As a graduating senior writing my last blog post for this class, I can look back and smile at what transpired. Originally, I took this course to hang out with Jeff Goetz and Adam D’augelli while learning a bit about the future of marketing. By the end, I just wanted to hang out with Jeff and Adam and Nick Lamberth while making jokes about the future of marketing. They times they are a-changing, eh Bob Dylan?

I was legitimately surprised by the effect of user-generated content; we ARE marketing. Also, I was surprised by the low effect I actually have on the world of media and how little I impact the world–fame is quite hard to come by. Burrito Bros didn’t suddenly become the hippest restaurant in town because Jeff and I gave them a Facebook page. Good publicity takes time and luck, I believe.

Directly because of this class, I created a blog about my life and a twitter about my jokes. Add these two things up with my facebook (the entirity of my social media presence) plus two dollars and you can buy a small coffee at Starbucks! Obviously, I carry no false pretenses about garnering fame from these small outlets, but I definitely enjoy the forum for my creative ventures that my blog and twitter provide.

Overall this has been an intriguing class. It is a case study in itself as the students create the content for the website and grow the social media presence of the Media-Savvy instructors Adam and Nick. I enjoyed it and I’m also glad to be moving on, glad that this is my last post. Eat, drink, and be merry at my last supper, everyone. One of my strongest memories of this class was eating a Pancake Sandwich at Bagels Unlimited (don’t try it), what about yours?

Fortunately for you, on the internet nobody knows you are a dog. Unfortunately for everyone else, the people labeled as experts (read: any fool with a blog) are also not revealed as dogs. Somehow, when people read a well-written blog or grammatically correct passage, they seem to believe its content. It is much akin to the “halo effect” wherein attractive people are trusted more so than others.

Our homework in this class is to learn from guest speakers (considered “experts” in their fields) and write about what we think they said. However, because we have a nice blog site and the legitimacy of the University of Florida supporting our efforts, any unlucky soul who reads my cynical words will also think me an expert.

Hopefully internet users are becoming equally as deft at finding useful information as they are at ignoring faux-info written by college boys like me. Anybody reading this site should know I am neither an expert nor a particularly committed learner; I just like to write and hear what other people have to say about it. I implore you to not believe me just because I have platform from which to speak.

woof woof

The biggest deadweight holding our society back, not to mention running up debt to no end, are retired peoples. Do they contribute anything to the hard-working, blue collared US of A besides nothing at all? No! Yes, there is only one solution:  Medicare needs to change from a system of health benefits for the elderly into a human culling organization. On their sixty-fifth birthdays, instead of earning retirement payments, all retired peoples would be, should be, euthanized.

Medicare spending added up to $480 Billion in 2008 and is only getting larger as American people live longer and the United States population ages. Killing off, instead of spending half-a-trillion dollars on, these people would surely change the world. It would be low-cost, need no marketing, and be entirely without controversy. This plan needs no Facebook Fan Page, no Twitter, no Viral Marketing, nor Subservient Chickens. It needs only a shotgun and a back alley, and hopefully a few illegal immigrants to do the shooting. Perhaps we could even use the corpses to feed Africans and homeless Americans. We cannot even agree on health care anyway, why should the old or the infirm receive it? This is, without question, a foolproof way to save the world and finally stick it to those party-pooping, parade-raining Mayans. I’m ready to make $450 billion; who’s with me?

However, such is the right of anyone in America. If people are forced to digitally sign their work (as on Facebook and on Twitter and on blogs, where peoples’ real identities are used) they become much more civil. When reputations are on the line, people show tact, remorse, and humanity. While it is definitively ignorant, it is also quite insightful toward the psyche of American society. I may not like it, and I may even hate it, but I am prepared to accept the reality that everyone hates everyone else if it is convenient and anonymous to do so.

We read books like Never Eat Alone and Wikinomics wherein the authors take it upon themselves to teach moral behavior, and these ideas are LAUDED as revolutionary. Is it really that hard to grasp that we should help each other out? Are we so scared of the evil menace of communism that allowing people free access to things is considered a SIN? Are we so far removed from any civility and compassion that we cannot give favors without expectations for repayment? Why do we need paradigm-shifting books to recall that we are a community of social creatures; that we are raised by people and helped every step of the way. This isn’t merely trading and bartering, this is the reality of human life–people depend on other people.

The only reasonable course of action at this unkind juncture of human history is, rather obviously, to restrict all freedoms until people learn to behave. The First Amendment should forever be stricken from the US Constitution and people should never speak again. Does it sound unreasonable? Nah, not to me; not when people act like this.

Now, celebrities can set up their own personal News Outlets to the world and hold constant, random press conferences via Twitter and enhance their own personal brand equity. Chad Ochocinco and Shaq are prime examples of two enormously popular celebrities gaining more fame by posting hundred-character excerpts of their world-view. No one should care, these people haven’t a firmer grip on society than anyone else. They come out of their houses naked, tweeting about nothing, and everyone praises their amazing new clothes.

I now have a twitter, to go along with my blog, that I like to post funny comments to my friends with. I am not sure anyone else would ever want to read my one sentence summary of my past-hour’s antics, but I think my friends might want to. I do not have arrogant ideas about my words; I do not expect to gain celebrity status or change the world with my words. In fact, I hope that NO ONE hangs on my every word like they do their celebrities.

My, and everyone else’s, Twitter is user-generated content at its finest. Twitter merely elegantly organized a silly, gossipy conversation already going on. As long as people have things to say they will want a forum to speak. Twitter cannot personally gain from this dialogue, but indirectly it can WWGD its way to the top.

Do any of you see the same thing I do? Do you follow people on Twitter and read about them in tabloids? I can say I am sometimes ashamed to see other people live and die by the acts of the famous, but I cannot change anyone else and I do not want them to try to change me. I will just whine about it to my followers on Twitter.

The truth about the wonderous internet is a sad tale, indeed. The vast majority of internet users are immoral, barbaric, unconverted bystanders who never reach the promised land.

The promised land, of course, is the interaction-based pages of websites–”check-out counters,” commenting boxes, videos to watch, or forums to contribute to. Companies’ bottom line internet goals are to convert these moochers into contributing members of a web based community, instead of sitting idly by or, worse, bouncing off of a web page as soon as they reach it.

A novel web-analytics term to throw around at the office is “conversion rate,” or the proportion of web views that result in a desired goal such as a purchase or a comment on a post. There are different ways to optimize one’s conversion rate but it these strategies are often company-specific.

Right now, Burrito Brothers uses Facebook and Twitter to interact with customers and receive feedback to stay involved in the community. A converted site-viewer may only hit “like” on a status or click “follow” on Twitter; Burrito Brothers already has a market and merely gives their pre-existing community some elegant, online organization. If desired, they can probably increase interaction by starting discussions and posing questions to their followers in status updates and forums online.

My blog, for example, likely has six readers (including my two parents, sister, and myself) and I do not have much to offer or expect from them. Sometimes people comment, sometimes they don’t, but I could optimize my page by catering to a specific market and giving encouragement for posting replies to blogs with questions or controversial statements. However, that isn’t what I currently define as success. To be successful, I need only keep my four most loyal readers (my family) updated with the silly things I like to do, write, and photograph.

Later in life, I might become interested in selling my products or ideas and I will need to learn optimization and learn to entice readers to comment. I’ll give it a try here, for practice:

I don’t care about conversion optimization or any other strategy that derives its basis from convincing people to give you their time or money. Learning about these terms and ideas makes me feel greedy; the words seem soaked in do-anything-to-make-money avarice. What do you think?

Right now, Jeff Goetz and I are working with The Burrito Brothers Taco Company. It has subsisted as a local eatery in a college town on simple practices alone for twenty-five years. The food is homemade and the owners are friendly; they rely on word 0f mouth, instead of coupons or promotions, to advertise their delicious food.

Google is doing a lot of things really well right now–innovating and making money like no other company before. However, some of their practices would lead to years of potential lost business in a smaller company like the Bros. I cannot suggest that the Burrito Brothers put their secret Guacamole recipe online and open it for criticism. I do not want them to let people vote daily on the soup of the day or what the burritos should cost.

However, I would suggest that the restaurant know its identity as a local food place and maybe borrow some Starbucks Coffee ideas as being a Third Place to chill and enjoy the atmosphere. I also think it would be sweet if the menu was a digital and posted on a video screen on the wall. It could constantly change its prices and rankings based on the hour, the number of people in the restaurant, and the popularity of the food.

Some ideas would work and others would fail. Taking Google’s advice would be to try many new things and see what sticks, while staying true to one’s identity. This seems okay but there seems to be an inordinately large potential for loss. I do not mind Google’s serpentine arms reaching out and touching a lot of things in this world, but I don’t want them touching me, or my Burritos.

In approximately eighteen months, I will begin law school and follow in the enormous footsteps of such people as Barack Obama, Judge Judy, Abraham Lincoln, and Tucker Max. Three years of my youth will be spent toiling away in libraries, fiercely competing with intellectuals to fit INFINITY into our brains and set  bell curves. However, our memorizing and wading through all of law-textual history may soon be for naught; the future of law is on the internet, and anyone may read and understand it.

Law appeared in many different forms throughout history and it currently manifests itself in the USA as miles of indecipherable legal-ese and text books. As more laws were added and more loopholes discovered, the language of law necessarily became more complex to avoid further complications; this, though, created more problems. Now, intense schooling is required to understand the vast amounts of data in law and there is a movement to make it more accessible to the public online.

Perhaps the lawyer of the future will not wear suits or drive a nice car. He never refers to his “billable hours” and needn’t memorize countless texts. The lawyer of the future could be you or me; he will be able to understand the spirit and the letter of the law easily–so that he who defends himself may not have a fool for a client.

After the surprising success of their day project for class, Jeff and Nate set off again on Thursday to collect more money for the Bush-Clinton Haiti fund.  A passerby took the video above of the team working to raise awareness.  To learn more:  about the project here or the source of the video.

At first I was a bit skeptical when he suggested that I take off all my clothes, “I feel like you can pull this off!” he mentioned, while I considered the merits of covering the Turlington Potato with stickys…

After tweaking the idea a bit, we decided that we would both be in our underwear only and act as Human Petitions for people to sign their support for the Haiti disaster relief effort; once people started offering donations, we realized we were part of something bigger and chose a charity (Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund) and accepted contributions.

Today, we found ourselves on the front page of the Alligator and resolved to restart the project on this cold, rainy Thursday and see what we could accomplish. We ended up with a Gainesville Sun reporter in tow as we collected $162 for the relief efforts. It also inspired me to start my own blog on tumblr.com

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