Thank you!

I recently wrote a post for Andy's Goode Life and you can check it out here.

I haven't tried my hand at fiction writing in a while and all her kind words have really inspired me. These are some of the nicest comments I have received about anything I've done to date.

So...

Thank you!

My Really Goode Video

Well folks. It is up. My ridiculous video application for Murphy-Goode's Really Goode Job is live for the world to see. Shot in about an hour including teaching my wonderful girlfriend how to use the camera (thanks for putting up with me)! Another hour to cut it together and voila! I know about the spelling error on the last title card. I think I am going to play it off as "tiwtter" is a cool new site y'all haven't even heard of yet. Anyway, check it out and please vote for it here!

Thanks for your support!

Shaun

A Really Goode Job Description

Anyone can say they have a really good job. Hell, just having a job these days is really good, but how many people can say they have a really goode job? If you didn’t catch what I did there, I added an ‘e’ to the end of the word to make it better (much like a shoppe is like a shop, but more expensive).

Well, Murphy-Goode Winery is offering just such a really goode job. It is a six-month gig blogging, networking, and producing web videos to expand the brand’s social network presence. Did I mention that the job pays $10,000 a month? Not bad, eh? Then you ask, how can I get in on that loot?

Well, you make a video, of course. Then you get all your friends to visit the site and vote on your video. Neat huh? The best video wins the really goode job.

Here’s the fun part! This job isn’t worth $60,000 to the company. Any Joe with a facebook page can be a social networker. The only qualification for such a position is generally to be a nice person (harder than it seems to find sometimes). And, as soon as the six-month carnival in dreamland is over Joe will be hired at a much more reasonable salary and life will go on just as it always has.

You see, the $60,000 is not for six months of work. It is for three months of craziness that this application process creates. It is a similar to the principals of a sweepstakes. The hullabaloo generates at least $60,000 worth of brand awareness if not more. If you think of it this way, Murphy Goode is getting six months of work out of someone for free!

You may remember when Tourism Queensland used a similar strategy to find a new web 2.0 guru and promote its brand through a worldwide video contest. I can only hope that this sort of scheme catches on. It appears to be greatly beneficial to the company and it gives some poor sap steady income for half a year.

I would also like to point out that this game makes friends with the web 2.0 community, which has been known to have the power to lift an entity from obscurity to stardom, but also to rip to shreds anything it might deem unwelcome. I would say anytime an organization decides to embrace this community and even try to cater to it is a really goode thing.

So, I just read through this post again and realized how horribly cynical I come off. I would just like to make it absolutely clear that any cynicism is born entirely from jealousy. I would also like it to be known that I totally made a video last night and submitted my application. Who wouldn’t want to be that “poor sap” if only for six months?

I feel bad, ok!

I know I haven't posted in quite a while, but the gears are turning in the old noggin and I have some plans for my blog's future. Stay tuned!

...please

-Shaun

What to do with all of this???

I got this very kind message on my Facebook the other day and I thought it was worth answering here on the blog.

The question is, what do I do with this huge social network once I have acquired it?

First off, Katie proposes a fantastic solution to the question. Send a message to your 400 Facebook friends or post a status update that would refer them all to your gym and you are in the money, provided that they remember to drop your name. I love it!

Social media marketing works in the same way. Amass a large network of personal connections and profit from them. As far as I know, Katie is not a small business or a large corporation trying to sell some outstanding product to as many people as possible so gym membership referrals might sound like a good idea, but there are certainly other things that can be accomplished by a large social network on the web.

My favorite solution is somewhat selfless. Let's say Katie needs signatures on a petition or wants to raise awareness for a cause. A large, online, social network can be the perfect place to get people participating. As long as Katie has maintained strong personal relationships with her online communities they are certainly more likely to listen. It is much easier and more effective than soliciting to strangers on the street.

Big brands are certainly not the only ones benefiting from large online social networks. Much can be accomplished by little people with lots of friends. The key word here is, of course, FRIENDS.

Creating huge social networks without any personal interaction is absolutely useless! I can't stress that enough, especially if you are not big brand, which people expect to sell them stuff. It is in the individual's best interest (as well as the big brand, if you are listening) to keep personal relationships his/her highest priority. A 'Facebook friend' should be no different from a 'friend' and communication should be kept open. You never know when you might need your 400 Facebookers or 3000 Twitterers or whatever connections you have.

Be a nice person and interact with other nice people as much as possible. You will need them eventually and, certainly, they will need you!

Facebook: When To Post Your Big Announcement

Facebook is obviously a really fantastic way to connect to people and with its ever-growing population the connections can get numerous indeed. It is important to use those connections to their utmost potential. The idea, of course, is to get people talking about you as much as possible and it is looking like, timing matters. People Facebook (as a verb) more at some times than at others and capitalizing on those peak moments could mean the difference between selling one widget and selling one hundred.

First, let's talk about good Facebook practice. Facebook can be a complicated beast with many different ways to interact with people. However, some methods can be more effective than others. The News Feed feature is the bread and butter of Facebook these days. It is the first thing you see after login and provides easy navigation through all the updates that concern you. Ideally, you should be updating your profile daily* just to show up on your friends' and fans' news feeds. Notice that I asterixed the hell out of "daily." Updates are helpful, provided you have something interesting to share. Too many updates on what you ate for breakfast will quickly become "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and when you post "The Wolf" no one will listen. I would rather miss a day of updates than write crap in my status bar.

Great! Now you have some big news you want to share with the world! You want to get people talking about it, clicking through to your website, pushing it on their friends, etc. Awesome! Who doesn't? It turns out there are specific times durring the week that Facebookers seem to be more active. Mid-week (Wednesday to be exact) sees much more activity than any other day. These are not people "checking their Facebook." This is when they are responding to posts, giving thumbs up to status changes, writing on walls, interacting on every level. You want to get on as many peoples' news feeds as possible early in the day (Tuesday evening if possible) and spend the entire day responding to posts, clarifying details, driving traffic, etc. Facebook can easily be run on autopilot most of the time, but if you know that there is going to be a surge in user interaction on a particular day it is certainly a good idea to provide personal feedback and communication.

With more and more social network communities popping up on the web, no one can be expected to devote all of their time to one such as Facebook, but capitalizing on the one day per week that users are at their most interactive can be an extremely valuable use of time.

**A weekly breakdown of online social network activity.

Phase IV Wrap-Up #4

Total Activity