Social Media…
I dabble in social media for my business, which obviously is blogging, writing and editing. A current list of the top 15 networking sites can be found here, exbizmba websites, just in case you worry that you’re not on all of them. Perhaps, if I were a forest ranger, I probably would not need any of them, but being stuck out in the wilderness with no one but Smokey to talk to, I might want to engage with all of them. There was a point in time that I stayed clear of Facebook, Twitter and all the others, and I didn’t realize until recently that MySpace was still around.
Since it was the “in” and fashionable thing to do, I signed up for everything, complying with their annoying requirements to fill out profiles, make up NSA-type secret passwords and go back and forth with texts and emails confirming my status as a human being. I gained friends, followers and others seemingly interested in my career path, all with the end result of having more spam, junk and utterly useless BS in my already cluttered life. The more I attempted to avoid it all, the more people expressed a desire to interface with me, “me” having no desire whatsoever to have any contact with them.
Recognizing that it was all just a childish game, I went on the various sites and did this and that, then stopped. Then started. Then stopped. For no logical reason I accelerated my participation on Twitter and just the other morning, woke up with 1124 “tweets” waiting for me. Holy “@” and #’s (hashtags). I’m an angry person and after less than a week, I started to respond to the 140 or less character messages, with, well, a bit of sarcasm. I found the people that call themselves “successful” writers, freelancers, SEO “experts” the most annoying with their useless amateurish “advice” on how I should run my business. If you put a keyboard in from of me I write, it’s that simple. More advise, I don’t need.
One tweet from some self proclaimed travel writer said, “Isn’t Georgia a great place, come to Georgia.” No, I will not come to Georgia. I hate Georgia, especially Atlanta. I find nothing of any redeeming value in Georgia. It seems worse than NJ, I don’t like the people that live there and Atlanta is nothing but a urban corporate ghetto. So, I responded – replied – with a tweet saying just that. You can imagine the response. The person apparently grew up in the damn urban corporate ghetto. I can just hear her whiney voice, “There are good and bad things about every place.” No, Atlanta sucks and everywhere there is called Peachtree something and it stinks. Sorry, nothing good about the place, except the nuts and peaches.
So, you see what happened. I’m an idiot. I got sucked in by a freak’n tweet. It was about 15 seconds of my life that I will never recover. Katie Couric tweeted a pic of NYC early in the morning on her way to work. Big deal. Some aging bondage model tweeted that her knee hurts. No kidding. I told her to take Advil and see a doctor. She told me to go “F” myself. I guess she doesn’t have health insurance. Anthony Bourdain tweeted something – I don’t know what he was talking about. I still love him. On and on came the tweets. A cross dressing kid named Jersey Barbie “posted” something about he’s (she) is going out tonight partying with lots of vodka. OK. You should see this kid, I’d take him out – “he’s” stunning!
All this social media crap reminds me of when we had people sitting in a room at NBC (yes, the television network) opening up the thousands of letters we would get everyday and decided which deserved a response. We’ve gone from using a letter opener to a mouse. Isn’t it amazing how far we have progressed? If you include all the useless garbage that we also get on our cell phones from Groupon, Pinterest, Foursquare and others, I find it refreshing that a woman paying for her groceries in the supermarket the other day, saved a little over $325 from clipping coupons out of an old fashioned Sunday newspaper. She also, the wild female that she is, paid in cash.
Bottom line, people, is that since the beginning of the social media – networking “revolution” – it’s great for the socially needy and wanting. One big funfest of some form or another of human interaction. Folks still can’t talk to each other fact to face, but they can tweet and post. For business, it’s another way to “touch” and interact with their customers, the result being little or no improvement in the products or services they offer, no better pricing or delivery and most definitely no improvement in customer service at the point of purchase. But, it’s a great way to interact with customers, and that’s it. I personally need no more touchy feely contact with a business other than going on line and ordering something. Otherwise, I want to left alone.
The clutter of social media networking squelch is enough to give anyone a headache. We all will want more quiet soon. I want it now. The goal is to get rid of my Android phone and buy a simple flip phone similar to one they offer to seniors and the poor for free. I’ll use it to call my wife and she can call me. That’s just enough social media networking for me. Someone else will have to appreciate Katie Couric’s early morning NYC pics.
PS/just got a tweet – American Express @AmericanExpress – Bye bye coupons; Hello hashtags! It takes minutes to sync your#Amex card w/@Twittr & start saving by tweeting!
