Having such brutal honesty offline AND online is hard. People don’t like being told their babies are ugly. They don’t want to hear that their UI sucks, their competitor is leaps ahead of them in advancement, or that there aren’t many compelling software companies founded by women. Michael Arrington has faced criticism from all angles and from every part of the planet, because he and his team happen to run the biggest technology blog the world has ever known. People want power, they believe they deserve power, and telling them they haven’t earned it yet will get some people angry at you.

Shira Ovide singled out the culture of TechCrunch in her Wall Street Journal piece as a factor for why there are so few women leaders in technology. Arrington found this unfair. He, after all, has a female CEO whom he picked himself because of her skills. He would LOVE to see female entrepreneurs in the space and end the sausage fest. So he responded with an invite that TechCrunch is happy to cover software created by women that actually interests people.

I read the piece and thought, “Man, he doesn’t get what it’s like to be a woman out there”. It’s not his fault. He’s a guy, and it’s easy to assume that if YOU are cool with having a female CEO, others would be as open too. I disregarded the post entirely until I noticed commenters saying that women just don’t have the right skills for software. I thought this was a bogus statement, so I commented back. It isn’t nature that ensures there are no women in the tech space. I used to be quite good at math and science. I just gave it up because there are a lot of societal pressures on women and frankly, the sciences are a very lonely place for us and I like having friends.

What ensued honestly freaked me out. People would state their impressive credentials and then would put out some of the most illogical, hateful statements I have ever seen. I continued to comment, trying to keep my cool figuring it would do me no service to be nasty about it. I was continually painted as a whiny, know-it-all manhater, almost always by anonymous or obscured commenters. I was called beyond horrible names. It was bizarre enough to almost be funny. Almost.

Prior to installing Disqus, an innovative commenting system, the men behind the curtain of TechCrunch (in this case Arrington and MG Siegler) would have deleted the nasty comments and then grumbled to themselves that humanity is going to hell in a hand basket. But Disqus is real-time and comments show up literally as fast as people can type them. When a nasty comment would pop up, Arrington or Siegler would attempt to delete it and thirty, often nastier threads would show up after it. As the real-time web becomes more prevalent, it will become easier and easier for online mobs to take these pot shots at people with little fear of repercussion. After all, the moderators can’t control them anymore.

People want power. Nice people want it and mean people want it. Like it or not, TechCrunch has it, so it attracts the good AND the bad element no matter what. That’s just reality. As the web speeds up and becomes more connected, it will be up to US to ensure that this blog and other blogs we read are fair and civil for everyone. It’s up to decent men to tell the sexist ones that their jokes and vitriol are not acceptable. It’s up to women to stand up for each other instead of tearing each other apart, or simply ignoring the the problem. Not just when it is easy to add a +1 to a blog post opposing such buffoonery like my last one, but when someone is getting hounded by trolls for standing up for what is right, when it’s brutally hard. The web, like the real world, can be a cruel place. You can’t expect the man behind the curtain to fix all the nastiness for you. It’s just too hard of a job for one person to handle.

If you didn’t see, I merely mentioned to a TechCrunch commenter on this post about female entrepreneurship that my math SAT was, in all probability, higher than his. While this wasn’t the coolest thing I could have come up with, it was Saturday night, I was tired after babysitting a drunk friend, and it was in response to his notion that women somehow are not as good at quantifiable intelligence. I also mentioned that great leaders (since the post was about the lack of female entrepreneurs), can actually have a host of different skills, and generally surround themselves by people who make up where they lack.

What ensued was a barrage of comments about what an idiot I am for somehow believing women can be capable of the same tasks as men. I was called the “c” word, had my privies referred to as a “gash”, was called illogical, arrogant, angry, and a troll. Someone said that if I don’t like how my female body works, I can euthanize myself legally in Oregon. One commenter even blamed the decline of the economy on feminism and another said he would short sell any stock of a company with a female CEO.

If Michael Arrington and the people at TechCrunch really want to be heroes in this whole debacle and actually do want to promote female entrepreneurs, they should tell all those nasty commenters to piss off. Seriously. You aren’t going to get respectable women in your restaurant if there is a table of lewd, ape-like men in the corner who berate any woman who walks in the door. Mr. Arrington, how would you feel if you came to my blog, commented, and some woman called you a sexist, illogical freak? How would you like it if these women were not only upset at you for suggesting that they need to work harder, but they were actually calling you a d**k and suggesting you euthanize yourself? You would not want to come back, but would be very torn on this if my blog were one of the most influential blogs in your industry. You would expect that I would defend you especially if you were being perfectly reasonable. I would do that, because although I love a good healthy debate, I also recognize that stereotypical and unfair attacks solve nothing and hurt people.

Think about it this way–you are telling the apes to go away, so all the respectable people you like will come back. We want to, Michael. We totally do. I felt like I was doing a service to women by basically defending the notion that we can be intelligent leaders too. This morning I sat in my shower and cried for 20 minutes because those commenters exemplified the attitude that has made me feel like I cannot succeed in this market. I’ve worked my butt off my entire career, and I have innumerable horror stories about sexist bosses who were embarrassingly less competent than I was. It makes you defensive and question your own abilities. And unfortunately I’m not alone.

So I know I have to stand up for myself. I know I have to have a thick skin, compromise when it’s necessary, and just let the haters roll of my back. But can you do us a favor and at least call out the haters who literally add nothing to your conversations but nastiness? Can you take a stand against the band of chimpanzees who tear everything that is different from them to pieces, instead of requiring me to fend them off myself? If you really want to make women a part of your community, than show us because it’s really not that hard. We’ll come back.

What would happen if someone got footage of you uncensored in your natural state? What if people saw when you were sad, angry, or doing things that don’t exactly make you proud? And then what if someone put this footage on YouTube for everyone to see and mock, and you became an instant internet celebrity against your will? Would you lose your mind like the Star Wars kid did? Would you cash out like William Hung? How would you decide cash in on your ten million theoretical dollars you get from YouTube?

Austin based Bear Media decided to delve into the life of internet celebrity Jack Rebney with their film “Winnebago Man”. To the everyday observer, Rebney would strike you as the average crotchety mountain hermit guy. To the trained viral video connoisseur, Rebney is “The Angriest Man in the World”, able to launch diatribes that would make sailors blush.

Rebney’s anger caught in the outtakes of shooting a Winnebago infomercial 20 years ago is pure. Sure, shooting takes for a Winnebago ad in 100 degree heat surrounded by flies and annoying interns would test anyone’s patience. This though, this anger is very YouTube worthy. It is simply a work of art:

How does the internet make it so easy for us to laugh at people’s pain? How do you earn this dignity back when it is taken from you? Director Ben Steinbauer lets Rebney voice off about his internet fame, how he feels he should be remembered, and what we can all learn getting caught on the internet saying the f bomb hundreds of times, on loop, and potentially remixed. Highly recommended, so check out if it is playing in your area.

It’s strange how we lump so many of our contacts in one place. Some of my contacts on Facebook are professional. They are people who I don’t mind knowing most of my business, but I would prefer them to stay out of certain segments of my life like my dating situation. Some of them are my family. They don’t care what goes on in my professional life. Some are old drinking buddies. What’s odd is that I have grouped all of these people in one place, which is Facebook. Why do we do this? Well, it’s kind of hard to turn down friend requests from people you actually know and see regularly.

It’s this lumping of contacts that has me concerned about Facebook Places, primarily the feature that allows your friends to tag where you are. Granted, some of these issues were present with the tagging of photos and I acknowledge this. It just seems a lot easier to tag your friends with a place than in a photo. What do you do when these types of issues get presented to your “lump” of friends?

1.) It’s very unfortunate, but some people cannot come out as homosexual. It’s literally a matter of their physical safety and emotional well being. What happens when someone is outed by getting tagged at a gay club on Facebook? Could it affect their employment or family relationships? While I wish society could just accept different lifestyles, I also acknowledge that privacy isn’t just a a matter of “hiding” things–it can protect us from conversations we might not be ready to have and even physical violence.
2.) Imagine you hate your job. You decide you want to go to a Bootstrap Austin meetup to learn to start your own company. So as to support the group, someone tags your location at this meetup. Your boss sees this and notices there would be no reason you would be there except to leave his company. Although you had planned to leave in six months, you now have to leave tomorrow.
3.) My parents are Catholic. I myself do not consider myself Catholic. If someone checks me into a church that isn’t Catholic and my dad sees it on Facebook, it brings up a conversation I’d just assume not have (again).

I opted out of letting my friends check me in. It’s not that I don’t trust my friends. It’s that they might not know what is going on in my life and the implications of doing so, and I’d rather not think about it. I don’t see enough benefit to allowing others to check me in. So while Facebook Places is not the end of online privacy as we know it, we should think critically about its implications before blindly embracing it. My concern stems that most people who use Facebook have not even heard of Places and may face a rude awakening of sorts.

These are not new issues, but they are becoming increasingly more key to evaluate as social networks push us into becoming more and more public with information that was formerly private. Is this rapid transparency a force of good that will cause people to be more authentic? Is our society ready for this?

NO.

I love the movie “Usual Suspects”. In the film, Kevin Spacey’s character gives a speech about how the greatest trick the devil ever did was to convince you he didn’t exist. This is exactly how I feel about people who don’t get why privacy is still an issue with social networking. Most people are indeed benevolent. However, it only takes ONE PERSON to make your life a living hell, and even seemingly rational people do very irrational things. Good people can do very evil things sometimes and you do have to have some form of circumspection when utilizing social media. It doesn’t mean it can’t be fun or useful–it just means you probably shouldn’t make yourself a sitting duck by broadcasting where you are every waking moment to the entire world. I don’t understand why this is something people resist so much.

Why is this so scary to me? The lady who processed my protective order told me one of the most common ways abusive ex-husbands find their ex-wives in hiding is by using their credit card statements. If a woman forgets to have her credit card statements forwarded to her new address, her abusive ex can see where she is spending money and track her whereabouts. Yes, women have been killed this way. Educated women who thought they were married to sane people.

So now, with a public profile on a geolocation social network, any shmuck not only could have access to your address, where you are legally entitled to act out against an intruder, but where you like to get coffee, eat, drink, or hang out with your friends. You have no legal rights to ask someone to leave in these places without a protective order, which is VERY difficult to get. So you could go to a party, say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and then find them in all your regular spots looking for an apology. You could anger a customer by accident and find them in your favorite coffee house to harass you. You could date a girl twice, decide she’s not for you, and then find her in all of your favorite spots, and you have no legal rights to tell that person to go away. It takes one creepy person to really mess with your mind and trust me, you have to be physically harmed or threatened before the cops really start to look into it. Sometimes, they don’t believe you and it makes you feel even crazier. Is it really worth it?

So sure, use geolocation. Just make sure you are accessible to all the cool people you want in your “community” and not so much to the creepy people you don’t.

Wha? The social media strategy guy at the conference didn’t preach that on stage when he was waving his book around.

Tom pointed out that in the 90s, every division of a big company wanted control over their presence on the website. There can be a lot of pride of ownership issues, with each division thinking their message and agenda is the most important. You can’t really blame each division for wanting to use the site to become more effective at their jobs, but giving each division control over the layout, voice and functionality of their website would not make for a very cohesive experience to the customer. It would also make it difficult to decide what sections to prioritize.

Social media right now has a bit of the element of the Wild Wild West. Some people go full throttle in with no strategy and get nothing but fool’s gold. Some companies are too scared to venture in such uncharted territory, refusing to let people actually talk back. What seems very common is that the top often doesn’t know or doesn’t care what the underlings are doing with it until an innocent blogger wanders into hostile territory and gets shot up by some Native Americans who didn’t exactly welcome their preaching the virtues of their company with spam.

Like a website, a social media presence can communicate a lot of things. It can reduce tech support costs (see Deirdre Walsh’s thoughts on connecting the National Instruments users to help each other). It can help you get new recruits from the people who know your products best–the users. It’s not just a leadgen tool. This is why I stress that it is not merely a function of marketing, and if you view it as such, you aren’t wrong–you just aren’t using it to its max potential.

What do you see as the best strategies for keeping a company’s social media presence in check?

I like seeing patterns. I often see the pattern that big companies are really struggling with this stuff. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that social media is well, a communication tool. In a small company, it’s easy to wrangle down the number of blogs, Twitter accounts, etc and overall strategy to be more cohesive, especially if you started your company after they came out. In a large company where the customer care team doesn’t know the marketing team from a hole in the ground, this is much more difficult. They both want to use the tools to solve problems, and they do. What they may or may not realize is that to the end user of these accounts, they aren’t divisions. They are just a product or service they use.

It’s like having a phone system where there is no operator. There is no prompt getting you to the right division. If you’ve ever been on the phone with a company where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, this is infuriating. It’s not the hands’ fault. The brain isn’t connecting them to each other.

I believe companies must make every effort to assess where they stand with their customers and how they can better leverage social media to improve this standing BEFORE dumping money into big social media efforts. What do customers like about us? What don’t they like? What causes them to come and how can we improve to get them to stay? It’s one thing to do spin things that get people talking about your spin. It’s another thing entirely to pinpoint what you need to say or do to get them to say, “Holy crap, those guys are awesome and more importantly, they make me awesome.” Maybe I’ve seen too many superhero flicks, but I’d choose the latter any day.

What do you think, all? How can big companies wrangle down their multiple divisions to not just generate buzz, but to actually make their customers better?

When people call me a “Social Media Consultant”, it makes me cringe. Rather than focus on the medium, I’ve always preferred to focus on the audience, how a product benefits that audience, and then finding what mediums will get that message to that audience. If it’s on social networks, then that’s the medium to pursue.

Some people thought this campaign was silly. Personally, I found it amusing, but that’s not what struck me the most about it. The Old Spice Man was both on TV and in viral videos. The company obviously spent calculated efforts using both new and old media. This gives me hope.

I’ve often felt that new media fanatics write off old media as dead. I don’t know. As a business owner, if someone offered me a free TV commercial during “Dancing with the Stars”, I’d take it. The sheer numbers alone would drive traffic and hopefully my website could field people who might not be worth my time.

People involved in old media describe new media as a “fad”. They see it as a lesser medium, not worthy of the time and money often reserved for old media. They don’t see that it’s leaner but more segmented, and just requires more of a sniper vs. cannon approach.

The Old Spice campaign used both the cannon and the sniper. It drove mass awareness by using TV commercials and then engaged those masses with a clever YouTube and Twitter campaign.

I must send props to the people at Old Spice and their agency Wieden + Kennedy for recognizing that these mediums are not mutually exclusive and can actually work best when used together, depending on the scope of your product and the demographic you are pursuing. I’ve worked in places that considered old media dead already and other places that felt new media was a novelty you set up just to say you have it. I’ve worked in places where the new media people seemed to have to compete with the old media people. At the end of the day, all people care about is that you are delivering a message that is useful in some way to them. The medium is irrelevant.

REI is a cool store. From the moment I walk in, I feel the former athlete in me clamoring that I just don’t get outside enough.

The employees are fit. They all do outdoorsy stuff. From the wood walls to the visually blech-but-oh-so-snuggly NorthFace jacket, REI is all about getting that inner kid in you back outdoors. They have “Family Adventure Programs”. Oh, and you aren’t a customer of REI–you are a member.

I can just see the out-of-touch bean counting accountant going, “Wait, we are paying for our employees to go to the Muir Woods? Jigga wha?”

To the average bean counter, none of these things make sense. It does not make sense for REI to be a co-op instead of a corporation and hire people based on their kayaking skills versus last years’ quota figures. What it does do is promote loyal customers. There is no measurable ROI you get when a loyal customer buys a cool new bike from REI, shows it off to his friends, and then says, “You have to talk to Jorge about your next bike. He is the BEST.” REI’s ridiculously lenient return policy for members is a bean counter’s nightmare but does ensure that customers always start their search for outdoor goods there.

Apparently REI’s model makes sense because they have stores in 28 states and have been in business 72 years. Who knew?

Essentially, you get a link and the more times people click on the link, the bigger your photo shows up in their influence graph. Now, the graph looks pretty cool, but let’s break down this concept for the end user (the clicker):

1.) I click link.
2.) I make your picture bigger for other Fast Company readers to see.

As someone who loves using technology to make marketing campaigns more interesting, I am not quite sure what the end goal is here. Do people really think true influencers will actually value having their photo show up bigger on Fast Company? Is the Dalai Lama keen on showing you that he has more clout than you? Can you see Alan Greenspan hovering over his computer, furiously spreading his link around to ensure that Bill Clinton does not beat him on the influence graph?

Influence is something we earn by gaining expertise and by executing on it. It’s also something we can waste if we get too carried away in our own egos. I don’t question that influential people could certainly “win” this contest, I am just not quite sure they would actually care to. It is self-promotion for self-promotion’s sake and reminds me of those weird programs where at-risk kids go door to door and practice their speaking skills for money. Couldn’t they just spend that time selling something? Raising money for charity? Anything?

So I have to agree with Amber Naslund’s assessment. The graph is a cool idea, but I wish Fast Company appealed to my desire to be helpful rather than my desire to be known.

*pic from http://www.rohitbhargava.com