previous article, where he said,“"At the end of the day, I don't really want to engage with a corporate brand. I want to engage with people."

Exhibit “A”

Southwest Airlines uses an approach that realizes this. They have an employee who operates their twitter account. People know they are talking to an employee, and the company is transparent about that. The employee answers people’s questions, jokes around with them, and gives tips about travel. People actually have reason to follow Southwest on Twitter. They’ll get some laughs, have some fun, and learn a thing or two about travel. When they have questions, they know they will be answered. It works. They now have the best reputation of any company in their industry.

Exhibit “B”

For another example, lets look at Vendr.TV, a food podcast that travels the country showing you the greatest mobile restaurants in America. They did something incredibly simple. They gave away stickers. To get one of these cool looking stickers, you needed to follow them on Twitter, and send an @ reply to them asking about the stickers. Within minutes of getting your tweet, the actual show host would follow you back and ask for your address to send you the stickers. They weren’t building a mailing list, and they never send any junk mail or spam. Their followers would willingly promote the podcast for them. How did they do this? People communicated directly with the show host. The show host never talked about the show, he just talked to them, and sent them some free stuff. As a result, the show has a great reputation, and people willingly talk about the podcast to their friends. So, if you can’t hire a full time social media person, who cares? People want to talk to you, not some corporate face.

In Summary

So, I’ve told you what doesn’t work. I’ve told you what people hate, and what they love. Now, get out there and change your ways. Improve your reputation, relax, communicate, and build relationships. Success will follow. You don’t even have to buy some 59 dollar program. You couldn’t if you wanted to. I don’t have one, because it really is that simple. Just keep it real, don’t pitch your stuff to people online, and keep building those relationships.

Question? Comment? Drop me an @reply on Twitter @justinlowery, or email me at mail [at] justinlowery [dot] com.

Posted via email from ∞ Infinite Loop

A Million Dollar Idea, or How the Music Industry Could Innovate and Save Their Reputation in the Process

2009-10-31T15:38:00.003-07:00

There has been no shortage of news stories of late regarding the music industry and it's ever less-creative ways. They've been suing 12 year olds and single mothers, shutting down websites, and swooning legislators into writing absurd laws in their favor. They have truly forgotten who they are.

They've forgotten their purpose.

At it's core, the music industry has a single purpose — to provide the people with music in exchange for money. In any industry, times change. Times change. People change. In any other industry (except maybe the newspaper industry, but that's another story), as times change, smart companies innovate. The tech industry tends to get this better than anyone. The music industry does not. The ironic part of the whole thing is that the music industry could be considered a branch of the tech industry. They could do what successful companies do, and innovate to keep up with the market, but no, they resort to truly barbaric tactics and attempt to force people into giving them their money. It's as if they have this attitude that the people exist to pad their pockets. They now assume that the rest of the human race has no purpose but to give them money, regardless of their total lack of innovation, and be punished for doing anything else. People want to use their music in ways that work today, not in the ways of 2 decades ago. CDs are 2 decades ago. They are obsolete in every way, and they need to go. Now. People share music. Get over it. Barnes and Noble realized this in the book industry, and introduced the Nook. It's users can share books, legally. They can loan a friend a book for 2 full weeks, and at the end of the two weeks, it comes back to them, wirelessly. It's pure genius. If the music industry would simply come up with ideas like this, everyone would be much happier. Unfortunately for everyone, they'd rather pay millions of dollars to lawyers than give the same money to software developers to build a system that actually works. If the music industry spent the money they pay their lawyers with on innovation and implementation of new ideas, they'd be far, far richer than they are now, and would fix their reputation in the process.

So, how could they innovate?

I have a few ideas.

They have long since forgotten one of the first rules of selling anything. "Give the people what they want."

What do the people want?

The people want playlists, with the exact songs they want to listen to, in the order in which they want to listen to them.

The people want to save their playlists, and access them from anywhere, on any device.

Services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker come about as close to the mark as possible while still missing it entirely.

Here's an idea.

Create a music service that gives the people exactly what they want. Allow creation of ordered playlists, with none of this 'We know what you want to listen to, so let us pick the tracks.' crap. Subsidize it in the good old fashioned way. Have 2-10 second ad spots in between tracks, every 10 tracks or so. On the desktop and mobile versions, reduce or eliminate the commercials in favor of visual ads on screen, Pandora style. Allow people to search for new music from anywhere, and add it into their playlists on the fly. It's all being streamed, after all. You'd just be making small changes to their user account database entries, rather than copying actual songs. If the music industry, or even the some bright internet entrepreneurs would implement this idea, they'd be instant millionaires. Is this too much to ask? Give it some thought, and feel free to let me know what you think.

Comments? Thoughts? Let me know at mail@justinlowery.com.

Posted via email from Infinite Loop - on Posterous

A Million Dollar Idea, or How the Music Industry Could Innovate and Save Their Reputation in the Process

2009-10-31T15:38:00.001-07:00

They've forgotten their purpose.

So, how could they innovate?

I have a few ideas.

They have long since forgotten one of the first rules of selling anything. "Give the people what they want."

What do the people want?

The people want playlists, with the exact songs they want to listen to, in the order in which they want to listen to them.

The people want to save their playlists, and access them from anywhere, on any device.

Services like Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker come about as close to the mark as possible while still missing it entirely.

Here's an idea.

Comments? Thoughts? Let me know at mail@justinlowery.com.

Posted via email from Infinite Loop - on Posterous

Sarah - a Vector Illustration.

2007-07-22T12:56:00.001-07:00

This is my first flash project in a while. It's a little buggy, but OK for what it intended for (just a little fun).

Update after so long....

2005-10-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, so maybe I haven't updated this in a while. Sorry. I have been way to busy with college and work to do anything with this.

Dragonfly soaking up the rays.

2005-08-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

Here is a little something I thew together last night. I shot that dragonfly at work with a Nikon FE an d a 210mm Macro I think... Anyway, I thought I'd try it squared, cropped, and on a black matte to see how it would look. Please comment, let me know what you think! Anyway, that's all for now... --Justin

FED-3b

2005-08-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a pic of my FED-3b that I bought on eBay for 25.00 + shipping from Ukraine. It's got the Industar 61 L/D lens on it, which is a very sharp & slightly radioactive 52mm/2.8 lens made as a Soviet replacement for the German made Leitz Tessar type lenses. The Soviets banned camera imports from Germany (understandably) during World War II and started producing their own natively made derivatives. After the war, Soviet Camera makers had become well established, and started coming out with their own designs. The FED-3 is a result of this newfound industry's strides into the world of Lieca type rangefinder cameras. I think it's a pretty good cam, with the one outstanding exception being it's rediculously dim, small viewfinder, which has sharp ridges around it which scratch your glasses. It's a good thing it features diopter correction, so they aren't needed anyway. I like the blue color, it's pretty unique for a Sov-cam to have this bright a shade of blue. It almost looks modern. I have even been asked questions like "Is that digital?". Pretty good for being nearly a 40 year old design.

Dad and Cam

2005-08-07T06:41:00.000-07:00

I shot this pic of my Dad with the FED-3b and it's Industar 61 L/D lens @ f/2.8. He was playing with his Canon S2 IS Digicam. It was just after sunset. I'll post pics of the FED-3b later

Another great photo shoot.

2005-08-07T06:08:00.000-07:00

Last night my Dad and I went for a ride in the Hudson Valley of New York where we live, and were looking for some good views to photograph. We ended up coming across this field on the side of the road where you could see across the Hudson river and all the way to the Catskill Mountains. We had just experienced a cold front, so that caused some great cloud formations as the clouds blew over the mountains from the west and fanned out after they cleared the peaks. The sun shown through the clouds, changing them from grey to pink to orange and then finally to purple as it went down. I shot almost two rolls of Fuji Velvia slidefilm on the views, so I'll be posting the shots to my Flickr account (www.flickr.com/photos/justintosh) whenever I get them developed, scannend and published. We also climbed a steep hill near the Rip Van Winkle bridge after sunset and took some shots with long exposure times and a tripod of the traffic crossing the streetlight-laden suspension bridge with the ominous mountains lurking in the background. Should be interesting to see how they come out.

Kicking off the new Photoblog - The future of this thing.

2005-08-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's been awhile since I've said anything on here. A long, long time... So, what's new? I've been really getting a lot more into photography, and have been using Flickr more than anything else, hence the lack of updates here. The reason I'm posting this now is simple. I love flickr, but I figure it's about time to set up a photoblog so that I have more control over my pictures and how much I can say about them. I'll still upload to Flickr, but I think I'll post many of my shots here so that I can write more than just a very brief paragraph about them. Anyhoo, here's a pic I took of a girl named Gabrielle to kick off the new photoblogging idea. Enjoy.

TIGER TIGER TIGER !!!!

2005-04-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

Awesome. Apple finally let that ever-so-sweet-yet-incredibly-fierce kitty out of the bag. This will be the best Operating System to ever grace the face of any electronic device anywhere. Period.

Metadata. Automation. Dashboard. RSS. H.264 AVC. CoreImage. CoreVideo. Full 64-bit OS.
Perfect.
It'll run great on one of those nice new Mac Minis for $499 too...

A Brief Review of the PSP

2005-04-13T14:47:00.000-07:00

Overall, the PSP is a great portable gaming system, with some multimedia features that will be more useful to some than others. It has a lot of room for improvement, but it is also starting from a great place. Here is what I thought of the various features:

Screen

The PSP’s most prominent feature is, of course, it’s stunning 4.3 inch 16:9 wide-screen display. The display has three brightness modes, which can be toggled through via the display button.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Controls

What good would a portable gaming/multimedia device be without a good set of controls? The PSP fares fairly well in this area, and the controls are comfortable and easy to use. The flattened analog joystick-type control on the bottom left is not much use, at least when compared to it’s close relative found on the PS 2 controllers. it moves only in 2D space, and it’s difficult to distinguish between different directions, as it only has 4 possible directions, with 360 degrees of movement.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Battery Life

This one has been a pretty big issue lately. The PSP gets between 3 and 7.5 hours of battery life, depending on what it is being used for. This, in my personal experience is fine, especially when compared to the battery life of say, a laptop being used for similar purposes. The shortcomings people are complaining about are mainly the result of comparing the PSP’s battery life to that of the iPod, which gets about 12 hours, or the iPod mini, which gets about 18 hours of nonstop play. The DS from Nintendo gets something on the order of 12-16 hours if I recall correctly. let me set something straight. The PSP is not a DS. It is also most definitely not an iPod. If anything, it is similar to a laptop in design and use. Now, compare the PSP to the competition. The best laptops ( Apple PowerBooks and iBooks) get around 5 hours of life, tops. The PSP, clocking in at 6 or 7 hours beats them. Also, the PSP can play graphics-intensive games off an optical drive for that long! Even a very good laptop would not get more than 2 hours of life while performing similar tasks.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Removable Media

This is one area where the PSP currently falls short. In it’s typical fashion, Sony only includes Memory Stick Duo and UMD drives, both of which are proprietary media formats. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sony has the relative audacity to charge $220.00 USD for a Gig of storage in Memory Stick Duo format. Fortunately, SanDisk will sell you one for just $150.00. Neither price is all that encouraging, especially considering that it’s just a memory card for a gaming system. I think it’s very likely that Memory Sticks will drop in price, fairly rapidly in the near future. Even so, Sony would have been smart to include an internal hard drive, ala the iPod Mini. They could also have released UMD burners to the consumer market, which they have not done thus far. I have heard rumors that Sony is considering building a future PSP model with an internal 50 Gig hard drive. Nice. Sony, please fix this.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Games

Need for Speed: Underground Rivals was the only Game I could afford to buy after going nearly bankrupt from the initial purchase of the PSP. It’s a great game, though I may somewhat biased from a long history of playing the previous NFS games. Here’s a tip: you can download save files from www.pspsaves.net that will unlock most or all of the cars in the game.

Video Project Update

2005-03-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

I've pretty much finished editing and shooting video now. My video premiered on grand opening day of the new auditorium of First Baptist Church. About 8,000 people watched it on the 2 IMAG screens and 60 plasma screens. They also recieved copies of the accompanying DVD afterwords. Pastors' School opening night also saw another showing of the video, also to a group of about 8,000, though this time a different group. They also recieved copies of the DVD. All in all, I'd consider it a success, but I'm glad it's over. :) --Justin

Studio Work

2005-02-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

I've been working in a pretty sweet studio lately. We have a Powermac G5 Dual 2 here, and more video editing/recording equipment than one could shake a stick at. A Canon GL1, a Sony DCR-PD150, a panasonic DV camera, can't remember the model, three scanner/printer/copiers, and two PowerBook G4s now that my friend and I bring in and out as we come and go. We just produced a 30 second commercial that will air on 500 different primetime spots on Chicagoland TV stations. We are currently producing a DVD that will be distributed to 11-16,000 people a few weeks from now. We are also producing a video that will be shown to around 7500 people simultaneosly by way of two twenty foot IMAX screens and 60 40" plasma screens in a massive auditorium. Yay. This stuff is amazing, to me at least. :)

Windows....making people give up their potential?

2005-02-16T14:30:00.000-08:00

I was in the same V.B. class again today. The teacher seems to have given up on computers as a classroom aid altogether. He was drawing out all his points and illustrations on the blackboard. I heard him mutter something about having so many illustrations he had wanted to show us. It seems the same company that uses propaganda about helping people reach their potential as advertising material has stopped one teacher from reaching his in the classroom. Yay. This stuff just gets better and better.

Professional isn't so Professional

2005-02-11T14:11:00.000-08:00

I was sitting in a Vertebrate Biology class the other day, and the teacher was using a Compaq running Windows 2k Pro. The thing crashed 3 times during the one hour class. All three times it refused to boot up all the way, and crashed during the Windows loading screen. He eventually gave up trying and just shut off the projector. Makes you wonder why people still use Windows... The PowerBook could have done it flawlessly. :)

New PowerBooks!

2005-02-03T16:21:00.001-08:00

Being an Apple PowerBook user and fan, I usually notice right away when this stuff comes out or gets updated. Apple just released a new PowerBook lineup. The processors have been boosted to 1.5 and 1.67 GHz G4s (no G5 yet :( ) and the keyboard backlighting in the 15- and 17-inch models has been updated to provide brighter keys. The BlueTooth modules are now BlueTooth 2.0, which is 3x as fast as the previous standard. They now include 8x DVD+/-R, RW Superdrives which burn CDs at 24x and DVDs at 8x, much faster than the previous 'Books. All in all, a great set of upgrades, though not as good as the G5s everyone has been looking forward to.

Starting blog

2005-02-03T16:21:00.000-08:00

This is my first posting to open up the new blog. This blog will be about my life, Macs, college, my varying interests, and whatever else I feel like putting up on here... That's all for now.