Slim Thug’s Twitter Account is Amazing
If you're thinking of killing yourself and need one good reason to keep on living, I suggest putting the gun down, undoing the rope or pulling the car out of the garage and checking out Slim Thug's Twitter account.
Yes I am joining the late train on this one (Chris told me about it) but after a week of following his words, I can tell you this much, its the most entertaining thing on the internet.
Take some of the following words of wisdom from Houston's finest:
"Ok I quit I was bored back to the game #whatmendo but fathers pls spend time with yo kids they could become stans or boyz who like boyz smfh"
"Hey @TayGoHard4Ciara HOMO I wasn't hating on Ciara I said she's fine and I wanna have sex with her now u and yo faggotfriends go buttfuck"
"No I said u need a face transplant and a body transplant 2 RT @iSTANFORSUPERCI: Lmfaooooo. @slimthugga said I need a face lift. Ahhhhhhh!"
"Somebody tell Ciara I want her to ride my beat"
"I just hit the weed for the first time since December I dnt even miss that shit" this was followed by "#fuckdrugs" (this is also the name of a new song)
Regarding #teamnatural "Rules no sunglasses to cover up rings around the eyes no bras to push up sagging tits no heels to help u get a ass no make up. #teamNatural"
"But I'm not saying everychick need a big ass and titties some are sexy without it"
"Ok I quit tryna help yall ass stay yo lonely ass in the house with yo toys.. And be single forever with yo high expectations #doyou"
"Cause some niggalaos bitches@SammieLovesU: So why do some guys call females hoes when they do fuck on the first nite if its ok? @slimthugga"
"Nobody wanna fuck yo fat ugly ass anyway RT @lulucakess: @slimthugga ass be having sum ole bullshit ass tweets #killyoself BIG TIME!!!"
"And 2 all girls who already had sex be4 but still wanna make u wait its a 3 date limit Oprah even said it It only makes us fuckother girls"
The Power of Affliction Looking Shirts
A few months ago my mom saw a long sleeve shirt on sale at JC Pennys and bought it for me because it looks like "what other people wear." The shirt is a generic ripoff of the whole Affliction / Tapout MMA tough guy clothing people are wearing and is the only shirt of that style that I own.
I decided to wear it downtown on Saturday because it was a little bit cold and it yielded some interesting results.
Late into the night, I got a text from a friend asking me to meet up with him at a bar. I walked in and couldn't immediately find my friend, however in the back there was a girl that I know and I went over to say hi. She happens to be very good looking and there were two guys talking to her, each was maybe an inch or two shorter than me (I'm 5'9) and when I walked up she recognized me and asked how I was doing.
Almost immediately the guys who had been talking to her started apologizing to me. One guy said he didn't know we were together and thought he recognized her from an RTF class. I tried to explain to him that we weren't together and that I wasn't trying to do anything (I have a beard right now, guys with beards don't fight people) but he kept apologizing and then both of them walked away.
That's the power of wearing an Affliction shirt.
If you can’t fix the internet in 30 days
Internet service has been out at my apartment since the middle of March but this isn't a story about a landlord not listening to its tenants. In fact the building owner, 512Realty sent a company to fix the problem shortly after the connection went out.
The problem ... the company has been working full days since then trying to 'fix' the problem and I think that given the amount of time they have spent, they are ripping off my landlord and even worse, making money at the expense of me having to go to a local coffee shop just to check email.
In the month since the internet died, they have managed to:
- Switch ISPs
- Install new antennas
- Install new hardware
- and still are at step 1 when it comes to the problem
In fact the hardware worked perfectly fine, I can connect to the router, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the solution was something really simple. However this company has decided that ripping people off and forcing residents to deal with the inconvenience is the proper way to deal with the issue. The company won't even give me a progress report to at least explain what the hell they're doing.
I'd love to name the company in this blog post so that any property manager in the Austin area can be sure to avoid them but I think they were a past client of a company I am associated with and I don't want that to be an issue. If you are an Austin area property manager, email me will.gallahue [at] gmail.com and I will let you know the company name.
Library of Congress to Archive Tweets
Whether you say really intelligent things on Twitter or whether you're a bot that tells people where to find torrents and mortgage advice, you're going to be archived for all eternity by the Library of Congress. Today Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced that the LoC will begin archiving the 55 million daily tweets in an unprecedented validation of social media as a culturally relevant item.
The LoC already stores 167 Terabytes of web site information and works to preserve and collect significant digital content (not to be confused with Archive.org which is completely separate). Since 1800 the Library has collected 32 million book along millions of maps, recordings and films. Somehow archiving anything ever said by @willgallahue or the hundreds of thousands of ghost repeater / bot accounts seems a bit much but I guess Twitter is an important cultural institution.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams noted that DMs will not be archived but those "@mom stop nagging" messages will be visible to scholars working on dissertations years from now.
Misc. Updates
- Perfect Pants, the band I work with has now completed their album and they will be doing a cd release on 4/15 at The Ghost Room. We're working on getting digital distribution and merch all squared away.
- Went to Dallas last week and attempted to sell some web services but instead ended up eating a lot of good Mexican food.
- My friend Brittney now has a blog, According to Lady A
- I still have yet to get my Toyota fixed but the more I read about the sudden acceleration stories, the more I question how many people experienced legitimate product failures and how many people just can't drive. Toyota's "black box" has been able to refute some of these accounts and the guy in California ... something about that whole story doesn't seem right.
- My wrist is still healing.
- I still don't use Akismet when I really should. You'd be surprised ... for every 1 legitimate comment, I get 100 spam comments. The fun is digging through the haystack to find the needle.
Disappointing Competitor Conduct
Preface: The marketing industry for asbestos and similar terms is a very secretive society. There are a number of non-disclosures, waivers and confidentiality agreements that prevent and dissuade people from talking about their experiences.
Over the last year however our industry has come under fire as tort reform and bloggers have launched some rather vitriolic assaults on lawyers and subsequently their marketers. The criticism takes away from our collective professional identity and I think its time for someone to at least stand up and give a response. I think the fact that this is the only serious entry on my personal blog should give an idea of how upset I am.
-------------------------------------------------
Recently an article was published about a deceptive marketing practice used by some of our competitors. The article, written by Roger Parloff, exposed a network of sites that were modeled in such a way that they could confuse visitors into believing they had reach an official VA medical site and not a site aimed at generating leads / cases.
Parloff previously published an article a few years ago about industry practices that had similar tones but the issues raised in that piece were rather mundane compared to this article. When I got a Google Alert mentioning the article I was interested to find out what prompted him to write a second article.
While the sites in the newest article were decidedly about mesothelioma, the screenshots show that the creators referred to the site as the VA Medical Center for a particular area. Many sites in our industry use titles like "information center" or "cancer center" but we know the boundaries and that you can't cross the line and start implying that your site is a legitimate treatment facility much less a VA medical center.
The author contacted the site's sponsors and thankfully someone did get back to him. Christopher Seeger of Steeger Weiss responded to the accusations about the sites by saying he wasn't aware of the problem and that "I don't want my name on a Website that purports to be a government site." Seeger's response is legitimate, often legal marketers and their companies aren't in sync with their clients and that leads to these kinds of situations.
While the sites were later removed I was disappointed that the other firms involved (Flood, Hellbock, SEF) and EJustice, the creator of the sites, did not feel compelled to at least talk to the author and offer their side of the story. It certainly doesn't help our collective professional identity when something like this happens and save for one person, the result is deafening silence.
The asbestos litigation industry is constantly mentioned as the reason we need tort reform in this country and terms like asbestos litigation and asbestos lawyer can have decidedly negative connotations. To make matters worse, over the last year our industry has been harassed by an on again / off again blogger named 'sleazeothelioma' who blogged about what they felt were other deceptive practices.
Mesothelioma, the cancer caused by asbestos exposure, is a horrible and painful disease that I would not wish upon anyone. As a marketer I like to imagine that if I helped someone reach a settlement ... perhaps the little comfort it provides will validate my purpose and the reason why I work for this industry.
But all of that is lost when I see this kind of conduct. It hurts on a personal and professional level because it takes away from my work. Maybe I need a change of scenery?
You’re not getting a free gift card
The newest Facebook scam that has popped up are groups and fan pages that say "The first 1,000 / 5,000 people to join get a free gift card." Usually the amount of the gift card is in the thousands of dollars and for some reason, people continue to be stupid enough to fall for them. This is how your information gets stolen or your account gets hacked.
Seriously do the math. If a page offers the first 5,000 fans a $1,000 gift card, that's a $5 million investment. Think about it ... if a company can choose between spending $5 million on PPC/Display/TV/Print ads and reach millions of people or $5 million on trying to get a few thousand fans ... what would they choose?
If it sounds to good to be true, then guess what? It is.
What Are My Facebook Chats Like?
Observe:
2:19am Person 2
- it was!
- all started when she walked into my bar
- out of all the bars, she walked into mine
2:20am William
- is that from a movie or tv show?
2:23am Person 2
- movie
- Casablanca
2:24am William
- oh yeah the one about the tranny granny on the run from the sheriff in east texas
- great film!
2:25am Person 2
- I wish that was an actual film
- that sounds fantastic
2:26am William
- they already made it ... aka any Kevin Costner movie after Dances with Wolves
2:26am Person 2
- awww...
- I love me some kevin c
2:27am William
- except the postman
- which should have starred liam neeson because his name backwards is no seen mail
2:27am Person 2
- we discussed this already.. i agree
- I still think it's super clever though
2:28am William
- I wish I had a time machine and his agents phone number
- or I wish Journey's don't stop believing was about the khmer rouge
- Just a general, living in a cambodian world, he took the midnight train to the killing fields
2:30am Person 2
- yay, a song about Cambodian Genocide
- I wanted to go to sleep at some point tonight and not have nightmares...
2:31am William
- if your having sleep problems I feel bad for you son, I've got 99 dreams but nightmares ain't one
2:33am Person 2
- ouch....
- if i do have nightmares, i will be hella upset with you
2:33am William
- i got the nap patrol on the bed patrol, folks that want to make sure my sheets are closed, nap critics say she's dreamin of bros, i'm from west campus stupid what kind of facts are those
2:35am William
- if you grew up with holes in your sleep cycles, you'd celebrate the minute you was on the floor, i'm like fuck snuggies you really blow, if you don't like my sheets then you got to go
- okay time to stop, i'd parody the entire song
2:36am Person 2
- that was super impressive
2:37am William
- i was about to make a reference to john snow too
2:38am Person 2
- I can stand another line of that song parodied if you need to get it out of your system
2:40am William
- i need to learn to do this live with a piano
2:40am Person 2
- that you do
- that might get onto the side of scary impressive instead of entertaining impressive
2:41am William
- daddy, would you like some sausage?
- would be a good representative example
2:42am Person 2
- exactely
- except I assume you still have your balls
2:42am William
- yep!
- lance armstrong doesn't but if he wanted to make clothes he could start a line called Pants Armstrong
2:44am William
- or a gay club called Dance Armstrong which would actually be more fitting than pants armstrong, no pun intended
2:44am Person 2
- haha
- I've always wanted to go to oil can harrys
2:44am William
- NOT WITH THE PRICE OF OIL
- you crazy?
- you think we're made of solid gold?
2:45am Person 2
- yeah...
- why?
- am I wrong?
2:45am William
- we're pyrite : (
- somehow that needs to be a line in a dramatic film ... like these animated mrs butterworths characters have a family tragedy
- and thats the major revelation
2:47am Person 2
- that makes me want pancakes
-----------
3:11am William
- tigers are lame
3:11am Person 2
- do you really not like zoos?
3:12am William
if you tell a lie in a Nigerian court room, I want to be there to yell "What do you think this is? Lie-geria?"
3:13am Person 2
-that would be worth getting a Law Degree in Nigeria
-also, back to the zoos... this is serious shit
-might not be able to be friends with you
How to Take a Bad Article to Digg’s Front Page (Case Study)
Every so called social media guru has their own secret sauce when it comes to getting on Digg. Some will tell you top 10 lists work best, others say amazing images or interesting infographics are the way to go. But no social media consultant would ever tell you to submit something bad ... unless of course you had some help from the right people.
170 Diggs? WTF?
I logged in to Digg earlier tonight and noticed the usual array of items ... odd pics, cringeworthy videos, Republican drama and typical fails. I was pleased but then I noticed the following story had 170 diggs (now 217):
I clicked the link thinking it would be something interesting but instead it was a rewrite of a Google news release on an Adsense site by someone in Bangalore, India. Normally Digg users quickly bury this crap because they realize its scam or the person's vote purchases are all brand new accounts that leave comments like "great post, please write more."
Instead this article was getting natural looking votes and people were leaving legitimate comments. Furthermore the writer claimed Google invented "Search" when in actuality Google launched four years after sites like Lycos and Infoseek. Normally someone making an error in an article, even a small error gets crucified on Digg but somehow none of the comments made light of this obvious problem.
This struck me as highly unusual considering the fact that if you aren't a power user, your quality content (not junk) will at best get 4 to 10 Diggs before it dies. So what is the secret? How does someone push this crap through the internet's smartest community?
Humble Beginnings
Our story begins with "Sneh" / @onlinesneh, a content writer in Bangalore, India. If you take a quick look at Sneh's twitter feed, you'll notice the usual output that comes from India's best writers (not being facetious but its a lucrative market over there). Data recovery, mortgage advice, top 10 lists and tech news rewrites all published and pointing links to advertisers ... you know typical outsourced content writing.
Now I have nothing against this "Sneh" person, in fact if the bio on their web site is correct, they are currently working on a college degree (which is more than I can say for a lot of people).
Sneh proceeds to publish an article titled "Employees are Brands" which basically is a rewrite of a Google corporate release talking about employee appreciation. In fact the article should actually be titled "Google Employees are Brands."
She then tweets a link to the article three times but doesn't link directly to the Digg submission, instead the links in her tweets go to the site directly.
Then What Happens?
Before this hits Digg, a network of fake Twitter accounts are already promoting the content (img1). These aren't linking to social bookmarking submissions yet but they don't need to because a second network of Twitter accounts has begun tweeting it.
The story hits Digg when it is submitted by user nikki4digg. "Nikki" joined Digg on October 14, 2009 and has managed to Digg 18000+ submissions at the astonishing rate of 120/day. Consider this for a minute, if you only Digg pictures, on the site (the fastest way this could happen since news articles require reading and videos have to load and be played) and it takes you 15 seconds to click, load, view and digg the image ... that's 30 straight minutes of repeating the same action and that's assuming there are 120 worthwhile images to Digg. When you start to think about digging articles or even short videos, (assuming you read/view them) 120 Diggs becomes a full time job.
Sorry for getting sidetracked ... shortly after submission, the digg submission is tweeted by Jasicasmo ... one of the thousands of "ghost repeater" accounts on Twitter. I'm going to use that term a lot so let me define it for you. Have you ever heard of Bob FM? Bob FM delivers music without human interaction. It simply plays friendly demographic appealing radio and you can listen or you can change the channel.
Ghost repeater Twitter accounts simply broadcast links all day long with no interaction with the audience. In addition ghost repeaters tend to follow anyone that follows them and generally have high follower numbers that equal their following numbers because other bot accounts add them because they tend to post on competitive SEO or tech keywords (ex: mortgages, apple, mlm, linux, work from home, torrents, dui lawyers).
Before I go any further, I want anyone reading this to understand that if you think its crazy to suggest a coordinated large scale effort to get Diggs ... for $600 you can get your article on the front page and it that fails they'll make a second attempt.
After the initial article is published, just one other account (that of one of the early diggers) Tweets the same link but momentum is slowly growing because a number of well connected diggers have 'dugg' it. In fact 7 of the first 10 diggs (not including the author, the submitter and an employee of InRev) have come from accounts with extraordinarily high digg counts and 100+ friends.
The article then sits for the next 10 hours before a sudden turn of events puts it on page one when a new network of ghost repeaters suddenly begin Tweeting the link. The resurgence starts when digg_worldnews (which doesn't appear affiliated with the service) tweets with a link to the digg submission. Suddenly a number of accounts (img2) begin to tweet the same link using different URL shortening services but often with the same ad text. The use of different URL shortening services in my opinion is an effort to confuse Digg to make visits appear natural instead of arising suspicion from the same link. (note: a small number of these pointed their links to Stumbleupon or Reddit)
How many ghost Twitter accounts spontaneously start promoting it?
@a_Technology, @BlissTribe, @cloudprav, @cybermotier, @darrylwilliamss, @designfront, @financial__news, @FollowInTheKnow, @gerryblack, @goodfinancial, @InvokeResults (same owner as @ReviveCoaching that also tweets it), @jc421, @juanarce, @Kafgemini, @lonnymiller, @KnowMoreTech, @kyrontrey, @mathewmurphy, @miketruong, @onlinedegr3e, @patelankur, @peterlubs, @redesocialesweb, @robertolorenzo, @robtesttweets, @Sandy3010, @sastiger, @spaceKebabji, @Srce_of_Errors, @SuperHuddle, @surveygizmo, @tchista, @tosumitgupta, @tracyoverton, @VictoriaNovikov, @voltronthecat (twitter account for a cat) @webvertise2, @wechartsdotcom, @weirdsht, @zombiegirrrrl
Unsettling Truths
Even though these accounts are crap, humans who follow these accounts might be able to generate the needed social media push. However how many of these 'gullible' people to have Digg accounts and how many of them use them on a regular basis? Furthermore can any of these accounts be tied to actual Digg votes from their administrators?
The unsettling thing is that I checked the people who dugg the article and account after account after account showed they were veteran users with many of them had Digg counts in the low thousands with some user approaching 100,000. For experienced users who have been on the site long enough to accumulate these numbers, how did they fall victim to something like this?
At the same time these repeaters are coming on line, Diggs start to magically appear and accumulate and the article is made popular. Is this all coincidence with one account influencing the votes of an entire community? Or could it be that this happens at around 2AM EST which ensures a lot of US Diggers are in bed and can't bury what amounts to an awful article (or are playing WoW or streaming movies). Furthermore another vocal segment, UK diggers, are commuting to work and settling in for the day.
The article currently has 526 views with 229 Diggs ... an incredibly high ratio considering the article's quality.
Something doesn't seem right.
Am I saying votes were purchased?
I'm not a cop and I don't want to assume anything but the votes on this article just don't seem to make any sense. The article is of incredibly poor quality, makes no conclusions, fails to argue any strong points, has no epic images and has some errors. Normally this kind of material gets 0 Diggs but somehow it racked up more votes than anything I've ever submitted to the service which includes some pretty awesome pics and epic criminal fails.
Considering the intelligence of the community and the general disdain for low quality material, I can only surmise that some of the established accounts that dugg the material didn't read it or perhaps received some considerations. I don't want to name names or speculate on what happened but I wouldn't be surprised if a pay-per-vote / submission service was behind it.
Geico fail: We won’t hire you but please buy our insurance
I was thinking the other day about a new problem for American businesses, people who have been turned down for jobs yet are solicited to use that same company's services.
Let me give an example ... a few months ago my mom applied to work at a phone bank for Geico. According to Geico, a woman who has sacrificed much of her adult life (two jobs, long hours ...) to provide for my well being while earning insultingly less than her male counterparts for the same work isn't qualified to work at their prestigious phone bank.
That really sucks because, well, phone banks hire anyone. Drug problems? You're hired. Trouble with English? You're hired. 2nd grade dropout? You're hired. Mental instability? You're hired. Felonies ... well as long as you didn't hurt anyone, you're hired. You get the point.
All my mom wanted to do was take daily abuse over the phone in exchange for a few bucks more than minimum wage but apparently Geico thinks she wouldn't do well (umm ... she raised me by herself, that deserves a medal).
As you can tell, my mom isn't happy with Geico. She's worked hard her entire life, never asking anyone for anything and she can't even get a job with a phone bank. Yes, my mom is nearly 60 but she's smarter and more dependable than her younger counterparts. People like my mom get shit done because unlike me they don't have Twitter, Facebook or other random shit to check throughout the day. Plus since she isn't in the party-hard phase of her life, showing up at 9am isn't a challenge.
You'd think Geico would have a computer program to audit their mailing list and say "Okay we declined to hire this person for a job they are completely overqualified for ... let's not add insult to injury by sending a bunch of junk mail asking them to buy our insurance." Nope. Every week the little green gecko shows up in her mail asking her to switch her car insurance. It makes my mom angry and understandably so ... she's constantly ignored / rejected for everything she applies for (due to age) and has a lot to worry about. The last thing she needs is a reminder of how invisible the 55+ crowd really is in our current economy.
Geico, I hope you understand that your weekly postcards aren't ads, they're corporate America's little way of saying fuck you to the unsung and unemployed heroes whose corporate service has been forgotten as they're lumped into the old age pool.