When we met, it felt like you really cared about me and my feelings. You used to help me stay better connected to people. Now you only connect me to places in a mindless game.

What was once an interesting and useful relationship has become an irrelevant distraction. I’m taking you off my iPhone’s shortcuts dock for now, but I hope this note might help you change in ways that make you relevant in my life again. I’m going to take a break from our friendship for a while rather than unfriending other people…

This week marks a year and a half since your big splash at SxSW in March 2009. That’s when I started loving you. Back then, we had a few dozen friends in common in San Francisco. I loved getting alerts as they checked in. Seeing where my friends were, I dropped in to bars, parties, and tech events. We made a great team.

I deepened connections to people I knew and felt a stronger sense of community. I visited places and met people I never would have otherwise. For months, I was the most socially active I’d ever been in my life. For a while, you fueled that. I was a better person because of you. Thanks.

But we seem to have grown apart…

As you grew, hundreds of people requested to be my FourSquare friends. Even after rejecting folks I’d never met, I still had more than 150. That’s a fraction of the people I’m connected to on Facebook, Twitter or email, but this is simply more people than I can ge

t location alerts from. I can’t keep track of it all, and I can’t act on it. You no longer help me sort the interesting from the mundane. Excepting your downtime this week, the database in my ears isn’t capable of handling nearly the volume that yours is.

At first I disabled alerts for many people, but I found I had to disable them altogether. Part of this isn’t your fault — the alert system on the iPhone is primitive, and alerts from apps trounce each other (and incoming SMS messages). I found I was losing both. Hopefully that’s something Apple improves soon.

The bottom line is, you don’t help me meet up with my other friends anymore.

And frankly, you seem so focused on work that you seem to have forgotten people. If I need a business directory, I’ve got Yelp and plenty of other options that do a better job right now. If that’s what you want to be, you’ve got a long road ahead of you. I fell in love with you because you were all about the people in the places, not the businesses themselves.

I realized I just wasn’t getting anything from our relationship anymore. I kept putting in checkins and tips, but what’s the value for me? Coupons? Really, you think love can be bought?  Badges? Honey, if you think I’m a boyscout, you really don’t understand me at all.  Mayorships? They’re not worth the hassle, it’s just more work without a meaninful payoff. (Well, OK, it does tickle me a little to be the mayor of a few of my favorite places, even though no one notices anymore.) You used to mean something to me, but I see you’ve grown shallow.

I thought maybe I could help you myself. So I started to unfriend people on Foursquare. Then I realized that I’d lose context for people who are loose connections, so their tips wouldn’t pop up. And I wouldn’t be able to spot larger scale trends.

I don’t need to unfriend other people. What I need is for you to acknowledge my feelings.

While I love all people, I really do feel closer to some more than others. I’d love to know what my closest friends and family are doing wherever they are in the world (my feelings for them are enough to create relevance), while others only matter to me if they are checking in to someplace of professional interest rather than their social haunts (or vice-versa).  Some people I might only care if they are very near to where I am now. Often I’d like to follow someone closely for a while as I get to know them, but later let drift into my pool of broader friends or acquaintances (once I’ve decided how compatible we are, or how interesting they are).

You need to respect the fact that some of our friends are closer than others, and mean different things to us.

I still care about you, and I’d like to see you change. My friend Facebook has the same problem, and started trying to manage it this week with a new groups feature. I’m not sure how well that’s going to work out. Twitter has its own issues. But they’ve both changed so much in the last year. They show me they’re really trying, that they really care about me.

I hope someday I’ll again feel about you the way I still do about Facebook and Twitter, but for right now, I just need a little break.

Skittles Vodka (with instructions on Flickr)

In a brilliant publicity move, tonight Skittles made its website home page primarily a Twitter search on “Skittles.” (They overlay a menu that lets you get to other Skittles content, including Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia.)

Even if they take it down quickly, everyone will be talking about it for some time to come.

Like any good publicity stunt, this required rare courage.

I’ve already read several folks putting obscenities together with Skittles (some more creatively than others), or folks just adding the word to any tweet. The conversation will be as much backlash and criticism as anything else. But the point is exactly that people are talking about what Skittles did. And any publicity is good publicity, right? You just can’t buy the kind of media this will generate.

As well, we’ll all learn something in the conversations and fallout. That alone is worth the experiment. Bravo, Skittles.

Update (9:21am Monday):
Skittles is generating so much traffic to to Twitter that users are complaining of timeouts on loading pages (and TweetSuite isn’t yet updating with all the folks who’ve been kind enough to tweet a link to this blog). I’m looking forward to hearing from @abdur, Twitter’s Chief Scientist and creator of search.twitter.com, what he thinks of all this (and whether Skittles gave him a heads up).

@dalelarson on skittles.com

Update 2 (Monday afternoon):
I liked this post, inspired me to think a bit deeper and comment:
Skittles Goes Modernista! With A Distributed Experience.

So far the only comments I’ve seen out of Twitter about Skittles are:
“I am neither… there are both pro and con points” (thanks for getting back to me, Abudur!),
and Netik’s quick response to @LaughingSquid: “I don’t know what they’re thinking.”
Though one might take this status blog entry to mean that Skittles blew a fuse at Twitter’s datacenter: “We experienced a brief data center power failure this morning affecting a small number of servers. Site performance was degraded for 5 minutes.“

It was easy to focus on Rich Ullman‘s lunchtime talk during OMMA Social today as he creatively wove in stories and slides from his experience over the last 48 hours. (Sorry about that olive, Rich.)

He made a point about transparency making newly appointed U.S. Senator Gillibrand an example. With the news around her appointment, he’d just learned that as a congresswoman, her Sunlight Report broke ground making her the first to list her official schedule daily (who she is meeting with) and among the first to disclose all her earmark requests and post her financial disclosure reports.

Cool!

Take it one step further:
I’d love it if every member of congress had a Twitter feed updated as they went through their daily meetings and proposed, amended, or voted on budgets or legislation. Following those I vote for would be manageable and give me a much deeper awareness and sense of engagement.

[Rich was kind enough to upload his slides to Slideshare within an hour of my request. Thanks!]
[You might also be interested in live blog posts about each presentation at OMMA Social by @dberkowitz]

I think we’re missing the mark, though.  It’s not really about Twitter.  It’s not about Facebook.  It’s not about whatever the next buzzword is.

It’s about friends.

It’s about building real relationships that inspire people to act on your behalf.  That’s the skill we should focus on building. Whether it’s Twitter or Digg or Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s about those relationships.

We have to teach ourselves to operate that way again.

We commonly use phrases like “Facebook Strategy” or “Mobile Strategy,” but we’d never talking about building a house in terms of “Hammer Strategy.”   The technologies are just tools and our language is tricking us.

When we’re wowed by case-studies showing off the power and effectiveness of these tools, we’re really being impressed the underlying strategy, a powerful one that we can all take advantage of.

It’s easy to forget that it has always been one of the best business and marketing strategies to make friends. We do that by focusing on others, on listening to them and meeting their needs. How will your business be making friends and thriving in 2009?

It’s short, well-written, and says again what we need to keep hearing about how companies need respond strategically to Web 2.0. It’s not just implementing promotional marketing programs there as if it were a new media channel to add to the mix.

Remember how companies were left behind in the nineties. It wasn’t because they didn’t develop a web site or an email list quickly enough, it was because they didn’t have a good response to the changing environment and competition. They needed to add offerings and/or change positioning to carve out a new niche in the new world. Mobile and social media are causing even bigger shifts.

Consumers are flocking to blogs, social-networking sites and virtual worlds. And they are leaving a lot of marketers behind.

• A New Approach: Marketing these days is more about building a two-way relationship with consumers. Web 2.0 tools are a powerful way to do that.
• The Pioneers: A growing number of companies are learning how to collaborate with consumers online on product development, service enhancement and promotion.
• The Lessons: From these early efforts, a set of marketing principles have emerged. Among them: get consumers involved in all aspects of marketing, listen to and join the online conversation about your products outside your site, and give the consumers you work with plenty of leeway to express their opinions.

What to do? Paper Christmas cards seem eco-unfriendly. Ecards just seem unfriendly. Thoughts/alternatives?

Looking for the best way to connect during the holidays? Me too.

At one time, I mailed cards each December as part of maintaining important relationships personal and professional. But I’d fallen out of the habit.

Wanting to restart or create a new habit in line with my values, I turned to the collective wisdom of Twitter (and Facebook) to ask “What to do? Paper Christmas cards seem eco-unfriendly. Ecards just seem unfriendly. Thoughts/alternatives?”

I was surprised by the instant response with so many wonderful ideas to share! Read on for the best so far, and add your ideas to the comments.

Holiday cards are a lot of work
As a CEO of a software and book publishing company in the Nineties, much of our business and promotion was online. Still, holiday greetings meant snail mail, and were a major project:

• Custom designed and printed cards ordered months in advance.
• Database work to update lists and print envelopes.
• A quick handwritten note and signature on each one.
• Postage for each of the countries we did business in. (We’d literally shipped software and books to every continent including Antarctica, and won the occasional argument with the local postmaster on customs declarations and other postal regulations.)

Worth the effort?

I loved sending Mele Kalikimaka cards the year I lived in Hawaii. These from Etsy look nice.

While it was expensive in time and money, it was well worth it. Relationships matter in business as much as elsewhere, and staying in touch, letting someone know you’re thinking of them, just brightens people’s days. Of course, we shouldn’t just do that during the holidays, but having one more excuse each year is great.

Plus, it was a point of pride that we sent something beautiful. An opportunity to further our brand and message as well as to maintain important relationships.  I sent company cards also to friends and family, adding personal letters so they would know what was happening with me as well as my company.

Wasteful?
But perhaps it was also wasteful. As much as we’d pioneered minimizing our software packaging and printing our books with non-toxic inks on recycled papers, we splurged on the fancy cards (and delivering them around the world).

Stopped sending them… and lost contact
For that and other reasons, in the years since, I’d stopped sending cards altogether, and never found a replacement besides the holiday calls made to my closest contacts. I’ve felt the resulting loss of connection. I want it back.

Answers

So, what came back from my query?  As I’d expect from Twitter (and Facebook, since my Twitter automatically updates my Status there, too), I quickly got several humorous replies (themselves a way to maintain contact and relationship) as well as serious ideas and hints. Thanks for all the responses!

The rest of this post is the Best Twitter and Facebook responses so far (with my thoughts on each).

I’ve mixed a couple Facebook responses in with the Twitter replies. Can you add your own ideas in the comments on this blog post?

Personalized Video Email

Great answer. In fact, I’d just done the same thing with a video birthday greeting to a friend.  I’d started to send a note, realized Facebook would be an easy way to do it, then saw the video option as well as text. I think it took less time for me to use my laptop’s built in camera than what it would have taken to compose a decent email.

David Spark has a couple of great posts with more details and instructions on doing this. I highly recommend: Sending personal holiday cards this year and  I just sent 325 personal video holiday greetings-How I did it.

Facebook Apps Overdone?

Eran makes a good point. “This calls for a viral facebook app! I see Elves instead of zombies and Santa’s little armies at war over who’s more annoying!” It can be all to easy to use e-cards and newer social media in ways that are more likely to annoy your friends than to make them feel Holiday joy.  At the same time, different strokes for different folks. You might consider reaching out in different ways to different parts of your address book according to what you know about their preferences. (Thanks for permission to make your protected update public.)

I already tried the telepathic approach

Thanks, Timmmii, for one of the funnier responses. “Send your holiday greetings telepathically. saves money, time and commitment. ”

Besides reaching out by telephone to my closest contacts during the holiday, I do make an effort to try to stay in touch throughout the year.  If I did a good enough job of that all the time, I might just ignore the holiday hype and go back to the telepathic approach.

Cupcakes and Art Cards

Given how cupcakes have become the latest craze and internet meme, that’s not a bad idea. Bake a little love and give a consumable card.

Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, give a card they’d want to keep forever, one that makes great art and preferably suits their taste. While sending it as a postcard risks damage, it saves the waste of an envelope.

Cards can be Eco-Friendly

Of course, I could go back to cards, but make an effort to minimize their impact, including reducing and recycling. As Leslie says, “make cards on waste paper, paper bags, etc.”

As Alex points out, delivering by hand is an alternative to save on delivery expense and waste, especially since we might presume that a good visit is a great addition to a card anyway. Leslie’s link to http://www.directcreative.com/postal-experiments.html is pretty amusing, too!

(Thanks to Leslie and Alex for permission to include your Facebook comments here.)

E-cards great if you put some thought into customizing image and message

Technopatra’s tweet made me realize that ecards really can be one of the best options.

Like any other method of communication, when you’re on the receiving end of an indiscriminate broadcast which isn’t well thought out, it can feel like being spammed more than being loved.

When thought is put into it, though, especially if they include something really personal from the sender and customized to each recipient, this is much like the video option (and, of course, you could combine both). I’ve also seen mobile holiday cards (sent as an SMS link) that make sense for those in that business.

With just a little thought and for very little effort and cost, you can make and impact and let the people in your life feel touched during the holidays.

Thanks for reading, and happy holidays to you!

How could this make sense? Facebook and Linkedin already have considerable revenues. Twitter has zero. They also have far more users than Twitter. And so on. Some have even said Twitter is not a business.

Yet Twitter has a kind of transcendent clarity.

It’s not that Twitter now tops the list of fastest growing social networks or that Facebook offered to buy Twitter for $500 million.

The moment I was introduced to Twitter, my eyes got big. I saw something simple, different and open. It was already evolving through user behavior and through the addition of connecting services. It could be a kind of underlying protocol, the hub of an ecosystem, not a stand alone website.

Today, Tim O’Reilly added to that sense with a wonderful post explaining that Twitter does one small thing and does it well, has brilliant social architecture, cooperates well with others, creates ambient intimacy, and provides core services not bound to a particular interface.

Social networks like Facebook and Linkedin (and Friendster and Tribe.net before them) jealously guard their social graph, the connections between users. So I have to “friend” someone (offering and accepting) separately for each network I belong to, and I can’t take advantage of those connections except in software that run on a particular service. Twitter is different.

Twitter cooperates well with others. Rather than loading itself down with features, it lets others extend its reach. There are dozens of powerful third-party interface programs; there are hundreds of add-on sites and tools. Twitter even lets competitors (like FriendFeed or Facebook) slurp its content into their services. But instead of strengthening them, it seems to strengthen Twitter. It’s the new version of embrace and extend: inject and take over.

An example of that difference comes out in looking at how Facebook and Twitter share status updates.

Last month at CM Summit I asked Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, about status updates going from Twitter to Facebook, but not the other way.

Today, John Battelle (who interviewed Williams on stage during CM Summit) pointed out a new problem I’d also been facing. It isn’t just that status updates only go one-way, there is also an issue about replies (thus conversation):

I admit that I’m still catching up on Facebook after having overdosed on Friendster and Tribe.net all those years ago. So please comment to suggest things I might be missing.

• Despite having many more Twitter followers than Facebook friends, often my tweets get several more Facebook replies than Twitter @ replies. Why?
• At least where the Facebook user also has a Twitter account, it would be nice to see their comment as an @reply on Twitter so that the conversation could continue there. And vice-versa, I’d love it if my @replies mapped to Facebook (perhaps as a post to that user’s wall?).
• Since it doesn’t work like that, how can I best keep up with that second reply stream? Since I’m on Twitter more often than Facebook, that means I tend to miss them until later. Others may have the opposite problem.
• Another service, FriendFeed, proposes a kind of solution, but in fact, makes the problem worse by providing one more island of comments.
• When I want to continue the conversation, what’s the best way to do that? Respond with an Fbook comment to my own status update? @ reply them on Twitter if I know they have an account there? That seems impractical since I often can’t remember everyone’s Twitter handle.
• Ping.fm, a front-end for posting status to many services, differentiates between updates to “micro-blogs” and “statuses”. Perhaps it will grow to include a category for “replies”? Still, that is only a solution for status going out, it doesn’t solve the problem for replies coming in.

Perhaps the real reason I use Twitter so much more than other social networks is exactly the reason that it is creating this kind of problem. Exactly the reason I felt OD’d on more traditional social networks. By being the most open broadly adapted social network, Twitter becomes the hub for every type of social networking.

Users won’t keep all their lives separated into artificial compartments by service for long. Nor will they keep using many different interfaces to lots of similar services. They have little patience for re-entering and re-confirming their friendships, but they will do it to move to a solution that works better for them. Just as they moved off closed email systems to open ones. Until Facebook develops the kind of clarity that Twitter has, it should fear the fate of Friendster and Tribe.net.

In the end, we’ll flock to the solutions that best increase our ability to be in touch with more people as well as to have deeper connections.Those won’t be the closed solutions.

(Incidentally, I started writing in response to the tweet from John Battelle. In the middle of it, another tweet alerted me to Tim O’Reilly’s post and sent me off in another direction. It’s on Twitter that I keep up with everyone.)

What a wonderful idea. I’d love to help “rework the interface between legislators and their constituencies: to rebuild trust and honest, genuine relationships between lawmakers and We the People.”

Certainly, social media could play a role in this. For it to do so meaningfully, lessons beyond those learned in the Obama campaign are needed. The campaign succeeded more in using social media to help spread messages than it did in giving voices to the people.

What’s needed to change congress has more to do with changing the listening habits of legislators.

Where Lessig hopes to first reduce the volume of voices belonging to monied interests, that still leaves empowering voices and increasing the volume for those with the best ideas and the interests of the people at heart. How to do that without simply creating a useless cacophony, and how to get legislators into the habit of doing the work of seeking out meaningful input remain as issues.

Some have contended that social media doesn’t scale for business because it is so personal. I suppose the theory must be that it’s too expensive to hire enough folks to engage in all those conversations.  Of course it doesn’t scale like that.  Instead the idea should be to transform an organization so that every member participates in conversations as part of their work.

If each legislator and their staffs are truly engaged in conversation with their constituents and those conversations are public and leveraged through technology so that they are shared, that’s an awful lot of conversations going on and being aggregated into deliberation on the floor. That sounds like scale for democracy.

I sent each of you this because we’ve talked recently about marketing yourself or your business. Most of you are thinking about blogging, or have a blog and other online marketing that you could get better results from.

Sales without selling? Selling by giving away? Here’s a good article I just read this morning after Jim twittered about it overnight. (He is a small business marketing expert based in the UK, so it wasn’t actually overnight for him.)

It doesn’t say anything new. Lots of people have tried to explain this. It says the same stuff I keep trying to tell folks about marketing online, only more clearly and without so much yelling:

http://jimsmarketingblog.com/2008/10/26/blog-marketing-newsletter-marketing/

“I have not used any form of paid marketing for my business for years.

That’s right – 100% of my non-referred business comes from either my newsletter, my website or this blog!

All I have to do is make sure I give away as much valuable marketing information as possible, to as many small businesses as possible. Then, when these small businesses want someone to help them market their products or services, they give me a call. When they want their blog or website transformed into a goldmine, they already know my work and that I get results – so they get in touch!“ [Emphasis his.]

Jim is selling (marketing advice) by giving away as much fantastic free marketing advice as possible. The advice he’s giving applies whatever your field, it will work for any kind of consultant, coach, trainer, health practitioner, lawyer, accountant, IT or other professional service. It really applies to any business.

Stop working on selling anyone. Look for ways to help them and provide a service.

Stop worrying that you’ll give away too much and your services won’t be needed because you’ve written it all down. You’re valuable as a person, and people will pay more for that value when you give of it freely.

Stop worrying that your competition will catch on to what you’re doing and somehow take advantage of you. Instead, you might just end up in public conversation online, come off looking good by making each other appear both smart and friendly, get more sales calls, learn from each other and succeed through those and other forms of coopetition.

Get online, give away as much as you can, and the sales will come to you on their own!

Cheers!
-Dale

voice/txt: +1 415.902.2146
http://dalelarson.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dalelarson
http://twitter.com/dalellarson

Right now, Sunday morning, I’m watching a live video telethon with hundreds of other viewers. Adam pulled this together yesterday in an emergency to not only help his friend but to make a larger contribution to the community. He’s been “on air” overnight.

Adam has been running a live video telethon all weekend on Ustream.tv as well as reaching out through other bloggers, on Twitter and elsewhere to get the word out.

They’re asking everyone who can to find ways to spread the word in hopes that this will go viral. It’s all still unfolding as the word spreads and people find more creative ways to help.

The chat room in Ustream is active with viewers who started contributing by building a wiki to act as a hub for all the information and efforts, a ChipIn.com widget for contributions, offering non-cash donations of services, discounts and goods to be offered as premiums or auctioned on EBay, and more.

It hasn’t gone without hiccups. Things have evolved so fast that their presentation in writing hasn’t kept up with what they’re explaining on video. They pulled together things like a way to accept donations on-the-fly, crowd-sourced with the help of viewers. They’ve started having a problem with static coming from Adam’s laptop that they don’t have a technical resource to solve yet. But they’re going forward whatever the issues and trusting that it will all work out in the end, with a little help from their friends.

What an amazing use of social media!

EDITED to drop details and links no longer relevant.

UPDATE: In the end, Adam ended the telethon and returned the money raised. The comments on this blog post reflect that people really appreciated being able to get involved, learned a lot through pulling this together in a collaborative effort, and felt like it was overall positive and successful in the most important sense — even if it didn’t save the studio.