This Betty White nonsense needs to stop

Read: Facebook Wants Betty White to Host EVERYTHING

By now you’ve probably heard/seen the raving success that Betty White’s hosting stint on Saturday Night Live – and as Betty says, it’s largely due to a campaign on Facebook to get her to host.

So yes, Betty White killed it, SNL got a ton of ratings, and the Facebook honks that started that group are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back.

Unfortunately as with most internet memes, the people who started and supported them don’t know when to quit, and are now getting greedy.  Now if you go onto Facebook you’re seeting groups like “Getting Betty White to Host the Academy Awards” (not to be confused with “Betty White to Host the Oscars,”), “Betty White Must Host 2010 Emmys!”, and I’ve there’s “Let’s Get Betty White on Glee”?!?

Seriously, this has gone too far and has got to stop.  For crying out loud, the woman is 88 years old. I know actors are a different breed, but who wants to work this much at 88? Let’s call a victory “a victory” and don’t try to get lightning to strike twice. Betty said it herself, it’s “a huge waste of time”.

Facebook Fail: How to ruin a year’s worth of burritos

Ah, Social Media.  Every company wants to get in on the action, using tools like Twitter and Facebook, finding new ways to engage customers and drum up interest for their company.  Some companies do it well, and for others: their good intentions blow up in their faces.  I talked about Motorola’s mismanagement of their Facebook presence, the Denver-metro area Qdoba also now has an unfortunate Facebook story to tell.

Last weekend I got ping’d by a friend on Facebook, who was taking part in a contest put on by Qdoba with the prize of a year’s supply of burritos.  In order to win, Qdoba wanted you to get your friends to “Fan” them on Facebook, then write their name and Qdoba Card # on their wall.  On paper this seems like a great way to build Facebook currency (friends/fans) and drum up buzz for your company.

Introduce the chaotic variable known as the Internet into the equation, and your contest is now FUBAR’d.  While my friend was lobbying people through his Facebook contacts, his two main competitors were packing their own ammunition.  The first is allegedly a “Professional Contest-Player”, and quickly rallied her other “Professional” colleagues on the various contest and giveaway sites (I Googled her name + her card number and got these search results:
QdobaScreen

The other competitor, has some association with ThePensBlog and his plea for help got picked up there, rallying their army and ultimately bringing him the victory.  However, along the way, the blog got wind about the “Professional Contest-Player” and lobbied some attacks in the form of: “Do you hate this bitch’s face already? Want to bring pain to her ego? After the jump, a call to arms.” Of course, when you take prideful Pittsburgh fans and pour gasoline on your story, your commenters are going to light the think of fire with hate and vitriol. Say what you will about “Professionals”, no one deserves the mud this poor girl was slung.

Qdoba’s once great contest idea was fast becoming a platform for slander, so they had no choice, but to post the following on their wall:
QdobaResponse

Of course, you can comment on anyone’s fan page, so the people who were perpetrating this slander were now acting like their candidate was the victim in all of this, and made threats about what would happen if Qdoba didn’t award the contest to him.  Ultimately Qdoba made the most of their bad situation: gave the prize, then awarded the runners up with generous prizes of their own.  Still the proponents of the winner are still whining – nothing like looking a gift-burrito in the mouth.

To be fair to the guy who won, he didn’t make any public disparaging comments about the other contestants.  At the same time, there is definitely an association of guilt, and I’ve always found it fair to judge people based on where/who they build their community.  Responsibility should be taken up, especially since the guy is now 52 burritos richer.

Ultimately I feel bad for Qdoba. We’re all still trying to navigate this social media river, and when you have something like this blow up in your face it doesn’t encourage you to get back on the boat.  They ended up giving away nearly 2 years worth of burritos, and all they have to show for it is a page full of slander and intimidation.

Companies like Qdoba, please don’t lose heart in this. I think if they were go back and do it again, they could have made one tweak to the rules and avoided much of this mess.  Simply add a rule to the effect of “No promotion or lobbying outside of Facebook is allowed. We will be running searches on the leaders and if we find any external lobbying, you will be disqualified.”  I used Google to get that above screen shot, and discovered the blog post by doing a similar search on the winner.  That way you keep your promotional efforts within Facebook (which is what you want), and ensure that your winners are using the same platform to campaign.  People may try the winner’s excuse of “I can’t control what people do”, but let’s be honest: if I wanted to win that badly I’d make damn sure people kept it as word-of-mouth.

So sorry Qdoba, I still think you’re great. Better luck next time!

Reasons to for Bands to Quit MySpace

I ran across this great post a few days ago that I found to be very relevant as my band evaluates where devote on-line energy.  This brings up the elephant in the room that all bands need to discuss sooner or later.

>> 5 Reasons for Bands & Musicians to Quit MySpace

GFMySpace

It’s no secret that MySpace is on it’s way out.  The prominent rise of Facebook, coupled with our pain threshold for spam, flashing graphics and blaring noise has worn out MySpace’s welcome.  Long ago have I abandoned any meaningful time spent at the spent for my personal profile.  For my band’s profile, I still log into MySpace a few times per week, but the ROI has continued to decrease for our band and MySpace.

The biggest thing you can take away from the article is Reason #3:

Other bands are not your primary source of attendance

According to the statistics I’ve heard, there are roughly 8 million bands on MySpace, and you have 15,000 of them as friends! Unfortunately, those people are probably not buying your albums or attending your shows. While they may be good to do a show swap with, or bro down with for a tour some day-they’re not helping you pay the bills and put butts in your seats.

The 10% of users that are real people more than likely COMPLETELY ignore the “bulletins” that you can blast out to everyone. When was the last time you went to a show based on a bulletin you saw on MySpace? [Assault Blog]

I can’t tell you the last time I’ve interacted with an actual fan on MySpace.  Almost every interaction I have is with other bands, and the ones that aren’t bands are booking agents/venues – which is really only the valid communication that goes on for us on MySpace.  The collaboration is on MySpace is also a downside, because typically when these venues list you on their promotion, they link our MySpace, which isn’t our best web presence out there.

The article lists some great resources & alternatives to using MySpace.  We use some of them including Twitter and Last.Fm.  There was one omission which I think is starting to become unavoidable: Facebook.  While I agree that it’s always best to own your own content and presentation, along with the concession that Facebook is a little harder for brand outreach – but you need to be where people are at – which right now is Facebook.

Until then, I think we’re going to start to wean ourselves off of MySpace.  I don’t think we’ll ever stop posting music, pictures and show schedules there, but only because it doesn’t hurt to keep things updated for booking agents.  However, I think it’s time for bands to focus their energies elsewhere.

Giving up Facebook for Lent?

To the Catholics reading this, if your answer is “Yes” to this question then you’re a braver person than I.  However, if you are looking to give up Facebook for the next 40 days Lindsey Turrentine from CNet has an awesome write-up on some steps to do it without people thinking you died.

How to give up Facebook for Lent (CNet)

The best idea on the write-up is changing your photo to be a black box stating that you’re off Facebook for Lent.  Great tips!

To those of you staying off Facebook: good luck! Me, I’ve decided to give up parking close for Lent. I spend a lot of time driving around looking for that magical spot – that’s going to stop.  If you’re driving and see me walking across from the furthest parking space, try not to speed up.

Facebook Responds: No more forced invites

Last week I wrote about my annoyance of Facebook Apps forcing people to invite their friends before being able to actually use the App.  While I was browsing my feeds, I found the following good news from Caroline McCarthy on WebWare:

[Facebook Apps that do this are] annoying And now Facebook has done something about it. Developer applications must “offer some navigation option to leave the friend invite process,” according to a change in the social-networking site’s platform policy. If an application’s friend-invite page doesn’t contain one of Facebook’s in-house “Skip This Step,” “Cancel,” or “Skip” buttons, it has to contain an alternative way to navigate away from the friend invite process.  Developers whose applications ignore the new regulations reportedly receive warning letters that threaten shutdown if they fail to comply.

Good riddance! I’m glad to hear that Facebook is responding to critics in this way. Their ability to adapt to issues like these solidifies their position as the “anti-MySpace”. Now only if they could do something about the “we have your data forever” problem…