Last month I did a selfimposed crashcourse in social networking. Read the books, the blogs, the tweets and there are just some things I do not get. Don't get me wrong I like to use social networks but from a personal and professional (marketer's) view I just don't get certain things.
Twitter:
- Why is it practice to follow someone back who follows you? (Unless you are a celebrity of course, then you follow hardly anyone.) I really do not want to follow everyone who follows me. Especially if the tweets are limited to the summing up of daily activities. Who cares!? Some people you suspected really had something interesting to say, turn out to be incredible bores...
- I get that in order to promote yourself you want a lot of followers, but why would you want to follow 50.000+ people? You are never going to pay attention to all of them. It is very unauthentic and unbelievable. And as a personal brand (I hate that term) you definitely do want to be authentic.
- And is it just me or are some tweets just unintelligble? One person I followed when I restarted Twitter again seemed to be using some kind of secret language. How inviting is that to read? NOT! I bet there are copywriting classes for Twitter already. Copyblogger probably has 10 or 43 tips on how to write catchy tweets.
- Why are there so many blogs on social networking? There should be a good blog on that topic and then some other with different opinions, so as a reader you can form your own opinion. All these thousands of blogs seem to blur into one another and they all say the same. The repeat themselves and others. How do you stand out if you parrot one another?
- And what is with the incredible number of posts (or tweets for that matter)? The advice from all those blogs on social networking mentioned in (1) is that you have to be prolific. For me as a reader it is about the quality not about the quantity. I do not want to open my Google Reader to 4 new posts per blog every day. It gives me less time for a wider variety of blogs. I think consistency and a regular frequency are more important than quality. Think about it. It is like bombarding your audience with (advertising) messages.
- Some SM blogs suggest that you have to give your audience what they want. How does that match with working from your own values, your vision, your expertise, the story you have to tell? Of course you want to have an audience, but should you change the content you think is worthwhile because you do not have an audience? You want to remain true to yourself now don't you? And if you have no audience then there is no demand. Tough but a fact of life. Go do something else.
- Whatever happened to trackbacks? I loved Trackbacks (after I finally understood what it was and how it worked) but they seem to have disappeared while they are such good ways to connect on content.
- Blogs filled with absolute truths are being presented. Things are being claimed and stated for which there is no proof. It is all anecdotal or based on lifelong experience. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but combined with # 6 there are some uncontrollable "memes" being created. Blog lemmings! Who would want to be a blog lemming?
- The last thing I wonder about is the critiquelessness of it all. Everyone seems to have had the same feedback training. It is all so positive that I can almost smell the roses coming out of my laptop. And stardust too. And happy thoughts.... All these readers seem to gobble up what they are being fed. An independent mind or a realistic critique are very seldom seen. One does rather not say anything. So comments vary from: "this is so deep", "this is excellent", "this is the best I have ever read".... Really? Go to a university library and read a book.
Maybe someone can explain it to me. Give it your best shot I say! And if you do not agree, please vocalize it!


