Let’s say you’re BP. You are nearly fifty days into what could be the worst environmental disaster in United States history. Ouch, that’s going to be a heck of a public relations nightmare, isn’t it? But, wait, here’s an idea! Why not invite all those connected Facebook users who live along the Gulf coast to play a game to raise awareness about the environment!

Volunteers could “check in” at locations via Foursquare and unlock badges for their volunteer efforts. Or they could earn patches of the ocean as rewards — similar to the (Lil) Green Patch game on Facebook that empowers users to fight global warming.

That’s just the kind of strategy companies and organizations need to be pursuing to win public relations battles in this social-networking era. (Source)

Yes, because while you’re looking out on the shore and see the oil on the horizon threatening your family’s future and your community’s economy and environment FarmVille will solve the problem.

I’m sorry, but if I were living in Louisiana and BP sent me an invite to “check in” and unlock badges or get myself a patch of the ocean as a reward I’d tell them where to virtually stick it.

Social gaming is pretty darn big as anyone with a Facebook account and a million invites to Mafia Wars will tell you. With applications like Foursquare and Gowalla providing virtual merit badges for physically roaming about town, there are opportunities for businesses to really turn online interest into offline activity in new and exciting ways (insert “ooohhhh” and “aaahhhh” here).

Social gaming requires a certain level of buy in and effort by the users, usually for little reward other than bragging points. It is the companies who help create real world reasons to play that capitalize best off of this.

Richmond has already experienced a few local examples of businesses utilizing Foursquare successfully. Westpark Beer & Wine hosted a Foursquare Swarm Badge party in March, filling the store with over 50 customers who enjoyed a wine tasting and received a 10% discount through the end of Spring just by showing their Swarm Badge. Many local businesses are already rewarding Foursquare users all sorts of discounts and freebies not just for Mayors but just for checking in.

National brands such as Starbucks have also started offering rewards. Pepsi has developed it’s own application, Pepsi Loot, that tells you where to find the closest delicious Pepsi and rewards you for checking into Pepsi serving establishments with free music to enjoy while partaking of your delicious cola.

What makes these attempts successful are the REAL rewards given for virtual efforts. Foursquare just gives you badges that look neat on your phone and maybe profile. Foursquare + businesses = free stuff that make you really want to play more because, hey, who doesn’t like free stuff?

Companies aren’t just getting on board with location based games. Zynga, the folks you should blame for FarmVille and Mafia Wars, have teamed up with 7-11 to provide packaging for your hot dogs that include codes to get you stuff for Zynga games. Not only that, but 10% of the United States spends their time playing FarmVille. Yes, that’s right, your grandmother and at least two of your cousins are playing FarmVille.

There’s gold in them there virtual hills for businesses and organizations who can wisely invest in the medium.

It’s a matter of finding your niche and utilizing it properly. But also working the measure into your already existing Public Relations strategy (or nightmare depending on what’s happening).

If you’re, say, Roundup and you want to spread your brand’s name, latching onto something like FarmVille might be a smart play:

But Roundup isn’t faced with an environmental disaster that will take years to measure the full results of.

If you’re BP, is this a wise investment? Do you really take your money and personnel and image and buy into a game when public opinion right now is that you aren’t doing enough to stop the spill? That you aren’t taking it seriously?

That’s thousands of dollars BP could and should be putting into clean-up costs, measures to help small businesses in the effected area, local charities that will be directly impacted by the catastrophe. Real world investments that are the kind of public relations BP needs to be “buying” right now.

Look at Nestle, a small chocolate company you may have heard of. They got into a bit of bad publicity that they handled very poorly on Facebook when an organized Greenpeace effort to give them grief over its use of palm oil succeeded mainly because Nestle’s social media presence acted like jerks. What did Nestle do to help their image? They didn’t invite folks to plant virtual trees in their farm. They didn’t ask people to volunteer to go to the rain forest and replant trees they had a hand in cutting down in exchange for virtual badges or plots of forest to claim as their own. No. They partnered with The Forest Trust and began work on changing the way they do business to be more environmentally conscious in the future. They developed a strategy that created real world results for their efforts.

BP’s trying to buy forgiveness. And you don’t get that with virtual rewards that rely upon the efforts of those you are trying to win over. You get that by actually investing in the physical things that play directly into the results you want to see. You spend your time and money focusing on the communities directly impacted by the disaster. Because no matter how bad this spill gets, Facebook, FarmVille, Foursquare? They’ll still be there. But will the Gulf Coast?

Person gets a job at Cisco.  Person tweets that they’re not all that excited about job.  Person gets tweeted back at by Cisco employee.  Person does not get job.

Person then learns a lesson and shares it with others:

Should Tim Levad have backed off? Not necessarily; it was crass of me to say what I did and I take full responsibility for the stupidity of my action. Instead of blaming him, let me use him to illustrate what I have learned: Tim Levad and @timmylevad are two different people. @timmylevad is defined entirely by the number of people listening to it. But whatever @timmylevad says is backed up by the subtle persuasive knowledge that somewhere back there, Tim Levad the person is pulling the strings.

I don’t really mean to use Tim specifically in this allegory, but the point is that people with many Twitter followers can’t afford to be real people on Twitter. Tim Levad would probably never use Twitter to make a flippantly negative remark about his career, because he understands that @timmylevad is more of a mass-media channel than a human being.

It’s important to think about these things as you go about your daily life. How am I using Twitter, really? Do I have the service set up in the right way to support that? Am @I more of a mass-media channel than a human being? Do @I act as such?

I don’t entirely agree with the first point.  Too much about how someone acts when observed or unobserved and assuming that Levad acts differently on his Twitter feed because of his audience.  It’s a big assumption to make and one that exists more because the author is soul searching and excusing the content of their twitter feed after these events.

That said, the rest is valid in that Twitter or other social networks or even any place where you plop your name and reputation on the web is what you make of it.  How you use it is a direct reflection of you and you can either define it or let it define you.

A good portion is also public, and so you are going to have to keep that in mind as you go about and use the services accordingly.  But that doesn’t mean you have to change who you are to fit the public nature.  You can be selective or say, screw it, I’m going to be me, consequences be damned.  And maybe that’ll cost you a job.

Media Guerrilla: Social Media Marketing Ain’t Always ‘Cheap’:

I think there’s a tendency in ROI conversations to over indulge in hard numbers sans consideration for all the underlying soft costs of social media projects. And by “soft costs” what I’m really getting at are the *absurdly high* time and attention investments that typically come with these projects and what are the unique shared scars among many a social media practitioner. If you’ve ever administered a blog or a community of sorts, you’ll know what I mean, nuff said.

One night everyone and their grandmother heard about this thing called Twitter and started joining it. Twitter was pretty nifty, a nice little tool where you could shoot a short message from your computer or phone and let folks know what you were up to.

But Twitter’s open API invites third party applications that have made it not only easier to tweet but allow you to tweet just about anything: blog posts, currently listening to, whether or not you washed your hands after you flushed the toilet, and on and on.

And this is where Twitter lost me.

Twitter is a nice tool to supplement an online presence. These days, most everyone has a blog or Facebook profile, and Twitter provides a simple extension to the content you might put on those pages. It was a way to add filler to your virtual content, thoughts between the conversations and rants.

But now it’s more than that. It’s a social network summary itself, an aggregate of every piece of Web 2.0 that someone might be a part of and that’s where it gets overwhelming, not just for me but maybe for Twitter’s servers as well since it’s been down more often than not this last week.

Twitter doesn’t strike me as serving well as a funnel of information about people. There are other applications more suited for that, something like Friendfeed, but even then, there are times when too much information just turns me off to a service or even a friend.

There have been a couple instances of my no longer following someone on Twitter because of some plug in that tweet what they were listening to. Every three to four minutes a new tweet would pop up with the new song they were listening to. And, like a stereo turned way too loud at a party, it drowned out everyone else.

I’m almost at that point with some people who use TwitterFeed, a service I myself use that updates your Twitter feed every time you add a blog post. This is OK, except sometimes people blog a lot. And the same people I follow on Twitter I more than likely am following through my own RSS reader or on an aggregator somewhere. So instead of informing me of things, again I’m overwhelmed.

Twitter struck me as an odd application at first and then I started to get it as a way to fill in the gaps. This video really went a long way for that:

But now it’s so much more. Too much more.  And at a certain point it’s going to turn people off.

People want more out of Twitter and they have third party applications which can provide it, but maybe Twitter really can’t handle such things.  So sites like Plurk, which looks like a souped up Twitter that does everything a blog might do, are going to become appealing alternatives.But maybe this is people trying to turn Twitter into something it was created to be the alternative of: a blog.

Peter Kafka notes that social networking sites are having a bit of trouble keeping folks around:

comScore has provided BusinessWeek’s Spencer Ante with user engagement numbers — time spent on each site, per month, per visitor — for a slew of social networks over the past year. The data looks particularly grim for News Corp.’s MySpace, which saw time spent on the site drop 24% from December 2006 to December 2007. But Spencer notes that all the social nets are either dropping or slowing.

It looks like MySpace’s loss is Facebook’s gain, though.  While it’s not an even tilt, as more and more competitors emerge, MySpace’s hold on users is going to dwindle.