A Roundtable

.

Kristen Vang and Naomi Hybariashi are social media strategists at AttentionPR. Jackie Johnson is the social media manager at Pronto.com, as well as the matermind behind fashion eye-candy blog, Some Notes on Napkins.

Note: This little web show of our is an experiment in...perception. Its largely divorced from my work and this blog, as the subject matter varies from fashion to simply nothing at all. Given that my interests include Web theory, the evolution of computing and social behaviors...IJSS has been an interesting departure for me, and a chance to simply chat with friends.

We have seen a lot of negative feedback as well as positive, and we have quickly discovered who our key "audiences" are. The thing is, I fully understand why people would react so negatively to these shows...they do seem random and at times utterly pointless, particularly when there is no context for who we are.

The interesting thing for me is to watch and listen to the dialogue and a few things have become clear from the conversation data around IJSS:

1. Girls are our biggest fans, in general. And more specifically, 20something girls who live in New York, have blogs, and are into fashion and culture (go figure)

2. Males tend to abhor us, thinking our dialogue trite, vapid or utterly "unintelligible" (again, go figure!) :). Their comments are generally "troll" comments in nature, meaning they provide no real constructive criticism, only rants or attempted snarky one-liners (I would also venture to guess they range in age from 20-35, but this is pure conjecture...and we did have one self-proclaimed 60 year old commenter who really, really disliked our girlish banter)

3. People within a particular industry (fashion, marketing, etc) provide constructive feedback, whether positive or negative and are generally fair even in their dislike

4. We publish ALL comments. Negative, irrelevant or otherwise. My favorite part is responding to the negative comments we receive-- you will note we are always very receptive and friendly with our most negative of commenters. This is what I like to call "practicing what we preach"...and you know what? We've managed to turn one vehement commenter in particular from being "NOTAFAN" to "Becomingafan"...and we await his "AFAN" status :)

Being receptive, positive and constructive-- rather than censoring, is a lesson we like to impress upon companies (clients) who venture into this ever-changing social Web. Its tough, and sometimes you'll get a little mud slung, but you can learn a lot from it. For example, I've determined to overcome my California-born, generational-induced overuse of the word "like" :)

And finally, these girls sum it up best: