Recently, I have had to ‘unfriend’ several people because of their blatant spam. Just yesterday, I received four invites for four Theta Healing workshops in California by one of my Facebook friends. This is not only NOT an area of interest to me…I am not local and so how would I get to it if I wanted to? She didn’t just invite me, but ALL her 1400 friends to this event. Does the venue have room for even a 1/10 of this number? Probably not.

This is pure mass broadcasted spam using social media. DON’T DO THIS! Whether personal or professional, this kind of thing alienates your friends and many will simply remove you as a friend. It was not personal in any way…she sent all four invites to all 1400 of her friends. There was no selectivity. It ticked me off. I reported all four invites to Facebook as spam and removed her as a friend. I posted the incident on my wall, so my 1,000 friends know about this. In hours, I had a dozen comments about how some of my friends receive ‘Event Invite’ spam as well and hate it.

Furthermore, these spammers don’t track what is going on. They don’t care. Another event…another invite blast to all friends. When I create an invite, as I said I invited the 50 local people I thought might really be interested in attending. A number of them have rejected the invite every time. Guess what, I stop sending them invites. I was wrong…it does not interest them. I created a special ‘Friend List’ of just people I would invite to my event. After a few rejections, I remove them from this list so they don’t keep getting invites to something they obviously have no interest in. Currently, I invite around 30 people…my venue could hold 1/2 that number. Over time, I will have a list of only those that are truly interested…and many will accept the invites regularly.

Micro-segmentation and hyper-relevance is what is needed on social media…not mass broadcast spam. If your friends unfriend you because of spam, they no longer see your wall posts…and their friends no longer see your wall posts. For the want of an easy and short-sighted method (spam), you would be destroying your long term value of having these relationships. Yes, it takes more time to segment your friends into lists of interest and local for your invites and messages…but the long term benefits of not destroying the relationship is worth it.

The steel bands that run around the phone’s edges function as antennae, and Apple touted this as a selling point. Unfortunately, consumers discovered a design flaw immediately after the phone launched. When you cover up a small gap between two of the bands on the corner of the phone, you experience dramatic signal loss.

As I continued to read, I saw the following:

People began to realize that Apple probably knew about the flaw all along, because the bumper cases it launched alongside the phone do little except prevent skin contact with the problem spot.

Now what does Steve Jobs say? Steve Jobs responded in an e-mail: “Just avoid holding it in that way.” Now, I don’t know about you, but the answer is NOT to suggest to stop holding the phone that way…that is the normal way you hold your phone. Doesn’t this sound like something Microsoft would say?

Then last week, I see another article, ‘Apple Shows That Nokia N97 Mini Also Suffers from Death Grip Issue‘. Again, this is not the way to address an issue – by showing others have the same fault. Again, this is something Microsoft would do (and has done I believe). Who cares about Nokia anyways? I hold Apple at a higher standard than Nokia.

I have been really disgusted with Apple the past couple weeks. There has been some very Microsoft-like behavior from Apple. Is this the beginning of the end?

Thanks to Todd’s attempt to make a comment on my last post and emailing me when he could not, I became aware the function no longer worked.  Sorry about that.  I was being hit pretty hard with spam for a while, so I really upped the security level.  It was rejecting many legitimate posts as spam bots. 

I tweaked the system and no you can post comments again.  Please do…I like comments and the conversation/interaction.If anyone has suggestions for improvement, I would also like to hear them.

Thank you for the help in improving this blog,

~ Eric

1. Bad sound

This could be solved easily enough with a lapel microphone. It is called a “close mic,” as opposed to the built in microphone on the video recorder (while standing ten or fifteen feet away the person being filmed). Built-in microphones pick up everything and are worse with distance. If the video has good sound, that alone sometimes can carry a video…but if the video looks great and there is crappy sound, people don’t want to watch it.

2. Unstable and unclear video

This could be solved easily enough with a tripod, using a manual white balance, and making sure the video recorder is in focus. I can’t stand camera shake. It is a major distraction and shortens how long someone is willing to watch the video (which is already very short – less than 3 minutes on average). Then if the subject is out of focus or (because of white balance done improperly) the person looks like they are ill because they are tinged blue, green, etc. All these scream amateur who doesn’t know what they are doing…which is not the image you want for a business video.

3. Too Long

I already hinted at this in #2, but you don’t have long in online videos before the viewers become bored and move on. I still see too many videos 6, 8, or 10 or more minutes long. This is a killer in business videos. The message must be focused, as well as quick and to the point. When you want to talk about more than one thing, it may be better to make another video. Three 3-minute videos are more likely to be seen than one 9-minute video. Keep in mind that as soon as the viewer becomes bored, they are gone. Also, they are watching for their benefit…not your benefit. They are looking for some information and/or to be entertained. The content must benefit the viewers right away or they will go elsewhere shortly.

I would say these are also my three biggest pet peeves. If you have a short video with stable & clear video and good sound (that gives content to the viewer), it is really hard to mess it up. People will watch it. It doesn’t have to be flashy. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune and look like Hollywood produced it. Just don’t commit these three mistakes.

Then shameless “happy scenes” of the injured child getting out of the hospital and giving her stuffed animal to the lawyer (because now they are so much like family). This truly is sickening. I will remember not to call them if I need a truck accident lawyer.

Am I being too harsh…or do you think this kind of marketing is a good thing? This commercial is in very poor taste in my opinion.