Sometimes websites are like potato chips: You can’t have just one and you feel like crap once you’re done.

Many of us wander aimlessly around the web day after day, night after night, telling ourselves we’ll quickly check something only to surface, hours later, from a long fall down the rabbit hole known as the Internet.

Unlike Alice after her Wonderland adventure, we don’t come out of our web haze armed with grand insights of self-discovery. Instead, we feel worn down and wasteful, and fear our behavior is bordering on addiction.

A bad habit is not an addiction. Addiction makes a severe impact on a person’s well-being and threatens to destroy their lives. If you think your Internet use is approaching that level of harm, contact your doctor. There are therapies that can help.

But if you’re like me and you have a pretty balanced life yet are concerned with the amount of time you spend online, then read on for some tips I’ve gathered from the experts on some innovative ways to gain back those hours lost to the Internet:

1. Surf the web first.

What was that? Yes, surf the web first thing in the morning (or the beginning of your day). Use the Internet only in your most energetic moments. You’ll be efficient because you will be obligated to do other things (e.g., get ready for work, take the kids to school) and you’ll have the energy to ignore the endless lure of “interesting” links. Winding down at the end of a long day shouldn’t include the Internet. Our ability to make good decisions is used up by the time we usually sit down to surf. Dan Ariely, a Behavioral Economist at Duke University, says this phenomenon is explained by what is known as Depletion Theory: “our ability to make any type of difficult decisions …[is] adversely affected by fatigue.” Limit your web time to solid energy level hours, and you’ll spend less time wandering and more time researching or getting done what you need to do online.

2. Find autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Author Daniel H. Pink, in his book DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says that the best way to love a job is to have autonomy over your work, have the possibility of mastering the work, and have a sense of purpose for doing the work. Find these three aspects in the “work” of your web surfing. AUTONOMY: When you go online, remember that you are in total control over how much time you will spend. Use a timer if it helps you stay conscious of this fact. MASTERY: Learn how to research topics quickly (e.g., use the outbound links at the bottom of wikipedia entries); Aggregate social sites by using RSS or email. Automate as much as possible. PURPOSE: Go online with specific tasks in mind. Keep a sticky note on your desktop with a list of the top 10 of your life goals on it; if a website doesn’t fit under one of those categories, then close the window. Gaining control over yourself, the subjects and sites you surf, and surfing with a goal in mind will help you feel like the time you sit online is time well-spent.

3. Use Disruption.

If you spend too much time mindlessly web surfing, you’ve developed a bad habit. The key to stopping bad habits like smoking or superfluous eating is to interrupt the pattern of behavior by using a technique known as disruption. According to Psychology Today’s Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, willpower isn’t as powerful as it seems; Disruption, in research studies, proves to be more successful in ridding yourself of bad habits. Try changing the context of your web surfing. Build a high shelf or treadmill stand for your laptop, and allow yourself web time only while standing or walking (very!*) slowly. Next, try changing the method of performance. Use your non-dominant hand to scroll, use the mouse, or one-hand type. Or use your phone (harder to read and navigate) to check social media sites, AND use your non-dominant hand to do it. By designing some well-placed disruption in the course of your habitually bad behavior, you’ll break the pattern and feel better about yourself.

With a little effort and concentration, you can kick mindless surfing to the curb. Design your life with new, healthy patterns of Internet behaviors and you’ll never spend another minute lost in a maze of cheshire cat videos again.

3 Surprising Ways to Overcome Internet Addiction is a post from: PurpleCar

The manager at my local branch of the brick-and-mortar retail store GameStop went so over-the-top with his “customer service” delivery today that I left the store feeling suspicious and uneasy. What I found out about the motives behind the manager’s overzealous push will keep me from returning to GameStop.

My newly six-year-old son received a GameStop gift card as a birthday present. GameStop gift cards are popular in this area, as many of the children have gaming platforms (e.g. Wii, Xbox) as well as personal systems (e.g. Nintendo DS). My son couldn’t wait to spend his card, so we went today after school.

The game I wanted to buy

He browsed a bit and settled on a Mario Bros. game for the DS. I took the new box up to the counter (all the games inside all the boxes in the store have been removed to avert theft. I don’t like this idea, because I prefer untampered products, but I understand). I put the box down on the counter and took a picture of the game cover to text to my husband; I wanted to make sure we didn’t already own the game.

The manager, or, the man I know as the manager (generally a nice guy) was the only employee in the store. I didn’t hear back from my husband, but I felt pretty sure the game wasn’t one we owned. I presented the box to the manager.

Without being asked, he said, “I think I have this used” and proceeds to look up the game in his “used game” file.

I paused. I have a general aversion to used games.

The manager said, “Yup, I have it,” and puts the used game cartidge only (no box) on the counter and rings it up before I could say anything. He answers the phone during the transaction (understandable, as he was the only one in the store, but honestly? What kind of policy is that?).

I handed him the gift card for $25.00 and an extra dollar for the .75 cents left on the bill.

When the transaction was completed, I stood in wait; I expected a case and a cover as well as a book. I’ve bought used games once or twice before and they’ve come with these packaging materials. I had no idea GameStop sold only the cartridges mostly, that I must’ve had rare “full box” experiences with my used game purchases in the past.

I said, “Where’s the box?”

The manager said, “This is how it comes.”

“What?”

“That’s how most people trade them in. I can give you a case, if I have one. You can get all the other stuff online.”

I thought, I have to print out the cover? Then he hands me a case with a big rip in the plastic.

I said, “I’d rather have the new game. Take this all back.” I gave him the lonely little game cartridge back and the receipt.

“You’ll pay 9 dollars just for the case?” he asked. At this point, he should have just apologized for the misunderstanding and taken the return. Instead, (I think) he went to answer the phone again. (He was the only one in the store, so this is kind of OK).

I paused again and looked at the new game price. When he was present again, I said, “This isn’t 9 dollars more.”

“You just paid 25 and for that with taxes you’d pay 31.” he said. (I paid $25.75 and the new game would be $31 and some odd cents. It wasn’t more than 6 dollars difference).

“Yes, but I hate looking at this,” I said, as I held up the crappy black cover.

“Who looks at the stuff anyway? All the instructions are in the game. All the information in the book is online. It’s not worth 9 dollars.” (again with the fuzzy math).

This is the case I got

“I’d rather just have the new game.”

Then he answers the phone or otherwise goes away. I was left standing there, mumbling about the cover missing and how I hated looking at black covers (not white) without an insert (no official cover), the manager said, “Well, have him try the used game and if he doesn’t like it, you can exchange it and you haven’t bought the new one.”

This last point is a good point. I get it. But my son is 6, and he doesn’t like much for long.  He does revisit games as he grows, though. He also has our 11-year-old daughter with whom to share games. I’d rather have a new game that I can put on my shelf along with the others, lined up like books so I can read their spines. I’m an organized person who likes to keep things neat. Also, we sell games back occasionally and I take pride in treating people and things with respect, and teach my children to do the same. It’s worth 6 bucks to have an in-tact product. AND I actually do read the inserts & use the online codes. (By the way, I don’t need to justify my desire to pay GameStop an extra six bucks for a new game.)

At this point the manager, with his tone and his body language, basically communicated to me that I’d have to argue with him to get the new game. This, I decided, wasn’t worth it, especially since my son and I were both well overdue to eat lunch.

On the short drive home, I began to wonder why the manager “helped” me so much. His insistence on the used game bordered on weird. The fact that I left the store feeling bamboozled into buying an inferior product started to anger me.

As lunch was cooking, I remembered my basic capitalism education: there is a reason behind every sell. What could the reason be here? Why sell these used games so strongly? It must be profit margin. That was the only logical choice.

I took my suspicions to Twitter. More than a few savvy users confirmed it: The profit GameStop makes on used games is far, far higher than the profit on new games, even though new games are at a higher price point. GameStop buys back games at a low price and then sells them for the majority of the new sticker price (of course, this is without the cover, the box, the original instruction booklet or any of the inserts, as well as unused online access codes unique to the game). They sold me a game at $25.75 out of a possible $31.17 (I’m guessing on the cents, but it’s around there), so at about 80% of the new price. GameStop most definitely paid much less than $25.75 for this used game

Notice the custom-sized shelf for DS games.

(impossible to know how many users the game had, by the way).

New games on wholesale probably are at least 80% of the price. So say GameStop makes 6 bucks on every sale of new games. So if the store pays less than $19.75 ($25.75-$6.00=$19.75) for used games, which, they do (and as I said, this game may be used and used and used), then their motivation to re-sell the used game is much stronger than their motivation to sell the new one. They’ve already paid the wholesale price for the game, so pretty much anything they make on it afterwards, even with the buy-back money they put out (which they usually give in store credit, of course – even more money saved for GameStop), is pure gravy.

So the manager (who, as I do want to stress, is a knowledgeable and nice guy. Usually) was not just “being helpful.” He was pushing his profit margin instead of listening to me. I didn’t want the used game. I also didn’t want to justify my purchasing decisions. I just wanted the new game. He should have taken the new game and asked me, “Would you like to save a few dollars on a used game? They don’t come with the box but they are much less expensive.” I would have said, “Thanks but no, I want the new box. Call me crazy” and my whole dust-up on Twitter and this blog post wouldn’t have happened. Plus I may still be considering shopping there. Not any more. Now I know he wasn’t trying to be helpful to me at all.

Some friends on Twitter told me to complain to the GameStop district manager, but honestly I don’t see the point. The store’s model, their whole business theory, is based on re-selling games. They aren’t going to tell a store manager to stop pushing them. That’s the majority of their profit margin. My little complaint will do no good, except for the manager being trained to be more subtle (and evil) with his push.

My friends tell me Amazon is a decent alternative to GameStop. We are GameStop members (pay $16 bucks a year for discounts, but guess what, only on USED GAMES) but I’m going to pursue the Amazon option. I predict GameStop will go out of business if they don’t insist on selling decent-looking used games for a better value than 80% of the new game price (and that was with my discount!). More and more women are buying games for kids and themselves. Daughters have personal gaming systems of their own (my daughter games a lot. GameStop ignores her as a gamer.) DS ownership in adult women is rising (my own mother has one) and women don’t, in general, buy crappy-looking stuff. We are also smart shoppers who know the value of products. A game without a case isn’t worth 80% of the new price. If GameStop doesn’t have the women going forward, they won’t survive. (Their email and print flyers are so male-oriented that I don’t even read them. I unsubbed today). If GameStop doesn’t figure out how to market to and treat girls and women as customers, and if they don’t construct a better business model than “used games profit margin” they will be dead within 5 years. If you have stock or work there, strongly consider something new now if possible.

Any thoughts, gamers?

-Christine Cavalier

GameStop Won’t Survive is a post from: PurpleCar

Stop crying or we'll give you something to cry about

I wrote these words and made this poster, just for fun, to put up on the popular photo(and video!)-sharing site Pinterest.com. If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, welcome to our planet.

If you’re not from outer space but Pinterest has eluded you, allow me to sum up the fuss: Pinterest is the Wikipedia of search. Pinterest users have already filtered the Internet; they post their hard-won nuggets on the site. Google only has an algorithm; Pinterest has humans. Imagine, the massive ocean of data online, picked through by live people. (Personally, I find the search function especially useful when it comes to obscure crafts or DIY instructions.)

In a communication from Pinterest that went out late last year, the founders said they had no idea how viral the site would go. I can’t imagine the founders were that innocent; Pinterest had no other destiny but to go viral. Normal people want sites to “just work.” That is normalese for “Intuitive design/function is the fundamental necessity of a website,” and this site gets it. Pinterest is beautifully arranged, is easy to use, has simple user organization, employs no-brainer sharing options and fills a dire need that is lacking online: human input (read: filtering). Viral it was going to be, no matter what.

Pinterest, like all other sharing sites, has its growing pains, its quirky trends, its buggy tendencies (nothing months and months of all-nighter coding and a crapton of investor dollars can’t fix!). At first, the site was filled with early adopters, designers, and Internet denizens. On second look, it’s filled with moms the world over pinning everything from recipes to punk hairstyles to sarcastic quips. The etiquette at Pinterest is just forming. Some users consider posting photos that don’t properly attribute the creator a big no-no. Others just want to collect appropriate themed pins to their boards and don’t care from whence the media came.

Probably most annoying user on Pinterest is the marketing type. These types come in all disguises. Some are Etsy sellers (“Don’t steal my idea!”), some are merchandisers (“Zomg! It’s only $79.99! at our store!”), and some are stealthy ad agency workers scoping out how this new service can reach the masses. Their self-promoting behavior has yet to take over the entire site, but the “Gifts” tab is in serious danger of becoming little more relevant than those silly Sunday circular ads in the newspaper. The “Everything” tab [every picture every member posts] also will soon come to ruin; I’ve already heard grumblings from users about the porn that regularly pops up there.

The site’s designers have a long way ahead. They need to keep a hold of the mom crowd (even the stay-at-home-moms in my neighborhood who barely know how to power up a machine are on Pinterest now) to stay afloat. But without some more solid code and some tighter filtering, the moms (who will be Pinterest’s main money maker) will drop the site like its covered in germs. I can’t wait to see how the founders hustle to catch up to the viral wave that has swept Google search and the nation.

Are you on Pinterest? What’s your favorite board? Let me know in the comments!

-Christine Cavalier

Pinterest:The Wikipedia of Search is a post from: PurpleCar

Book Review: The Psychology of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most intriguing literary characters of all time. A new book, The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, examines Lisbeth’s character in depth. The book’s publishers, SmartPop (BenBella Books, Texas), recently sent me a copy for review.

Edited by a clinical psychologist and written by various PhDs in Psychology, The Psychology of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo gets inside Lisbeth’s head in a more thorough and professional way than any fan or blogger could. The essays look at Lisbeth’s personality, decisions, and growth, e.g. her Goth appearance, the tattoos and body piercings, the silent stance, and even the significance of Lisbeth’s breast implants toward the end of the third Millennium Trilogy novel.

The Psychology of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo not only looks into Lisbeth’s reasons behind her behavior, but places those behaviors in a larger society as a whole, giving us a broadened perspective on the beautiful logic and justice of Lisbeth’s joie d’ vive. In dissecting the hero of Lisbeth, the academics build up her character to the superhero proportions it deserves.

Lisbeth is truly the newest Titan of our day. Superman would want to whisk Lisbeth away to his bed but Lisbeth would geolocate the Fortress of Solitude within seconds and broadcast its GPS co-ordinates on the Internet. Spiderman would want to web her up but Lisbeth would nail his feet to the floor, then empty his accounts and publish his identity on Facebook. X-Men’s Storm would make Lisbeth laugh (then maybe Lisbeth would seduce her). James Bond 007 could learn quite a number of tricks from Salander, like international hacking techniques, disguises, videotaping, money laundering, weapons handling, and hand-to-hand combat theories. The Terminator would give Lisbeth pause but she’d find a way to either sleep with it or erase and reprogram its harddrive. Or both, in reverse order. Lisbeth is supremely capable and cannot be stopped.

How did Lisbeth get this way? What age-old mythology supports Lisbeth’s super-humanness? Why do people tattoo and pierce themselves? Why are we so uncomfortable when someone like Lisbeth doesn’t fit into one feminine or masculine profile? By the way, WTF is up with Sweden? What’s with the extreme sexism and the gnarly dudes in the books? What if Lisbeth Salander were real? What would happen then? Where would she have come from?

The Psychology of the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo answers all of these questions and more. Just take a gander at the book’s essay titles:

1. Lisbeth Salander and the “Truth” About Goths
2. The Body Speaks Louder than Words: What Is Lisbeth Salander Saying?
3. Lisbeth Salander as Gender Outlaw
4. What to Say When the Patient Doesn’t Talk: Lisbeth Salander and the Problem of Silence
5. Mistrustful: Salander’s Struggle with Intimacy

1. Sadistic Pigs, Perverts and Rapists: Sexism in Sweden
2. Broken: How the Combination of Genes and A Rough Childhood Contribute to Violence
3. Men Who Hate Women But Hide It Well: Successful Psychopathy in the Millennium Trilogy
4. If Lisbeth Salander Were Real
5. Confidential: Forensic Psychological Report: Lisbeth Salander

1. The Magnetic Polarizing Woman
2. Resilience with a Dragon Tattoo
3. Lisbeth Salander, Hacker
4. Salander as Superhero 
5. The Cost of Justice

These titles alone are enough to start active fan forum threads. Plus, the writing isn’t at all dry or academic – it’s accessible and flows, but is not in the least condescending to the normal reader. I do wish that some of the essays would’ve steered away from the typical pitfalls, e.g., the first essay on Goth cites statistics that affirm the stereotype of Goths but doesn’t fully examine how those stats are deceiving. Sometimes the analyses can be a bit off. Also, if you’ve read my reviews of the book, I don’t see Blomkvist as such a great guy; In this book he’s referred to as a good influence on Lisbeth (perhaps so, but Blomkvist is no prize himself). Another thing I had an issue with was the promulgation of the word “Girl” to describe Lisbeth. I understand the book is just riffing off the American title but as responsible citizens and members of the Psychology profession, I would have hoped for a bit more accuracy. (There’s a great essay about gender in the book, though, and it’s worthy of study by any top Women’s Studies university-level classes).

I did enjoy the book and will keep it as a reference for my own character studies in my writing. Enjoy the American version of the movie, which releases on December 21, 2011 and then pick up a copy of this book for the fan, the literary writer, the psychologist in you or your family. It’ll add depth to your knowledge and understanding of our most favorite modern-day hero, Lisbeth Salander.

-Christine Cavalier

 FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Book Details:

Title: The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Editors: Robin S. Rosenberg, PhD, and Shannon O’Neill

Publisher: Smart Pop, an Imprint of BenBella Books, distributed by Perseus Distribution

Publication: December 2011, $14.95 (CAN $18.95), Paper, ISBN: 9781936661343

Psychology, 256 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4

Book Review: The Psychology of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a post from: PurpleCar

Huge Pile of Paperclips+Design=Carpety Goodness!

Big data is pretty useless by itself. So is a building-sized pile of paperclips, or an endless amount of pictures of your cat. A small few of those paperclips could save a school secretary some headaches with dead-tree records and maybe a dozen of those photos of Mr. KittyPants are worth enlarging for that montage you have planned for the bathroom, but thousands of entries in a category need one thing to become useful: a filter.

Tech companies are constantly tweaking algorithms to sort through the huge dumps of data that come out of places like Facebook, Twitter, MMORPG’s, or the whole of the Interwebz. Too much data exists for humans to handle, even if we hired entire continents of people to do it. It’s like a trip to another galaxy: we’d have to plan for multiple generations to be made during the trip, and it would still take eleventy billion years to get there.

But big data manipulators do have one advantage: humans populate the Internet. And what do humans do really, really well, even before they can speak? They love to categorize. Big sticks, little sticks, hard rocks, flaky rocks, young mates, old people, what have you. Our brains are programmed to filter.

Human behavior on the Internet is the same as human behavior in the caves of yore. We sort. We categorize. If we cannot sort of categorize, then the whole is disregarded. The modern office supply shopper will walk past a display of “fill your own box” bin of unsorted paperclips to go over to the nicely separated or packaged ones, even if they have to pay more. The enthusiastic home photographer may be smart enough to back up their massive photo file but they rarely take the effort to re-label and sort their work. How many attachments have you received with some title like IMG_7869.jpg? Exactly.

So, what’s a non-psychology-non-sociology-trained engineer to do? Look for the human filtering, that’s what!

Incorporate into your design some of the following algorithm-ready human filtering that are already present online:

1. Twitter lists. Users filter followers/followees into lists. They spend human hours sorting people, according to their own opinion of those people, into categories. For the most part, lists on twitter are also named pretty aptly, like “philosophers” or “funny people” (we can also assume that those two categories are mutually exclusive). Your algorithm can compare the results of these human hours and then build results again. Perhaps you are looking for who’s famous in the paperclip community? Compare a bunch of Twitter lists, then find the most-mentioned person. Twitter’s API has a great amount of human filtering, you just need to know where to look. Language use is pretty common amongst cultures, certain terminology, etc. etc. Facebook groups will work in the same way (once the API is open).
2. Tagging and Grouping on Photo Sites. Flickr is a great example of a community that puts in a lot of human filtering hours. They tag and group photos to within inches of their lives. Flickr users also have a low tolerance level for bullshit. They call out sneaky photoshopping, they gripe about mis-tagged photos. Many of them also share their exif data (fancy photo tech terms) of each photo. If a company needs to process photographic evidence that may come in droves, then a Flickr group is a perfect way to get humans to tell your algorithm whether or not the photos are legit. In Flickr’s design, human filtering is a key element. Also with Pinterest and other curation sites. Figure out a way to use that culture of filtering to your advantage. Then go pay Flickr lots o’ start-up cash for use of the API.
3. Networks: The measurement and tracking of human networks online dominates the design thinking in every new website and app. It drives me crazy. The credibility measurement algorithms of Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, etc., all take number of Twitter followers into consideration. This is ludicrous and about as useful as our pile of perplexed paperclips. Followers can be bought and gamed, as is evidenced by #teamfollowback. Facebook networks are almost equally as useless, as users add total strangers to their Friends lists. What is useful, if anything, about follower numbers is the ratios that surround them. We can assume, say, that a user who is followed 5 times more than they follow and has no history of mentioning the terms “follow” “back” and “me” together and has built lists of people who also have similar high ratios, is a different sort of person who has mentioned those terms and does not build lists of users. This is not about the numbers in networks, it’s about the human behavior of users.

This are just a few beginning thoughts on how to harness the power of human behavior in your algorithm. Hire a Psychologist or Sociologist, or me, for that matter, to find you more easily-tapped, custom-fitted examples of online (and offline!) human filters that you can use in your website, application or algorithm design.

Anything to add? Let me know in the comments.

-Christine Cavalier

Big Data, Small Opinions: Human Filtering in Website Design is a post from: PurpleCar

I just saw this job posting:

Director, Social Media Strategy

Hiring Company Industry: Food & Beverage

Number of Employees: 10,000+ Employees

Total Compensation: $120K – $145K

Reports to: VP, Consumer Strategies

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Job Description
 

ARAMARK is a leader in professional services, providing award-winning food services, facilities management, and uniform and career apparel to health care institutions, universities and school districts, stadiums and arenas, and businesses around the world. The company is recognized as the industry leader in FORTUNE magazine’s “World’s Most Admired Companies,” and as one of America’s Largest Private Companies by both FORTUNE and Forbesmagazines. ARAMARK seeks to responsibly address issues that matter to its clients, customers, employees and communities by focusing on employee advocacy, environmental stewardship, health and wellness, and community involvement. Headquartered in Philadelphia, ARAMARK has approximately 255,000 employees serving clients in 22 countries.

ARAMARK is seeking a Director, Social Media Strategy to develop, manage and implement ARAMARK’s social media infrastructure. This role is responsible for collaborating with ARAMARK’s businesses  to develop strategies that enable meaningful engagement with its consumers and clients to drive demand and foster strong and positive connectivity.  The Director will also collaborate and work closely with Corporate Communications to support  ARAMARK’s broader employee and external communication initiatives. This position will serve as the central hub for guiding, solving and observing the social media presences of ARAMARK as well as its lines of business. Additionally, the position is responsible for the tracking and reporting of all social media to executives and must be skilled  in assessing and presenting the business implications, meaning and value of social media activities on ARAMARK and its businesses, employees, clients and customers. Specific responsibilities include:

• Develop and implement the overarching social strategic framework, including the listening strategy, playbook, governance, policy and measurement criteria.

• Coordinate responses to appropriate conversations.
• Manage the  multiple profiles for ARAMARK in corresponding channels.
• Provide leadership and guidance in the creation of social media strategies for the corporate ARAMARK brand and individual line of business brands.
• Partner  with Corporate Communications to adapt the corporate branding strategy and mission to enliven in social media.
• Work with business units to develop original and curated content to be used across all social channels and as an integrated part of their entire marketing mix.
• Ensure the integrity of the ARAMARK brand across all ARAMARK social presences for the different lines of business.
• Analyze activity and reporting status, trends and business value and identify areas that require follow-up actions in the form of more research and/or understanding, business strategy modifications, or remediation plans.
• Partner with relevant functional areas and businesses to drive alignment in complementary activities.
• Grow the social media program based on opportunities.
• Provide or coordinate training and awareness within the organization where necessary.
• Manage vendor and service provider relationships.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelors degree in marketing, communication, PR, technology, or significant work experience.

• Minimum of 10 years business experience in marketing or communication on client or agency side; minimum of 5 years in the digital and/or social space.

• Proven experience in independently developing, implementing and measuring sustainable social media strategies for a corporation or brand.

• Superior hands on knowledge of technologies, partners and conferences.

• Well networked in the social space- ability to keep up on trends and new innovation.

• Minimum 2 years of developing, implementing and measuring social media strategies for clients, a corporation or brands.

• Strong written, verbal and technical communication skills with thorough attention to detail.

• Existing knowledge of social networking and monitoring tools for utilization of metrics and benchmarks to measure effectiveness.

Other skill sets and experiences required include:

• Must demonstrate the ability to impact and influence at the most senior levels of the organization and across the enterprise.

• Must also possess strong collaboration skills coupled with experience strategically navigating a large organization, including partnering with other departments and stakeholders to understand need and generate appropriate, innovative solutions.

• Ability and desire to lead high-performing matrix project teams.

• Ability to partner with the corporate IT department to develop technology solutions that advanced the social media capability.

For more information or to apply, visit www.aramark.com/careers (Job Number 65760).

 

 

 

I could go on forever about the eleventybillion things wrong with this job posting, but I’ll contain myself to only a few words, in hopes that Aramark comes to its senses in this hiring process. Aramark is a Philly company and I want them to succeed solely for that reason. I have no affiliation with Aramark or any of its related companies.

Aramark should tread very, very carefully in this realm of social media. The company should have a clear sense of its goals. Social media can be damaging. This posting doesn’t at all pinpoint what Aramark should expect this Director to accomplish. It seems like one of the social media kumbaya kool-aid drinkers wrote this job posting, as if they were sitting around drinking coffee, saying “Hey, you know what we need? A CONVERSTATION WITH OUR CUSTOMERS! We need to ENGAGE! Yes! Let’s engage!”

Uh, no. Let’s not engage. Let’s listen, sure. Let’s not build our own channels on which to listen. Let’s not have this pie-in-the-sky idea that we are going to build a social network around Aramark. Let’s not intrude on our customer’s private conversations just because we want to “engage” them. Aramark is a food service provider. The psychological elements around food and eating are a delicate bunch. You cannot hire a social media strategist that doesn’t understand this. Aramark’s social media strategy should be extremely custom-made, and IMHO fly as low on the radar as possible. They need to build a personality profile around the strategy, like an old grandmother with comfort foods or a sleek, fine dining gourmet vegetarian chef. Perhaps they need multiple personality profiles for the many, many businesses they have.

But this job posting is only going to attract the PR hacks, the cheerleaders, the cultists who think the word “democratization” holds meaning. It’s very worrisome to me.

I’ll stop now.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

-Christine Cavalier

Social Media Strategist Job Listing Misses the (Ara) Mark is a post from: PurpleCar

Dear People of the World,

We are Americans.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and you may be feeling a bit annoyed at the staggering amount of news coverage and online status updates devoted to those moments when we found ourselves a target of vile hatred.

We see your news coverage. We hear your voices. We know that you think Americans can be spoiled, greedy and irresponsible. We know it can look like we don’t care about the rest of the world’s problems, like we don’t mind the wrong moves governments may make in their quests to protect their people and way of life.

It’s easy to assume this about us. But the easy way isn’t always the right way.

We are just like you. We get up early and we go to work. We come home after a long day and feed our families. We do chores, keep up with the kids’ homework, try to relax, go to bed. We do this, day in and day out, and we consider ourselves lucky. There are many people who don’t have the privilege of being exhausted after a full day’s work, nor a home to come back to. We thank God daily. Sometimes hourly. Sometimes by the minute.

We know that you have lived with terrorist threats and war on your home soil for generations, that in your country there is still violence like none we have seen recently in the United States. We remember you today, too. Every September 11th, we remind ourselves what it feels like to be a target, what it feels like, individually and a nation, to live in danger. We are not equating our suffering to yours; we want to end suffering.

We are asking you on this day, in any way you are able, to celebrate peace with us. The mothers, the fathers, the sons and daughters, the families that make up what you call America, want to see the end of terrorism. We wish safety for the world’s children, not for just our own.

We are individuals with families, just like you. We are also a proud nation. We don’t only mourn for ourselves on this day, we mourn for the world.

On September 11th, we are all Americans.

With Love,

The People of the United States of America

A Letter to The World, 11 Sept 2011 is a post from: PurpleCar

I just received this in my email today from one of my social media contacts. I know it’s spam because 1. This is a common travel scam. 2. This friend and I are not at a level of friendship that would allow for a request for money. 3. The request is outrageous to receive via email. If someone needs money quickly, they would call their family members, on a phone, that the local police would provide. 4. Hotel bills? Please. One call to my credit card company would fix that, pronto. I don’t know very many people who travel abroad without a credit card.

You all know this. I’m just putting the text up here so the search engines can catch it. If you are finding this post from a Google search or other search engine, yes, it is a scam and don’t reply to the email. Contact the sender through other means immediately and tell them their email has been hacked.

Here is the text:

How you doing?i am so sorry about me not informing you about my trip to London, United Kingdom some days back, Unfortunately for me i was mugged at gun point last night and here i am totally freaked out! All cash, Credit cards and phone were stolen,i got messed up in another country, stranded in London,United Kingdom, fortunately my passport was in my hotel room. It was a Brutal experience and i was hurt a little bit on my right hand, but would be fine.

My return fight leaves in a few hours but i am having Problem sorting out the hotel bills, wondering if you could loan me some money to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport i will refund it back as soon as i get back home. I have been to the police and embassy here, but they aren't helping issues,i have limited access to mails now,i have canceled my cards already and made a police report, I won’t get a new card number till I get back home! So I really need your help.would def refund it to you once i get back home...Hope to read from you soon
I await your reply soon.
Thanks
(first name of sender)

UPDATE: TUESDAY SEPT 6 2011
Sent Clarence Westberg a head’s up on Google Plus. (notice I did not reply to this email. Never reply to a travel scam email. Never use email to reply to any request for money. The return addresses are fake and redirect you to scammers. Also, there is a chance that the whole account is fake, as it is in this case.)

Here’s what the real Clarence Westberg said:

 It's not my yahoo account, they created it using my name, probably using the create account from FB [Facebook] feature. I don't even have many of the email addresses, so they must be getting them from FB.

So now accounts can be spoofed. I do not own the christine.cavalier -@- yahoo.com account. If you see an email from that account, know it is fake.

But, that being said, another, easier rule to remember is this: No voice, no money. Never wire any money to anyone unless you’ve talked with them on the phone. The local authorities will help victims place a phone call. Don’t be fooled. No voice, no money. Spread the word.

More Travel Scam Email is a post from: PurpleCar

“There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”
-George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical 1866

The Internet is changing the way we view our private lives. Keeping secrets online isn’t all that relevant anymore, as clandestine facts no longer deemed worthy of concealment are posted for everyone to see. Disregarding the shock and awe visited upon us by any number of exhibitionist young Facebookers, we must agree that our own adult sensitivity to what is considered private is narrowing. Our love of miniature bonsai rose gardening or our pet peeve of all things yellow are now innocuous enough to post. “What’s the harm?” we think. “I may benefit from finding community,” we hope.

We post our best pics, our library book check-outs and our wandering check-ins in hopes one of “our people” will find us. We post for validation. We post to make our friends laugh. We post exercise our self-esteem muscles: “This is me. Like it or not.”

But this seemingly harmless sharing of our less-intimate secrets in hopes we will find these boosts and connections isn’t so harmless.

I’m in the process of collecting images for an inspiration board project. There are many sites like Pinterest and Tumblr where I could collect these images online, but I’m choosing to keep the images in a folder on my machine. I know this is “risky”, i.e., no online back-up. But curating the images in a semi-private place doesn’t appeal to me. (Side note: don’t think any place on-line is private. Even pay-to-use site dropbox has been accused of reading and selling their users’ secrets).  If I did post the images online, comments would surely come, and I’m not looking for love. And I’m sure as hell not looking for hate.

This board project is to chronicle my inspiration; it is not for markers to chronicle my hopes and desires. Enough of my “secrets” are online that any marketer with half a brain could construct my complete stereotyped profile to sell to brands interested in my business. It’s already happened. A lot. It’s as if there is a pack of wild marketing dogs constantly nipping at my heels. What does this mean, practically, for me? It means I get more fleas, i.e., more spam and junk mail, more Twitter direct messages, more offensive Facebook ads, more ridiculous type-ahead suggestions on search, more pop-ups, more people coming up to me at events and making some obscure reference to a personal fact about me. Sharing on the Internet’s worst case scenario would be a stranger showing up at my door uninvited and unforewarned expecting to spend time together (this actually happened to me via IRC in 1989).

With every piece of information I share online, I get more eyes on my life. More dogs sniffing my trail. As I said to the pushy liquor store owner in a vacation town who wanted me to sign up for his frequent buyer list: “I like to keep things simple.” I don’t sign up for frequent buyer lists to stores where I will visit once a year (or once in a lifetime for that particular one). Adding details online is akin to signing up for store club cards. A Yellow-Hater store, a mini-rose bush shop, a Star Trek Conventioneer newsletter. We can refuse these lists easily, yet we can’t see the connection between posting a tiny little secret and the increase in subject-related ads or other invasions of our privacy.

Alarmism about our new lives online isn’t my goal for this post. It’s OK that little tidbits of information once kept secret are not thought as precious as they once were. The pundits yammer on about the assaults on our privacy, but the fact of the matter is that plenty o’ people are giving up smidgens of their privacy each day, considering tiny tidbits a small price to pay to be able to connect with like-minded souls online. I do, however, want to point out that we have yet to fully rub the dark,rabid underbelly of sharing online. Today it is spam based on your general personality profile. Tomorrow it is a specifically-targeted pop-up ad that loudly announces your healthcare issues to your co-workers.

If one follows this argument through, one will end up at a socio-economic class issue. But it’s the same class issue of the ages: rich people can afford to keep things private. In the past, the rich paid for custom services and hired only the most discrete of white and blue collar laborers, who acted as guard dogs for their wealth, health and privacy. Those custom services come now in the form private server administrators and premium software engineers. Just as the rich shop at elite stores and eat at expensive restaurants, they will demand “above the cloud” computing that keeps their information under exclusive lock and key. I’m not endorsing or rejecting this attitude (because, of course, I don’t want to give the marketers any clues ), I’m merely noting it. If you are looking for a start-up idea, you should start building out server racks and hire an electronic security ace (or 2 — dozen). A wealthy cohort who will pay handsomely for you to safeguard their secrets and give their spoiled teenage sons a place to host naked pics of the townie girls online is out there and waiting for you.

The capitalist system has not changed. The “freedom” of the Internet is not a freedom at all. Personally, I’m keeping my secret inspirations secret; these images are not portraying seemingly useless facts about me, like where I ate dinner or if I liked jumprope as a kid; these images are portraying my very deep and distinct desires. My dreams. The Internet is the bed of the market; I need not lie down with dogs.

-Christine Cavalier

Keeping Secrets in the Age of the Internet is a post from: PurpleCar

For Emergency Use Only

Please Delete

Ever hear your mom mention her sex life? A cringe-worthy moment for the ages. You wish Hermione could wave her wand and extract the very words from your ear. If you were one of the unfortunate children to actually witness parental “involvement,” then I’m sure you’ve wished Hermione had immediately applied her latest forget-it potion to your irritated eyes.

“Eye Bleach” is a term for the mythical mind-cleaner that erases offensive sights from one’s experience. Eye Bleach is a popular phrase among the early adopters and geeks, as we are the first to see many a grim meme. We fantasize about the day we can stumble upon the magic formula that would bring riches beyond those Bill Gates.

Living in today’s übermedia world poses constant challenges. More than ever, we need to control where, and at what, we look. Many of the older generations grew up in days where national newspapers didn’t dare print sensationalistic or gruesome photos “above the fold.” Playboy Magazine covers were wrapped in brown paper. Efforts were made to conceal the rank and the odious from the sensibilities of children and the genteel.

Today, all efforts are lost. The Vietnam War changed photojournalism, newspapers, and television news. Shocking images of war casualties fueled student protests and changed our expectations of news reporting. The seal on the careful distribution of images was broken. When the Internet went viral years later, that seal had all but disappeared. The desperate need for Eye Bleach grew along with the Internet’s fast and furious distribution of images and information.

The Memory Rat Race

Our culture felt this shift. Various forms of art reflected the concerns. Google’s ngram viewer scans a large sample of books and rates the frequency of occurrence of each word. Here’s the ngram chart of the frequency of “memory,” “remember” and “learn” in the Google Books sample from 1900-2000 (Google’s sample does not yet go past the year 2000).

memory, remember, learn, from 1900-2000

We can see the blue line (the one at the bottom at 1940), representing the word “memory” had a significant increase in appearance after 1970, a slight dip at around 1992 but no significant loss, with increases beginning in 1999 or so. The word “remember” (shown in red, at the top in 1940) slopes downward from about 1943 until about 1980 when there was a steady increase. “Learn” (in green, in the middle at 1940) remained pretty steady until about 1990, when we see an increase.

Two popular movies from the 2000’s took particularly interesting approaches in order to address the problem of experience and memory:

In the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, main character Joel’s ex-girlfriend Clementine underwent an experimental procedure to have her memories of Joel erased entirely from her mind. When Joel learns of this, he also seeks out the doctor and undergoes the procedure. The rest of the movie explores many concepts around memory and experience, as Joel realizes how much he loves Clementine and doesn’t want to lose her or the memories of their times together, good and bad.

In the 2000 movie Memento, main character Leonard sustains a brain injury while fighting off attackers who kill his wife. Determined to avenge his wife’s murder but unable to remember anything until after he sleeps, Leonard resorts to writing himself notes all over his body so, upon awakening, he can be reminded of the information he gathered the previous day. The movie has two story lines, the forward timeline scenes shot in black and white and the backward timeline (flashbacks) shot in color.

These snapshots of Western culture’s artistic take on the prescient problem of memory are just a tiny few of the many works, both in art and in science, that address memory. Governments want to know memory’s secrets, scientists seek where memories lie, poets lament memory’s loss. Memory eludes. But we know it works. In fact, at times, it haunts.

New Lessons for a New World

When I lecture to parent groups, I outline the importance of teaching our kids new lessons to help them survive the übermedia. I give them this mantra to repeat to their children: “There is no such thing as Eye Bleach.” Parents usually chuckle when they first hear the term, as it’s so poignant it’s funny, but I go on to explain that images can haunt us. We all know how difficult, if not impossible, it is to erase disturbing pictures from our minds. It’s a hard enough concept for adults to grasp, let alone children. I’m actually working on a children’s book that illustrates the idea that we need to decide what media we consume. I’m not so hopeful in finding an agent or publisher, though. It’s too futuristic of a concept for mainstream buyers. It’s hard to be conscious of controlling the information that flows into one’s brain. How do you not see something before you know what it is that you’re not seeing? You can’t, of course. But you can learn to spot the warning signs that something repugnant is waiting. For example, an email from a particularly disgusting colleague that contains a link and the subject line “OMG YOU HAVE TO WATCH THIS” is a good candidate for the “Trash” folder.

The curiosity, though, that compels us to click on the link is the toughest to fight. Also, it’s hard to break the underlying etiquette rules that dictate we click on every link, read emails, listen to voice messages, or even peruse blog posts that are sent to us by people we know. We need to fight the curiosity, and we need to change the unwritten etiquette rules to include the right to ignore. These changes pose the real challenge.

If we can be aware of the warning signs, learn to control our automatic clicking, and negotiate with friends and family that we love them but can’t always absorb all their output, then we can move past the daily need of Eye Bleach and on to something memory is meant to do.

NEW IDEA: Lessons Learned App

Here’s a funny exchange I had on Twitter today:

Who wants to write me the app?

Memory is key to our survival. It retains information like which berries killed our slow Uncle Ted. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when Joel starts to lose the memory of Clementine, he realizes that those memories made up his very worthy love for her; he feels something akin to a slow death as each memory of her fades away.

Memory, as a muscle, needs flexing and care. Unfortunately, as more media comes at us on every flat surface in our lives, our memory gets fractured and frazzled. Instead of being exercised, our memory is being pulled thin. It’s becoming harder and harder to remember simple strings of data, like phone numbers or birth dates.

Like Leonard of Memento, we take to writing things down. We pay the memory industry billions each year in the forms of personal organizers, photographers, calendar software, therapists, event planners, and more. As Leonard and Joel finally each come to the realization that memory is the key to not only survival but happiness, it’s almost too late.

It’s not too late for us. Respect your memory. Don’t fill it with useless facts and data; don’t let it get drawn into a vacuum of endless posts and links. Try to stay aware that when you are caught in the Internet Procrastination Vortex, that you are actually depleting your memory’s ability to remember important things, to stay focused on and be able to recall the good, helpful information that you already know. The more you lose yourself in the vortex, the more likely you are to deplete your abilities to do anything else. Habits form. Your memory will get out the habit of being useful and get into the habit of wanting tiny bits of useless dreck that it will never have to recall in the morning.

Let me know what you’ve forgotten and what you’ve remembered in the comments.

_________________

“Eye Bleach” poster was photoshopped. Original sign here.

Beyond Eye Bleach: Learning the Lessons of New Media Consumption is a post from: PurpleCar