Mostly, I try not to write about social media. I have no desire to be known as a social media expert despite the fact that many would agree that’s how I receive a paycheck every two weeks. I find the topic itself fairly stale, but sometimes I can’t help myself. So, I write. In these posts, you won’t find the top 5 Ways to Build Your Facebook Page, but rather an inquiry into the social media tools that shape and dominate our lives.
1. Bloggers Are Not Writers (98 comments)
Bloggers are good at a great number of things, but writing doesn’t always top the list.
Favorite Social Media Bloggers These people mostly make me think. Sometimes laugh. Other times, both. I believe those who are really great at social media don’t just write, but practice it every day – so you won’t find a lot of the social media celebrities in this list, but you’re welcome to link to your favorites in the comments.
I hope you enjoy this resource! Feel free to leave your favorite links on Social Media in the comments as you come across them. Resource guides will be available permanently on the sidebar.
January 19, 2010 | By Rebecca Thorman | 98 Comments
There are exceptions, okay. But very few bloggers can actually write. Bloggers pander to a crowd trying to satisfy the hive mind. Blogging is entertainment. Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially aggrandizing self-promotion, but not writing.
Crowdsourcing is a bloggers’ anthem. I remember my first blog. I deleted it. The posts didn’t get commented on and weren’t passed around. That wasn’t the point. But for bloggers, that is their mission; to create 500-word packages, bold-faced and headlined, read and digested in two minutes or less, bursting with lackadaisical opinion and junk epithets.
“Blogging is not writing,” the author of You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier agrees. “It’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.”
Blogging is in its essence, not about originality, but about the aggregation, recycling and digesting of ideas. It is the darling of the open culture ideology of the web, where mediocre collaborations have produced a destructive new social contract, reports the New York Times.
“The basic idea of this contract,” Lanier argues, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight.
Bloggers are not writers, nor are they press, or superior to old media. Where disintermediation in the media shines, where a cadre of reporters has eliminated the need for a specific background (say, a degree in journalism or the need to pay dues at the right newspapers), is not evidence of bloggers taking over the world, but rather that the term blogger is now so broad that its definition no longer suits the myriad stacks of people and posts underneath.
Take a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a novelist, a Mashable blogger and a Gen Yer typing about their quarter-life crisis. They are not the same, nor equal, and certainly not held to the same standards or expectations. They are, despite the fact that we’d like to give little credence to the notion, entirely different.
“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Lanier writes. “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”
Blogging is entertainment. Maybe it didn’t use to be. Maybe when bloggers were first getting started, it was about thought and connection. But increasingly, it bows to the “appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise.”
Writing is something more. And it is in the reading of such writing that enduring ideas, observations and philosophies satiate what we spend hours a day trying to glean from skimming any number of blog posts.
There is nothing wrong with blogging. But let’s give credit where it’s due – to the true writers, journalists, novelists, reporters, columnists, and others who inspire us to boil their ideas down in an effort to hold onto them just a little longer.
October 12, 2009 | By Rebecca Thorman | 25 Comments
Trust is easily bamboozled.
Like in social media, all you have to do is start a blog and write a lot of content– it doesn’t even have to be original or even good. Next, find partners and create alliances where you tweet, digg and stumble each other’s content. Abuse whuffie to make crowd-sourcing work for you. Mass follow everyone on Twitter, import them into FriendFeed to inflate your subscriber numbers, and then unfollow everyone but twenty on your list. Spam people. Promote under the guise of community. Push. Pull. Publish.
Give your efforts a few months in the oven, and then… voila! You’re an influencer.
Congrats! And don’t worry. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually putting out interesting, new or relevant ideas into the world. Pure hustle, as Gary Vaynerchuk so aptly explains, will do the trick.
These are the mostly unspoken rules of social media. And in a medium that is supposed to be revolutionary, it’s disappointing that not much has changed from the status quo, despite claims that PR and traditional marketing is dead.
“The old way was to create safe, ordinary products and combine them with mass marketing,” Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain in the little spark of a book, Baked In. We’re repeating the same inefficiencies in social media, however, where the focus on accumulating mass numbers is doing a great disservice to the possibilities.
Indeed, in my own outreach efforts with Alice, I’ve found that individuals with smaller numbers – whether it be traffic or subscribers – often have just as much influence, if not more than those with large badges on display. Bogusky and Winsor agree, reporting on a study that found “news travels as readily through ordinary people as influential ones. Interpersonal networks are democratic.”
We’ve supposedly learned from the likes of traditional advertising that worshiped a spray and pray approach, and yet we still pay credence to only the large influencers. Such an approach could be even more flawed than mass marketing, because social media numbers mean nothing. They’re often so inflated and distorted, that in trying to boost our influencer status, we’ve leapt back into the untargeted and interruptive advertising pool where relevancy and effectiveness drops drastically.
While the smaller scale of social media hides such issues right now – for most Fortune 500 companies, the medium is still emerging – it will soon come out that while the tool is different, the habits are the same.
What we need then, is not an improvement upon or even a replacement of the traditional PR and advertising model, but a complete market shift. “The new way,” Bogusky and Winsor explain, is to “create truly innovative products and build the marketing right into them.”
That, in a nutshell, is why my job at Alice is so enjoyable. We better connect manufacturers and consumers in the giant consumer packaged goods (CPG) market. And in disrupting the traditional retail market, Alice has made it possible to buy all your household essentials online with competitive prices and get it delivered to your door with free shipping. Toilet paper is all of a sudden revolutionary.
And in the few short months since our launch, the service has spread. While that doesn’t surprise me, the ease with which it has done so and continues to (knock on wood) does. Good spreads. Something I didn’t fully believe in until this job.
When good spreads you don’t need all the superfluous advertising and marketing campaigns. You don’t need traditional posturing, marketing gloss, fluff and trickery. Good has the promotion baked in. Creating products that market themselves means tearing down the walls between the company and consumer. No longer do you have to spray over the ledge, but you’re able to join them on the other side.
“In the same amount of time it takes to create an advertising campaign – it’s possible to take all that consumer insight and actually bake it right into a new product. A product designed with a mission. A product with a story to tell. A product with the ability to sell itself,” argue Bogusky and Winsor.
A product with integrity. That is the future of marketing.
What do you think? Does good spread or do you need to give it a promotional push?
Bloggers, Facebookers, Tweeters and more seem to be constantly besieged by warnings from young and old alike that we will regret our words, photos and thoughts. One blogger reveals, “I look back at some of my own posts and shake my head.” Online tools make it possible to change in front of the eyes of the entire world… And some believe this is going to be pretty embarrassing in the years ahead.
What do you think? Do you share enough to worry? How do you think your online activities will affect the future?
I read a lot of posts on social media hoping someone will say something new, but that never happens. We need to stop masturbating to what the tool is and start using it to see how it works.
Some of my favorite bloggers have said recently that they want to stop their current blog and start writing a blog about social media. How unoriginal. You aren’t an expert because you write about social media. You’re an expert because you use it.
It’s like saying social media isn’t as individual as the style of clothes that we choose to wear, or the neighborhood we live in, or the brand of toilet paper we buy. Different things work in different ways for different people.
Social media is as expansive as every kind of book out there, and while there will be bestsellers and cult classics, there’s no one style or clear path to follow.
Innovators aren’t people that join the conversation, but interrupt it. Innovators ignore the should and should nots, and just act.
I get why people write about it – it’s a fixation — an obsessionfor many of us — that we all have in common. But you can’t define social media. You can’t package it up neatly in a box.
Here’s how I know this is true. I don’t like Scott Monty, social media guru for Ford, at all. I mean, he’s a nice guy (nice enough to email me personally when I ranted about him), but I don’t like the way he represents Ford, and I think his approach is slightly ridiculous. But it is working for him, and tons and tons of people do like him.
Also, Chris Brogan isn’t all that original, Guy Kawasaki can be annoying, and ProBlogger writes about the same thing every day. There. I said it.
Celebrities are not more interesting than you. They’re not smarter. They have skills. In social media, they have mad skills. Mad, crazy, enviable marketing skills. You can have respect for individuals and their game – and don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for the Scott Montys and Chris Brogans of the world. They are succeeding and deserve props.
But it doesn’t mean you have to follow what they say, or emulate their game or even read them. That makes you an observer. An observer that sits in a wagon pulled around by “the influencers.” What chance do you have if you’re not even thinking on your own two feet?
Here’s how to escape the social media wagon:
1) Unsubscribe from one of the talking heads. How do you expect to be original and innovative when you read what everyone else reads? Lightning will not strike down upon you, I promise.
2) Subscribe to one of the thousands of other bloggers out there that are putting out real and original content. Content about politics, design & art, relationships, news, fashion, careers and issues. Content about things that matter. (Yes, fashion matters too).
3) Write about something else besides social media.
January 13, 2009 | By Rebecca Thorman | 33 Comments
Last Friday, Monica O’Brien of Twenty Set wrote about how blog networks sucked and that there wasn’t any advantage to being part of one. I disagree and this post is my response.
Here are the four universal truths about blog and social networks, and how to use them to your advantage:
1. Network means it’s not just about you. Social media by definition is social and is thus a give and take world.Traffic will not magically be sent to your blog, nor will exposure magically occur.
Joining a network – whether that be a blog network like Brazen Careerist, a social network like Facebook or Twitter, or the professional network LinkedIn – doesn’t mean that all of sudden things will be easier for you. Really, it only means that your work has just begun. Hard work.
I mean, I get it. I’ve been there. We think that since we are letting networks have access to all of our writing – words that we have toiled over until 2:00 am and let sit until 2:37 am just to feel motivated and confident enough to even publish – that we should reap grand rewards. That just by giving away permission to our soul, great things should happen. I’ve been there, but that’s not how it works.
It works by not only allowing more people into your world, but by listening to them, hearing them and responding. It works by participating and figuring out how you win with your post and how the community does too.
2. You can’t be found without showing up. A blog network is not your blog. Think of a network as the meeting place – a community house, a bar on a Friday night, the lunchroom at work, whatever. Your blog, in contrast, is your home. You’re the same person – and your posts are the same – in both places, but different people show up and different conversations occur.
If you stay at home, people will find you, but the majority won’t know you exist. Similarly, if you go to the bar and just sit in a corner, that girl is not going to magically give you her number. So you can’t just blog in a vacuum, nor can you join a network and expect that to be the final step if you want to build exposure and traffic. People don’t just find you – you find them.
And that isn’t a theory just for beginners; it’s a commandment for established bloggers. The fact that Penelope Trunk syndicates the heck out of her blog is no coincidence to her success, nor is the fact that Chris Brogan shows up to every social media event imaginable. You don’t stop working ridiculously hard when you’re established. You work harder.
3. Use their network to build your network. A blog network is not promising you a product like cereal, but is selling you on relationships. Before Brazen Careerist started, the sense I had of the Gen Y blogging world was limited; I knew around twenty-five Gen Y bloggers. Now I know and have access to hundreds, not only because Brazen Careerist helped discover those people, but also because Brazen created, inspired and facilitated that particular market to be part of the conversation.
I take advantage of the Brazen network by looking at the community profiles in the same way I look at who my favorite Twitter friends are following, or who my real-life friends and I have in common on Facebook.
And when people comment on a post of mine on any network, I don’t just hope that they subscribe to my blog, I’m proactive. I check out their blog, reply to them, comment on their posts, link to them and begin to build a relationship. I get interested in what they’re doing, because they’ve shown interest in me.
I can’t imagine how I would find these people – those that are interested in my topic – in an easier way. That’s called building community and it’s what social media is all about.
4. Blog networks do give special treatment for two reasons. The first is to attract a lot of traffic from good writers. Want to be featured on the front page of a network? Be a good writer. You could be among the most-hated participants but if you write well, you’ll still be featured.
The second is to reward the people that they have relationships with. This isn’t unfair, it’s smart. Relationships make the world go round. I personally have no idea how blogs are picked to be on the front page, but there’s an easy way to circumvent whatever process the blog network has installed. That is, build a relationship.
Email the community manager if you feel you have an especially good post to, 1) promote yourself, 2) begin that relationship, and 3) make the community manager’s job easier.
I guarantee that a better attitude to success is to ask not what the network can do for you, but what you can do for your network.
September 18, 2008 | By Rebecca Thorman | 54 Comments
“Yeah, but it’s just a blog,” someone said. About this blog. My blog. We were talking about social media.
I didn’t have a response at the time. I was like George in that Seinfeld episode (he goes to great lengths to deliver a retort to a coworker), floundering for the perfect comeback.
I couldn’t come up with anything, and later realized that this person? This person doesn’t even have a blog. Pfft. How can you possibly understand the concept of social media if you’re not a participant?
Of course you can understand it on an intellectual level. Like, I understand war even though I’ve never been a soldier. But you can’t really get it unless you’ve been in it. Unless you’ve been in it to win it in fact.
So let’s clarify something. Blogging is one of the most valuable and intimate forms of social media that exists. It’s akin to writing love letters back in the day. It’s not as good as spooning your girlfriend, but it works.
So if you’re not participating – i.e., if you’re not responding to blog comments, or if you’re talking to yourself on Twitter, or you’re refusing to claim your name on Facebook, you lose.
If you do not participate, you are not a part of social media. You’re last year’s season. Obsolete. Outdated. Old-fashioned. And oh-so entrenched in traditional media. Do you want to be a gatekeeper or a gatejumper? I’m going to give you a hint. Gatekeepers are like those London guards in the big funny hats. I told my mother that when we visited London, I thought one guard was particularly cute. She was extremely put out.
“Remember,” she said, “it was 96 degrees and he had to stand there for who knows how long. I felt bad for him.” Shefelt bad for him.
Gatejumpers on the other hand, they get to go wherever they want. Even into air-conditioned buildings.
Going wherever you want, that takes some gall. It’s such a big responsibility. This is why a lot of people – and a lot more companies – fail at social media. Because we all want to connect to people and ideas, but to do that you have to go ahead and open up. You have to expose that birthmark on your ankle, the stash of Ben & Jerry’s in your freezer, and the fact that you can be hypnotized by a girl hula-hooping.
People fail because it’s scary to put yourself out there. Like Zeus and I, we’re really bad at this. Or mostly I’m bad at it, but I’m trying to be better because I understandvulnerability is good. But practicing it is something different entirely.
Companies fail because somewhere along the line, branding gurus rolled right over the fact that companies are made up of people, not a blacktop of products. Underneath the monolith that defines companies today are ideas, opinions, passion.
Social media is about synthesizing and refining ideas, opinions and passion. You know, two-way conversation, or more often than not those racy three-ways or more. And in being any way but alone, you discover value and an understanding that is difficult to grasp if you’ve never even participated in the conversation in the first place.
December 28, 2007 | By Rebecca Thorman | 30 Comments
This post was originally published at Conversation Agent. Thank you to Valeria Maltoni for the opportunity.
We have a deep desire to feel that rise in our chests, the quickening of our breath, the spread of a smile.
Generation Y wants to change the world.
Not the environment. Not healthcare. Not education. Not poverty. Not racism. Not sexism. Not war. Not cancer. Not anything, really.
Just the world.
We want to change the world.
And in wanting so much, we get so little.
Restlessness courses through our veins, for we are never doing enough or being enough. Volunteering, leadership, and entrepreneurship, nor the eventual acceptance of the mundane satisfies our edge.
And there’s a majority of us who just sit back. We sit back, content to lead mediocre lives. To never step out. To work, to love, to lead good lives. To lead good lives, but not extraordinary.
Who among us will lead an extraordinary life? Who will be the leader who steps out on an issue? Who is strong enough in their beliefs and convictions to not only sell their Volvo for a hybrid, but to tell the world about it and get others to do the same? Who will stand up for the horror and revulsion that plagues our world today?
Because the warmth from our laptop screens does little but light our idle faces.
Who will be loud enough? Who will scream?
There’s an acceptance that it will all get done. And social media will help us do it. This idea that we can bring groups together over the internet through blogging and Facebooking, and that it will create significant change is ridiculous. It’s hiring a gardener for the privilege of missing the sensation of earth between your fingers.
Sam Davidson tells a good fisherman story about a man that finds another man fishing, and explains to him that if he catches many fish, well he could eventually buy a boat. He could then catch many more fish, and could buy another boat, and another and another until he had a whole fleet of boats. And he would sure catch a lot of fish then, and with all of that he could do whatever he wanted.
And the man replies, “You mean, fish?”
So it goes with social media. There is a man talking to another woman in a coffee shop. He says to her, “you know if we stalked each other on Facebook and cuffed ourselves to our crackberries and twittered it up, we could communicate, and reach out to each other, and have great conversations, and you know, change things!”
And the woman replies, “You mean, like right now?”
We’ve created social media for the privilege of missing the look from someone across the table, face to face, secret to secret, ambition to ambition.
When all we really have to do is simply say, “Hello.”
Don’t get me wrong. Facebook is great for all the reasons people say it’s great. But when you focus on how a tool can change the world, instead of the cause itself, you mitigate the importance of taking action.
The amount of effort we put into our relationships is what will create change, not the amount of effort we put into building and maintaining the printing press, the telephone, the television, or the better, more collaborative, more inclusive web.
We have to show up, face to face. Our actions, not the means – technological or not – propel change. Our effort makes the difference.
It will be quite easy, really. If only we paid attention to the rise in our chests, the quickening of our breath, the smile spreading on our face.
Rebecca Thorman works at the start-up company Alice.com. On this site, she hosts career & life conversations, and design & style picks daily to occasionally. More >
