Killing Another Evangelist

As much as I love Twitter (and the whole of social networking technology, for that matter) I’m noticing an ever-growing trend of D-baggery. Twitter seems to consist mostly of “Twitter Experts.”

As the end of 2008 crept closer, my homesickness for Minnesota grew more urgent. So on December 29^th I arrived back in the tundra ready to see if I couldn’t just pull the same kind of self-motivated connection-building I did online while I was in Denver.

When I changed my Location field, I went from being the top-ranked TwitterElite in Lakewood, CO to the second-from top in St. Cloud, MN. Within a few days I overtook @scsuscholars somehow, even though they’ve got more followers. It’s not like anyone in St. Cloud even has more than 300 followers, so it’s nice to see that twittergrader.com doesn’t rank simply by number of followers but by overall completeness, and I assume bythe power of one's overall network.

That’s all fine. I have no beef with the fact that both Lakewood and St. Cloud are small potatoes when compared with their respective larger nearby cities of Denver and Minneapolis. Both of these cities have the same problem: they’re cluttered with “Twitter Experts”

It seems to me that there are a significant amount of people who are so pleased with themselves for using Twitter, that they’ve found a way of turning their self-perceived importance into something marketable. While those who are being suckered into paying for the services of these self-proclaimed “social media mavens” think they’re getting advice on the cutting edge of advertising, they’re being duped. Here’s exactly how it works.

Step 1. Divorce your sense of self-worth from your public image. You’re about to tarnish that forever so you might as well get pride out of something private like collecting commemorative thimbles.

Step 2. Create a Twitter account. You can use your real name, or you can use something you assume is catchy like “BlogProExpert” or something similar. Remember, no one is tooting your horn yet, so toot it yourself while no one is watching.

Step 3. Dedicate an entire day to adding 10,000 users to your Follow list. Don’t bother adding the top-ranked 10,000 Twitter users, as they will most-likely not follow you back. But those schills that are new to the whole process are still under the impression that if someone follows them, they’re morally obligated to follow back. I know what you’re saying, “I can’t keep up with tweets from 10,000 people!” Don’t worry. You’re not doing this to collect feedback. That’s for people with actual knowledge of marketing to do.

Step 4. After about a week, maybe 3,000 people are following you because of the afore-mentioned assumption of a non-existent obligatory politeness. At this point you can un-follow all of those who didn’t follow you back. If you’re even so inclined, you can un-follow all but the 50 people you really care about following. Now that you only follow 50 people and have 3,000 people following you, people will think that you invented the donut.

Step 5. It’s at this point that you can change your Bio line to say something cool like “Marketing and Social Media Professional on the bleeding edge.”

Step 6. I think here you charge some interested sucker a lot of money to set up a Twitter account for them and just blindly add people to their Follow list. I'm not really clear on that part just yet.

Step 7. Profit.

In all seriousness, Twitter is a great tool that can be utilized in a lot of different ways. If you already have a huge audience then Twitter is the best way to quickly find out what your fans think. If you work for a large corporation that’s already a household name, a Twitter account can serve as your friendly-face that’s approachable to the public. If you’re just a tech-savvy anybody, then it’s a great tool for interacting with other possibly like-minded individuals. And if you feel like you could use help from someone who knows the ropes, there are those legitimate professionals out there, but in this sea they're few and far between. If you’re any of those types of people, do me a favor; don’t try to become a “Social Media Evangelist” as soon as you've established a presence on Twitter unless you've already performed some other form of consulting.

Kickin' It Local

Last year I moved to Denver based on a lot of big promises that came from a person who first said they'd be my employer, then became my client, then failed to pay. Luckily, once I decided to start working for myself, things started looking up.

In 2008 I got to meet Barack Obama, I got to meet Kevin Rose, I started writing for Rocketboom, I completed a few different audio and music projects, started painting again; in short I found out that I can be mostly self-sufficient by being creative. Denver was an alright city. I had a good time while I was there. I met a whole lot of really talented people, and I'm sure I'll come back to visit again. But I've missed my home-state more than I thought I would. I always seem to come back.

So I'm here in Minnesota, eating Minnesota foods, listening to Minnesota tunes.

Owen Thomas Tries to Think. How Adorable.

In a recent Valleywag article entitled Do You Twitter? How Adorable, Owen Thomas compares Twitter’s 4 million users with Facebook’s 140 million users; concluding that Twitter is, “an incosequential nothing.”

Valleywag gets about 500,000 hits per month, while Digg attracts about 29 million.

What’s that you say? Equating an inconsequential nothing like Valleywag to Digg is an apples-and-oranges comparison? Really?

Just as Valleywag is sometimes featured within Digg’s article stream, Twitter is sometimes featured within a person’s Wall application.

Facebook is a social networking site that allows its users to post all sorts of information about themselves and interact in a multitude of ways by utilizing many smaller applications. Twitter, on the other hand, is a simple but handy, stand-alone social networking application that can be utilized on a variety of other platforms.

Digg is a social media website. Valleywag is a...what the hell IS Valleywag anyway? A tabloid? To be honest, I don’t know why I’m reading this trash.

Know Your Meme: Boom Goes the Dynamite

I love writing for Rocketboom. Even more so, I love writing for Know Your Meme.

Boom Goes The Dynamite

“You Can’t Get News on the Internet.”

At what point is a person so offensively misguided that they shouldn’t be helped?

Last night I was out at Kinga’s Lounge on Colfax, the usual location for Denver’s Social Media Cafe on Friday nights. I had missed the last three weeks, and despite seeing some RSVP’s on the Meetup.com group, found myself to be the only one attending.

I sat on the couch, with my laptop out, drinking Zywiec and browsing my RSS feeds while this group of 4 in their 60s discussed their hatred for Northerners, liberals, and old Union types. Sometimes I forget that I’m not living in a Northern state anymore. It never really crossed my mind that some Colorado residents would still have Confederate loyalties considering the Civil War not only ended in 1865, nearly 150 years ago, but that Colorado wasn’t even a state until 11 years later.

I was only moderately phased by the strange way they tried to relate the election to slavery, and didn’t feel like it was worth my time to tell them they were wrong. But then I overheard a comment from their side of the room that made it all fall into place.

“You can’t get news on the Internet because you get on and you just search. So all you hear about is Britney Spears.”

I felt like I had been shot in the gut. I’m fully aware of the fact that not everyone in the world lives with Twitter turned on 24-7. Those of us who use the term “Social Media” are still a small subsection of the whole population. But I’m constantly amazed by people’s ability to have strong opinions based on absolute fantasy, despite having unfettered access to the worldwide database of knowledge.

Sure, social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are inherently flawed in that they’re representative of the populist ideals of the community its self and not necessarily all of the little-known facts, but it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who used these sites could seriously say something like that.

“And then my daughter-in-law, one of these high-society university types started in about Bush. She actually thinks there’s no one who still supports Bush.”

The four of them were really happy reassuring each other that they were among friends, and I didn’t want to spoil it for them by telling them that Bush’s approval rating is less than 25%.

Whether this situation was born of the “proud to be ignorant” trend of Sarah Palin’s “real America” or if it’s a result of Social Media not being as user-friendly as Google, I can’t say. At first I had considered writing down some basic URLs on a notecard for these people, to open their eyes to the fact that there’s an incredibly rich amount of news that’s easily accessible if they just want to look. But I finished my third Zywiec, paid my tab, and headed home.

I may be skeptical or maybe a little impatient. I just think that some people will only lean what they want to learn.