On social media...
Category: Internet
Published: 01/08/2009 08:38 p.m.
Social media and social networks have been a godsend for some people. The original intent of myspace.com was to be a place where burgeoning musicians could come and display their musical talents for anyone to see. Then, somewhere along the way, it became popular for anyone and everyone to make a profile and become "friends" with people online. And this was the birth of online social networks and in some ways social media too.
The idea of a social network is nothing new. Everyone runs with certain circles and has friends in overlapping circles and is connected to more people. These used to be called friends-of-friends. For example, in high school, I had some friends in band. I was not in band, but because I had friends in band, I was connected to other people in band through my friends. The same is true for football and other organizations in school.
But combining with the internet combines everyone together and creates all of these loose ties which I have talked about before. And this is just the beginning, innocent part of things. This is about where the line should be drawn. Just friends and maybe some other connections. But then things start to get corporate, and I really start to get annoyed.
First all of these companies show up on Facebook to try and sell you. Facebook at it's core is a dynamic advertising machine, and while I am cool with them having everything that I put up there, I hate the idea that people are out there abusing it. People are gaming the system and trying to create leverage. Fan pages and apps and the like all are ways for businesses to sneak in. The normal ads are sometimes pushing it, but the rest gets ridiculous. Instead of stupid groups like "I'm in school, I don't have time for homework", people are trying to profit. Now, cause fund-raising aside, I don't think anyone but the Facebook people should be profiting. (*I love what Burger King is doing - unfriend 10 people and get a free burger. That's just funny.)
Then comes Twitter. People use twitter for all sorts of reasons. I communicate with friends, tell jokes, comment on football and politics, and the like. Other people do similar things, and I tend to follow them. But then the corporate people come in and ruin it. Antherton Bartelby said it best on mashable with his top reasons not to follow someone back. Numbers 5, 6, and 7 are the corporate jerks. The self-experts, constantly self-promoting their web2.0 garbage while trying to turn a sale or make a buck. It's selfish and pathetic and I want no part in it. And the real problem is that it taints the entire market for the legit professionals who are web experts. But most of them are too smart to waste their time in that way. It's really web2.0 spam (did I just coin a term?). All of these auto-generated ad sites and the people that are self experts just trying to get hits to sell ads.
I would accuse Mike Arrington or Scoble of this kind of spam, but they have influence. They are the experts. It's the people that see them and do as they do that are the scammers. People that pay to get their posts on digg or people that plug their own stuff everywhere they go with out listening to the other people. The advantage that Arrington and Scoble have is they listen more than they talk (or maybe close to equal). They participate and are behind the scenes and in the know. These other leeches are trying to make a cheap buck, and it disgusts me.
I don't want to use social networks or social media that way. I want to run an honest transparent business. One of the reasons I love Apple is that they don't have cheap tricks. They don't rely on business and discounts to make their platform the de-facto standard (like Microsoft). Apple innovates the hell out of things. They come out with the thinnest, lightest, fastest, most fun devices ever. Have you ever installed software on a smartphone or on symbian? What a pain. Compare that to the app store. Even if the only reason they sell music is to sell ipods, they have transformed the music sales industry. And, most ipods are easy and fun to use.
Apple charges a premium for greatness. The come out with cool stuff and people buy it because they want it. People buy windows junk because it's cheap or because they have to because their last PC is full of crapware. It's a short-term model that lost me after 5 years. And social media and social networks offer the next platform for people to be great or be corporate.
I want to offer a product that is incredible, that people want (and maybe think they need). I want to create a functional process makes purchasing easy and offer world-class support. And I want to use social media as another way to showcase all of the great things I am doing with permission advertising, not cheap spam tricks. I want to use rich media to show my tools in action. I want to be transparent and honest and say this is the cool thing we sell, it costs this much because we had to work hard to make it and we need to be paid, and we need to profit so we can keep coming up with groundbreaking products/services. As a consumer, I use my dollar to vote for companies like that. Jetblue has some of my money because that are cheap, easy, fun, and fast. Apple has my money for creating cool gadgets that I love to use. Flip has some because they made something complicated into something easy and fun, and it's inspired me to (try to) be more creative.
I want to create all of these things, and use Facebook and Twitter and the like to do more than promote. I want to be able to inform people that want to be informed, to not push things. To communicate and answer questions. To find like-minded people to work with on these great ideas. LinkedIn shouldn't be a platform for me to leverage my own brand. That's the corporate/web2.0 spam model. I want to use it to find cool people to collaborate with and work together. I want to use it to keep track of old connections, not to solicit new ones.
Most of all, I want to make tech personal. I think at the heart of social media, there is a person behind the good things, and a machine/auto-bot behind the bad. On twitter, there are people that auto-follow back and send an automated message. Even if its "Thanks for following me!", it isn't personal. The personal ones ring true, and they make or break the relationship in my mind.
Just today as I was out for lunch I heard a woman complaining on her cellphone about how technology is making things so impersonal. She wanted to return to a time when people sent thank-you cards. Now, I personally am a chronic non-thank-you sender, which is bad. But as far as social connections, I think I am very personal on the web. I have reached out to a couple of people in a genuine interested fashion. And I was so happy to receive a response from a human. And I got one because they first heard from a human. I remember maybe 10 years ago my dad was sending emails to senators about something. He would get emails back immediately, which at first impressed me. Until he showed me they were just auto-responses based on subject matter. Auto-responses suck when you are trying to reach a person. They are acceptable if I am interacting with a machine. A coke machine can say SOLD OUT, and that is an ok auto-response. But when I try and reach out to a person who runs a blog or social media whatever and I get a machine in return, this is not ok.
Humans should act human. They should treat other humans as humans. DON'T ABUSE SOCIAL MEDIA. Don't abuse all of the wonderful technology that aids in human-to-human contact. If your inbox is overflowing, get another human to help, or just stop receiving email (and let people know). Big tech celebs that have public email addresses seem insane. There's no way they are reading my email, so why would I waste time sending one. I'll save my energy for the Paul's and the Aron's of the online world. (Thanks for getting back to me, it restored my faith.)
So, the next time you are thinking about calling yourself an SEO-Pro or trying to pimp your latest blog post (which is just links out anyway), think about how you could use social media to really attract real interest. Be better.