David M. Green: Purveyor of fine humour

Category: Facebook

  • Burger Heaven – The spam is better at Hungry Jack’s

    On Friday 22 February, popular fast food restaurant Hungry Jack’s (The Australian incarnation of Burger King, for my international friends) posted a Facebook status:

    “Today the legendary Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin would have turned 51. Rest peacefully in burger heaven mate.”

    What exactly has the late animal lover got to with cheeseburgers? What is this “burger heaven”? Why doesn’t it have capital letters? Would Steve Irwin even go to burger heaven? Who’s to say he wouldn’t end up in burger hell? And are the burgers in burger hell still flame-grilled?

    Perhaps he wouldn’t be admitted into burger heaven OR hell – Condemned to an eternity in “Burgertory”. Ahh, Burgertory: where the burgers are plain and the service is “okay”.

    This is social media marketing: Using current events (or anniversaries of current events) to tie back into your brand, no matter how tenuous the link.

    Everyone hates ads. Especially on the Internet. When I’m watching a YouTube video with an ad at the start, my mouse-clicking finger hangs over the “skip” button, waiting impatiently as it counts down from 5 to 0 – which actually takes 7 seconds, if you’ve ever bothered to count it.

    Advertising has really invaded social media in the last couple of years. Facebook and Twitter are now awash with spam. And most of it is just lazy. Status updates from major brands can be as vanilla as: “Happy Friday!”

    And I know. Because I wrote them.

    For a short time, I was one of the faceless men who came up with these updates for companies. Last year I spent seven weeks at a digital advertising agency, writing Facebook and Twitter posts for their big name clients who wanted to sell hairspray and sunscreen and avocado dip.

    The problem with social media advertising is most advertisers have absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to do. All of these companies demanded their Tweets and Facebook statuses a month in advance. How are you supposed to make a Tweet topical and interesting if you have to get it approved by middle management 30 days in advance? The best you can do is look at an upcoming anniversary and schedule something about burger heaven.

    Hence, most companies just end up posting generic spam about their products – a sentence that will offend no one and bore everyone – effectively junk mail delivered directly to your news feed.

    Remember junk mail? It’s really amazing that businesses still persist with print advertising. This is how I deal with it:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F93H10n_JdA&feature=youtu.be

    But how do you make advertising work on social media? I don’t know. But I can tell you what people don’t like. People don’t like someone trying to sell them something they don’t want. People don’t like being bothered. People don’t like being asked by a brand of head lice shampoo what they got up to on the weekend.

    Businesses are desperate to engage you on social media. There’s an abundance of discounts on offer. Lots of restaurants are now offering free drinks or 20 per cent off your bill, just for using Facebook to “check in” to the restaurant. And even better, most of these restaurants don’t even check to see you’ve done it. So you can get the discounts anyway!

    And believe it or not, businesses may still be vying for your online engagement long after you yourself have gone to burger heaven.

    A company called LivesOn is due to launch in March. Using complex algorithms and artificial intelligence, they plan to mimic individuals’ Twitter activity to allow you to continue to socialise online after you’ve logged off the server of life.

    If your online robot is still posting statuses for you after you’re dead, you can guarantee there’ll be banks and supermarkets and airlines all too eager to keep you up to date on their latest deals.

    We may need to develop Blade Runner-esque testing to determine which Twitter accounts are real people and which ones are robots. Who knows, maybe it will be the companies themselves who use LivesOn to continue advertising their products long after the business has died?

    Robots selling robots to other robots – this is the future. Do androids Tweet about their dreams of electric sheep? More importantly, do they go to burger heaven?

    Burger heaven… wait…

    Wouldn’t burger heaven just be full of burgers?

    When we say the dog has gone to “Doggy Heaven”, presumably this is a heaven for dogs, right? Not a heaven for the people who eat dogs?

    So according to the good people at Hungry Jack’s, the late animal activist Steve Irwin now resides alone, surrounded by either whole or partially eaten, possibly sentient cheeseburgers.

    That is absolutely horrifying.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Happy Wednesday!

  • 800 million reasons to hate the new Facebook Timeline

    I don’t like it and I don’t want it.

    The big wigs over at “Facelessbook” tell us their 800 million users (11 per cent of the world’s entire population) will now be forced to adopt the new Timeline layout.

    And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I declare this to be history’s greatest disaster. Thanks a lot, Zuckerberg.

    The much heralded “New Facebook” design is bad ergonomics.

    Users of “Facebook Classic” will know that everyone’s most recent status updates are at the top of the page, and to trace backwards requires a simple vertical glance downwards, like so: (follow the red arrow)

    Viewing Timeline on a computer requires your eyes to dart left and right around the screen, zigzagging down the page, searching for some sort of chronological consistency.

    Compare the above design to the Timeline layout:

    It’s the equivalent of designing a stove with controls that don’t line up with the hotplates, or a speedometer with no numbers on it.

    If I land on a friend’s Facebook page and they have the Timeline, I usually leave straight away. I don’t care about whatever benefits they’re toting. I simply do not want to look at it.

    Now, I don’t have a problem with software giants changing the design of their user interfaces. But I do have a problem when it’s a forced change, and not one for the better.

    They’ve been doing this to us for years. Windows Media Player used to have the “play” button on the left of the screen. Then they moved it to the middle.

    The latest version of Internet Explorer moved the favourites menu to the opposite side of the page. Why? Because they can.

    I had to break years of mouse-moving habit in order to adapt. And even still, if I’m not concentrating, I’ll sometimes go for the old positions.

    And YouTube just made their new channel design mandatory as well.

    It rightly ruffles my feathers!

    Of course, they’re not all evil manipulative execu-nerds over there in Silicon Valley, driving around in their fancy convertibles, laughing at the thought of pissing off millions of users by making them change their habits.

    The good people who designed the Winamp multimedia player also catered for their long time users who don’t like change. With a simply click, you can revert back to the classic “skin”, where everything on the screen is where it should be.

    It’s quite possibly the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or rather, if there was such thing as sliced bread that – with the click of a button – could also be turned back into the classic unsliced variety of loaf.

    People don’t like change. That’s the only thing that stays the same.

    But is Mark Zuckerberg offering users the option to keep the old Facebook design? No he is not. And why should he? At this point there’s no incentive for the colour-blind monopoloid to cater to his “friends”.

    What are we gonna do? Go crawling back to MySpace? I don’t think so.

    But before you criticise me (probably on Facebook) for overreacting, I am aware this is a first world problem. No one’s starving to death because of some rearranged zeros and ones. At its worst, it’s just kind of irritating.

    There must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Australians who along with me, are lamenting waking up one morning to discover a Timeline where their Facebook page used to be.

    They’ve already converted the fan pages for myself and 31 Questions. They switched over on March 31.

    But what choice do we have? Could you imagine your modern lifestyle without Facebook? Impossible.

    It’s now so ingrained in our society there’s no way back. You don’t ask for someone’s phone number any more. You ask for the correct spelling of their name, so you can stalk them on the Internet.

    How on Earth are you supposed to remember anyone’s birthday? Write it down on a desk calendar? Absurd.

    And up until the late 00s, if you wanted to “poke” someone, etiquette dictates you needed to buy them a drink first.

    But, I suppose if being subjected to the Facebook Timeline is the worst thing that happens to you this month, you’re probably doing better than the 6.2 billion people who don’t have Facebook at all.

    They actually have real problems to deal with.

    Feathers can be unruffled.

    We will adapt. Reluctantly. We will learn to like. Reluctantly. We may even eventually give it one of those little thumbs up… Reluctantly.

    And then we’ll kick up a fuss when Facebook decides they want to change the Timeline to something else.

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    Reluctant Facebook user.

  • More bad grammar

    It’s been a while since my successful grammatical stand against the Commonwealth Bank, so if you’re in need of a reminder, check out BEFORE and AFTER David’s M. Green’s red correction pen.

    In the mean time I’ve accumulated a few more examples of bad grammar and general incompetence, so back by popular demand… it’s David M. Green: Grammar Nazi!

    What’s worse than finding human faeces in your hotel swimming pool?

    Well… actually, I’d probably prefer the bad grammar:

    Don’t worry. Darryl will sort you out.

    Went to see a movie at the Hoyts cinema at Melbourne’s fabulous Northland Shopping Centre the other day. Ain’t that just humanity at its worst?

    They’re not the kind of folk that take too kindly to outsiders, NEITHER their food NOR drink:

    And here’s an amusing Facebook slip-up from my good friend Rebecca McKinney. No explanation required:

    Jesus, what kind of stitch pattern is she using? She might have to give Darryl a call…

    Grammatical mistakes happen to the best of us. Stuff on Facebook is pretty forgivable, but once it’s printed and turned into signage – especially when it’s big business – grammar fans, let the mockery begin!

    Kind regards,
    David M. Green
    David M. Green: Grammar Nazi will return in “The Spellcheck Is Not Enough”.