All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Social Media

Are You An Online Troll?

36 Comments

There’s a guy I know who’s not necessarily a bad guy. Matter of fact he’s a pretty good guy. Loves his wife and son, treats his friends pretty well, and has a pretty good sense of humor as well.

Troll
Marcos Telias Barra via Compfight

And he’s a troll. He’d probably argue with me on this one but I’m going to state the case. He has a Twitter account not using his own name. That’s not a big deal overall.

He also uses an image that’s not his face but someone else’s face. That’s a bit bad because it reminds me of those dating sites where most of the time people aren’t using pictures of themselves, or are using pictures of themselves when they were 100 pounds lighter and 10 years younger.

With his Twitter account however, every once in awhile he decides to crash Twitter chats and says stupid stuff just to be annoying. He does this because he doesn’t like the concept of Twitter chats and thus feels its his right to say whatever he wants to, which is always something rude and off-topic, and on purpose.

That makes him a troll. It’s no different than someone showing up on a blog with a fake name and fake avatar and deciding they want to be stupid just because they can. It’s one reason why I will delete a comment in a heartbeat without worry about protecting anyone’s first amendment rights, which they don’t have, because it’s my space and I’m paying for it.

Are you an online troll? It’s an interesting question because though I gave you one scenario above, it can apply to multiple similar scenarios. I’ve talked about the trolls that write comments on news sites. Child bullies who pick on people in their Facebook groups are trolls, even if you get to know their names. For that matter an overwhelming number of comments on YouTube videos are from trolls. And, oddly enough, I have another friend who, on some of my serious posts on Facebook, will throw in a rude line trying to be funny, and in a way that makes him a troll.

What makes you a troll outside of the things I mentioned above? If every website you go to or every blog you comment on leads you to leave a rude comment, whether it’s on topic or not, you’re probably a troll. If you never have anything nice to say about anyone you’re a troll.

There are many people who live off that sort of thing. Trust me, you’ve never seen that behavior around here for long because I’m not putting up with it. But I thought about myself and wondered if I could be considered by anyone as being a troll. After all, I’m not necessarily always saying nice things when I visit blog posts I disagree with. And on Facebook, if you show any kind of insensitivity towards someone else, I’m probably coming after you.

Does that make me a troll? Nope, not one bit. I don’t go out of my way looking for trouble; I actually let a lot of stuff that irritates me pass. I set up a filter on Facebook to block a lot of stuff that used to get me riled up. I comment on a lot of blogs and talk to a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook. And for the most part I think I’m pretty nice.

Can you say the same thing? Can you say the same thing about people you know and their online behavior? And how do you feel about it?
 

Business, Social Issues

Facebook Edgerank, Et Al

32 Comments

Facebook pages; how much fun are they? Truth be told, obviously some people aren’t having much fun at all because they don’t put much new content on it, if they put content on it at all. Two weeks ago I spent some time going through some of the pages I liked to see if they were doing anything, and those that weren’t I “unliked”; you know, when I was a kid that wasn’t even a word. lol

Facebook pages are an odd duck, if you will. We create them because everywhere we’ve gone to talking about them says they can help us with our business. I’m not all that sure, but I do believe that if done right they can at least help give you a presence. But who’s seeing that presence, and what can you do to increase your presence?

There was this article on Jeff Bullas’ blog titled 6 Ways to Increase the Marketing Effectiveness of your Facebook Page, which includes this very cool infographic. It talks a little bit about Edgerank, which is the name of the algorithm Facebook uses to decide just how many people who have liked your page will have the opportunity to see whatever you put on your page. It’s based on a few things; how often those people have come to your site, so they participate in any way, do they ever share, etc. Actually, they use the same algorithm in determining how many of your friends and which friends see your general posts If you’re connected with 1,000 people on Facebook, you can bet that if 100 people ever see any of it you can count yourself lucky, unless you’ve made yourself popular.

Why do they do that? They do it because people share way more long form information on Facebook than they do on Twitter. On Twitter, every person I’m following has the ability to have me see everything they post via a general column. I have the ability to select certain people and put them in segregated columns so I definitely see what certain people post as opposed to everyone, but if I decide to check the general column the skies the limit.

On Facebook people share pictures, blog posts, etc. Some folks write long form prose of some type. If Facebook showed you every single thing that everyone posted, you’d be overwhelmed. Yes, you do have the ability to segregate your audience on Facebook at all, something I’ll cover at another time, but it’s still a lot of stuff.

So now you know why you don’t see everything from all your friends and why everyone doesn’t see everything you put on your Facebook page. How can you improve the odds of getting more people to see your stuff? The link I provided above gives you 6 ways. The idea is that, at least for your business page, you want to add more content to it so people have more to see, and you want to add more images because it’s been proven that people react better to them, but what if you’re not a bit time photographer, or the images you have don’t quite fit what your business is about?

Now, you might want to know how it’s going for me, since I adopted the process I talk about in my link about 3 weeks ago. I mainly post links from my business site since, well, it’s my Facebook business page. lol I do post a link here and there from this blog, the motivational stuff, but not all that often.

For the full month period before the last 3 weeks Facebook was my 5th best source of traffic, and I only had 21 visits. In the last 3 weeks Facebook has moved up to #3 and I had 55 visits in that time. Not only that but I went from a page duration time of 1 minute and 4 seconds to a whopping 14 minutes and 39 seconds. Why anyone would stay on a page for that long I couldn’t tell you, but what could be happening is that people could be sticking around and looking at other pages. And one more thing; from Facebook it’s a lot of repeat visitors, as the rate of new visitors is only 29%, as opposed to 95% from Google and 79% from Twitter.

Not so shabby I’d say. Anyway, I’ve told you about Edgerank, shared a link to an infographic, and a link to my post about ways of finding things you can add to your Facebook business page to help raise the number of people who come by. What else would you like to know? 🙂 By the way, if you’d like to see my page look to the left and click on the link that will take you there; always happy to have more likes for that page.
 

Social Issues

Blog Action Day – The Power Of “We”

55 Comments

Every year this group that calls itself Blog Action Day comes up with a topic that they hope bloggers around the world will write on. I’ve only participated twice as far as I know, and I did the same date on this blog and my business blog. This time around I’m only doing it on this blog, and this is that article. The previous articles were on the topic of poverty and food.

This year’s topic is on the power of “we“, which I find fascinating because not only was this a calendar year where the collective “we” changed history, but this is a presidential election year, and the “we” have a another chance to select either the current leader or a new leader. I’m going to touch upon the former then talk more about the latter.

In the last calendar year we saw the governments of Egypt and Libya overcome decades of dictatorship, and we almost saw the overthrow of Syria, not by military means but by the people joining together and deciding they wanted another way. To the credit of the military in the first two, they didn’t just do their “duty” and start slaughtering the populace, which they could have easily done. Syria showed that when one just “has” to stay in power, it will be by any means necessary.

We have seen the power of “we” used in other countries in the same fashion, sometimes to the detriment of the rest of the world in my opinion, but sometimes change has to happen before things can move forward, no matter what kind of change it is. And it’s hard to ignore the power of “we” in these instances.

So, what about our presidential election? Voting is a right that people in many countries would love to have. There’s almost no corruption and, when it concerns presidential politics, millions of people go to the polls to vote. This is the best way of using the power of “we” in our country.

Except it doesn’t quite work that way. Some of you might remember my post titled I’m Black where I talked about having people question my vote for current President Obama because of my skin color rather than using reasoned decision making. Truth be told, what really happened is that leaders in black communities across the country worked hard on getting the vote out, and it was a success.

But it wasn’t the first time there was such a push. Every year since Gore decided to run for president the same thing happened, and black voter registration has increased every year, thus more black people voted. The power of “we” was in evidence.

Was that what put President Obama over the top though? Not even close. What pushed him over the top was the other side of the power of “we”, that being white voters that decided they weren’t going to vote at all. There was a decrease on the other side of around 35% that decided not to even show up, even though they were registered. See, the power of “we” can be apathetic, and in their own way participate in the process by not participating.

In 2008, just over 57% of registered voters decided to exercise their constitutional rights to vote. It was the highest turnout since 1968 when just under 61% of the population voted. Compare this to the years from 1848 to 1900 when only once did the voting populace come under 70%, and it was still 69.6% in 1852. Three times in history we couldn’t even get 50% of registered voters to the polls; apathy are “we”.

Still, it all shows that the power of “we” is strong, both for positive and negative reasons. If people decide to band together for a cause, “we” is a powerful statement. When all is said and done, if we all want positive things to happen in society, it’s up to “we” to get it done. And we can do it.
 

Writing

Content Curation Faux Pas

24 Comments

This is a relatively short post that I wanted to get up to discuss one of the problems with the concept of content curation. I’m not necessarily a fan for many different reasons, and the link below is one of them.

This link is from CNN News, and it’s talking about the guy who set the record for skydiving from the highest point in space ever, more than 24,000 feet; ouch! It’s a great story, one I’ve actually been following for about a year since I first heard about it, and it all ended well.

Anyway, the story talks about how he got up there, how he jumped via balloon, how far he fell before deploying his parachute, speeds, and then the landing. It’s all fascinating stuff, and I wanted to read more about his feelings and what other people thought about him going through it.

There was, and probably still is, a lot of content in the story. However, after the first few paragraphs, it turns out to be all filler. And not just regular filler, but it’s all pre-event filler. In other words, it talked about potential dangers “before he jumps” when he’s already jumped. In essence, all the information and data that CNN had accumulated before he made the jump was posted again, and had probably been posted time and time again every time his guy was part of the story.

Thing is, that’s one of the problems I have with content curation. It’s a lazy way of reporting, and it makes you, the source, look stupid if you don’t update it in some fashion so that it looks current. If it had been written without time emphasis it might have worked better. But it wasn’t, and thus it’s disappointing reading and stuff that, for the most part, I’d already read. And if I hadn’t read it I’d still have been wondering why it was written in the past tense.

Maybe I’m being sensitive so I’ll ask you. Based on this story and the way they’ve used content they’ve previously curated, should they have updated it, not used it at all since it’s past its usefulness, or am I way off my rocker?
 

Social Media

Do Other People Know Who You Are On Social Media?

26 Comments

This might seem like a strange question, but it’s an important one; do people know who you are in all the social media circles you’re in? If you think it’s a strange question I’ll explain why it’s not.


Raquel & Me

Back in March 2011 I wrote a post here titled Why I’m Now Mitch Mitchell. In that post, I basically talked about changing my name in this blog from just Mitch to my full name. Sure, I still compete with the guy who was the drummer for Jimi Hendrix and a particular reporter in Dallas – Fort Worth, but I’m being found. It also worked out well for me, as you saw in my post about Google Authorship.

On every site I go to, that’s the name I use. I link back to my site, as many as possible in as many places as possible. I usually have some kind of bio filled in so people can see what it is I do in all these different circles. My intention, as I’ve stated often, is to grow my influence, as I believe that’s one way to increase income possibilities since I provide services more than products. I’m all over the place online; people might not always remember my name but I know I’m being seen. I can say that because it seems I’m #19 on the list of leaders talking about leadership. Not bad, eh? 🙂

What’s got me talking about this subject then? A few days ago I came across someone I’m connected with on Twitter who I talked to once on a Twitter chat. I decided to see if I could find out more about her. The only link she had on her Twitter page was to one of those About.me sites.

I’m not necessarily a fan of those sites, although I can see the possibilities. It actually gives people a chance to list all the places where they can be found on social media as well as having a bio page where people can learn something about them. It saves on the cost of having to have a website, and if used properly it could work wonders.

However, most people aren’t using it all that well. Some have only an email address on there; how helpful is that? Some might have only a few words here and there; once again, not all that helpful.

In her case she actually has a lot of words on the page. And they tell a lot about her. Only none of it means anything. For instance, favorite colors, favorite flavors of ice cream, what makes you smile… okay, in the context of a blog post that might be interesting, but on an About.me page what is that telling anyone? She does mention where she works; that’s something. But you’d be hard pressed to find her on the website that she links to; once again, tells us nothing.

She has multiple social media pages also; now we’re getting somewhere. Uhhh, nope. Has a blog but no blog posts. Has a Pinterest page but no words and nothing about her at all. Had an Instagram page but, once again, no words and all the Instagram pictures have been moved to her About.me page; pretty young lady but no information. Has accounts in at least 6 other social media sites, but no information on any of them.

You might remember when I took a position on my post regarding whether to follow people as a social media strategy and having no other purpose was worth anyone’s time. I ask the same question here; what’s the point of being on social media sites if you’re not going to participate on any of them? It’s even hard to say you’re wasting your time because you’re not doing anything with them; it’s more that you’re wasting everyone else’s time because you link to these things but none of them mean anything.

She’s not alone by the way. I had the same lament in looking at many of the accounts on Empire Avenue, where people link to blogs they haven’t written in 3 years and other sites that are empty and vacuous because there’s nothing there.

What is the purpose of this type of thing? Any of you doing this, and if so what’s your strategic purpose? What do you think of this type of thing in general?