For all the emerging expertise in social media and communication, there is an increasing shortage of one skill set. It's called common sense.
It must be in short supply, especially because many of my colleagues write about common sense all the time. And, no matter how much they write about common sense, people are still dazzled by it. Me too.
This week's fresh content picks all share some sound advice on the back of popular discussions, with their solutions all ringing true with common sense. Was Steven Slates really a working class hero? Do customers always use your company's name when they talk about you? Can monitoring really improve CRM? Can content farms replace journalists? Should we care about other people's petty judgements?
Hark! Common sense, I say. Here are some frightfully smart writers who offer periods to the end of everyone else's sentences.
Best Fresh Content In Review, Week of August 16
• Steven Slater Is No Working Class Hero.
In the wake of Steven Slater's sliding escape from JetBlue after losing his cool with one of the airline's passengers, Andrew Weaver puts the incident into perspective. While everyone becomes overwhelmed by the bad behavior of others, Slater went further by inconveniencing everyone with his alleged display of runaway egoism. He didn't hurt the passengers as much as his employer, innocent bystanders, and anyone else who happened to be at the airport. As one of my friends point outs, he captured the essence of how many Americans feel right now, angry at everybody.
• Why TweetDeck Isn’t A Discussion Monitoring Strategy.
Everybody talks about building brand evangelists in social media circles (heck, me too, at times) and Jeremy Meyers says that it is all fine and good. However, social media experts who attempt to control the language of their new found brand evangelists are a step too far. More importantly, Meyers smartly points out that social media experts who are searching for brand names are only hearing part of the story. Most of the time, people don't include the brand name in their discussions. Common sense for us, but not common sense for most people.
• Understanding And Implementing Social CRM
Jason Falls recaps the mash up of "social CRM" and why some of these automated programs are falling short. CRM, if you don't know, stands for customer relationship management. It doesn't stand for monitoring what customers do. It's about developing a meaningful relationship with customers. It's one of several functions that step well ahead of "monitoring" services and requires an investment by people, not programs, in nurturing that relationship. While the tools might help improve your proficiency, don't expect them to replace people.
• Content Farms And The Death of Remarkable Content
Basically, Lisa Barone cites the ill-conceived document that claims content farms are stealing journalists’ jobs and lowering content standards. There is some truth to that. Some folks have even been so bold as to offer our firm content for pennies on the dollar. The trade, of course, is content farm content might not be all it is cracked up to be. Repurposed prose doesn't consider the end user. It simply provides content that is then trumped up by fancy headlines and solid SEO backlinking. It's a game of bait and switch. Of course, content farm content is not sustainable.
• Everyone Will Judge You (But No One Cares)
A few weeks ago, someone wrote an article that called for the death of "cool," saying that "cool" was always about what people liked and trying to catch up. I had to correct them. "Cool" originated from keeping one's cool in the face of judgement, whether it was spoken or not. Ergo, Steve McQueen didn't care what people thought of him. It was also a nice warmup to Julien Smith's post, which highlights various traits among great people who typically ignore the judgements of the otherwise mundane. His advice: be who you want to be (unless you'r representing someone else) and let all those other folks think what they want. Amen.
