Netflix 'culture' guidelines get two thumbs up

In this era of social media, companies have made headlines (for better or worse) by way of their social media policies. With respect to this trend, I say Netflix should take Best in Show.

Netflix has posted its entire quasi-employee handbook titled, "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture." It promotes everything you'd want to read in an employee handbook - freedom, flexibility and fun. Even if this was published as a marketing ploy, it's a darn good one.

Most impressive is Netflix's vacation policy. According to the middle pages of the vast document, there is no vacation limit for Netflix employees.

Wow, I know.

You may be asking, "What does this have to do with social media?"

Everything.

Social media is about conversation. Most companies worry about maintaining social media channels and branding more than they do contributing quality content to the conversation. Here, Netflix has set itself up to be a conversation piece for social media enthusiasts. Search Netflix on Twitter and you can see that the publishing the guidelines have worked.

Intel gave Netflix some good competition last week by embracing transparency and sharing its social media guidelines publicly (See Intel social media guidelines.) Best Buy, too, started from the foundation and crowdsourced the requirements for its new Sr. Manager, Emerging Media Markets position, which spread like wild fire across Twitter. (Full disclosure: I used to work at Best Buy in college. I can alphabetize DVDs like a mofo.)

On the losing end, ESPN dug its own digital grave this week by telling employees they can only Tweet if it serves ESPN. (See Ric Bucher's Tweet and the Mashable article.) Da-da-da. Da-da-dumb.

Netflix is a clear winner because it managed to create so much buzz with (what appears to be) so little effort, simply by telling people want they want to hear. Leave it to the direct-to-you movie service to make an indirect social media move.

Netflix has created advocates through this simple effort and let them do the talking. That's a best social media practice that I give two thumbs up.

Food porn: Open-face taco fiesta

This is an iteration of something Moos makes. Actually it's hardly comparable to Moos' Mexican cuisine, but I tried!

I cooked up some black beans with white onion and home-grown green peppers. I put a soft tortilla over the beans and topped it with an over-medium, yolk-broken egg, green onions, home-grown jalapeno and cilantro, pico de gallo, cracked salt and pepper and Tapatio.  To enhance the plate, I probably could have added sour cream and avocado. It was oh so tasty!

My prof is a pro

I've got another night of grad class ahead of me in a few short hours. For those of you keeping score, I'm in my second year of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at UW. As many of you know - especially if you follow my Tweets - our class term project this quarter is to create a book on how businesses use Twitter. I'm writing a chapter on how wineries use Twitter and finished my first draft, 20-pages long, earlier today. What a relief!

My professor, Kathy Gill, is freakin' genius. This is my third class with her.  She packs a lot of (Read: Too much) content into a quarter, and she continues to kick my ass by way of deep expertise in social media, telecommunications and general technology.  Social Media Club Seattle recently profiled her and you can read that profile here and see her interview below.

Good times, great oldies

Behold, some of the most influential people on the Interwebs at one table!

I was so happy to see  my friends Jeanna, Al and Cari yesterday at Purple Cafe. Al, I owe you a drink.

Camping was rocky

To follow-up on my Paolo vs. Wild post, let's just say Wild won by KO.

I won't repeat everything that's been said at AM|PM by Amanda, but I'll provide the Cliff Notes version here.

We left way too late on Thursday and took Scott's advice to camp at a closer location than Dewey Lakes. The forest service road to the campsite was too much for the Ford Focus and my blood pressure so we turned back. We tried a close hotel, but it was full so we tried another campsite along Hwy 410.

By this time it was pitch black out and we got lost in the camp site, if that's possible. We ended up stopping across from an abandoned airstrip and pitched a tent using the car headlights.

Little did we know that we were at a horse camp site. We slept terribly. Lesson learned.

We woke up early on Friday morning to avoid a ticket for camping without a pass and went to Sunrise at Mt. Rainier instead of Dewey Lakes. We weren't really prepared for another night at a camp site, so we figured we'd hike for the day and head home.

We weren't really prepared for a full day's hike either.

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Amanda and I are collectively stubborn. We think we should do things that we probably shouldn't. In this case, we hiked WAY too deep into Rainier. We started at 8:30 a.m. and didn't get back to Sunrise until 4:30 p.m. We stopped for a combined total of one hour between breaks and eating. We hiked around 10 miles and exchanged 3,000 to 3,500 feet in elevation.

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The last three miles of the hike was a 2,500-foot elevation gain. I literally thought I was going to die. I couldn't even hold the camera, which is why there are no more pictures.

I write to you sore and tired. It was a totally satisfying experience, kind of like running a marathon... But you don't necessarily want to go back and run a marathon the next weekend, ya dig?