The Social Path

Birmingham Magazine features Luckie's social media team.

Apologies for the blatant chest-thumping here, but I was quite proud to see this writeup in the new issue of Birmingham Magazine. (Click on the picture to see a full-size version.)

The writer, Carla Jean Whitley, did a great job boiling down the recent conversation she had with me and my cohort Whitney Sides Mitchell.

One of the main points I hoped to get across was the fact that there is a vital place in social media marketing for full-service agencies like Luckie & Company. I think veteran agencies have a level of breadth, experience, strategic perspective and resources that can be hard to find with solely digital upstarts or consultants.

Don't get me wrong. I think there are some stellar freelancers and specialized shops out there. But it feels like mid-sized agencies like ours often get short shrift in discussions of "who should be doing social media marketing."

In the end, I think the only way you can tell who would be the right social media partner for your business is to look for marketing folks who share your passion and your vision for reaching out to customers in new, rewarding ways. Maybe it's a two-person shop that just launched last week. Or maybe it's a highly experienced agency that's been around since the 1950s.

But whomever you're considering, I'd give them bonus points if they have a giant picture of a guy's nostrils on their lobby wall.

Robots and Supermen among us...

...and other wacky tech news this week of June 22nd - 26th.

• News of the popstar's sudden death spread the world over like lightning -- and almost took the earth's axis with it. [Canada.com]
• The dreamiest incarnation of Superman made a return this week, when we started seeing ads for Microsoft's Internet Explorer featuring none of than Dean Cain? [Switched]
• Social site Mashable launches the Twitter Guide Book, which gives you every possible bit of information you'd need for starting, understanding or hanging tough on Twitter. [Mashable]
• Talk about being ahead of the curve... one blog has compiled a wishlist of apps that have yet to be invented. The suggestions start at searching people and faces in your immediate vicinity to letting your smartphone FIND your keys or car for you. Wow. [ReadWriteWeb]
• AdFreak reports on robot spottings worldwide lending promotional support to the new Transformers movie. Yes, I'm serious. Robots. Hopping on motorcycles and stuff. [AdFreak]

This week's photo credit: tipoyock/Flickr

Twitter fights, subpoenas and Twilight

I was inspired this week to share links that were in some cases dramatic and in others just plain unbelievable.

• A city in Montana has been asking recent job applicants to turn over information about their social networking activity online. And by information, I mean, they are requiring passwords to Facebook, Myspace and even forums! [Switched]
• Guess what doesn't stay in Vegas? Internet anonymity! In other surprisingly similar news, a Las Vegas newspaper has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to release information on the identities of their commenters. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Guy tweets "so my apartment just collapsed". Luckily he was way across the country at the time, but woooow. [Mashable]
• This year's graduates are being documented by MTV News as to their hopes and fears, milestones and defining moments. Of these defining attributes, one is America's election of its first biracial president, while another is a popstar wearing a suit made out of sequin bubbles who sings about disco sticks. Priorities, folks. [MTV News]
• DRAMA INDEED: Infamous gossip blogger Perez Hilton was in Toronto covering the MuchMusic awards when he claimed on Twitter that he was physically attacked by Black Eyed Peas' frontman Will.i.am. It gets stranger: instead of immediately calling the police about the incident, he begged his thousands of followers to summon the police to his hotel. As of Monday morning, Will.i.am had already taken to videoblogging his side of the story on his very own account. [Daily Contributor]

This week's photo credit: dpdixon/Flickr

Iran brings the world its first Twittered revolution.

A mere few months ago, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah brought Twitter to the mainstream masses. Soon enough, people were jumping to prove that Twitter had been overhyped and was on the verge of stagnation.

Then came the Iranian Election. In the days since, Twitter has proven to be a vital hub of information for a peaceful revolution that has been locked out of almost any other communication channel.

If you've only been on the periphery of this online saga, here are a few links (in chronological order) to get you up to date:

• "US State Dept. Helping Twitter Stay Up For Iranians" [ReadWriteWeb]
• "Iran's Twitter Revolution" [The Nation]
• "Iran's struggle for free expression on Twitter." [NPR]
• "Twitterers Protests CNN's 'FAIL'" [WSJ]
• "Ahmadinejad Rally Photoshopped to Appear Larger" [Daily Kos]
• "Social media allows reports despite Tehran's curbs." [NPR]
• "Twitter 1, Censors 0: Why it's still working." [MSNBC]
  

Those of us active on Twitter have noticed that for the past several days, thousands upon thousands of updates have been labeled with the #iranelection tag, allowing for news to spread quickly before being "blacked out" by the Iranian government's current ban on most forms of media coverage.

One inspiring thing to come out of Iran's recent struggle with election tallies and suffering democracy is citizen heroism. The decency and compassion in which the Iranian reformist protesters conduct themselves makes it even harder to watch in real time when violence flares up.

Meanwhile, Iran's government officials are seeking out bloggers within Iran and filling Twitter with false information.

 I won't name any specific Iranian bloggers since I know they currently have a bounty on their heads, but if you like your news and information in real time, you can watch it all unfold on Twitter Search (even if you're not a user).

This post was co-written by Whitney Sides Mitchell and David Griner.

Remembering Barry Beckett, a quiet musical legend.

Music lovers everywhere, especially here in Alabama, suffered a tremendous loss last week with the death of Barry Beckett. Mr. Beckett was keyboardist for the legendary four-member Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, immortalized in the lyrics of Lynyrd Skykyrd's Sweet Home Alabama as "The Swampers."

I never got to meet Mr. Beckett, but I did get to sit down with two of his partners, David Hood and Roger Hawkins, as part of our series of Web interviews for The Year of Alabama Arts.

If you've got a few minutes, check out this YouTube playlist of excerpts from an incredible chat with some incredibly humble music legends:

To hear the Rhythm Section in top form, especially Mr. Beckett's subtle but distinct piano playing, just give a listen to Paul Simon's "Kodachrome."

The looming Twitpocalypse (and other overhyped news).

Whitney Mitchell again brings us her weekly wrapup of social media news, The Social Pathology Report:

The end of the world is nigh, at least on Twitter, and at least as of Friday afternoon, according to Twitpocalypse.com.

Apparently, a bug similar to Y2K (geez, really?) is going to wipe out the social drug known as Twitter, and people will no longer be able to share with the world their shouts of expertise or the fact that they just found a parking space.

I'm sure Griner will be back to comment on Monday on this weekend's events, but I'll be on a beach somewhere delighting in the suspense!

NOW, onto the week that was.

• Almost every graphic designer here was glued to the computer this week to see the newest of the Mac new, the soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S. Here's a guided tour, courtesy of GearLive.com.  [Video]
• The internet also brought us the news that Japan's Kaguya lunar probe went out in a blaze of glory, by crashing into the moon's surface at 4,000 mph! [Scientific American]
• Switched raises a pretty haunting question for gamers everywhere: Will Digital Downloads kill video game stores? [Switched]
• Following in this post's tradition of laughing at Twitter hysteria, check out Conan O'Brien's newest endeavor, the Tweet Tracker. [Business Insider]
• Nowadays with Bing, WolframAlpha and LetSimonDecide, it seems decisions are being outsourced as much as some jobs. [ReadWriteWeb]
• Speaking of brainy li'' search engine WolframAlpha, it's now available in app form. Great, now arguments will be settled even more by my husband stopping the conversation while typing away on his iPhone. Thanks guys. [Mashable]

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

Must watch: Zombies, Skittles and innovative brillance.

If you haven't heard of "augmented reality," you might want to check out a recent post I wrote for AdFreak about how GE is using the new technology. Essentially, it blurs the lines between real life and video.

To see an incredible evolution of the concept, check out the video below from the Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design. It's easy to see what a dramatic promotion this could be for marketing partners like Nvidia and Skittles.

How cool is that? Big thanks to Craig Daitch and C.C. Chapman for digging this up.

The Five-Second Challenge: Why are you posting that?

"People just don't stop to think before they post things online."

That quote from our IT manager, Alan Jones, came out of a conversation he and I had months ago about online privacy and security. It's a simple truth that can change your entire outlook on social media.

And thus was born the Five-Second Challenge.

Here's how it works: Next time you're about to post a Facebook status, Twitter update or blog comment, pause for five seconds.

At worst, it might help you think of a better way to phrase things. At best, it might stop you from writing something that could have unintended consequences — like identity theft, hurt feelings, embarrassment or burglary.

A few things you might ask yourself in that five seconds:

• Why am I writing this?
• Am I giving away private info about myself or my family?
• Would I ever say this to a stranger on the street?
• Am I revealing my travel plans or otherwise showing when I'm not home?
• Am I just bragging to impress people?
• How will I feel if my boss sees this?
• What about a client?
• This will live on the Web forever. Am I cool with that?
• Am I adding to the sum of human knowledge?
• Does anyone really give a crap?

OK, so I doubt you'll have time to tackle all that. But you get the idea.

I've tried my best to do this since that talk with Alan months ago. And you know what? I've probably deleted a fourth of the updates I've started to write. Oh, I doubt they would have done any damage. But they also wouldn't have had any benefit to anyone whatsoever.

So take the Five-Second Challenge and let me know how it goes.

The goal isn't to make you paranoid or to suck all the fun out of social media. But if it makes you a little more cautious and insightful, then I'd say it's five seconds well spent.

Today's photo credit: motleypixel on Flickr.

'Sometimes, you just have to save the world on your own.'

Is the solo video game a dying art?

I've been thinking about that quite a bit since picking up a few used Xbox 360 games during a recent sale at GameStop. As the guy behind the counter was ringing me up, he stopped to give me a warning about the critically acclaimed title Mass Effect: "You know that this one's offline-only, single-player, right?"

Until then, I'd honestly never realized how much video gaming has become a community experience, thanks largely to online services like XBox Live and innovative party games like Rock Band.

So is the solo gaming experience on the way out?

I posed this question to my friend Dale Mulcahy, a 3D effects artist for Activision's Treyarch Studio who worked on games such as Call of Duty: World at War. He said that game developers still put a lot of emphasis on the single-player aspect of each game, though players don't always share the priority:

"There is a very high percentage of Call of Duty: World at War players that skipped the solo campaign and went straight into multiplayer. I think I'm safe in assuming this is the case for Call of Duty 4 and any other game popular for its online component. But still, most of our development time goes into the flagship solo campaign because, I dunno, it just feels like it's the core of the game.

"Also, I think many developers feel that their multiplayer modes are extensions of the single player campaign. This philosophy might not prevail in a few years considering where the players are running to first."

Since GameStop's where I was first inspired to tackle this topic, I figured I might as well throw it back in their lap. I turned to Gary Offutt, GameStop's online editor, who just got back from the massive E3 gaming conference.

Gary responded with a truly fantastic writeup on why he believes single-player gaming will never die. I couldn't bear to cut a word, so read it in its entirety after the jump.

Questionable bus routes, gardenias and bad news bears...

So, after a month of Mondays (or more like half a Friday) off, here I am with my little links and useful urls. As you can probably tell from the alliteration, I'm glad to be back. I'm in a fantastic mood, mostly because one of my coworkers left a fresh gardenia on my desk this morning. Viva la Friday!

• Smart phone users have been all over the search engine made especially for mobile devices, Taptu. ReadWriteWeb breaks it down and lets us know if it's any good. [RWW]
• BAD NEWS BEARS: All you pirates (of the musical persuasion), the MPAA has now trained dogs to sniff out "fresh from falling off of the truck" CDs by identifying chemicals "integral to the bootlegging process." [Switched]
• Headline of the week: "Back Up The Porn Bus." Got your attention? The newest wunderkid of the Google-killer kind, Microsoft's search engine Bing has been in some pretty hot water over one little fluke: its easy access to porn. [DownloadSquad]
• In the past few months at Luckie, some of my favorite moments have been spent with our digital communications planner, Keith Browder. I'm surprisingly interested in metrics, purchasing and parking domain names. Here's a primer for everyone who is wondering about the Do's and Don'ts of company URLs. [ReadWriteWeb]
• The professional golfers of the LPGA have refused to tweet while competing, citing the opinion that it shouldn't happen in ANY sport. What do YOU think? [Mashable]

Whitney Sides Mitchell is an intern social media planner for Luckie & Company, founder of the local-music blog BHAM.FM and a music blogger for AL.com. Her Social Pathology Report appears here each Friday.

This week's photo credit: futurowoman/Flickr