I’m doing something different this time; I’m starting with a video. Watch it, laugh, but pay attention because once it’s over I’ve got more for you:
Did you enjoy that? I enjoyed it a lot, so much so that I spent a big part of yesterday sharing it with a lot of folks for a lot of different reasons. You’re probably asking yourself why; you know I’m going to tell you. 🙂
Continue reading Black History Month: The Blogger/Social Media Edition
By now, at least if you live in the United States, you’ve probably heard about the controversy about the Academy Awards not having a single black actor in any of its major categories for the second year in a row. It’s turned into a major issue, calls for boycotts, and the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite has become fairly prominent. Not one to duck an issue, even I did a video giving my overall take on minorities and award shows in general:
Even if this isn’t a world breaking issue, it’s a big one, big enough that all sorts of people are weighing in on both sides. The wildest has come from a woman named Janet Hubert, the woman who played the original Aunt Viv on the show Fresh Prince of Beverly Hills. Of course she’s taken the position that the calls for a boycott are ridiculous, but her reasoning has more to do with the feud she has with Will Smith and, by extension, Jada Pinkett-Smith, than anything else. Most of her video is against them instead of against their position, which is sad.
Continue reading Controversy, Publicity And Social Media
I have periods where I enjoy being on Facebook and other periods where it’s been a terror. There’s a lot of things I like to see, a lot of people whose updates I also enjoy seeing. Then there are those folks whose stuff gets on my nerve, or posts and sites that have content that I’m just not up for seeing all that often.
I’ve previously talked about a plugin called FB Purity which can eliminate a lot of stuff. It works very well, but it can’t block everything. As a matter of fact, there’s no way any of us can block everything; but we can make changes you probably didn’t know about, that I really hadn’t explored until last week, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today because, after I made these changes, my stream has drastically improved.
Continue reading Sculpting My Facebook Feed
It’s been years since I’ve written one of these. I’m doing it this time because there’s a lot of stuff irking me lately regarding blogs I’ve been visiting and social media things that people are doing.
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I love social media. I love interacting with people. But some folks aren’t even trying to be sociable. Frankly, I figure it’s time someone called a bunch of stuff out, even if a few people who might read this are doing these things. Y’all are being irritating, no matter your reason for doing or not doing what you’re doing; did you keep up with that bit of Southern speech? 🙂
These aren’t in any particular order; I figure a bit of “disrupt” won’t hurt, and might even keep some folks reading and learning; I’m all about the learning piece. Here we go!
1. I get it with the captcha, although I hate it with a passion. You’re trying to stop spam; fair enough. Still, two issues with it. The first… why do you have captcha that comes in capital letters but won’t accept capital letters if we put them in? We do that because some blogs have captcha that says it’s case sensitive.
The secondary gripe about this? You hit “reply”, it takes you to the next page that says you got it wrong, then you go back to the page and… what you wrote is gone! Ugh! I’ve taken to copying my posts from this point on because that was irking me more than the captcha, but y’all need to fix this.
One last thing. You put the captcha on there to verify that we’re real people. Why the heck are you also intentionally moderating comments? That’s what the stupid captcha was for wasn’t it? Do you run into a lot of trolls who want to spend time putting in captcha codes so they can call you names and such?
2. I’ve griped often about people who auto DM, or just DM you, when you connect with them on Twitter. At least 99.99995 of the people I connect with on Twitter reached out to me first. Since you reached out to me, in the open no less, why are you so afraid to now talk to me in the open?
That’s not the rant this time however. The rant this time are those people who, instead of sending the DMs, instead send either individual messages to every single person or groups a bunch of people into one post, thanking them for the connection or mentioning them as their top interactors. Almost none of them are doing it on their own; they’ve hooked up with some stupid Twitter app that does it for them.
That’s irritating, to the point that if I’m checking out profiles of people who want me to connect with them and I see their stream has lots of those things, I refuse to connect with them. Sorry folks; your other content might not be so bad but the last thing I need is more blather in my Twitter stream.
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3. This is the year of social media sites changing things that are supposed to make things better… but they didn’t. Let’s see…
Google Plus just changed their format to make it more visually pleasing and, supposedly, easier for us to use. Except they’ve messed up two things that have become quite irksome.
The first is not always accepting links we share on their site. Every once in a while it won’t accept a link from a site it’s always accepted links from before. It makes me think it’s not accepting that link because they’re blocking the site… until I tried sharing the same link on my laptop, which I didn’t upgrade to the G+ new system… and it took it as if nothing had changed.
The second is that previously you could share links or stories with different circles at once, or circles and individuals. With the new system, you can either share it with your circles, the public or individuals; you can’t share with more than one at a time, which means if you want to do that you have to post it multiple times and look like an idiot. You don’t have to do that in the original version… yes, I’ve proven that as well.
Twitter has done a couple of irritating things as well. One is recently taking away the counts we had to see how often our articles might be shared with others. They’ve done that to go to a paid model for those who really want those numbers; it’s not going to be me.
They’ve also opened our direct messages so that people we don’t know can send us garbage. Goodness, there are enough people I connect with who are already auto-DM’ing me, even though my profile asks them not to do that, without now having to see people I don’t know selling to me. At the same time they also set it up so we have unlimited characters in direct messages… okay, I’m not mad at that. lol
LinkedIn also did a few irritating things this year. The first was suckering us into posting articles on their site, sharing it with lots of people, then throttling us back down. I’m presently on a course to see if it changes after having at least 100 articles there. If I don’t see improvement by article 101 I might stop posting and just allow my two blogs that post original articles there to be the only source of new content shared there.
The second was changing how groups work. First, they made all groups private, regardless of whether the owners wanted that or not. Second, they took away the ability to be seen as an influencer in a group, which took away the incentive to participate all that much. The second irritates me more because there aren’t a lot of people participating to begin with, so I loved being an influencer in a few groups. Now it’s not worth my time.
4. In a year when I’ve been trying to figure out more ways to make money online, some days ago I got an email from an affiliate program I was a part of saying they didn’t see their code on my finance site anymore. Actually, I’d totally forgotten about this affiliate, Bidvertise, and couldn’t remember why I removed the code, so I added it back.
Suddenly, the site went wonky after testing it and, after a couple of minutes, I decided to remove it. Maybe that’s why I removed it in the first place. However, all it took was that 2 minutes before Google put the site on a “do not trust” list; sigh… This led me to run all kinds of test software on the site to see if anything had been embedded before I could request a review from Google to get off the list.
I’m happy to say that I was off the list about 4 hours after I sent my review request; whew! But it’s made me become more wary of adding javascript code to my sites without reviewing better the kind of ads it puts on them. I mean, things were popping up all over the place; that was freaky.
5. Also in the last week, I started looking at my statistics a bit better; at least trying to.
The first thing was looking at Google Analytics. Have you ever checked your referring site? I had a few I not only didn’t recognize, but they said they were sending me lots of people. However, the minutes were at zero and a bounce rate of 100%. It turns out there are sites that use yours to promote their own sites without your knowledge, and it sends you false visits; ugh.
It’s known as referral spam, and I learned how to take care of it from a site called Megalytic. Actually, it shows you how to set up filters so you can see the actual stuff; I’m not sure if there’s a way to get rid of the referral spam for good.
The second thing was loading an add-on program called SEO Doctor that was recommended on some other site… the name of which I forget now. Actually, it worked great… until I started visiting a few blog sites and started getting requests to sign into their routers and having difficulty getting out of them. I had to shut that bad boy down, since it started around the same time I added it; sigh… This is a reminder to everyone that testing something new is imperative!
I think I’ll stop there. I have more gripes but I don’t want all of Monday to be a gripe fest. What’s irking you about social media lately?
Oh, the angst!
Every once in a while I start a post, can’t quite figure out what direction I want to go, and save it to draft. I figured it was time to pull this one out of draft and go ahead and get it written because recently there was something that happened that fits right in with this theme.
Last week a young and very pretty model who has a major Instagram following decided it was time for her to shut down her account. The reason she gave for shutting down the account is she felt it was telling people a lie about how good and perfect her life was. She said she didn’t feel that way at all, and that social media had turned her into a liar.
Continue reading Of Course We All Look Good On Social Media