Web Monitor
17:02 UK time, Tuesday, 3 November 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: feedback phobia, the "me" brand and a sticky subject.
• Avid Tweeter and comedian that the age of instant feedback is a bit of a shock:
"Time was all you had to do was avoid the reviews and the odd tactless yawn in the audience but now everyone's a critic. Every YouTube clip you're in, every blog or article that's posted online leaves space for comments. And Web 2.0 is not shy about telling you what it thinks. Unfortunately for some of us, the Ego 2.0 upgrades haven't quite come in yet."
• Incidentally, when linking to his article, he gave it the hashtag #shamelessselfpromotion. So where did all this self promotion come from? the rise of selling yourself like you'd sell a product to decades before Twitter. He sees the increase in marketing speech in normal language as coinciding with people seeing themselves as a brand:
"First 'markets' - target and niche, up and down - crept into everyday conversation. I knew something had changed in Britain when I met a Church of England clergyman at a 1980s dinner party and he described his Belgravia flock as 'rather upmarket'. Then 'segmentation' and 'demographics' emigrated out of -ology country and into the suburbs, soon followed by those exciting intangibles, 'image' and 'spin'... The enormous growth of PR - a business with few barriers to entry - made it a first-choice career for all kinds of people, from seasoned marketeers to confident, well-networked Sloane girls. Soon practically everyone you met seemed to be working in PR. And once they had PR-ed everything - from hospital trusts to pressure groups, museums to art galleries, government departments to, soon enough, entire countries - the idea of a little light self-promotion seemed increasingly obvious."
• Yesterday's Web Monitor shone a light on the extremely-detailed blog. The writer of said blog, James Ward, is not just obsessed with where and how chocolate bars are sold in his area. He's also got a thing for Blu-Tack. He's been in contact with the company about it's claim that there are "1000s of uses" for the product. He has published his correspondence with the company - which claims one of the uses is as earplugs. However, Ward wonders how the fight is affecting his personal life:
"I just want some indication that it is true to say that Blu-Tack has '1000s of uses'. Not 'lots', not 'many'. '1000s'. They say on the packaging it has '1000s of uses', show me it has '1000s of uses'... I went to a course at work this week. At the start, there was one of those 'ice-breaker' activities where you have to tell everyone your name, explain your role and responsibilities and share one interesting fact about yourself. I hate these things. There are very few interesting facts about me. Under pressure, I said that the interesting fact about me is that I'm currently embroiled in a dispute with Bostik over the accuracy of their claim that Blu-Tack has "1000s of uses". When I said this, everyone laughed, but I'll be honest with you; I think they might have been laughing at me rather than with me."
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