While technically my first startup was somewhere around 1991, I first joined the ranks of the Internet revolution and that emerging startup culture in 1994. I joined a very successful company with a rotund 20-something-year-old CEO who once challenged a 120lb programmer to a drinking contest. He won of course and after winning, proceeded to urinate on said programmer as he lie passed out on the ground. One of many bizarre experiences at that company, and simply the start of a career full of them.

I’ve always worked on the fringe of technology, quite often joining companies that were so far ahead of their time, that even 10+ years on, I’ve still not seen the full potential of what they represented come to fruition…but knowing it will. My career has been historically one of great ideas and bad timing.

These days, I feel that something is missing in startup culture. A fire, a passion, a desire…a need to transform from where we are to where we could be. We were once stepping onto truly unknown territory, but now some of what we see today is predictable and blasé. I feel we have reached a point of acceptance over what we have instead of a need to do something completely unexpected. Each new social media project to me, seems like a play off of the one launched just 2 months before it.

In my mind much of startup culture is broken. It seems to be trend and fad driven and makes me desire for something more tangible, lasting, real.

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I’ve been thinking about these ideas for some time, and today I read a clever site/post/illustration that perfectly encapsulated a lot of these concepts. Liz Fosslien has really captured the spirit of how unimportant and unoriginal everything feels these days…how we’ve somewhat lost the magical feeling of the truly wonderful times we live in.

Startup is the new Hipster

Pensive, but on the whole feeling pretty good about it all…

Something I’m just starting to work on…rough sketch of a larger campaign. Here’s to all your crazy insane hot sauce adventurists, who never quite find enough punishment on either end.

In my time at the Discovery Channel, I dealt with a lot of difficult online personalities. And when I say a lot, I’m referring to hundreds of thousands of passionate people who don’t always see eye to eye. More often than not, it required a little hand holding to keep the pot from boiling over into complete chaos. So basically it was a daily affair of rage management.  

I’ve handled celebrity PR scandals, bullying, stalking, and threats of all kinds. In fact, during one incident, I had my own life threatened to the point where the Discovery legal department had to get involved. The one thing scarier than an insane online troll is a pack of Discovery corporate lawyers. 

Over almost three years I saw people from all political spectrums call each other every conceivable name to the point where terms like “nazi,” “fascist,” “socialist,” “commie,” and the like became meaningless and comical.

Good times.

Suffice to say I’ve learned how to handle everything from the horribly vile to the insanely annoying while keeping not only my cool but my own sanity. I’ve thought about writing a short book on this subject, but in the meantime, why not share just a few things 

Online, There Is No Such Thing As Shame

I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest that one of the best things about the Internet is also the worst thing about the Internet, which is the perception and sometime reality of anonymity. Since people typically don’t have to actually post their real identities online, there’s a tendency to feel a sense of unfiltered freedom which allows them to basically express their deepest hidden feelings. These are things that in polite company, a person would never admit to. Online it comes out as an expression of deep seeded inner rage. Most of the time you’ll see this manifest itself as some form of prejudice. 

Difficult People

The problem with difficult people is that they disrupt and derail conversations. This also causes good standing members of a community to leave. In the beginning I would try to reason with difficult people, yet it becomes apparent that their disruptions were part of a psychosis that was beyond something you could simply rationalize with them. What ends up happening is that initially you think you can turn them around, talk them back to sanity, and bring a calming zen to your community. You realize over time, this is impossible, and if you are smart you recognize disruptive behavior and simply ban it immediately. 

There are many types of difficult personalities one encounters online, but here’s an example of one of the worst. 

The Self Hater

This person has some deep seeded hatred of themselves that manifests online into some nihilistic hatred of everyone and everything. They always take a contrary position. They can’t have any honest discussion because all they want to do is tear everything down through name calling, vile comments, intimidation, and derision. They look for the weakest members of any community, latch on, and destroy whatever they care about because they derive pleasure from the pain of others.

You simply have to ban this type of personality immediately. You cannot rationalize with them because they don’t want to participate in any discussion, they want to ruin it for everyone. However, if you are a member of the community, and not a moderator, there are several ways to handle this type of person. Here’s three:

1. Ignore them – easier said that done, but if everyone simply ignores them, they lose interest quickly and go away. If you are well vested in the community, you can generally get others you know to follow your lead. 

2. Do not show you are upset. The moment you show emotion, is the moment you lose. Typically what happens is that you’ll get caught up in some long argument hoping that there will be some middle ground or consensus between parties. This never happens. You waste a lot of precious time, while on the other end of the conversation, the self hater is simply looking at your arguments and analyzing them for way’s to turn it all upside down and get you to react on an emotional level. Once that happens, they’ve got you. Keep your emotions in check.

3. Sticks and Stones – one of my favorite ways to handle self haters is to give a little bit back to them, like a credit card rewards program. Remember their goal is to get your goat. Once you show anger or frustration they win, and they’ll keep going. I recently had an exchange with a Reddit commenter who came into my discussion with the following (referring to an upcoming book I’m releasing):

“I guess if people would waste their money reading homo erotic shit like “The hunger games” or “the Holy Bible” they might pay for this crap too.”

Now if you research this gentlemen you’ll find he regularly posts inflammatory comments because he gets a lot of fun out of it. Now I could flag him (which might get his comment removed – in time), or I could ignore him (in which case someone else might egg him on), or I could engage him on his level. Self hater’s cannot handle being fed their own garbage.

I engaged him and here’s how the conversation went down. 

Him: “I guess if people would waste their money reading homo erotic shit like “The hunger games” or “the Holy Bible” they might pay for this crap too.”

And he’s gone. Not to mention it entertained some of the other commenters who were also tired of his bs. Is this the mature way to have a discussion? No, but then this type of person has no desire to participate on any level of maturity. He wants to derail the discussion and start a war. Simply mirror his behavior and he’ll typically leave because there is no fun in having your ass handed to you. 

As the Director of Marketing for an online food company I’ve been pushing internally for a site reboot and refresh. I decided to run a survey of customers to gauge just how powerfully a website and overall social networking strategy reflects on a food brand. I asked people to rank their answers based on how strongly they felt, and then plotted the answers into charts. Not scientific, but the results still interesting, if not surprising.  

The first question I asked as a baseline, was whether or not they made food purchasing decisions based on what they saw on the web. 

With the advent of all the food porn sites (Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, photo sharing, etc),  it’s no surprise that the internet and apps are a huge influencer of what people are purchasing in stores, simply because they’ve seen something that was shared. 

However, what about a brands website? Does it really matter what your site looks like? How it functions? If you sell gourmet products, does it need to reflect that view? If you make candy, should you capture the whimsey inherent in the product?

So I posited a simple statement, “A poorly designed website reflects poorly on a brand and makes me question the quality of their product.” 

Can the way you present your brand online, specifically your website actually make someone question the quality of your product? With 76% in agreement, it seems like you should put a lot of effort into how you reflect and project your products and values to potential and existing customers.

As for social networking:

“A brands social networking participation is important to me”

95% agree

4% disagree

“I like brands that are more fun and engaging other than constantly promoting their products”

33.3% Strongly Agree

66.7% Agree

No dissent

“I follow more than one brand on a social networking platform”

91% Yes

  9% No

There are countless articles out there which will tell you the importance of a website to your brand. There are countless articles out there that will tell you the value of social participation. What I found interesting is hearing from our own customers just how integral our online presence (site and social) was to them. 

So you might want to consider asking yourself in the future, does my online brand truly reflect my actual product? Like it or not, these days what you do online is directly linked to how you are perceived offline.

I’ve got some web issues going on with this blog…working to get it taped up and fixed ASAP.