We Want You, Big Brother

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

— George Orwell

Incredibly, the Kremlin has targeted LinkedIn users, with the result that Microsoft (LinkedIn’s owner) is punishing liberals and rewarding right-wingers.

After receiving a half-dozen emails from Microsoft in the course of two days, each advising me the company had censored one of my comments in response to a Kremlin post, I have now been “disappeared” from LinkedIn—as have several of my contacts on the platform, both here and in Europe—for posting “harassing comments.”

In other words, opposing viewpoints.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin—with the aid of thousands of hapless Americans, eager to amplify its stock messages—continues to push out hackneyed pro-Trump statements, all blatantly racist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, jingoist and nativist. 

Weary of the Trumpian twaddle, I tried to “unfollow” the Kremlin’s account before I was “disappeared,” but learned that you simply cannot do so. 

Like the telescreens in 1984 (monitored, of course, by the Thought Police) the Kremlin’s account is ubiquitous.

We want you, Big Brother.

UPDATE: Microsoft this morning has asked me to prove I am an American and asked me to warrant in writing that I will "adhere to LinkedIn policies from this day forward." I guess after that, I can kiss the bride.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 8, 2020: It appears LinkedIn has "disappeared" the Kremlin-backed user this morning. But for how long?

Facing Facts

The greatest American superstition is a belief in facts.

— Hermann Keyserling

Facebook is countering fake news by downgrading all news.

Beginning next week, users will see mainly the posts of friends and family in their feeds; publishers' posts will virtually vanish.

In the short term, the decision is harmful. 

Facebook's move will lower users' time on the social network, and lower the "referral traffic" publishers count on. The latter will force all publishers to scramble to make up for the lost eyeballs, and put a lot of them out of business, according to The New York Times.

In the long term, however, the decision is beneficial—to Facebook.

Under scrutiny for abetting Kremlin-backed trolls during the 2016 election, the company confronts the real possibility of government regulation, as it lacks AI's equivalent of a Walter Cronkite or Ben Bradlee to decide what's legitimately newsworthy.

Critics complain the company's move amounts to a news blackout, since nearly half of Americans get at least some of their news from the social network. 

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is merely "protecting our community from abuse and hate."

The decision signals a return by Facebook to its "college scrapbook" origins ("Look how my new brussels sprouts recipe turned out!")

Takeaway? Ten years from now, we'll chuckle to recall we once believed Facebook was a media company.

The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled

Democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

— Isaac Asimov

I've had it with the truthies, trash and trivia that's vying for my overtaxed attention.

Once intriguing, the big news sites and social media networks have become cyber cesspools.

My New Year's resolution: to boycott them.

The last straw was a click-bait headline that dogged me yesterday: "The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled."

I don't need—or care—to know why ABC executives scrapped a TV sit-com 46 years ago.

Worse, I resent being told the "real" reason was adultery, when in fact it was low audience share.

It's time for all good people to call a halt to America's romance with anti-intellectualism—the willful "dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility," as executive coach Ray Williams puts it.

We should take no pride in the fact Americans choose to be gullible and uninformed.

We should only take comfort in the fact that millions of the most gullible and uninformed are killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and guns.

Fakebook

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

― George Orwell

While Facebook is nation's leading source of news and largest recipient of display-ad dollars, its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, insists it's not a media company.

“At our heart we're a tech company; we hire engineers," she told Axios. “We don’t hire reporters, no one’s a journalist, we don’t cover the news."

As Wired rejoined, "Facebook does not want to be viewed as a media company, which would bring a responsibility to the truth and potential accusations of bias.

"Admitting Facebook is a media company would require Facebook to take responsibility for its role in the spread of fake news, propaganda, and illegal Russian meddling in the US election."

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Facebook is a tech company.

The Long Halloween

The threat to man does not come at first from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already affected man in his essence.

—Martin Heidegger

Heidegger said technology would either crush or uplift mankind, depending on our response to it. 2017 may be the year we learn which.

A minority of spiteful and uninformed voters has elected a Commander in Tweet. Every day, he dispenses candy-coated lies, for which we're to be grateful. Every day is Halloween.

And what costume are you wearing? Stormtrooper or Rebel?

Assist or resist; there's no middle ground.

NOTE: Opinions expressed on this blog are my own.

Glassdoor: Better Job-Seeker Tool Than LinkedIn?

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Slack and Company, LLC, a leading global B2B marketing strategy and services provider based in Chicago.

Glassdoor really is coming into its own as a terrific tool for job-seekers of all types—college students looking for internships or full-time jobs and anyone and everyone looking to change jobs or careers.

The platform used to be mainly for checking out what current and former employees anonymously say about their employers, but the site now does double duty big time as a repository of jobs—getting as much monthly job-post traffic as LinkedIn does.

Some interesting things about Glassdoor:

• The average company rating on Glassdoor (on a 1-5 scale) is 3.2. In my experience, any company that’s at 3.6 or above is doing pretty well.
  
  
• Caveat emptor with companies 2.6 or below—and, yes, there are plenty that do that poorly. They probably should be quarantined. But don’t pay too much attention to a company’s rating if it only has a handful of reviews—say 10 or fewer.
  
  
• Companies that have thousands of even tens of thousands of reviews and are at 3.6 or above are doing a pretty good job by their employees. When they’re above 4.0, like Google is, that’s just amazing.
  
  
• Glassdoor tells us their research shows prospective employees going to the site put more stock in reviews and ratings of current vs. former employees. Makes sense.
  
  
• Look at how raters rate the company’s CEO. And whether they would recommend the company to a friend and whether their overall feeling about the company’s future is negative, neutral or positive.
  
  
• You also can learn a lot about prospective employers from their company pages on Glassdoor—usually much more robust than company pages on LinkedIn.

You still need a strong LinkedIn profile more than ever, but consider making Glassdoor your first stop on the way to a first job or a better career.

Want Social Media Success? Hang out on the Stoop.

When I was a kid, the park was where we went to find our friends, but the stoop was where the good stuff happened.

That's where the stories were swapped, the jokes told, the dreams dreamed, the plans made.

Marketers frame their social media strategies around showing up at parks—i.e., "platforms"—when they should be hanging out on stoops.

"Customer engagement will occur where your fans want it to happen, not where you want it to happen," Mark Schaefer says.

You won't form a successful social media strategy by chasing trendy platforms, because customers "will naturally migrate to wherever they want to be."

Schaefer wonders whether we're asking the right question when we ask "Should we be on Snapchat?" or "Should we be on Facebook Live?"

"Maybe it doesn’t matter if we’re on Snapchat or Facebook Live" he says.

"What matters most is where our customers want to be found, where they want to engage."

Newshounds' Loyalty on the Rise

Consumers' loyalty to specific news outlets is on the rise, according to a recent poll by Gallup. 

Among consumers, 48% identify a specific medium (TV, Internet, radio, newspaper) as their main news source—down 10 points from three years ago; while 42% identify a specific outlet (Fox, Huffington, NPR, The New York Times, etc.) as their main source—up 12 points from three years ago.

"The shift in thinking on the subject is partly powered by Americans' increasing ability to gather news from a single organization on multiple platforms," says pollster Jim Norman. 

Loyalty to social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as news outlets is also on the rise—particularly among Millennials.

According to the poll, 15% of Millennials identify a social media site as their main news source, up from 3% three years ago.

While the shift in media habits will affect news outlets in their battle for customers, it also could spill into politics and social behaviors, Norman says.

Consumers may shut out viewpoints not presented by their favorite news outlet, and be more apt to mistake entertainment for news.

Herdwick Shepherd Tips the Model

Q: Social media gurus talk in praise of the tribe. But who stands up for the herd?

A: James Rebanks, the "Herdwick Shepherd."

A self-proclaimed Luddite, Rebanks is a British farmer and author of the best-selling memoir The Shepherd's Life.

With 75,000 followers, he's also a Twitter phenomenon.

Writing for The Atlantic, Rebanks calls Tweeting about sheep "an act of resistance and defiance, a way of shouting to the sometimes disinterested world that you’re stubborn, proud, and not giving in."

What goes here?

Sheep have long symbolized the very opposite of "resistance and defiance."

"Fortunately, the world is not built solely to serve good natured herd animals their little happiness," the free-spirited philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said.

"I define 'sheepwalking' as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job," Seth Godin says.

Intentionally or not, Rebanks has flipped the model.

Or should I say, tipped?

Suddenly sheep are superbly chic.

SPEAKING OF TIPPED: Ann Ramsey tipped me off to the Herdwick Shepherd.

The One Percenters

Try as they might, the narcissists packing the 9/11 Memorial Museum during my visit this week couldn't palliate the place.

Out of a compulsion to vaunt their little lives, they vamped about Ground Zero as if it were Dollywood.

They never got the memo: One percent of people—tops—deserve attention.

Like the 3,000 workers who perished in the Twin Towers.

Like the first responders who risked their all.

Like the Flight 93 passengers and Pentagon employees.

The rest of us don't.

Pandemonium? Blame the Media.

Presidential politics rides a wayward bus.

It's named Media.

Media revolutions drive voters away from party élites, as historian Jill Lepore says in her article about populism in The New Yorker.

Lepore looks back at party upheavals of the early 19th century.

Although slavery was the big issue, the rise of populism was driven by revolutions in media:

• In the 1830s, advances in printing brought down the cost of a newspaper to a penny;

• In the 1840s, newspapers began to get news by telegraph;

• In the 1850s, newspapers began to include illustrations based on photographs.

"For a while, party élites lost control, until the system reached equilibrium in the form of a relatively stable contest between Democrats and a new party, the Republicans," Lepore says.

Then came the 1890s, when occurred another populist revolt, "which took place during another acceleration in the speed of communication, brought about by the telephone, the Linotype, and halftone printing, technologies that allowed daily newspapers and illustrated magazines, in particular, to carry political news faster, and to more readers, than ever before."

In the same decade, color printing appeared, which gave rise a nationwide "poster craze." Campaign posters papered every wall of every building, in every city; and every candidate "ran as an outsider."

Oddly enough, the 20th century was saner. 

Although voters saw the introduction of phonograph records, radio, weekly magazines, movies and TV, media's power to propel populists waned. 

"Despite the upheavals of the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and Vietnam, the era of national newsmagazines, newsreels, and network broadcasting was a period of remarkable party stability."

But with the advent of mobile phones and the Internet, populism is again heating up.

"The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it," Lepore says. 

"It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative. But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system. And the national weal had better watch out. 

"It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution. 

"With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. 

"At some point, does each of us become a party of one?"

Where Have You Gone, Corporal Agarn?

When media were scarce—as they were when I was young—our states seemed united.

Nearly everyone, if not delighted, was at least familiar with Corporal Agarn, Samantha Stephens, Norman Mailer, Helen Gurley Brown, Perry Como, Chubby Checker and Walter Cronkite.

Today, no one knows who's who, or what’s happening.

You can no longer catch the pulse.

But we yearn to.

That's why Taylor Swift and Star Wars: The Force Awakens are blockbusters, while Vine and Snapchat aren't.

We long to consume and communicate as a nation.

Life in tribes can grow stultifying.

The Web is Too Much with Us

Our Tower of Babel has been under siege for well over 500 years.

Peeved about the patchwork of books in Renaissance libraries, bibliographer Konrad von Gesner complained in 1545 of "the silliness of useless writings of our time."

Annoyed by the algorithms that drive content-streams, blogger Hossein Derakhshan complained last month that, while homely people's brilliance is ignored, "the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant internet presence."

Griping about TMI in fact began with the birth of literacy, each generation thereafter seeing hobgoblins on the horizon.

But maybe, just maybe, the web is too much with us.

So before you release more pap, ask yourself if it's on strategy.

Because, as writer Arjun Basu says, "Without strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff."

HAT TIP: Mark Schaefer's blog {grow} brought Hossein Derakshan to my attention. I urge you to listen to Mr. Schaefer's recent podcast.

Why Facebook Disappoints

While your Facebook friends enjoy Kardashian-esque lives, you plod like a player in Samuel Beckett.

But don't worry: a University of Missouri study shows "Facebook envy" is normal (although too much of it causes depression).

Lead researcher Margaret Duffy thinks using Facebook to connect with friends is healthy.

"However, if Facebook is used to see how well an acquaintance is doing financially or how happy an old friend is in his relationship—things that cause envy among users—use of the site can lead to feelings of depression,” Duffy says.

For the rest of us, Facebook merely disappoints.

That's because, by pasteurizing lives, it sacrifices storytelling—our only source of catharsis.

"A storyteller must publicly display him- or herself as flawed," says screenwriter Neil Landau in 101 Things I Learned in Film School.

"Telling the story you are most afraid to tell—taking real, personal risks, dramatizing taboo events, pushing the protagonist to the edge of reason, showing things that seem too confrontational or emotionally raw for the audience—is most likely to translate into a provocative, memorable film experience."

Facebook just isn't a platform for storytelling.

My Marketing Prediction for 2016

Lacking results, B2B marketers will quit more social media networks than they join.

YEAR-END NOTE: To mark a change in direction, I'm giving Copy Points a new name today, Goodly. I hope you'll keep following my blog, for more good stuff. Happy 2016!

Think Evergreen

Pity the poor cereus, which blooms but a day.

Marketing content's a lot like that.

When measured by clicks, most content flowers but a day or two.

And deservedly so, when marketers are conditioned to think news.

But after all the work of content creation, you'd hope your effort enjoys more than a moment in the sun.

That's why I like evergreen content.

"Evergreen content answers your customers' most common questions, and rarely goes out of date," Mark Schaefer writes in The Content Code.

You can, for example, Tweet once every month about an old evergreen blog post, and receive new rounds of likes, comments and shares from people who missed it, Schaefer says.

You need to stop worrying the content is old and "view evergreen content is an investment in an asset for your business," Schaefer writes.

"If you bought a new tractor for your farm or a new truck for your plumb business, you wouldn't let it just sit around not being used. An investment in content is no different."  

I Tweet Dead People

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn't dead; in fact, it isn't even offline.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, devoted decades of his life to spiritualism, the art of communing with the dead.

He wrote 20 books on the subject; lectured about spiritualism throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and North America; and was an active member of the Society for Psychical Research for 37 years.

My medium for communing with the dead is Twitter.

Presently, I receive regular Tweets from Sir Arthur, Thomas Jefferson, the Ancient Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, and the Victorian lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong.

Tweets from the dead entertain and uplift me while I traverse the underworld (on Metro, not a raft) during my commute.

Indeed, communing with the dead is one of the very best uses of Twitter, which is otherwise largely wasteland. 

I recommend it wholeheartedly, and enjoy the fact the dead can Tweet and pay nothing for their mobile phones.

Woody Allen once wrote, “If man were immortal, do you realize what his meat bills would be?”

What Do Facebook Users Want?

With a grant from the National Institutes of Health, a Boston psychiatrist and psychologist have teamed to answer the question, "Why Do People Use Facebook?"

They reviewed 42 scientific studies of Facebook users and have discovered the following:

• Healthy people enjoy using Facebook because it improves self-esteem (our shield against feeling like outcasts). Women and members of ethnic minorities use it more than men and Caucasians.

• Healthy people don't idealize themselves on Facebook, with one big exception: they present themselves as more emotionally stable than, in fact, they are.

• Narcissists especially enjoy using Facebook, and spend an hour every day in front of the screen. And they love to upload photos, often enhanced with Photoshop.

• Highly neurotic people share more on Facebook than healthy people. They prefer written posts over photos.

• Extraverts have more Facebook friends and are more likely to become Facebook addicts.

• Introverts substitute Facebook use for real-world social interaction. And shy people spend more time on Facebook than people who aren't shy.

• Good-looking Facebook users are more attractive to other users than plain-looking ones; so are users with good-looking friends.

• Facebook users with only 100 friends are unattractive to other users; so are users with 300 friends.

Do the findings make you want to delete your Facebook account and find a shrink's sofa? 

They shouldn't. As Freud said, “A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”

Beware Influencers for Sale

The Federal Trade Commission isn't keen about marketers who truck with shady social media influencers, as two recent cases illustrate.

In November, it slammed ad agency Deutsch for misleading consumers after a rabid junior account exec persuaded fellow employees to use their personal Twitter accounts to broadcast ringing endorsements of Sony's PlayStation Vita game console.

The employees failed to disclose they worked for Deutsch or that Sony was a client, and the FTC ruled their tweets could reasonably be understood as the genuine opinions of consumers.

This month, the FTC charged online network Machinima with consumer deception because it paid two influencers $45,000 to post videos on YouTube that endorsed Microsoft’s Xbox One. Like Deutsch's employees, the two influencers failed to disclose that their seemingly authentic opinions were anything but.

Machinima had guaranteed Microsoft 19 million views of the videos.

Unfortunately, one originated within the FTC.

Publish, Don't Perish

Everyone knows "less is more," says Alexandra Samuel in the Harvard Business Review; but masters of brevity can sound loutish on line.

And one ill-thought-out email can jeopardize a career.

When writing an email or social media post, Samuel suggests you:

• Use a conversational tone
• Start with your key point
• Avoid profanities, acronyms, bragging and kvetching
• Exercise caution with humor
• Be 30% nicer than you are off line
• Adapt your tone to the platform

No matter the topic, "if you write it down, you should be prepared to see it on the front page of a newspaper," Samuel says.

"That doesn’t mean you can’t email your colleagues about confidential business dealings, but be sure that you can live with whatever you’ve written—so don’t write down anything that would sound small-minded or unethical (particularly if taken out of context). And when you’re posting on social networks, which are out in the open, assume that anyone can see anything—including your boss, your mother, your clients, and your kids."