Last week I freestyled a little blog post entitled “Social Media Experts Are Assholes” and it spread around the internet like wildfire (although I’m confused by the lack of Tumblr love). The traffic was very much appreciated but I WAS a bit insulted. I spend hours upon hours of my life crafting political commentary, short stories, and filming myself drinking bottles of wine while reviewing /giving oral sex tips only to have some angry rant I shot off the cuff become the most popular thing I’ve ever posted. Hell, more people read that post than purchased POSTCARDS, apparently. It easily usurped my previous most-read blog post which was basically a story about how I felt up a hooker in college. Clearly, I’m trying too hard.
Anyways, that just proves to me that maybe I should be listening to some social media experts, and I’m willing to lend an ear to good ones. But one thing that amused me about my fifteen-minutes of internet fame is who, exactly, was spreading this thing around. It was mainly social media folks. And it was accompanied with comments like, “AMEN!” and “Someone FINALLY says it.” Only one person seemed to be a bit pissed. ONE PERSON read that post and said, “Hey, I’m not an asshole.”
There’re two possibilities here:
1) There’s only one social media expert that’s an asshole by my definition or…
2) Every social media expert is a delusional asshole.
I’m going with #2, although some of the folks I’ve interacted with were actually nice people, so I feel bad calling them assholes. Plus, a good chunk of the folks don’t pass the “Delusional Asshole” test, which I just made up. Here it goes: If you have several thousand followers on twitter but follow several thousand people, you’re a delusional asshole. And there are A LOT of you.
It’s that circle-jerk thing I was talking about – you’re all just following each other and patting each other on the back. Here’s the deal and someone, PLEASE, call me an asshole for saying this: If you’re following thousands of people on Twitter you’re not using the tools you preach about correctly. There is no way IN HELL you’re keeping up. I follow 98 people and I find it almost impossible to keep up. Multiply that by 20, 30, or 40 more followers and I would just get a smidgen of the information that I’m subscribing to.
Twitter is an awesome tool. It is probably the most successful feather in a social media expert’s cap. We get bite sized bits of info from the people we choose to follow. We can interact, network. I’ve sold two articles over Twitter – 140-character pitches that led to a payday. And that’s because I’m paying attention. I decided when I signed up not to use a “follow me and I’ll follow you” model. I viewed Twitter as a scalpel, not a sledge hammer, and it’s gotten me results. And, yeah, I sacrifice followers by doing this but not the kind of followers I wanted anyways. I want people who are legitimately interested in what I have to say and I follow people that say things that interest me. And that’s it. I won Twitter.
So how can a social media expert completely misuse the tool he or she is throwing praise on? By being an asshole. Or, more appropriately, a delusional asshole.
That’s my last word on that for this blog. If someone wants to debate me, set up a time and a place. We’ll do it live over Ustream or something, and maybe ten of your 5000 followers will check it out.
