I gave a little talk about webcockery at BarCamp Seattle over the weekend — “webcock,” of course, being Dean Allen‘s “naming convention for online-marketing, web-strategy, killer-startup cheerleaders/water-carriers.” Instead of tearing down webcockery directly, I tried to give a cock’s-eye view of the ideal social media marketing expert. Retweets! Hashtags! Auto-following! With these simple tools, you can ruin Twitter faster than ever before!
The session was called “Webcockery 101: How to Leave Twitter Soooo Much Worse Than You Found It. Ugh. Jesus Christ.”
Unfortunately, there’s no video of these shenanigans. Just in case people are curious, though, I’ve uploaded a PDF of my slides. Also, thanks to Tara Hunt for posting a good play-by-play of the discussion to Twitter. It went something like this:
# Now onto Webcockery! ……I don’t know either.
# “The webcock toolkit includes linking to urself relentlessly, only reading ur @ replies, following everyone back, followfridays, etc”
# “Retweeting is the webcock reach around.” LOL
# “If you don’t provide a place for people to see popular links on the internet, who will?” #webcockery
# “Only follow people who automatically follow you back.” #webcockery
# “Refer to yourself to a ‘______ ninja’ in as many profiles as possible.” #webcockery
# “You might just want to tap that star”
# .@catherinegordon ‘Webcockery’ is NOT a positive term. It means you are a douche. These are tongue in cheek.
# p.s. If ur following the #webcockery tag, it’s tongue-in-cheek. Webcockery is douchery. The ppl who are using twitter for the wrong reasons.
# In other words…DON’T BE A WEBCOCK.
# He’s creating a venn diagram of where Webcockery overlaps with Douchebaggery. Nice.
Afterward, Chris Downie, who ran a morning discussion about “social microgames,” offered $10 to anyone who would “retweet” my talk later that day. Dylan Wilbanks took him up on it and put on a version of the presentation that was as deadpan as I wish mine could have been.
On Sunday, we did a live Q&A for Am I Flirting?, the flirting blog I write with Melissa Gira. Melissa co-presented via Skype, to talk about some of the situations that led to AIF? posts and take questions from the audience. A lot of fun people showed up, and we had a great time with it (despite some problems with the patchy conference wifi). I have nothing but good things to say about doing a live version of your blog, especially if you write to a fairly narrow theme, as we do with AIF.
