Media
Social media axis of evil
There is so much you can learn by just following smart bloggers. One of the blog I really dig is Fred Wilson’s. He is by far the most impressive practitioner of Thesis driven investing. On his blog he maintains list of Internet axis of evil. Its on the lower left side of the page. I just picked that idea and applied in the more subtle context of social media and came up with following evils -
Release Time Game - Release bad news on Friday evening and happy news on Sunday evening. That has been the rule of mainstream media for many years and still is if you follow the staged politics of Meet The Press etc. With blogging this game has become more deceptive. Without timeline view and general absence of an response stream as a function of time, this approach is getting manipulated without users knowing it. What we need is a timeline view news aggregator (like techmeme but with the horizontal/commentable timeline view). This model will reward news breakers and punish recyclers.
GroupComment Gangsters - Organized comment response on blogs to either make a point or just beat ADD-ed blogger to do a better fact-check. Recently observed this on Venture Beat’s posting related to concept car. Now gangster may be a harsh word but the idea is to deal with large set of readers who have suddenly gone sour by your blog post and are now out to either take over your comment thread or make questionable reputation attacks elsewhere.
Cognitive spam - legitimate blog post which has “favor” inserts and synchronized with many bloggers. This is mostly the case with popular bloggers. Most readers easily miss this part as most of them scan for main punchlines. This one is subtle and done mostly as “i have heard xyz is also doing this in a slightly better way” to pitch company services.
Spare Powder Post - Call it anticipatory response. This is a new kind of PR response. It goes like this - BigCompany releases a new widget and gets techmeme crowd excited with tons of free opinions flowing in. BigCompany’s biggest competitor pulls out some existing product feature and spins it in a similar way and joins the techmeme link fest. This way you can’t talk about BigCompany widget without referring to their competitor’s widget as well. You can pretty much find this once a week on techmeme.
New assignment for every marketing department will be to have “draft blog posts” for different “scenarios”. This practice is bad because its a painful tax on reader’s attention without giving any new value in bargain. This I guess will become a formal marketing task where it will be required to paint future scenarios and have blog post response for those scenarios.
I am sure there are more to add to the above list. If you happen to read this post and find something missing then go ahead add one in your blog and I will link it from here.
Update: Example of a “spare powder post” by Orkut team. Techmeme response to Facebook announcement.
Update: Another social media evil to list here. This one is old but this example I just can’t ignore.
Fake Commenter - Commenter claims to be somebody he is not. This one is easy to dismiss if the commenter is using somebody really famous. There are tons of fake comments in the name of Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs. It’s confusing when the commenter uses reasonably known personality. Take this techcrunch kerfuffle . Everybody is wasting time on this issue but Michael and Ted Murphy are happily going to bank.
This picture captures fake comment issue in a best way -
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