Thoughts on stoicism, marketing or both, by the business editor and writer.
N.Y. City Councilman Peter Vallone on social marketing tricksters
November 3, 2012
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Me: Those who have followed Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the Mid-Atlantic states, and in 
particular New York and New Jersey, may be aware of the controversy over false Photoshopped photos and misleading social commentary. At least one trickster posted alarmist tweets he knew were false—that, for example, the New York Stock Exchange was flooded, Gov. Mario Cuomo was trapped in the city, and that all electricity to New York City was shut off.
The posts, apparently just a prank, were picked up and spread by news outlets, alarming citizens already fearful for their lives. And they may now place the trickster behind bars.
On Friday, Nov. 2, 2012, I chatted with New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. (photo right) on the topic. Vallone, who chairs our city’s Public Safety Committee, said that New York State law marks it as a crime to intentionally distribute false information, about “a crime, catastrophe or emergency” that might result in “public alarm or inconvenience.”
A fuller story in context will run on Nov. 7 in BtoB’s “Social Media Marketer” newsletter, which of necessity edits down Vallone’s comments. But I felt his views in full are interesting enough to post in their entirety. I’m all for free speech. In fact, I founded and was the first president of the Florida Coalition Against Censorship during the Reagen years, when I lived and worked in Miami, when censorship over adult reading materials and images was running rampant.
However, Vallone makes good points about social responsibility that seems to accommodate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression. I’ll let you decide.
Vallone: I think this storm showed how great social media can be in illustrating potential problems. So many people out there (during the storm) got good information from social, but unfortunately morons like this guy were scaring people. The problem is, he actually tweeted a lot of legitimate stuff in between the fake stuff.
This is one of the first times we have seen social media used like this, and we need, unfortunately, to take some measures you’d hope would not be necessary. I have absolutely talked to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and they are taking this very seriously. Right now, they have no electricity, but we will continue to discuss this.
Even the First Amendment has its limitations. It happens few and far between, but yes, yelling fire in a crowded theater can be a crime. And with social media, the theater has gotten much larger.
There is a specific crime here, cited in New York State Penal Code Article 240.50 (“Falsely reporting an incident in the third degree”). We have to tread lightly to not infringe on free speech, but this person tweeted many times, and we don’t see any other information that he could have relied on. It wasn’t just one mistake. It was an attempt to mislead people.
I’m a former prosecutor for six years in Manhattan, and currently chairman of the Public Safety Committee of the New York City Council. When it comes to this, I am very serious and have a background in this area.
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Me: It will be interesting to see how this case proceeds, and if the D.A. feels a crime has been committed. Meanwhile, as we put our lives and livelihoods back together after the storm, it may be worth thinking a bit about how this new phenomenon, social media, can be a force for both good and ill.
Categories: Social media marketing, Uncategorized
Social marketing gems: Tools to make sense of chaos
January 4, 2012
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The health of social media marketing is underscored by the number of startups offering handy tools to monitor, manage, promote and respond to social media activity. Here are a handful you may have missed:
- Amplicate. Sentiment analysis tracks online opinions and (among other things) provides a sense of what’s hot and what’s not. Amplicate does that in a simple way with social
comments, collecting customer opinions posted on social sites, analyzing and comparing them, and determining what’s “loved” and what’s “hated.” You can search by company, product or category.Amplicate works best when there’s lot of opinion out there. For example, in the category of networking vendors, with more than 4,800 opinions logged, the most loved companies over the past 30 days, in order, were IBM Corp., Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard Co., while the most hated were AT&T Inc., followed by Microsoft Corp. and (weirdly) Cisco’s Linksys. Read more…
An appreciation of the 1948 film “Anna Karenina”
November 1, 2011
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There’s something about this film that’s a perfect embodiment of love, suffering, redemption and
self-abnegation, of wrong choices, of regrets. Of resignation. What does it have to do with marketing and stoicism? There is no need to ask. There is only the need to watch, observe and feel. Ah hell, do I have to be consistent?
OK. Let’s all take a deep breath and think about this for a moment: As to the flaws in the film, yes, it’s a murky transfer and shame on them! Further, the “features” which modern DVDs lard their releases with are laughable … a little bio of Leigh, a cast list, no interviews, no nothing. So much for extras.
That leaves us with this film and its accouterments … writing, filming, editing, and acting. First, it’s a masterful reduction of the whole novel, minus the lengthy disquisitions on Christian apologetics which Tolstoy larded on the original, and the postscript after Anna’s death. Anna in all her trembling glory is here, together with Dolly, her sister in law (so contrasting, because Anna helped put Dolly’s marriage back together, only to see her own fall apart); and Kitty, who was saved from the indifference of Vronsky and later who recognized the constancy of Levin (another solid marriage, in contrast with Anna’s own).
Categories: Uncategorized
Anna Karenina, film criticism, marketing, stoicism, Vivien Leigh
Pitney Bowes: Adding fuel to the B2B e-commerce trend?
October 26, 2011
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Marketers and customer-relations centers charged with keeping clients happy face differing international preferences when it comes to purchasing, shipping and communications, according to a new study from mailstream and content management technology company Pitney Bowes.
To me, this is an important look into the world of e-commerce, not because of what it says to consumer companies but rather what advantages B2B companies can glean from it. While not a mainstream way of going to market for B2B companies, e-commerce nevertheless is ideally suited to a vast array of software companies, and I’ve seen a compelling example of how it works in manufacturing as well, where prospective buyers know what they want and just need a quick and easy way to get it done without the hassle of dealing with tiresome sales reps. Read more…
Social gems: Additional tools for social media marketing
October 19, 2011
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Even as the world of social marketing matures, a number of new tools continue to attract attention. In previous editions of BtoB’s social newsletter Social Media Marketer (here, here and here), I profiled several apps that may be worth your attention. Here are some more intriguing options:
- BrightEdge. As social media becomes mainstream (becomes? became!), it’s inevitable that
channel optimization will converge. Thus, we have BrightEdge, the search engine optimization company that has optimized itself for social media. Recently the company launched BrightEdge S3, which provides suggestions on how to enable tweets and Facebook “likes” that have an influence on search rankings. How does it accomplish this magic? The platform checks out the buzz from both social networks and search engines while analyzing what prospects are searching for. Read more…
