March 22nd, 2006, 5:53 pm
What a pitch!
Straight up: You call me at work on 5:40 on a Wednesday afternoon, and you’re gonna get a little Sassssquatch.
A dude calls me to pitch some blogging software.
I’m gonna tell you right now: I do not like people who try to sell their software — generally, the products are inferior, and there is a reason they’re calling me, versus the other way around. (Can we say saturated market?)
So poor George does his pitch: Marqui.com.
I’m a dork, and I check it out. I’m asking some questions, when I scan this Marqui blog entry … of a 48-year-old woman setting up a MySpace account so she could give a presentation on social networking … and then being surprised to make a “friend” named Tom.
And within seconds of typing my name in and uploading my photo, the most amazing thing happened: suddenly, I had a “friend.” His name is Tom, he’s single, white, 30 years old and lives in California. He shared his favorite music with me (a range of those I recognized and didn’t), his favorite movies (c’mon, can someone love Gladiator, Titanic AND the Sound of Music?) and authors. He was there to help me negotiate through MySpace if I had any questions. I poked around through some of Tom’s 57,858,014 friends, many of whom were online at the same time I was - in the middle of a school day. All were obviously way younger than I, many of them had photos of themselves in interesting poses, and they were all sending Tom their thoughts.
I’m just laughing.
George, I ask … how can she be giving a presentation on social networking if she doesn’t know who Tom from MySpace is?
George at least had the sense to get off the phone with me quickly, before I was any sassier.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:23 am
nice. too bad the guy wasn’t selling wp 2.0.2, cause you know i’m buying.
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:24 am
Seriously? She can’t be that clueless. No one could. Maybe she was attempting satire. Perhaps?
P.S. If you got a PhD in anthropology, I bet you could find someone to pay you to give presentations on social networking.
Ask me how. I’ve got this GREAT software I can sell you to get started. Oh, and some swamp land in Florida…
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:05 pm
No, this gal was not attempting satire. She was serious. It’s cute that she got it so wrong, but it’s also troubling (to media-obsessed me), because we have this cadre of people who don’t know what they are talking about acting as experts in the medium at conferences. I’ve seen it time and time again - a clueless presenter giving a lecture on something they barely understand, to a room full of people who are taking notes like it’s the gospel.
It hurts the media’s ability to really predict the development of online communication when they are being led by someone with limited knowledge
And the less that “the media” understand, the worse their ability to adapt appropriately to a changing environment.
That being said, I’ve also met a lot of incredibly smart people who really get it and are leading their organizations down awesome roads.
As a knowledge socialist, I just wish that the power of the Internet meant that people everywhere could learn; and its frustrating to see that stuff like this is still happening.
March 23rd, 2006 at 11:19 pm
It reminds me, for reasons not entirely clear, of the “in the blogs” segments they run on CNN with pictures of people looking at blogs on their computers. Especially when they first started…damn, it was painful