Beware!! Cute name and all, as Technorati reveals here, Quechup, the little social media bugaboo has really ticked off marketing professionals and media mavens from all walks of life! I’ve been personally inundated by requests to join and simultaneous apologies and pleas to delete within nanosconds!
Multiple pings from social media users go something like this: “Please do not accept the Quechup invitation that you got from me! A dear friend invited me to join, and when I did, to explore it, it appears to have gone through my ENTIRE address book and invited everyone. I’m so very sorry about this!” (or something to that effect)
Obnoxious in its invasiveness and arrogant in its scraping of gmail accounts and address books, this is one way to make the entire blogosphere go ballistic with ‘sheesh, I opened it because it was from YOU’ rancor! Luckily, I’m circumspect by nature so didn’t take the bait…Nevertheless, forewarned is forearmed.
My Age of Conversation book colleagues, as well as multiple clients and peers from Sun Microsystems to soccer moms have forwarded and recanted in semi-simultaneous certainty! This is no way to make ‘friends’ people. And is hardly ‘social.’ Youth, adult, or otherwise.
Talk about a brand shooting itself in the foot. Sheesh. Not very bright. Similarly, on the kids’ front, Zwinky (article here) embeds a ‘toolbar’ as an ad revenue element derived from click throughs on icons, (Smiley Central, Webfetti, Screensavers, etc.) which I also find controlling.
Reports say the toolbar is ‘optional’ but when I created my own Zwinky to test it, they quickly hijacked my toolbar adding free icons unannounced. You can uninstall it but then you can’t access Zwinky.
Huh? What’s optional there?
As I’ve said before, ANY technology that doesn’t ask permission, then crashes into my world and tries to boss me and over-ride my system tweaks the heck out of me.
Meanwhile, parents get upset trying to figure out WHY they suddenly have an entirely separate layer of buttons out of nowhere, with the zealous among them no doubt clucking to their Zwinky teens, “told you so, the internet is evil, stay outta range, don’t download anything, eek!” If only we could take it down a notch and all get some media savvy to deal with this kind of spam-o-rama…
Personally, I’ve been sending out caveats to all of our readers that keep sending me invitations to come aboard everything from Hi5 to Facebook (which, btw, now allows ADS which will no doubt target kids’ profiles in slivered segmentation) explaining that I’m unable to contribute much to new groups since I’m literally trying to keep this blog ‘clean.’
I’ve become a bit of a blog slave right now, and have major ‘akismet’ spam filter issues, (I have close to 100,000 spams caught in my filters already, and by the time you finish reading this piece, I guarantee there will be a couple dozen new ones, that’s how fast they’re pinging me)
Even though I have very little ‘social’ time to be very chatty in these ‘social media’ sites, there’s a lot of info swapping and fun, so I DID join Facebook along with our Age of Conversation crew to benefit Variety, the Children’s Charity, (article here). But then I was VERY surprised to see that Facebook banished poor ol’ Ranger Rick (nonprofit icon for the National Wildlife Federation) because he was a critter cartoon rather than a human…Odd considering they have faux celeb and political sites out the wazoo clearly not run by the person they’re representing.
At first I thought they banished him to prevent corporate infiltration of Ronald McDonald and such to keep the site ‘pristine’…Alas, not so. Facebook has joined the thunderous herds of advertising pros, maximizing rev streams to mine kids’ profiles for profit.
Anyway, that’s another story. I’ll quickly close by saying if you begin to feel that crush of guilt that you ‘can’t keep up’ with a gazillion e-mail responses or ‘friend’ requests, you can always hit the delete key in the name of info overload and sanity. Easier said than done, I realize…but it’s part of my new mantra I’m trying to embed in my own brain…
Manage your media, don’t let your media manage you.
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