Tumblr vs. Posterous

It's another social media match-up, folks! This time we're looking at two different sites, Tumblr and Posterous.

Tumblr is a photo/quote/link/chat/audio/video microblogging site.  It's made for public, quick, bite-sized browsing, and so far, many of the people who share there seem to post beautiful, evocative, or well-crafted content. It's easy to share content from the iPhone, Android, and an internet browser, and it's easy to customize.  The interface is clean, and almost fun.  The site's dialogue buttons are fresh and informal but clear and welcoming.  Let me reiterate, though, it's a public space.  You can choose NOT to let search engines index your blog, but anyone who wants to can find your content.

screenshot from Tumblr popular feed

Posterous, on the other hand, seems like more of a productivity site and less like a microblogging site.  At least, that's what it seems to brand itself as.  You can choose who sees any given blog, or space, as its called, and you can upload anything you want to the space, at any time. You can even schedule content to appear in your space at a certain time of day. It can be public, if you wish, but the option to make your content totally private indicates a different purpose than that of Tumblr. It's a group sharing site, where that group is usually delineated by the user, instead of by the site.  Posterous enables public sharing, just in case you want to go that route.

screenshot from Posterous popular feed

Both sites are incredibly easy and fast to sign up for, and the sign-up/sign-in dialogue is fresh and informal while still being clear.  Both allow you to upload almost any content you like, and both make it fairly easy, although Tumblr has the edge here, with an optional bookmarklet for grabbing content off the web.  You have to copy and paste with Posterous.  Both sites support the Android and iPhone/iPad operating systems, though, so that's a plus.

So:  if you need a site for sharing content with a select group of people, go with Posterous!  If you like the idea of the Twitter microblog site but appreciate more visuals, or at least more multimedia content, check out Tumblr.

Frito-Lay vs. Nabisco!

Frito-Lay and Nabisco, large American snack food brands, both have Facebook pages. Let's take a look and compare the two instances of social media presence, shall we?

Nabisco has a calming, trustworthy blue timeline image, at least at the moment, while Oreo is the cookie of the month. Right now, 1,043,582 people on Facebook like Nabisco, and 5,455 are talking about it. Frito-Lay's Facebook page currently has a fresh green chalkboard background, with some football strategy chalked in. Exactly 2, 357,202 Facebookers like Frito-Lay, and 7,698 are talking about it.

I'm not going to get into the numbers of likes, except to say that Frito-Lay probably has a wider reach than Nabisco cookies in the real world, especially during the football season. What I do want to point out is the Facebook pages themselves.

I think the Nabisco page is much smarter than the Frito-Lay page.  Its postings target both women and men, with the majority seemingly aimed at women.  It offers recipes and keeps its product out in front of consumers, yes, but it tries to appeal to a wide variety of social media tastes.  Some postings are clean and spare and clever, like this one for Oreos.  Some are home-y, like this Newtons recipe.  Some are naughty, to encourage good snacking. It has interactive posts to engage consumers and solicit comments, but it also offers coupons.

Frito-Lay on the other hand, employs the same couple of tactics over and over:  It asks people to participate in sweepstakes or contests, like this one for Cracker Jacks, or it posts a product-related picture or graphic and asks people to comment, like this park bench and potato chip post.  The page asks people to comment so often, Frito-Lay comes across as pleading for interaction instead of inspiring. The postings are targeted toward men and women, but they are not as consistently clever or humorous as the Nabisco posts.

I know that both brands are pursuing well-thought out, expensive marketing strategies, so I'm sure there is more than meets the eye here.  But while the Nabisco page is somewhat fun to scroll through, and fun to read, the Frito-Lay site comes across as boring and pandering. On the whole, I like Frito-Lay snacks better than Nabisco snacks, though I don't eat many of either one - too many nasty chemicals and GMOs for everyday consumption.  Also, I had absolutely no prejudice or predilection toward either page before checking them out tonight.  However, the Nabisco page is a clear winner.

Quick bonus trivia:  Nabisco is owned by Philip Morris, and Frito-Lay is owned by Pepsi Co! If these guys can't get the Facebook pages right... well.

Oh, blogs

What's in a blog?  Today I'll highlight a couple of the blogging best practices that I've found over the past few months.  You may already know that a clean, appealing design, good writing, and having a personality are important for bloggers.  What else?

Echoditto.com reminds us to give an overview of the subject in the first paragraph, then a teaser near the end of the second paragraph, to keep readers' attention and encourage them to read more. Don't think that you have to wrap up the entire topic in a blog post, either.  Your tone is probably somewhat conversational, so make your post a conversation!  Also, if you say something in your conversation that later you wish you hadn't, always go back and update the post to correct your error of fact, grammar, or judgement.  Readers will forgive you, and will appreciate the honesty.

When you're being all conversational and real, not to mention humorous and charming, it's easy to fall back on acronyms, shortcuts, or assumed context.  Chris Abraham, President and COO of Abraham Harrison, says the bloggers at his company sometimes call the company AH instead of spelling it out, for example. We are more used to sharing inside jokes or speaking in a kind of shorthand with friends and colleagues, but let's not assume a reader from a different department, business, or country will understand what we mean.

There were two more tips from Mr. Abraham that I found particularly helpful.  When you link to your own or someone else's  pages, blogs, sites, whatever, use keywords to hyperlink!  Don't link to the words 'link,' 'here,' 'there,' 'her,' or whatever.  Help the reader, and the search engine, make connections!

The last tip is for you, but also for me, because I didn't do such a good job following it.  Don't just repeat other people's blogs, analyze them!  If you're just talking about someone else's stuff, why should your reader listen to you?  Why wouldn't the reader go to the other blogs or sites instead?  Interpret, synthesize, make it your own, and prove your value.

[Aside: Technorati, here's the smoke signal: 6D78TQ8BKXXW]

Marketing-as-conversation

Here's something else that has stuck in my craw, in a good way, over the last couple of weeks. One of our recent lessons was that posts, tweets, videos, blogs, micro-­blogs, any kind of successful communication from a company absolutely needs to take time significance into consideration. That is, keeping the message relevant to a the holiday, the weather outside, the current season, or upcoming national events can all help the message or content stick better in the mind of the customer, or audience.  It is great advice, really, relating communicated content to something the user is statistically likely to be already thinking about.

Image is still the property of Microsoft, but doesn't it make my message more memorable? Brrr.

This post is not an example of that.  You were probably not already thinking about timely marketing messages.  If you were, I'm sorry. This blog probably will not help you much.

Anyhow, it's another way in which companies can treat its customers like actual people. When we see a friend or aquaintance on a Friday, we often say, "Have a good weekend." If we experience a stretch of unseasonably nice weather in February, we comment about it to each other. When December rolls around, a lot of us mail a bunch of brightly colored cardboard, I mean holiday cards, back and forth.

I didn't mean to get cynical just then.  What I was trying to say was, we, customers, already tailor our face-to-face and mailbox-to-mailbox conversations to the holiday/day of week/time of day/weather/current events.  We are now subject to such a barrage of information online, that companies should be careful to follow those conversational norms.  The more natural and timely the message, the more we will notice it, right?  Actually, our social media class studied a series of infographics recently that took timely messages to the micro-level.  Did you know, for example, that people read the most blogs at 11 AM on Monday mornings, but the most comments on Saturdays at 9 AM? Eastern time? I'm about to post on a Tuesday at 11-ish, in the p.m., Mountain time.  I'm really shooting myself in the foot here.

Pay attention, though, to those corporate marketers trying to get your attention online this week.  Do they choose optimal times to post?

Companies, be decent.

The faucet is on.  I'm not sure of the water quality coming out of the tap, but maybe if I let it run for a while it will get clearer.

My discourse for this post is about social media and its role in post-consumerism.  Before I started this course, I had very little idea exactly how powerful a single person with a catchy or compelling message could be in the social world.  I also didn't think about how little control companies really have over their marketing messages.  Basically, companies need to be more responsible, accountable, and non-sociopathic.  Shocking, really. Corporations want to be treated like people... but they don't always want to treat their employees or customers like people.

Image used with implicit permission from Microsoft. Really, it's just clip art.

Olivier Blanchard wrote Social Media ROI, one of the books we're reading in the social media course right now.  Blanchard says "Fifty years ago, a regular customer might have been greeted by name when she entered the store... In a cruel twist of irony, efficient ad growth made companies forget the value of being social... and made the 'social company' the exception rather than the rule - that is, until social media came along to potentially make things right again" (p. 5). It seems that it's a somewhat empowering time to be a customer, at least in the sense of demanding and receiving decent treatment.  For proof, check out the United Breaks Guitars videos, if you haven't already.

Have you experienced this recently?  Have you shared a complaint with a large company, and received the same old level of indifference?  Or did you unexpectedly get stellar customer service? With or without sharing your experience on the Twitter? (I know, it's just called "Twitter."  Humor me.)

Is the water even on?

You know how, when you first turn on an old faucet, nothing happens, and you have to wait a while for the water?  That's exactly what happened to me with this blog.  I signed up for this social media course, and lo and behold I had to start a blog, and.... nothing happened.  I said, "OK, blog, start!" Still nothing.

Image from Fotalia

At first I was going to use this course as my impetus to start The Blog.  Capital T the, Capital B blog, the one  I would keep up for the rest of my life and make famous and soon I would be able to retire because my blog would become a book, and get millions of pageviews each month, and generate enough ad revenue for me to go grocery shopping every once in a while. I thought about it, and kept thinking, and realized pretty soon that I wasn't inspired or knowledgeable enough (yet) to start The Blog.

My next idea was to start A Blog, one that could take my current interest in meteorology, specifically nephology, and turn THAT into a blog.  I could learn about and indulge my interest in clouds, and share clouds with the rest of the world all at the same time! Unfortunately, it's hard to compare social media networks (for the aforementioned course) in terms of clouds, at least the atmospheric kind.

So I'm 0-for-2, scoreless at the bottom of the ninth inning, getting so desperate for a blog that I'm mixing up baseball and faucet metaphors in my mad scramble to write words.

I've finally decided just to start any ol' blog about, what else, social media.  Get ready.