What media do you prefer "old school"?

What do you do "old school," and what do you do digitally -- or even as an early adopter? The ongoing personal technology evolution is indeed a personal -- very personal -- matter. And we've all got our own style and pace.

That style and pace typically defines how we are holding on to the old as the new continues to sweep into the consumer marketplace and our lives. (Think iPad for Christmas.) Do we hold onto what we love -- some people feel a loyalty to newspapers, for instance -- or is it a random pattern in each of our lives, defined by what we can afford and when we discover new devices?

This is a historic change, but it is reflected on an individual basis. According to a Booz and Co. article titled "Preparing For Generation C":

Currently, there are 4.6 billion mobile users (67 per cent of the world population) and 1.7 billion Internet users globally. By 2020, the number of people using mobile phones will reach six billion (nearly 80 per cent of the world population) and 4.7 billion people will access the Internet, primarily through their mobile devices.

That global change is an enormous power converting the legacy media in our lives to digital and mobile media. We each resist it -- and embrace it -- in our own way. Some people still love ink on paper. Yet those same people might be addicted to their GPS, text alerts to breaking news, and Facebook on their Droid. What's most interesting to me is what a hodgepodge it is -- you never know how someone is a secret Luddite. What is it that you hold onto as the global online evolution pulls the books from our hands?

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, enjoy picking it up off the front lawn six days a week, unfolding it, leafing through it, and even stacking the old ones in a corner in the office. Yet I read The New York Times on my iPad, and Mashable on my iPhone.

I don't really know why I use the dead-tree model for the Journal. I just do. More than 1.6 million other people do, too. About 2.3 million people prefer it online, for reasons only known by them. This month, the number of people getting news online finally surpassed the number reading newspapers, according to a Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism study.

eBooks sales have skyrocketed, while sales of printed books have slumped, and bookseller Borders has declared bankruptcy -- but students say they prefer printed textbooks. One might think a younger demographic, and one that has to haul books around on their backs all day, might prefer eBooks. (The cost of a tablet could be a factor.)

I listen to books on my iPhone (in double speed, in fact), a habit that others find bizarre. But I take notes on paper, from years of working as a newspaper man.

It occurs to me that these are no logical, conscious decisions, but haphazard changes of lifestyle. Example: The other night I suggested to my girlfriend that we rent a movie on iTunes, and watch it on my desktop monitor from my couch. She responded as if I'd asked if she wanted to eat dinner off the kitchen counter, saying, "We should watch a movie on your TV."

We ended up watching "Ghost Town" on my computer. After a long discussion. In the media war between the Flintstones and the Jetsons, everyone's private life is a struggle.

Fast facts to commemorate Twitter's 5th birthday

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. About 400 employees work at the company.

• Founder Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet five years ago today. You can see it here.
• Dorsey dreamed up the idea while eating Mexican food on a kids slide in a park, according to Wikipedia.
• You can see when you joined Twitter here. I joined April 22, 2008, at the urging of my friend Brandon Uttley, who joined June 22, 2007.
• Twitter's "tipping point" is said to be the 2007 South by Southwest conference, when tweets boomed from 20,000 a day to 60,000 a day, according to Wikipedia.
• As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets were posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter.
• San Antonio's Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets in 2009 and found 40% of them to be "pointless babble."
  
• Yiying Lu, an Australian artist, concocted the notorious "fail whale" illustration triggered when Twitter is overwhelmed by users.
• I met Twitter co-founder Evan Williams in 2008, and found him gracious and fun. He tweeted about a serial I was writing on Twitter at the time about a female werewolf in San Francisco.
  
• The most popular Twitter personality is Lady Gaga with 8.9 million followers.

At Twitter in 2009. Co-founder Evan Williams' wife is said to have picked out the green deer statues.

Brands don't have conversations. People do.

If you Google the words social media strategy on this morning in mid-March, 2011, you will see more than 23 million results. Every one of them is hokum. Social media is conversation. No one in their right mind wants to have a conversation with someone who has a strategy. Mostly because those people are called salesmen (or saleswomen).

Imagine you were in a store, and an employee came over to say hello to you, to ask if he (or she) could help you, and to represent the business in a conversation. "Wait a second," someone in management said, pulling the employee back. "What's your strategy in speaking with that customer? Let's figure out what our goals are first."

Creepy. Do you want to be that customer, watching management and employee commiserate over what they want to do to you? I don't. Let's get outta here.

At a social media conference in Austin last year (not that Austin event, actually), I heard Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Get Back In The Box" and "Cyberia," say there's no such thing as an "authentic brand." In a long (and sometimes academic) address, he made the point that authentic businesses -- say, a farmer who sold his wares back in the old days -- didn't need to be branded. He was who he was. It wasn't until businesses got away from their roots, outgrew that personal basis, and entered a more impersonal marketplace, that we needed to give them a name, a picture or a slogan. A brand is a symbol conveying an image, and therefore inherently representative, or inauthentic. (Told you it was academic.)

The point is, I don't want to talk to a brand, or an employee with a strategy. I want to talk to people.

Social media strategy has replaced social media expert as the new buzz words in our field. I don't believe in either. On my fellowship to Stanford in 2008-'09 studying social media, I met Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams (founder of Twitter), and Craig Newmark (Craig of Craigslist). Those are social media experts. People like me are communications professionals. No shame in that, unless we pretend to be experts of something we're not. Social media is full of charlatans. You don't need their help nearly as much as they want your money. You'd be much better off getting a communications professional who knows your business, or simply a well-spoken employee.

Let's go back to the store. What if the manager pulled back the employee, brought in someone with a slick strategy who didn't know the business, and pointed them at you? Now let's run.

The more strategic (and application-based, but that's another topic) social media is, the less authentic it is. Conversation is free-flowing. And, as any good conversationalist exemplifies, depends upon good listening.

Management, let that employee approach the customer. The employee doesn't need a social media strategy. He or she just needs to know your business, to know the tools of the communications field, and to know how to listen. Then what unfolds will be authentic.

What do the 1972 Miami Dolphins and Woody Allen have in common? Me

I'm an expert on the 1972 Miami Dolphins, Elvis Costello, typewriters, and the films of Woody Allen. This a weird collection of topics for expertise, but I would guess most of us know a lot about a few things. I collect information about these topics casually -- for instance by "liking" them on Facebook, or reading wikipedia articles about them. I look at pictures, or, in the case of the films, watch videos.

And these topics create networks for me. On Facebook, 6,332 people are fans of the page The 1972 Undefeated Miami Dolphins. I am one of these fans because my family lived in Miami that year, and we went to games. When you're 9 and your team wins every game and the Super Bowl, well, it doesn't get any better. (No other team has ever done that. Or ever will.) None of the other people in my life -- not my girlfriend, my coworkers, not even my family who lived in Miami then with me -- understand my love for that team the way the other fans of that Facebook page do.



What abut the other topics of expertise? Well, Elvis Costello pulls me together with iTunes users (although not so effectively on Ping, Apple's music social network). I've seen Elvis six times, and met him once. He brought an erudite anger into my life right when I needed it.

I've bought typewriters on eBay, a social network, two of them are less than 10 feet from me. (See pic.)

As a second-generation newspaper man, I grew up with typewriters, and love their clackety composition.

I grew up going to Woody Allen films with my parents, and took a great Films Of Woody Allen class at Stanford.

Your friends list on Facebook is a fingerprint unique to you. But so are the interests you pull together online. What you "like" on Facebook, what you favorite on YouTube, the links you send around. We have an unprecedented ability to surround ourselves with media of the things we love -- even if it is rare and obscure.

What's your collection of beloved stuff, and how do you surround yourself with it online?

(Prediction: Someone who loves one of these things will at some point see this blog post, and reach out to me.)

10 weird places on Facebook

"Tis strange, but true
for truth is always strange
stranger than fiction"
-- "Don Juan," Lord Byron

Facebook can get pretty weird right there on your own wall. Just add one part childhood friend, one part almost significant other, one part frenemy from work, and a dash of your mom. There you go: a kaleidoscope of relationships spiraling crazily around your simple post that you liked "True Grit," or appear to have a cold.

When you branch out a little, the world's biggest social network gets a lot twistier. (There are pages devoted to people who are afraid of clouds. Not clowns, clouds. My apologies to anyone who truly suffers from nephophobia.)

Here are 10 weird places on Facebook, complete with links. Some of the pages are enormously popular -- but with a quirky backstory. Others are ghost towns. Enjoy.

1. Ferrero Rocher chocolates -- This is one of the most popular brand pages in the world, with 7.8 million fans. Weirdness: The company posts, oh, about once a month. ("Oh yeah! We have one of the world's most popular Facebook pages!") There are a grand total of three pics uploaded. That must be gooooooood candy.
2. William Howard Taft -- Personal page. The big prez has one friend, an eighth-grade teacher from Chicago. What's going on here?
3. Coke -- The most popular brand page in the world, with nearly 23 million fans, was started by two dudes. Not big-time ad guys. Not Coke execs. Two kinda slacker dudes, it appears. And their fingerprints are still all over it.
4. Which one of Charlie Sheen's women are you? This is an app. A developer somewhere needs more guidance.
5. Join if you didn't know that Yoshi from Mario is a girl -- It's one thing for video game characters to spawn some gender questions that can't really be answered. It's another thing for 718,000 people to publicly declare this to be a part of their lives.
6. I LOVE PUSHING THE PANIC BUTTON WHEN PEOPLE WALK BY MY CAR -- Group page. Doing this had never really occurred to me. Until now. If I do it and like it, I probably will go post about it.
7. Wearing Bacon Underwear -- This page is about exactly what you think it's about. (The profile pic is more attractive than you might be imagining.) 371 people in the world like this. One is a FB friend of mine. When I saw which friend, it all made sense.
8. There are HUNDREDS of Facebook pages related to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a fictitious character made famous in the movie "Ghostbusters." Hundreds.
9. I hate it when your mad at someone and they make you laugh -- This page suggests immaturity with its purpose. (Note the bad grammar in the name.) Here comes the scary: The page has 914,000 fans.
10. Penguins!!! -- It's not hard to understand why more than 200,000 would "like" penguins. What's weird is the page admin marched off the penguins page a while back. Not a month or two, three years ago. No posts for three years. New fans join every day, and post every day. And no one's home.
    

Got a favorite weird place on Facebook? Take me there.

Social media reading list

I listen to books on my iPhone at 2x speed. (A friend tells me that when I talk about these same books, I do so very rapidly, and that cracks him up.)

Maybe I listen to them at double-speed because the books are about social media, and it somehow makes sense in my mind to hurry up the old, long-form media. I think it's just because I get bored listening to them at regular speed.

But I do need the long form to take a reasoned, meditative look at social media. I don't want my thinking itself to be shaped by the ephemeral, nonstop short-attention-span pace of Twitter. (Lest I start acting like Charlie Shee, its latest VIP.) I want to think slowly about something that is causing us to think quickly. I don't want to get conned by the blurts of cute and clever. Here are the books I've been listening to, in the hopes that others might find them illustrative:

1. "Viral Loop" by Adam Penenberg -- Packed with case studies that are explained in a lively style by the NYU journalism prof
2. "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi -- A physicist compares the connections of a social network to the connections within the human brain
3. "Click" by Bill Tancer -- Global researcher at Hitwise takes a detective's approach to SEO. Like "Freakonomics"? You'll like this. He absolutely insists on unearthing truth.
4. "Cognitive Surplus" by Clay Shirky -- The author of "Here Comes Everybody" on crowdsourcing and wikis. He defends social media as far more active and productive than TV.
5. "You Are Not A Gadget" by Jaron Lanier -- An internet pioneer rails against "the hive mind" and general lack of new content in Web 2.0. If you work in social media, you should listen to this harsh criticism.
6. "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow -- Less about social per se than about the many events that make up our lives. But stripping away the mythology to look at the real patterns does resonate with Web 2.0's overall pointilist approach.
7. "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen and others -- What really motivates people in the new workplace is based to a large degree on how they interact online
8. "Self Reliance" by Emerson -- Not many know that Emerson was a Twitter celeb way back when. ; ) OK, what's he doing on here? Emerson was the ultimate individualist, and his challenge to go your own way is a stout reminder not to let the majority or trolls sway your resolve. Needs to be read now more than ever.
   
9. "The Cluetrain Manifesto" by Rick Levine and others -- On how clueless big business is to the marketplace of ideas
10. "Rapt" by Winifred Gallagher -- This study of how we give our attention to things is fascinating in the context of social media

I hope that's useful to someone. If you read these, I'd love to chat. Very quickly.

What it felt like to be inside a viral Facebook promotion

This graph shows page views to my company's Facebook page during a promotion. A later promotion jumped the graph even higher.

We gained 56,000 fans in one day, making us the second-most-explosive page on Facebook. We flattened servers like Godzilla stomps Tokyo noodle stands. (That's what happens when you get 71,000 clicks to one url in 30 seconds.) We got 16,000 "likes" on one post, and 4,000 angry comments on another. We made executives very uncomfortable.

We got 12.5 million page views in one day to our Facebook page. That's about as many page views as CNN.com gets on a slow day -- on a Facebook page. That's like going to the moon in a box. People just don't use Facebook that way. The great American Facebook experience is the Newsfeed. No one hangs out on a brand's fan page. The did on ours.

We got 12.5 million page views in one day to our Facebook page. That's like going to the moon in a box.

And this week the promotions we put on over the holidays to rock our Facebook page got three national shoutouts, the latest from the Harvard Business Review.

So what was it like in the middle of those viral promotions? Scary. "I haven't breathed deeply in four days," my boss said to me in the middle of one of our Facebook "parties." It felt like crowdsurfing a big crowd, one that was carrying us where it wanted to go, not necessarily where we wanted to go.

It was awesome. Viral is scary. It's like harnessing lightning strikes for their electricity. And it's something you can't command at will. You're lucky to get that huge crowd under your brand.

Scary is OK. Scary is good. You're not going to break Facebook, and Facebook is not going to break you. Social is ephemeral enough that today's disaster is tomorrow's success. (There were times early in our promotions when some believed they were disasters.) Take the risk. Surf the crowd. Control is overrated.