Saying Anything You Want - The Difference Between Radio & Twitter

There is an "alternative" radio station in Seattle called 107.7 The End that I have been listening to for years. They introduced me to Nirvana, The Flaming Lips, Kings of Leon and more. They unapologetically brought me Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky. And I am not going to lie, at the time, I loved them for it.

Over the years, this station has gotten away with more outrageous comments on the radio than anyone would have expected in such a PC city and this afternoon, someone at The End tried to take this attitude online.

Below is a picture of what was published publicly on The End's Twitter account this afternoon:


Before I move on I want to clarify that I am not writing this post out of anger. I believe that the online space should be a space for reflection and rationality, not blame and hate.

I think that whoever published this post failed to understand the nature of the online space.

Radio, for a long time, has been a one-way medium. The station controls what you listen to. From music to talk shows, you hear the main content but miss out on the content that is being generated in parallel to the programing. This means that the listener doesn't know what any other listener thinks of the content being played(besides screened commentators). I believe this creates a lack of accountability. Radio is not held responsible for any of its content by its users.

The Internet, however, is a multidimensional space. Something is said and it can be copied, pasted, forwarded, posted, Tweeted, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, etc. Responses can be made to any of these forms and the original commenter has no control over the information as it spreads through out the system. We call this Viral Marketing if it is positive but have started denoting the negative iteration of this with a #fail sign.

Whoever posted the comment above must not have understood this difference between the two mediums and thus could not have foreseen the potential repercussion (psst I am giving this person a bit more credit than I actually think he/she deserves):


Personal opinions are one thing online but as a Brand you have to be aware that in this space you represent more than just a set of attributes you and your team came up with around a table one afternoon. You represent the team that you work for and the customers that buy your products or services.

Tomorrow morning, The End might decide that they did nothing wrong. That they stuck to their brand. That said, I doubt that "alienate" is something that any senior management from a radio station wants associated with their brand.

UPDATE: This morning, The End posted as statement that claimed that their Twitter account had been hacked.
This seems very fishy since someone was responding to the backlash from The End alias (unfortunately, I failed to get a screen shot of this) for about two hours after the original post went up. If the account had been hacked, the hacker would have posted the comment and watched the storm hit. He/she wouldn't sit there and defend whatever was said. As @jonathanlawson put it this morning, The End's "twitter hacking" explanation is disingenuous. They erased original tweets to dodge accountability. At least now we know the person that posted the original comment isn't the only one over there that doesn't really understand how the online space works.

UPDATE #2: Tech Flash and The Stranger comment on the event and Paul Constant makes a better argument for why it was not a hacker (he also has a screen shot of The End posts!).

UPDATE #3: And The End's response to criticism that it wasn't a hacker.

My Favorite Videos 2009

Long. Short. Humorous. Touching. These are the videos that I would like to share with you as we head into the new year. Enjoy!

#5 Epic 2015 - Especially relevant with the development of Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, Google Goggles,etc




#4 I Feel In Love at the Apple Store - For every mac geek I know!




#3 Horny Turtle Humps Shoe - My wonderful friend Annie discovered this video and has since perfected the Turtle's cry of passion!




#2 Cory dancing to "Single Ladies" - Especially around 36 seconds into the video! Cracks me up EVERY SINGLE time I see this!



#1 Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams - Honestly, one of the most humbling and inspirational videos I have ever seen.

Announcing... Social Creature Media

My Dear Friends,

My business partner, Josh Dirks and I are very excited to announce our new social media marketing company, Social Creature Media.

Social Media is an emerging medium that has the power to engage consumers before, during and long after they enter the buying funnel. It gives marketers new opportunities to capture attention and build long-term relationships. The possibilities are endless and always changing, which makes this an incredibly fun and exciting space to be apart of.

We have been in sort of a "beta" mode for awhile and still have lots to work on but I am happy to say that the business is moving along. Still we are in desperate need of a website, a logo and an office (we are currently working out of Josh's basement). Any suggestions? :)

If you want to hear more about our business or about how it evolves, follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook!

Thank you for all your love and support!

Cheers,
Meg

It's alright. Just be you.

It is really easy to get caught up in what type of image you are presenting to the world. Based on X, will people think I am funny? smart? trendy? attractive? etc?

And now with all the public methods of communication online (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn), the feeling is only intensified. Now you have to have cute profile pictures, legions of friends, funny links, witty blog posts, etc. I think it stifles creativity. It makes people over-analyze how people will react to the ideas and information they put forward.

One of the most freeing things though is being able to let all of this go. Yes, it has taken a bit of time but I've realized that the best face for me to put forward is my own.

This might sound obvious but I have done a lot of censoring of myself over the years and it has never done me any good.

I am a goofball. I say things that are not particularly intelligent. I speculate. I am not quite at a point where I try to formulate opinions about content I feel is beyond me but I sure like passing it on if it struck a cord. I cannot spell for beans! I love silly videos of people singing about falling in love at the Apple store. I like my unflattering pictures (to a point) because that is the real me and it is way easier to be me then try to pretend to be something else.

In conclusion, as I would write in Elementary school, stop thinking so hard about what kind of content you put out on the web. Obviously, you might want to limit somethings, like that drunken rant you posted about your employer or the pictures of the rave you went to the night before a big presentation etc. But all-in-all, real-time web is moving so fast and producing so much content that your dumb post on Tuesday afternoon about frogs coming up SPDY will be ancient history by Wednesday evening, 14 texts, 23 emails, 450 RSS feed posts, and 3,421 tweets later.

San Diego

This past week I went down to San Diego to visit my best friend, Debra. It was kind of a last minute trip. My dad had purchased a non-refundable ticket and ended up not needing it. I asked if I could just use it instead and so I ended up with a free flight to San Diego. Not bad when it was going to be raining in Seattle the whole week. The only catch was that I had to fly into LAX. In my mind, that was alright.

All in all, the trip was a blast. I really enjoyed having my best girlfriend around for the four or five days. We watched the Charger game, went out for a late birthday dinner and sat on the couch at her house, watching movies and catching up. I miss that when I am in Seattle.


Anyway, I didn't want to write about what an amazing time I had on this trip. Debra and I can hold onto those memories ourselves. What I did want to write about though was the revelation that I had while down there. This will probably seem strange to many of you and maybe a bit obvious to most of you.

I have lived in Seattle for over 10 years. I have weathered through 10 long, gloomy winters here. I have come to accept that in fall, you start buckling down and preparing for the winter ahead. You take advantage of every last ounce of sunshine you get, even if it means that your fingers are going to freeze off or you will be blown away by the crisp fall winds. You start bring out the down blankets and the couch throws. You turn on the lights in the middle of the day and you try to accomplish everything you can before four when the sun sets. You also dread daylight savings. Falling back means that dark sets in at three, not four. You dread that you won't see the sun until April and you prepare yourself and your significant other for the inevitable seasonal depression that is going to set in. You start creating contingency plans, strategizing when to take your next vacation (only to sunny locations) so that it will get you through the winter. Have I gotten my point across yet? Either way, the point is that living in Seattle you get used to and anticipate the effects of a long, sunless winter.

Traveling down to San Diego this past week made me remember that the long, depressing winter was not always part of my life and I won't have to be part of my life if I didn't want it to be.

Don't get me wrong, I love living here. There is no place on earth like Seattle in the summer. And I will not be moving anytime soon but I just forgot that the weather/winter isn't like this everywhere (this is the statement that should just be obvious).

If you live in Seattle, I think you will understand my point and appreciate that, for me, this was a revelation. :) Maybe someday, I will relocate to a place that has a few more sunny days than Seattle. But for now, it is just nice remembering that I am choosing to live here and that if I want to I can choose not to live here.

The Jump

My last day at the restaurant I worked at this summer was Saturday and it is a tradition that on your last day you jump off the cafe balcony into the Puget Sound. I have included an image of the restaurant so you can get a better picture. The balcony in on the second story and if you move your eye along the deck all the way to the right you will see the point from which I jumped. I think the tide was a little bit lower that day but not by much.

It is October here in Seattle so it is not warm anymore and I jumped at 11pm so the water was dark and scary (I hate water I can't see in). Fortunately, the Puget Sound only changes a couple of degrees over the course of the year so it was actually not as cold as I thought it was going to be. That said, it was still cold.

There were about thirty staffers that watched my friend, Ivan and me jump. They waited for us at the bottom with warm blankets! Bless them!

All-in-all it was amazing. A lot higher than I had anticipated. I felt like I was falling for ages. But worth it. I never do anything really crazy or adventurous so I thought this was a good way to start easing into it. Plus I have to get prepared to go Skydiving with my brother when he turns 18. Hopefully, I don't pass out in the plane. :)

Twitter for Restaurants : Real-time Customer Service

"You need to make sure that you are aware when an experience becomes negative and take immediate steps to start correcting it." - CA

Over the past five months I have been working for a local restaurant here in Seattle. During this time period, I feel like I have learned an enormous amount about customer service, a value that is important to all businesses but crucial in the restaurant industry.

What has been really fun for me, though, is to think about customer service and how it can be improved through the integration of new technologies.

I ask people everyday, "How is everything tasting?" which normally garners the responses "Wonderful", "Delicious", or "Good" and on rare occasions, "over/undercooked" or "lacks flavor". That said, it is my job as a server to assess customer responses and really determine if my customers are satisfied with their experience or not.

Normally, I feel like I do a pretty good job of analyzing my tables. Verbal and physical queues help substantially, however, there are occasions when I simply cannot tell if a customer being upfront about how they feel about their experience.

Personally, I understand why people might hesitate. When I go out to restaurants, I hate complaining or sending things back. I might be intimidated by the server. I might not want to complain in front of the other guests at my table. Or in the worst scenarios, I might just hope that the situation blows over and my party and I can go back to enjoying our evening.

I know, these are all awful ways of dealing with a problem. But I see it everyday. And unfortunately, for the restaurant, if a person has a bad experience that is not address, be it the restaurants fault or the customers, the customer are most likely going to associate that bad experience with the restaurant and in turn make sure that friends, families, online communities, etc know that they have a negative view of the restaurant.

People who deal with issues at restaurant as I have described above don't understand that great restaurants want to hear about any issues their customers have. They don't want you to fester on them because they want the opportunity to resolve them. They want people to leave their restaurants satisfied.

In my opinion, for restaurants at least, communication (surprise, surprise) is where customer service gets tied up.

Enter the mobile web.

With services like Twitter, Facebook and other social feedback sites, customers are able in real-time to give their opinion about something. Although this can be negative at times, giving an opinion online is often less intimidating because there are less personal consequences in doing so. I think while that might change (soon people might expect businesses to be online and listening online), for now people don't expect anyone to be listening.

And that is exactly where the opportunity is. A restaurant that is a little more tech-savvy can follow real-time feedback on a mobile phone or desktop computer. If any of their customers have, mobile phones and twitter accounts and end up commenting on dinner, a manager will be able to see the comment whenever it is posted. If the comment is posted at any point during the dinner, it gives the manager an option to react to that comment.

Taking it a step further, if restaurants made their customers aware of their presence online, then maybe it would entice customers to comment even more. You could even offer up specific hashtags for people to use when commenting on their experience and thus limiting the noise that might not be as relevant to the manager.

I think this could help restaurants address some of the feedback and issues people encounter at their restaurant before that negative review is posted on yelp.com or before a comment is made to another potential customer about how bad their experience was at X restaurant.