Taken at Lucky Bar
Daily Archives: 14/06/2012
Those vagabond shoes
Taken at The Mayflower Renaissance Hotel
Getting Lucky
Taken at Lucky Bar
Those vagabond shoes
Taken at The Mayflower Renaissance Hotel
Never let them catch you rolling your eyes
I experience a lot of contempt for bloggers and social media influencers. From agencies and marketing firms as well as from self-professed social media experts and social media gurus.
Bloggers and other social media online influencers may not know who Edward Bernays is or have the lingua franca of a trained communications professional, but they sure can spot the eye roll of condescension and contempt from a mile away, even through the terse messaging of a single pitch. While the biggest brands with the biggest gifts and social cachet can get away with being douche bags and intolerable asses because the level of peer and personal prestige and importance more than compensate for bad manners, rudeness, and a condescending manner–the proverbial upturned nose and eye roll–this sort of behavior isn’t acceptable from anyone but the crown king and queen of their particular demographic. Continue reading
Don’t fall for shiny social media ephemera
Remember, you’re only renting in social media. What you’re learning by “renting” your pages on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com, LinkedIn, and Google+, is portable, which is to say that everything you’re doing, experiencing, and learning will improve your ability to engage and market online into the future. So, that’s good.
Invest instead in engaging visitors, drawing online attention, encouraging social sharing and telling compelling stories
The downside is that all good things come to an end. The recent Facebook IPO backfire reminds us that even Facebook, with its 900 million active users worldwide, can still fall, as did MySpace and Friendster before it.
It is essential that you keep your eyes up and forward, always mindful that there will not always be Facebook and that there will be another Facebook coming down the line before long. Be sure you don’t become so tethered to your Facebook page that you lose sight of the bigger picture of social media — your message, rather than your medium. Always remember “the essence of the Way is detachment,” according to Bodhidharma.
You’re in it for the long run, right?
Invest more in your ability to engage your visitors, draw online attention, to encourage social sharing, and to tell compelling stories rather than in your single-minded expertise in Facebook apps, vBulletin, or whatever. It is less about the inhuman technology than it is about the culture of the Internet and how to best discover, connect, and relate to online tribes where they live and how they want to be engaged.
And, on that note, while you’re at it, it is also essential to make sure you convert or transition your friends, followers, and likers away from these proprietary platforms before they are abandoned, rolled into something else, made redundant, closed (I still miss Utterly née Utterz to this day, RIP), or simply become unfashionable and uncool.
Starting to own, rather than rent, your friends is generally easy and straightforward, but requires possibly embarrassing yourself by actually asking directly or finding ways to convince them to sign your guest book in one way or another. It could be through signing up for an email list, entering a contest, buying a product, submitting a birthday and an email for a birthday wish, gift, or coupon–but be sure to do it early and often so that you don’t lose everything when the tide turns and all the water recedes.
It is less stressful to rent your followers because Facebook and its ilk have done all the work and you never have to put yourself out there where you might get turned down. But when Facebook is no longer the flavor of the month, you’ll wish you had asked.