Swing music is great for working on transitions, because the music changes are fun and predictable.

Internet culture is slightly different, although beer guts are still plenty acceptable. Many of the original internet memes were spawned by the heroes of 4chan, such as LOLcats and demotivational posters. Do you know the meme that sparked the popularity of Domo Kun in the US? Nintendo hopes not, and I won’t say as I’m not sure what age group finds this blog entertaining.

The main advantage of meme marketing is not only the ability to tie arbitrary information to something meaningful, but also that this generation loves a good joke and will make your message go viral. Which you want very much.

If you are going to enter this world of vicious hilarity, it is absolutely imperative that you (and the organization you represent) have a sense of humor and the ability to endure a good joke. You’ve been warned; I take no responsibility for any sleepless nights incurred amongst countless tear-soaked tissues.

Step 1:

Educate yourself on current memes. Check out 4chan, subscribe to Know Your Meme, and have a glance at what’s trending on Twitter.

Start by sharing the memes others have created. If you can find some that relate to your industry, fabulous. Though as I will show you later, that’s not absolutely essential.  Try opening a Google image search with something like “meme + [industry keyword].”

Here’s what I got with “meme + plumber”:

Post a couple of those up every now and then.  You don’t want to go crazy with it, although I understand how tempting it can be to share something hilarious right away.  Fight the impulse and spread it thin.

Step 2:

Start making your own versions of current memes. Wonderful Pistachios does a great job of this, even when the topic is nothing relative to nuts.

Of course, photos are way easier. Generally two skills are pertinent to this process, a little bit of digital imaging (“Photoshop”) knowhow, and the ability to crack a clever quip in a small amount of space. Usually if you can master the second bit, you can get away with a crappy photo you made in Paintbrush.  Sometimes all it takes is for you to add words to a picture, and icanhascheezburger has made that so very simple. Test your skills with this meme builder.

In other cases, you don’t even need text, just a funny picture, such as with the Paula Deen Riding Things meme. Perhaps our plumber might have her straddling a drain snake thingy, or the back of someone’s low-riding jeans.

Remember that in any case the goal is to be clever, with big bonus points for simplicity.

Step 3:

When your fans have gotten used to your sense of humor, you can up the ante by taking it interactive. You might post a picture like this one, which I found by Google image searching “Plumber + needs caption.”

Stick that piece of gold up on your page with the message “ADD YOUR OWN CAPTION” and be sure to Like or RT the responses, inspiring future interaction. You can also encourage people to share the image on their own wall or Twitter feed, inviting their friends to play along.

Again, you are allowed to reach outside your direct industry for inspiration, especially when you have established yourself as a source of comical amusement.

Step 4:

Step four is not for everyone, and that is to come up with your own meme. It’s really tricky and definitely not to be attempted until you are a meme expert and your audience is fully engaged in your shenanigans.

An example of this would be HootSuite’s “Owling” contest, in which they asked users to submit photos of themselves crouching like owls. This idea came from the planking phenomenon which captivated giggling interwebbers for months.

However, even the giant HootSuite had some difficulty pulling this off. I don’t know why people are so disinclined to enter photo contests with as easy as picture uploads have become, but that’s just how it is.

And you can pretty much forget about video contests. I worked for an organization that offered teenagers, the most tech-savvy breed of subhuman, $500 (which is like $7,500 in teen dollars at the current exchange rate) for a simple video. One kid entered the contest. She wrapped Christmas lights around herself and won $500 for it.

Of course, in certain niche markets this can be pulled off.  Viewers of Americas Funniest Home Videos got pretty excited about demolishing innocent snowmen, and Daniel Tosh can get people to film themselves doing pretty much anything.  If you are not either of those entities, proceed with caution. Give your audience the tools to succeed, an idea to spark creativity, and the flexibility to take it in their own direction.  The latter was what made planking so popular – everyone had a different take of the original idea.

Internet memes are about fun. If this is suitable to your organization’s culture, have at it. You’ll find it a lot more entertaining than drafting a press release.

First I tried sending a picture message to 40404, as I had enabled tweeting via text messages.  Facebook finds this perfectly acceptable, but nothing happened on Twitter.  Then I tried using Twitpic, sending a picture as an attachment first to a text message and then from a mobile email.  Neither worked and the email option took a lot more effort than I care to put into a tweet.

Tried a few other apps, like Peep, which came preloaded on my jerk of a phone and assaulted me with notifications.  I used HootSuite’s mobile app while covering an event from a presentation room that did not satisfy my Wi-Fi hungry laptop.

HootSuite worked fine, but I found it overwhelming.  There are too many options on one screen, and it isn’t organized well visually. Especially if you have 20 Twitter accounts linked into the same HootSuite account.

I considered TweetDeck, but the review section is stacked with users complaining of program crashes and bugs.  TweetCaster’s reviews were much more positive.

TweetCaster’s format makes controlling multiple accounts much easier, as it puts more distance between them, with options for each one listed on separate screens, rather than tossing them together in a tabulated stream.   However it is still just as easy to tweet from multiple accounts at once, because every tweet box has the same multiple account selection feature that HootSuite uses.  The system makes much more sense for a cell phone.

Did I mention that attaching pictures and links is even easier than on the old fashioned website?  Check it out in this quick video, in which I will take and post a photo of what I’m doing right now.

I still think HootSuite is top dog on the internet, but for my tiny phone browser, the interface is too messy.  Of course it does offer link tracking and other analytics, which can be important too.  And HootSuite works fine on an iPad, but if you don’t want to use your iPad to take pictures, an extra step is created.

Hopefully either TweetCaster or HootSuite will absorb the strong points of the other and create a super HootCaster or TweetSuite.

What this brilliant educator was referring to was the notion that proactively getting to know members of the media would be of immeasurable benefit during times of catastrophe.  This idea makes perfect sense, because reporters will be naturally inclined to represent your side of the story more favorably if you are already on good terms with them.  It can also be combined with a social media technique which steps around reporters and reaches the audience directly.

A solid subscriber base of people interested in your product or service is a valuable asset; these people already have some inclination to support your organization, and can easily help your message spread through the interwebs like the flu spreads through an elementary school.  This is the opposite approach to the “no comment” mistake, which ended up tanking companies like the Peanut Corporation of America, which went bankrupt in 2009 after the Peanut Butter Crisis.

BP was another company that decided to ignore the general public, prompting outraged consumers to create mock Twitter accounts, making the disaster even worse than it already was.

Canned Mouse, Canned Statement

More recently, allegations have been brought against Pepsi by a customer claiming to have found a dead mouse in his can of Mountain Dew.  Pepsi states that this is impossible, because the acidity of the soft drink would have disintegrated the mouse before the product reached its drinker.  While this doesn’t exactly sound like a positive point to me, people who choose to Do the Dew don’t really seem to care how awful the beverage is for them, and Pepsi is doing a great job at responding to mentions coming directly from their customers over the social networks.

Finally, this system has the added benefit of the ability to gauge public opinion, which is particularly important during times of crisis.  Mountain Dew is getting a lot more feedback about a running contest than the dead rodent, which is probably good news for them.

Why is that? The developers must have been extremely insightful, as they have recognized the delight with which people share information online and have capitalized on the notion of letting people connect this to their own identity.  Yelp users are able to do much more with the site than rant about the terrible service they received at Big Nancy’s House of Waffles.

The social aspect of Yelp allows those who have signed up for it to connect to one another on a personal level through the forums. People get to know their neighbors in a sense and learn to trust their judgment.  This dual-birded slingshot gives users what they want while strengthening the primary structure of the website. The tagline really says it all.

It’s also got an intense spam filter that might actually be considered a little excessive.  You won’t find that on City Search, which is littered with obviously made up reviews (insultingly so) from companies hired by other companies trying to push crappy products or services upon people they must consider tremendous idiots.  I’d prefer to get filtered out by Yelp until my profile is established than to try to sift through the garbage on a site like City Search, which is actually of very little use to anyone.

Yelp’s Achilles Heel:

There is one aspect of Yelp, however, that makes me want to tear my hair out.  If you’ve ever wanted to experience a ghoulish nightmare in real life, try to update the information for your business.  This content is often “locked” by the administrators.  And don’t think you can get a human being or any kind of primate on the phone, because Yelp, like the head cheerleader from your high school days, is too busy for your phone calls.

This is one point where Angie’s List excels.  I was delighted to find that upon calling them for an info update, a real live person answered the phone on the first ring (no VNR at all!) and transferred me to another human without any hold time or ridiculous jazz music.  And here’s how the conversation went once that polite fellow picked up:

Polite Angie’s List Fellow: Hello, what’s the name of the business?

Me: [I told him]

Polite Angie’s List Fellow: Ok let me pull that up… Oh, it looks like there are multiple listings of this business, I’ll send a request to merge those. What can I help you with today?

Me: Uh that was it and you’re awesome.

Polite Angie’s List Fellow: [laughing] We hope to provide the best level of service to our clients, given the nature of our business.

Me: Hmmm do you think you can you get a hold of Yelp for me?

Yelp’s just got too much on its plate, like Facebook. Got an issue with Facebook? Waste an hour scouring the outdated and unhelpful FAQs if you like, but don’t ever dream of talking to someone from the company.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Yelp, and I hope they don’t over-extend their services the way Facebook has done.  But they’ve got some Google in them there, and they stand behind their position to allow free speech without allowing businesses to hush it up with bribes. They’re even open about the criticism they receive on their Yelp review page. And there’s a lot of it.

I think Yelp’s got the business model straight. So long as they don’t get greedy, the entire US will be Yelping in no time.  Hurry, go pick out a silly avatar!

Twitter’s basic etiquette is generally follow-me and I-might-follow-you, so you must be following people who have some interest in your product, and they might just return the favor.  So really the trick is to *find* local followers, and follow them.  (I’d like to point out that many blogs would just BS around that concept without any further information, but this one’s going to give you something meaty to chew on.)

So how do you find those people?  Well think about reality for a minute. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s that thing your start to notice when you laptop battery dies, or the fail whale insists upon smiling at you nonchalantly.

If you were literally, creepily following your customers, where would they be? Let’s say you’re the owner of a toy shop. You notice that most of your products are bought by people who have had kids for some reason.  After your clients leave your store with their smiling little creatures, where could you imagine them going?  The park? The ice cream parlor? The grocery store? Think about the businesses around you with which you share customers, and capitalize on the work they’ve already done.  It’s the American way.

You’ll want to focus on local places, so targeting the followers of @ToyRUs isn’t going to get you anywhere.  But if there’s a TRU franchise with its own account near you, have at it. Not likely in this case, but you will be surprised who’s actually out there tweeting, so don’t be afraid to look.

Generally finding one good business can be a jackpot for many more, because they’re usually on lists made up of area businesses by people who want to keep a tab on stuff around their houses.  These lists are basically a goldmine of other companies whose followers you can share. This idea is expanded upon in my past blog, here.

Certain cities, such as, (unfortunately) Las Vegas, are more of a challenge for certain industries, because the Twittersphere is run by casinos, clubs, and their promoters, who are largely followed by tourists and other businesses rather than the fantastic locals.  So when I can expand the realm of the target to Sparks or Reno, the task has a higher success rate.  Small towns can actually be very good for this.

If your service is something a variety of local folks enjoy, such as a gas station or a hospital, you’re in luck.  Those types of industries do not need to be as specific in who they seek out, and so absorbing the following of @ColoSpringsNews or @GrouponDenver will be just dandy.

Remember that you need to be continuously purging your follower list every so often (once a week is fine), and I can tell you how to do that manually, here.  Or you can go the easier route and pay for a service that will mostly automate the following and purging for you, and you can find info on that here.

Yep, the world of Twitter is just full of possibilities.  Happy following, let me know in the comments whose subscribers you plan on creeping!

Since as far back as I can remember (somewhere in the 2003 range) there have been two successful approaches to marketing on the internet: search engine optimization and social networking.  Google is a search engine king now (successfully) entering the realm of social media, fusing the two together forever as one.  It’s really quite romantic if you think about it.

It all started last year, when Google introduced social search.  Before it, everyone got pretty much the same results.  After making an adjustment to the algorithm, the rankings started taking your social networks into account when populating results.  The links you see are now affected by what the people in your networks have shared, what’s near you, and what you’ve searched in the past.  Results have transformed from a baggy one-size-fits-all style to a personalized ensemble that fits you like a glove.

Then came the +1 button.  Did you notice that little guy’s been hanging out next to each listing for the past few months?  That’s another tweak to the algorithm which essentially allows you to cast a vote for a page to receive top listings.  That’s right, Google cares about your opinion.

…Facebook would

-make you fill out 189 pages of paperwork before you’re hired
-tell you what a good idea you had, and then tell everyone else what a good idea he had.
-hype up the company’s training and support sectors, even those departments don’t actually exist
-hire you to take keep your talent away from competitors, and then park you in the mailroom (@hwande)
- pay you to badmouth your former employer to his current clients
-keep a file on you hundreds of pages thick that detailed your every move within the company
-tap your phone, just in case
-carefully file and store the contents of your trash bin.

…Twitter would

-provide you with resources of people you should know and information that will help you
-keep internal meetings brief, very brief.
-throw trendy work parties that make everyone laugh
-put a ton of support behind charitable causes surrounding disasters
-never shut up long enough to let you get any work done

…MySpace would

-have laid you off a long time ago.
-be a terrible reference

…Digg would

-Respect your opinions and share them with others
-Send you home because of ongoing construction
-Pretty much keep you from doing anything productive, ever.

…Google+ would

-Keep jerking you around about whether there is or isn’t an opening

Please feel free to add to this in the comments section!

Really I guess it’s Mark Zuckerberg that I don’t trust.  Maybe it’s the profuse sweating he does when asked about privacy issues, or maybe it’s the obscenity he used to describe those who trust him with their information.  It could have something to do with how he paid to spread lies about darling Google.  But still, Facebook was a good idea, even if it wasn’t Zuckerberg’s idea.

Lately though, it’s gotten much harder to defend Facebook.  It’s become the new MySpace.  Dig deep into your memory; there was a time in the long-long ago that MySpace was without the status bar.  It got one shortly after Facebook invented it.  And remember when Facebook chat came out? What was right on its heels? Ah yeah, MySpace chat.

But what’s happened to that innovative chat feature now?  It’s pissing people off all over the place, because the sidebar only shows the first names in your friends list, rather than the ones who are online.  And it’s so strange that they just launched video chat, just as Google+ hangouts became available. What a coincidence.

Another coincidence is how the friend feature changed on Facebook when the Circles feature became so popular.  Facebook has gotten used to stealing ideas. After all, it’s tried to consume the success of many lovable websites, like drop.io, FourSquare, Groupon, and even sweet Gmail.  When they tore down drop.io, I was devastated, but it was when they started after Google that I officially told Facebook to Zuck off.

The whole point of the network was to get away from the drama of MySpace.  Guess what – it’s caught up.  All the same crap about DFS taking so-and-so’s kids has made Facebook into a Wall of Shame, and  I’m tired of my feed only showing certain users, often those who I couldn’t care less about, while people I would like to keep up with are shut out.

I especially hate trying to contact Facebook for ANYTHING EVER because the support is simply not there.   The help pages are generally a joke and I have to seek out blogs almost every time I have an issue.  Trying to claim a community page? Good zucking  luck!  You’ll get an autoreply that promises service within a week, but don’t count on ever hearing from them.

I’m pretty sure Suckerberg’s idea was to get everyone hooked and then start charging businesses for their usage, expanding on the advertising dollars already coming in.  But Google’s put a kink in his hose, and it’s about damn time.

I think the problem is, well, for one, as I mentioned, Facebook has gotten in the habit of stealing ideas.  And two, they keep getting caught zucking up, but no one ever leaves the network over it.   There is a growing sense of immunity that will ultimately lead to the fall of Facebook, just as it did for that one site… what was that called? MySpace, I think it was.  Especially with a new option offered by the heroic Google.  Your days are numbered, villain.

Social networking is a love story.  And the story goes like this:

In the beginning, you fall in love with a punk rocker named MySpace, the singer of a local emo band, in fact.  He’s wild and free, very much into self-expression and the music that he loves.  Life with MySpace is a continous party.  But after awhile, you get tired of seeing sluts all over him constantly, and he refuses to do anything about it.

At the end of the relationship, this guy Facebook comes along and sweeps you off your feet.  He’s clean cut and educated, and he doesn’t let just anyone into his life.  For awhile you’re wooed by his inventiveness, but later in the relationship, that ingenuity gives way to greed, and suddenly he too will intermingle with anyone who will show him a little attention.  At the same time, he becomes more and more controlling of you, always wanting to know what you’re doing and who you’re with.  He tries to tell you who to talk to, and wants all of your plans and communication to go through him.

Realizing Facebook’s flaws, you start seeing Twitter on the side.  First casually, just as friends, but when you realize how clever and thoughtful he is, you become more involved.  His generosity is in complete contrast to the ideals of Facebook, and you admire that of him.  But he often tries to help far more people than he can handle, and he’s just too unstable to ever turn into anything serious, so you continue seeing Facebook.  Facebook knows you have been hanging out with Twitter, and becomes insanely jealous.  And of course he doesn’t want you talking to MySpace either.

MySpace’s career as a rock star did not pan out the way he’d planned, and he calls you intermittently, even though you always tell him you’re not interested.  He’s already written over 30 songs about how heartbroken he is, and he wants you to know that he’ll always love you, no matter how much it hurts.

Meanwhile Facebook’s attitude just gets worse.  He sees that you’re putting up with his controlling crap, and knows that he’s the best option you’ve got, so he doesn’t really care.  He continues his quest to completely rule your life, completely secure in the fact that no one could ever take you away from him.

And then Google+ moves into the neighborhood.  He seems to be the best of all worlds –articulate, well-established, and trusting.  He’s creative and intuitive and doesn’t ask for your phone number right away.  He’s clearly not motivated by money, even though he happens to be loaded and he understands business very well.   Unfortunately for you, he’s still recovering from a recent heartbreak and just isn’t quite ready  to begin a serious relationship because he doesn’t want to make the same mistakes over again.

But you can see it in his beautiful, honest eyes that he cares for you deeply, so you vow to wait until he is ready, in the mean time loosely courting Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter, relaxed as he is, doesn’t seem to mind, as he is a free spirit and has a lot going on, too.  Facebook, on the other hand, is furious and makes up lies about Google+ to try to prolong your relationship status.  All the while, MySpace writes sonnets about you from his parents’ basement and dreams that you will someday come back to him.