This past weekend, ThinkTank attendees stayed at a beachfront hotel– a beautiful resort on the coast, north of San Diego.  A perfect stay, except for the scene created by a rude hotel employee.  In his defense, he’s got a stressful job– working 80-90 hours a week, primarily wandering about the bar and being social with drunk guests.  This is a story of a guy who made a bad thing worse, deciding to take his anger out on professional Internet marketers.

Jeremy Shoemoney was sitting in the hotel lobby, wearing no shoes at this beach resort.  This punk employee yells at him to put his shoes, on in front of a dozen friends.  Treated like an idiot in front of his wife and friends, he refuses– and the punk goes nuclear instantly.  He calls over multiple security guards and attempts to throw out Jeremy.  By now, everyone else is interested in the disturbance– it’s become an ego battle.

Shoemoney Vs. The Incredible Hulk

Fortunately, George Avery steps in help, getting in the middle of two yelling men, in the process being threatened to be thrown out, too.  The hotel employee threatened to throw me out, too, which was irritating, but I kept calm.  Certainly, this fellow was quite important, as he kept asserting his right to throw out anyone in the hotel.

Now there’s a blog at ChristopherPuffer.com– it ranks #1 for “christopher puffer” on Google, by the way, since so many people are linking to the site.  And the hotel management continues to deny that Puffer was in the least bit out of line or slightly aggressive.  Even Puffer continues to say dumb things.  I’m surprised the hotel management hasn’t swooped in to silence him, issue an apology and have the situation go away.

Remember the video on United breaks Taylor guitars?  Or perhaps the untied.com site?  Those customers were so pissed off that they took the effort to write songs and build websites, which in turn, were picked up by the press.  All the while, the company sat on the sideline, continuing to deny any wrongdoing.

Can you think of examples where you had a bad experience and wanted to tell others?  Amazon has a book on how satisfied customers tell 3 friends, while unhappy customers tell 3,000.

I’m surprised that more companies aren’t including social media training for employees.  But an ounce of courtesy would prevent such situations from flaring up in the first place.

If you find this interesting, put a link to this story on your blog– or just link to ChristopherPuffer.com. I’ll keep you updated with what I hear from the hotel staff and their PR agency.  The PR agency’s site is a 404, by the way.  And next time you see Shoemoney, tell him to keep his shoes on!

Update:

Have you seen the parody site about whether Glenn Beck murdered a young girl in 1990?  Obviously, he didn’t.  The site’s author put up the site because Glenn Beck used rhetoric to pin Representative Keith Ellison, a Muslim, to offer proof that he wasn’t working with the enemy.  Outrageous claim, of course.  So this guy gives Beck a taste of his own medicine with this satirical blog.

You may have heard the phrase “Kill two birds with one stone”, regarding taking one action to produce two results. Twitter and Facebook have teamed up to create a highway directly to one another, allowing users to update one status and be published to both sites. Most people are aware of how you can have your Twitter updates post to your Facebook status. Some people know that you can hide people who spam your stream, but not many know you can post your Facebook statuses to Twitter.

Would you like to talk about efficiency? This productive measure comes at no cost, sending your statuses via fiber optics at “status per 100 milliseconds”. The highway is perfect for users with high social networking priority that would like to save time and have more flexibility.

One AWESOME example:

You may have Facebook mobile, but you do not receive status updates via text message. This is where Twitter has an upper hand; those subscribed to a “tweeter” via mobile device will now be notified of posted Facebook status. This is a win-win situation, because this highway has two lanes and can also travel the opposite direction. For example, you text your tweet to the designated number registered with your phone, and it shows up as your Facebook status aswell. This is perfect for non-internet browsing mobile devices.

Looking for customization? Feel free to share everything between Facebook and Twitter, but lucky for us picky folks you can choose what information you would like to share. You have options to share status updates, links, photos, notes, and event creations. Statuses and updates via Facebook and Twitter are very important to keep your friends, clients, fans, and coworkers informed. Hop online and buckle up (for safety), because you’re about to experience the smoothest and fastest ride social media has to offer.

Businesses can benefit from this, too. Online sites like BidFire, a Real-time auction website like eBay, are primed  for these quick transactions. Twitter allows access to their APIs that can be used to post messages when a user does something Like buy a Nintendo Wii for $10, which then can be automatically posted to Facebook with a neat URL to your website. When users link to their social network accounts, you can dramatically increase visibility just by simply offering a way for people to tell what a great deal they received. People like to brag to their friends, so why not tap into that?

I started and completed a 260 page book in my 4 hour flight between Washington DC and Phoenix today.  It’s Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.  I average a page a minute for light content—half a page per minute for dense, textbook-like content.  The lie is explained later in this post, by the way…

Do you read books?  If you don’t, you’re not building your knowledge as completely as possible. Blog posts are great for little tidbits, but deeper knowledge takes hours and is usually the area reserved for books.

Odd that Brogan would write a book about social media, any more than you’d create a painting about English literature or write in Braille about how to dance. The links in his book were footnotes—as opposed to clickable blue anchor text.  Weird.

That aside, it’s a good primer should you want to learn the basics of social media.  Nothing shocking— write about what you’re expertise is, develop real friends online as opposed to a ton of auto-followed friends, your reputation is built upon trust as opposed to auto-dispensing business cards, set up monitors such as Google Alerts for your name and business, customer service on twitter is another helpdesk, and so forth.

It’s basic networking tactics with an online twist, which I believe are better-stated  in books such as “Never Eat Alone” (Keith Ferrazi), “Think and Grow Rich” (Napoleon Hill), “How to Make Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie), and “Swim with the Sharks” (Harvey Mackay).  If you haven’t read these classic books, you should.

However, Brogan is a top 100 blogger, so he’s doing something right. And he does admit that publishing a book is really just a 2 inch thick business card—something to give you instant credibility.  And I did read it word for word, start to finish, so it did keep my attention.

It was also free, by the way.  All attendees of Affiliate Summit East got a free copy.  I almost didn’t grab a copy, as I was laden down already with free T-shirts, squeezy balls, and other conference schwag.

The lie of Social Media

What I’m afraid will happen is that people will read this book and believe that if they start blogging about what they passionately believe in, plus start going crazy twittering and Facebooking all day, that they, too, can become popular bloggers.

He references Michael Jordan, who says that his secret to being so good is to keep shooting.   I could shoot baskets 18 hours a day for 10 years and still get my ass kicked by some teenager who never practiced.  Like the movie “Rudy”, the lie is that anyone can make it with some hard work.

The latest Malcolm Gladwell book talks about the 10,000 hour rule—that if you look at people who are at the top of their game, it took them 10,000 hours of practice to become pros. Somehow having put in the time would lead to success—although correlation is not causality, for those of you who remember first semester statistics.

Not denying the value of hard work.  Look at Robert Scoble, who is arguably one of the most popular bloggers—part of the “bloggerati”.  He became a famous blogger while at Microsoft because he openly denigrated Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft.  Thus, an authentic voice—a guy at Microsoft willing to say a product sucked.

However, were Scoble not at Microsoft and wrote the EXACT same posts, his voice would be unheard among the thousands with the same opinion. Think about it.  Change one variable and the “success” goes POOF.  Thus collapses a whole string of further successes that stemmed from that initial lucky break.

The biggest factors in success are being lucky and well-connected. If you know me, you’ll know that I’ve been fortunate in several instances not because of my skill, but because I was in the right place at the right time—a great situation with a great network.  And if you look at the others who are successful in Internet marketing, you’ll see the power of their network—how they leveraged those connections to the max.

If you don’t have a network of powerful friends that will promote you and link to you, your blog could be the most informative site on the planet and still get no traffic.

I’d place that sentence right at the beginning of the book, were I the author and dispense with all the stuff about making sure to make eye contact with people you meet, to smile and say thank you, to try to be helpful to friends, or to use PPC to drive traffic to your site.  I am not kidding, each of those points are whole paragraphs or sections in the book.

On page 256, they list 5 reasons why people might trash the lessons in the book- that the lessons are not implementable, not that simple, not measurable, amateurish, and time-consuming.

Reason #6, which is mine, is that most of the 260 pages are fluff—almost no actionable content for someone who wants to earn a living as a professional blogger—or to even make enough money to pay for their hobby.  The exception is page 12, where there are 2 pages on how to set up “listening posts”, which are alerts on yourself.

On page 117, they mention how Donald Trump made money in on-line real estate (he actually went bust a couple times) to then leverage that fame into “The Apprentice”.  The success of that program, he used to do Trump University—a series of online course and then a conference circuit with Robert Kiyosaki (the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” guy)

It’s like those people who are famous for being famous—or make money by selling books teaching other people how to make money. Well, I did get a $24.95 book for free, so I am grateful for that.

If Chris Brogran or Julien Smith ever read this post, I’d be curious to hear their opinion about whether I should express honestly (as I have here), give faint praise (as most book reviewers do, as most have never read the books of their friends), or not say anything at all.  You’ve elevated Scoble for his honesty in calling out Microsoft’s weak IE browser, so my post is either on target in that respect or perhaps ill-informed.

My other feedback is that the scope of this book  (“using the web to build influence, improve reputation, and earn trust”) was too broad, at least not without more focused examples, far less pedantic advice on how to be friends with people, and reciprocal promotion of friends that promote you (consider multiple over-the-top references to Beth Kantor and Greg Cangialosi).  By putting forth an honest review, whether informed or not, may burn bridges should I ever need a stunning review from these guys when my book comes out.

But who will read a sycophantic (ass kissing) positive review? And, to the book’s point, will your colleagues trust you when you’re shamelessly promoting something that you don’t believe in?

Mark Twain once said that the key to success is to be genuine—fake that, and you’ve got it made.  That’s one of my favorite quotes.  Hence the inherent lie of Social Media based on principles in this book.

If you want to actually see steps on promoting your brand and to drive traffic, I’d recommend checking out the guides at Blitzlocal.com.  They are on-line and also free.

A few days ago, I posted a Facebook status message, asking “Who wants a free SEO analysis?” 23 people responded and I chose one winner. Yesterday, I chose the winner and posted the analysis here.  And now, not even a day later, I do a search on Twitter and see pages and pages of people re-tweeting the blog post.

Funny thing is that I never promoted this on twitter to begin with. It started from just a Facebook status message and then a post of my blog.

You should search on your name to see what comes up.

You might be surprised.
You might learn something.

For example, look at who is mentioning me by typing this:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=dennis%20yu

Given the popularity, I think I’ll probably offer on free SEO analysis weekly. If you want one, just fan me on Facebook at facebook.com/dennisyu, then add your site to the list.

Update:

I now do a search on my name on twitter every few days to see what’s happening.  Now I see 100 mentions every time I do a blog post, even though I don’t mention it on twitter.  That means bloggers like us have to pay attention to twitter whether we like it or not.  At conferences, we get to see the live twitter feeds to get a sense of audience interest.  Quite lively!