Stephen Bolen's Internet Awesomesauce

I’ve been extremely busy with a great website project for the St. Louis City Democrats — Unwrap Healthcare.

For a $5 donation to the City of St. Louis Central Democratic Campaign Committee, you can send a customized Christmas card to the electeds of your choosing.

We’re using the following technologies to power this project:

• GoDaddy – Hands down the best Domain Registrar on the planet. Affordable, secure, quick.
• MediaTemple – Gladius Communications is powering a pretty bad-ass (mt) rig. We’ll be able to take on all traffic spikes from Digg, Daily Kos, etc.
• Wordpress – when you need a CMS to power a site quickly, WordPress is tops. We had the site up and running in no time.
• WooTheme’s Digital Farm theme – WooThemes is unreal. Love them.
• Espresso & CSS Edit (for the coding, yo) – I love Espresso and CSS Edit. They both work seamlessly with Cyberduck, my FTP program of choice.
• Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop – You can’t really do a design project without running into Illustrator and Photoshop.
• Google Checkout – We needed a payment gateway for securely processing donations. ActBlue cost too much (and they were able to keep all of the data they collected) and PayPal is straight-up ghetto.
• Twitter – A great platform to find progressives via the #p2 and #hcr hashtags. Also a good place to drop promo codes for orders!
• Facebook – We started a group, All I Want for Christmas is Healthcare Reform, which in 24 hours pulled in 560 members. It’s still growing!

All I’ve done this vacation is work on freelance projects. It’s nice, I guess, but I kind of miss having the time off.

In other news, it was 70 degrees today in St. Louis – the fourth time this month. We had our windows open at the house from about 1:30pm to 6:00pm; it was just too perfect outside.

Well, thanks to some good friends…

… I survived Thanksgiving.

But in all seriousness, I do have a lot to be thankful for this year. I’m for the most part healthy, very happy and am blessed with a beautiful family. Despite all of the hardships we had to endure in late spring, we came out on top. It’s been a great year in that regard.

What are you thankful for?

Happy holidays, you miserable bastards! If you’ve got to put up with family for extended periods of time, you probably lean awfully hard on your old pal Booze – I know I do.

So tomorrow, when I’m gathered around family trying desperately to protect my newborn daughter from the germs of relatives, I’m turning to Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale – in my humble opinion, the king of all seasonal beers.

So raise a glass and toast sanity – and Sierra Nevada. After all, they’re doing all the hard work!

I can’t wait for the day when Social Media Marketing is seen by organizations as a legitimate form of marketing by that requires a broader knowledgebase than how to use Facebook, Twitter, et cetera – that there *is* a lot of training involved and an awful lot of higher-level thought…

… which leads me to my second point: I also can’t wait for the day when Social Media Marketers are paid what they deserve for possessing a unique skillset, not paid like interns or part-time college students who fit the profile of a “Facebook user.”
Here’s the Craigslist posting that inspired this rant, posted in my own city!

Social Marketing/Digital Media (Hwy 40 and Lindbergh)

Date: 2009-11-17, 3:03PM CST
Reply to: job-anhhy-1470469986@craigslist.org

Looking for an outgoing, positive person to take our Company into the techie, communications world of twitter and facebook. Can you set up a facebook wall, maintain it, twitter, etc? Send a few sentences by email to us describing your abilities. Please, no attachments. Part time, could lead to full time. Looking for a high energy team player.

• Location: Hwy 40 and Lindbergh
• Compensation: $12/hr
• This is a part-time job.
• OK for recruiters to contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

It’s really insulting, but, at the same time, not surprising. People who put out ads like this are also the kind of people who think that they can get away with paying $150 to a neighbor or distant relative for a website that looks like it was designed in Netscape Communicator 4.2.

How does your organization view Social Media? Are you getting the resources you need? Do you even have a budget? Let me know in the comments!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: social media director (Kurt Greenbaum) at a major newspaper (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) blatantly violates own Privacy Policy (using IP address for non-stated purpose) after being offended by a lewd word (“pussy”) posted anonymously, turns over information to the anonymous commentor’s employer (school district), and when confronted by his employer, the employee (anonymous commentor) resigns.

If you need to get up to speed, read this.

Greenbaum’s mea culpa is priceless. He goes on and on about how he’s not wrong and doesn’t really feel bad for his actions.

Shorter version: “Even though someone lost their job over posting the word ‘pussy’ anonymously, I feel no remorse because I believe I technically didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t believe I went too far.”

What really gets my goat is that in the justification, Greenbaum goes so far as to say “We don’t condone vulgarity or obscenity on our site. We won’t tolerate it. Increasingly, we are concerned about the tone of the conversation on STLtoday. When we can, we ban people without apology for bad behavior. We have taken steps to beef up our review process and we’ll continue to enhance those measures to address bad language and intolerant speech.”

You don’t have to go far to find intolerant speech on the Post-Dispatch web site. In fact, do a search for “School Bus” (the incident where two African-American kids beat up a Caucasian kid on a school bus) or “Obama” (our 44th President, who happens to be black), and you’ll see the type of comments that are all-too common. Here are just two (in succession, from the same story):

But I digress.

So, in the worst mea culpa I’ve ever seen, Greenbaum says that this is a good teachable moment.

I’ll bite.

Here are 3 bulletproof ways to ensure that this never happens again:

1. Read up on social media ethics. Draft a policy. Make sure those in your social media team understand it.
   By deciding to take matters in your own hand – offended by the word pussy, ironically enough – you violated some pretty hardcore transparency guidelines when you went around your Terms of Service.
2. Install some WordPress plugins to Moderate Comments.
   This is the biggest facepalm in the entire debacle. The blogs on STLToday.com all run WordPress. There are ways to, uh, moderate comments with profanity filters, IP range bans, et cetera. Please don’t plead ignorance – anyone worth their spit in social media has had run-ins with WordPress, and thereby knows about plugins.
3. Enlist the help of the community to help purge unsavory comments.
   You’d be surprised how many people would volunteer to help out if it meant cleaning up the community. Empower them. Since you’re using WordPress, it’s super easy to set up roles. (Just sayin’)

What suggestions do you have to help clean up the mess at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? Let’s hear ‘em in the comments.

EDIT: I’ve had numerous people tell me things like “I know Kurt – he’s a good guy.” I’m sure he is, but that doesn’t change the fact that he went too far, and now someone is out of work in a recession.

I’ve been a dad for 5 months. That’s crazy. It seems like just yesterday…

Anyway, here’s a video we shot with our Canon EOS Rebel T1i yesterday of Jane dancing to her Fredbrid/St. Louis Cardinals Mobile. She really loves that thing.

Today was the *third* day we cracked 70 degrees in November.

I’m not sure if or how we’ll pay for it later, but I don’t care about that right now. I don’t care because I was able to rake leaves & clean gutters in a t-shirt. I was able to walk around the Loop with my wife and daughter. I was able to have lunch outdoors with my dad.

So if we hit a few days of single digit temperatures in January, I’ll be oddly ok with that. Ok because we had awesome weather in the middle of November.

First, if you’re not reading Amber Naslund’s awesome blog, Altitude Marketing, you’re missing out. Seriously – run over there and load up your feed reader. You’ll be very, very glad you did.

Amber currently has a two-parter on her website about Hiring for Social Media. This is a MUST READ: The Ugly Side & Good Moves

Highlights:

• Companies are trying to figure out who to hire.
  • Some good job descriptions/duties
  • Some absolutely head-shakingly bad job descriptions/duties
• Few companies “get it,” so be careful when you’re looking.
• Right now, the bad outweighs the good, but that will change with time.

What are you waiting for? GO TO AMBER’S BLOG! →

Sorry to be such a ‘bag, but I wanted to let all 10 of you who have subscribed to the RSS feed via Feedburner that I’ve changed the Feed URL. I know, I know, not cool.

But now it’s shorter and harmonizes with the site better. Or something.

Anyway, load it up here: Internet Awesomesauce.

/housekeeping