Bird Seed, a rather unconventional book on social media
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Aliyah Marr
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
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Chapter 1: Why You Should Not Read this Book
Chapter 2: Why You Might Want to Read It
Chapter 3: Can You Digest Bird Seed?
Chapter 5: A Revolution of Birds
Chapter 7: The Twittering Machine
Chapter 8: Chickens With a Rather Sordid History
Chapter 9: A Democracy in the Hen House
Chapter 11: You Can't Sell Birds Bird Food
Chapter 14: One Hysterical Parrot
Chapter 15: If a Bird Sings in the Wilderness...
Chapter 17: Birds of a Feather...
Chapter 21: Cold-Hacked Chicken
Chapter 23: Boneless Chicken Farms
Chapter 27: A Bird in the Hand
Chapter 29: Feel-Good Marketing
Chapter 30: Tricking the Time Machine
Chapter 31: Becoming a Frequent Flyer
Some people are willing to swallow any promise that might make them easy money. The latest target is social media. It seems that everyone these days wants to know how to get social media to pay.
Marketing mavens struggle to advertise on social media; content mills try to find a way to squeeze the maximum amount of keywords in 140 characters or less; bloggers want to clock enough traffic to qualify for high-paying ads. LinkedIn serves up one-line ads that guarantee you a lucrative social media manager job at the end of an expensive online course.
WARNING
This book is not intended to be a primer for corporate entities, marketing mavens, SEO keyword content mill workers, hysterical bean-counting “give us your last bean!” advertising professionals, networking pundits, get-rich-quick quacks, or self-acclaimed experts of any kind.
If you are looking for the quick fix, if you see social media as the perfect income-from-home-job, or if you are a marketer looking for a cheap replacement for ads, Bird Seed is probably not for you. This is not a book of guaranteed money-making techniques or platform-specific information.
The author’s goal in writing this book is to address the broader changes that have come about because of, and through social media. Bird Seed aspires to show how social media has engendered social change. This change is a fundamental shift away from “business as usual” in many fields, such as marketing, advertising, information technology, media, publishing, internet, and businesses of all kinds.
Without an understanding of the “big picture” of these changes, an average user might be inclined to try to make social media adapt to old, outdated ideas and techniques. But if you know what is really happening, you can better navigate this amazing medium, and use it in a way that enhances your life while participating in one of the most significant grassroots revolution of the century.
Bird Seed is a book for the everyman or everywoman who wants to exercise his/her voice in professional social media; for the dude (or dudette) who wants to learn how to present himself or his brand professionally, know the etiquette, discover how to navigate the forest of terms, and steer safely clear of the swamp of technological confusion.
If you want to know how to take part in the social media revolution and adapt it for your personal and business needs—while having fun at the same time—then please read on.
This book is a quirky, unconventional approach to professional social media, a motley collection of ideas—or seeds—on the phenomenon of this new means of expression. Bird Seed is a short, easy-to-read book that shows you how to cut to the chase, steer clear of social gaffes, organize mental clutter, Bird Seed shows how you can take part in the phenomenon of social media without social media taking over your life.
If you feel victimized by nonsensical Ebay ads in your search sidebar…
If you are pursued by a growing mob of Facebook friends whom you have never met…
If you are deluged with double opt-in messages when you can’t remember a single opt…
If you find yourself confused by application upgrades that downgrade your experience…
If you are unable to see the social media forest for all the meaningless trees of content…
If you are afraid that your last precious half-hour of free time may be on the chopping block of Twitter…
If you bemoan the disappearance of time, depth, and real meaning…
If you find it sad that your iPhone has replaced your dog as your constant companion…
If you suspect your wife has left you for her blog…
…then this book may be for you.
If you need a how-to on the specifics of any one social media platform or shining, inspirational stories on social media success, I recommend not buying this book; you may get frustrated and want your money back. The author writes only on subjects that last more than six months before requiring a rewrite.
New technology should not make us into a technician or slave to the application, but instead, it should free the individual to live a better life. The purpose of this book is to help you achieve the same goal.
Bird Seed is a collection of ideas—or seeds—about how to use social media for professional purposes. It shows how to promote without advertising and how to market without marketing: how to gather a flock of fans, and communicate with them effectively.
A new look at the contemporary phenomenon of social media, Bird Seed contains common sense suggestions on how to work with an amazing grassroots revolutionary movement.
The term “social media” is used in this book to refer to professional uses of social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. This book is dedicated to the art of professional networking and personal branding: it shows you how to represent yourself, your cause, or your business in social media.
Bird Seed sets out to show how our society has changed with the tools of social media, and how you can participate or choose not to participate in this social media revolution.
Bird Seed announces that a revolution has taken place under our very noses. The new medium of social media has created a new grassroots movement. It is such a big change that almost no one notices what happened.
Social media shows us that a new paradigm has evolved. You can see it in the verbiage:
Old paradigm
verbiage
Consumers, corporate power, mass marketing,
advertising, planned obsolescence, email blasts, broadcasting.
New paradigm
verbiage
Individualists, informed buyers reporting on products
and corporations, freedom of choice, democratized media, viral
messaging, conversation, democratic media, inclusion &
participation, flocking behavior, community, global reach.
Or to put it more succinctly, the old paradigm of the advertising age and consumerism is being replaced by a new era of individualism, free choice, and democratic grass-roots viral media.
OLD ADVERTISING AGE vs. NEW SOCIAL MEDIA ERA
Consumers vs. Informed Buyers
Advertising vs. Information
Broadcasting vs. Interactive Communication
Autocratic Media vs. Netizen Reportage
Customers vs. Neighbors
Markets vs. Communities
Bird Seed is a Think Upside-Down book. A think upside-down* idea is a counter-culture, creative, and fresh way to look at a given topic. It turns the topic upside-down and looks at the underside; it sees the forest for the trees; it gets right to the heart of the matter; it frees you to stand out from the crowd.
The funny thing is that a think upside-down concept is obvious, but like the proverbial elephant in the living room, it is often too big to see. That is why I have decided that the anagram T.H.U.N.K. is appropriate for something that is think upside-down concept.
THUNK is the sound that something really big makes when it hits the ground: it is also the sound that a new, blatantly obvious idea makes when it hits my head.
A THUNK upside your head
There is an even bigger change afoot that hardly anyone ever sees: our tools have a tendency to change us at such a fundamental level that we can’t even see what is happening.
Think about how your life has changed since the advent of cell phones, texting, and the Internet. We all know that modern communications have changed our lives by giving us ease, convenience, and speed, but how many of us can see how this technology has changed the way we think?
Before we decide to adapt, use, or discard these changes in our lives we should understand what they mean to us personally, and to us culturally. Only a new upside-down look at our old world view can allow us to see everything clearly, so we can decide what we should do, individually and collectively.
Not everything in this book qualifies as think upside-down, but on the following page are some of the basic concepts that turn the traditional marketing and advertising wisdom upside-down.
* I coined the term "think upside-down" in my first book, Parallel Mind, The Art of Creativity.
CONSUMERISM vs. COMMUNITY
THE MARKET: a mass
of uneducated consumers
THE MARKET: communities of smart
individuals
THE INDIVIDUAL: the
consumer is a stupid buying machine who will buy anything if we make
a commercial that appeals to his greed, ego, and self-importance
THE
INDIVIDUAL: the individual is smart, and does his research before
buying
SALES: advertising +
marketing + lots of money = sales
SALES: branding + information +
personalized customer service = loyal customers
COMMUNICATION:
broadcasting to the masses
COMMUNICATION: conversations between
equals
MEDIA: media in the
hands of professionals
MEDIA: media in the hands of the people
TRUST: trust the
media, corporations, & government to protect your
interests
TRUST: you trust your neighbor, because you know him
CONTENT:
advertising
CONTENT: information on demand
GOAL: get as many
"followers" as possible
GOAL: make meaningful
connections
FOLLOWUP: corporate
responsibility stops after the sale
FOLLWOUP: personalized
customer service is part of the sale
GAME WINNER: the
more people you have as fans, the more successful you are
GAME
WINNER: the more qualified people you know, the more successful you
are
CURRENCY: paper bank
notes that are no longer backed by gold
CURRENCY: your integrity,
relationships, contacts, skills, and reputation
There are more think upside-down concepts scattered throughout this book, like birdseed.
For a definition of social media I went to the big mama of all social media, my writing companion, my trusty unpaid editor: Wikipedia:
The term social media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue. Social media are media for social interaction, as a superset beyond social communication, but mainly still communicating just interactively using ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques.
Social media can take on many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter), content communities (e.g. YouTube), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.
Did you read all that? I can’t—I don’t have the attention span anymore. Here’s my translation:
Social Media has moved us:
- From a what to a who
- From centralized to decentralized
- From advertisements to information
- From consumers to communities
- From traditional media to citizen reportage
- From mass media marketing to viral marketing
- From voice-mail automatons to human customer service
- From broadcast messages to conversations
The beginning of social media marketing can be traced to email lists. In the early days of Internet marketing these were formed from non-voluntary, or pseudo-voluntary lists of individuals. Many of the people on these stone-age mailing lists didn’t even know they were on them. Marketing was up to its old trick of broadcasting to the faceless masses, trying to blast them through their email boxes instead of through their TVs.
As early Internet users started to experience a deluge of spam in their mailboxes, and the servers were swamped by mail going to thousands of recipients, promoters were forced by the beleaguered geeks and aggravated populace to adopt what Seth Godin coined as Permission Marketing. The misuse of email advertising campaigns resulted in the birth of the double opt-in: promoters with a message to deliver have to entice the user to join their list, and then ask for his confirmation.
Fast-forward a few years to the start of viral marketing: I am not sure if corporations and marketers get this yet, but viral communication works both ways. After all, if you can market a product using the viral opinions of the consumer, that same consumer has the power to completely bash your product, company, or idea as well.
***
The Democratization of Media
The emergence of popular outlets for social expression such as YouTube, FaceBook, and MySpace has changed online media in an unanticipated way. Who is an authority in an environment where anyone can contribute or edit the vast encyclopedia of human knowledge?
Regardless of whether it is the news from the “authorities,” or advertising from brands, or corporate reports, the average person has learned not to trust what he hears in traditional media.
What can you trust, and whom can you trust? The emergence of social networking and viral marketing in this same era is provides a clue to what may be happening. Corporations would love to control this amazing way of advertising their products to the consumer, but it can backfire: this area is very sensitive to hype and is quick to expose inconsistencies and flaws. It would be just as easy to get negative as well as positive results using viral marketing and social networking.
The positive result of this movement is that it may allow a real accountability to emerge in the economic as well as the political arena. It has the potential to finally hold responsible those in authority, hold companies accountable to their products and to their way of producing that product, as well as keeping them honest in advertising.
The power of free speech is in the hands of the many instead of the few as media has resulted in the democratization of the media. As ever in the past, commercial and political interests will strive to control and utilize this power to their own ends. Already, information on the buying habits and personal preferences of individuals is tracked by many entities.
Viral marketing is a hot topic among marketers. They ask themselves how what people talk about can be used for profit and how they can control what is being said. Bloggers are romanced by corporate entities and some even paid to write corporate messages and product review as if they are independent sources of information.
As the uncle of Spiderman said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Democracy in whatever form has the annoying tendency to mutate into something else, while pretending to have remained true to form. Perhaps the book Animal Farm was not really about communism at all, but about how information gets mutated by those in authority. Information can only be trusted if it remains independent of commercial or political interests, as the debacle of commercial media in present times has proved.