Tag Archives: Social Media

Social Media

Trolls And Mean People

36 Comments

I hate bullies, and I hate trolls. I hate self righteous people that don’t have a true leg to stand on, yet believe their self importance is so prominent that they have to put others down to make themselves look good.


Kate Upton,
Sports Illustrated

Who thinks the young lady in the picture to the left isn’t attractive? She’s a 19-year old model named Kate Upton that’s just landed the cover model spot on the 2012 Sports IllustratedSwimsuit issue. She’s been ranked as the #2 favorite lady for Maxim magazine. And yet you’d think by some people’s standards that she’s not only one of the ugliest woman in the world, but that she’s a tramp, slutty, and almost anything else you can think of to demean her. Remember me saying how it takes courage to be on social media?

Who’s saying these things? At the bottom of this article I’m going to post a video of her at a basketball game doing her version of some little dance called The Dougie. I’ll admit this, I don’t fully get it but it seems popular with the younger set, and she’s absolutely adorable in it. The video has been seen almost 4 million times on YouTube, and it’s what helped launch her into the position she’s in today.

However, if you look at many of the comments on the website, you’d think she slept with Osama bin Laden. Just horrible stuff being said about her and the young lady with her in the video. What the heck is this stuff? Come on now, is this the best the world has to offer for a young lady at a basketball game doing a little dance? I took a look at a few other videos of her doing some of the Sports Illustrated layout and the same types of comments keep coming up; wow. Is this the best America has to offer someone who basically seems like a nice young lady just having a lot of fun?

Then there’s this broad (yeah, I’m going there) to the left, Sophia Neophitou, the editor of something I’ve never heard of called bible 10, and the woman who supposedly helps put together Victoria Secret live model shows. She had this to say, which I felt was unnecessary:

“We would never use Ms. Upton for a Victoria’s Secret show. Her look is ‘too obvious’ to be featured in what has become the most widely viewed runway show in the world. She’s like a Page 3 girl. She’s like a footballer’s wife, with the too-blond hair and that kind of face that anyone with enough money can go out and buy.”

Let’s see, Upton is good looking enough to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated but isn’t good looking enough to be on the catwalk of a Victoria Secret modeling show? This bag (yeah, I said it) has the audacity to say this woman wouldn’t look good in Victoria Secret gear? Is she blind? Did she just demean most of the women in the world with this elitist miasma of perfidy? Obviously she’s not that smart, since these pictures here are of Miss Kate in a Victoria Secret’s catalog, wearing said lingerie. Too good for Kate, eh?

What’s happened in our culture when we can’t acknowledge that someone is good or good looking or even just cute? When did our culture get to the point where we have to go out of our way to be this mean?

I’ve been trying to think of whether I’ve been this kind of mean to anyone or about anything in the 4 years of this blog based on what someone looks like. No, I don’t think so. Have I been this mean in general? Yes, I have called out stupidity when it applies to racism, and I’m calling it out in this blog as it pertains to this Neophitou woman, but she in essence started it.

In the last week both CNN and the New York Times have decided to try to dismiss her as not being “model pretty”. Uhhh, anyone remember Anna Nicole Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Vanessa Williams and a host of other very pretty women whom someone determined weren’t “model pretty”? What the heck?

To her credit Upton seems to be handling it all pretty well. In one of the news stories she said that even Giselle, the multi-millionaire Brazilian model was once told she wasn’t pretty enough to be a model either. Morons; they’re everywhere (almost as bad as stupid clowns!

What’s your thought on this topic and this model? And yes, I promised you a video, so here’s the video; someone contact Sire because he might not want to miss this one lol:



http://youtu.be/tMpQgDbqz6U

 

Blogging, Social Media

Participating In Social Media Takes Courage

22 Comments

A few days ago, I had a post that also had a video where I ranted about MLM schemes. I can’t remember if I mentioned in the video that what prompted the rant was something that happened on LinkedIn or not, but that was the genesis for everything.


by Scott Feldstein via Flickr

One of the strangest things that came out of all of that mess, which continued until late yesterday afternoon when I finally decided my participation in the “conversation” had to end, is that the overwhelming majority of people who agreed with me wrote me privately rather than put their disgust out in the public like I did. As Sheriff Bart said in Blazing Saddles, “I’m quickly becoming an underground success in this town”. I got as many supporting messages in private as the guy who started the post got on the post itself; it did and didn’t help me, as you can imagine.

I’ve stated on this blog before that one of the gutsiest things a person can do online is court controversy, whether you started it or got yourself in the middle of it. Social media can be dangerous as much as it can be fun. This weekend another friend of mine posted something on his Facebook page that I kind of took exception to, so I commented on it. He said he had a right to express his beliefs, and I agreed with that while also saying if you have the guts to put out a belief like that in public you have to have the guts to take criticism for it from people who don’t agree with your position. I never heard back on that one.

How many reminders do people need before they realize that free speech really isn’t free? If people want to rant about things without giving others the opportunity to comment, set up a blog, don’t accept comments, and get on with your bad selves. 🙂

Unless you’re a big name once people realize they can’t leave comments they probably won’t come back, but you probably don’t care at that point. As Seth Godin seems to feel, sometimes getting your point out is more important to you than getting feedback. I find that sort of thing incredibly useless and selfish (I refuse to visit his blog or read links people share on Twitter), but to each his own.

Here’s my overall point. If you’re always afraid you’re going to create controversy, you’ll never be a good blogger. Controversy can pop up in the strangest places on the strangest topics. There is no safe topic, from babies to puppies to chocolate cake to the Muppets to weather. There’s always the possibility someone might not like what you said or how you said it. I once wrote a positive post where I mentioned my dad’s history and suddenly I was being attacked for talking about my dad being in the military. Didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t back down either, though eventually I had to block the guy because he became a major league troll; strange indeed.

Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re skittish your blog will be unreadable. Being flexible enough to see someone else’s point of view, even to the point where you sometimes might change your mind, doesn’t mean you don’t get to express yourself in your own way. Deciding not to change your mind and sticking up for your point of view, while trying to do it in a nice way, doesn’t mean you’re not flexible. Sometimes you have to adopt the position that my wife learned from Jack Canfieldone night: “What other people think of you is their problem.”

So, who’s ready to start blogging?
 

Social Media

The Power And Danger Of Social Media

44 Comments

As the world is getting more connected and more people are getting into social media, one is seeing just how powerful a medium it can be. Last year alone social media was credited with bringing down the governments of a few countries, forcing bank reform, raising millions of dollars for charity, saving lots of lives, finding children and killers, and a host of other things. It’s amazing what can happen when people get mentally engaged in something, even if it’s not in their area or might not personally affect them, and decide to do something.


via Flickr

But there’s also a major danger in social media. Obviously the biggest issues are that free speech isn’t free and privacy is a myth. Let’s talk about each of these for a few minutes.

We saw some interesting things happen in just the last week. The president of UFC, Ultimate Fighting Champions, decided not only to go live in giving his approval for a stance against SOPA (that wasn’t going to be popular), saying that content from his company is regularly stolen and costs him and his performers a lot of money, but then he decided to personally take on Anonymous (y’all have to have heard of these people), a group that’s shut down federal government websites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Sony… well, let’s just say that they’ve flexed their muscle in ways that prove that, for now, they’re probably the most dangerous online group of people in the world.

There are times when “being a man”, which means you believe you can engage someone in a fair fight to teach them a lesson, needs to be modified when you have no idea what you’re talking about. This guy, Dana White, called these folks all kinds of names, then dared them to come after him. I believe he thought someone would show up at his office one day and challenge him to a fight; nope, that wasn’t happening. Instead, Anonymous shut down his site. But that wasn’t all. They then posted all his personal information online, including his social security number, his private phone numbers (not so private anymore), and other private information. The next day Mr. White held a press conference to talk about upcoming fights; he never mentioned his verbal battle and when questioned ignored it. Yeah, learned that lesson just a little bit late.

From my perspective we should both be happy and scared of what social media has become.

We should be elated because, by participating, we never know when one day we might be “discovered” for our words or our videos or our pictures and become a big deal. We never know if our cause will touch someone or many someones or the right someone and get them to take action on our behalf.

We should be scared for exactly the same reason. People can turn against us for the very same things mentioned above if we’re stupid or make a mistake and the “wrong” people see it and decide to use it against us. Or the right people, especially when people are being stupid on topics concerning things such as race. If you don’t think you’ll get called out for taking a stance, serious or not, against a group of people, without justification, you’re not thinking straight.

Of course, I can’t go without mentioning the new Google privacy policy, if one can call it that, which goes into effect March 1st. I’ve often said that sites have the right to do whatever they want to do and that we all have the right to participate or not. That’s Google’s stance; they get to merge all the information they have on you and if you don’t like it, leave. Facebook will probably be doing the same thing soon as well. This comes about because of government complaints that their privacy policy was too confusing; nothing confusing about the new policy, that’s for sure. The new Search Plus Your World process on Google was an indication that privacy is all over, and it’s Google’s belief that it’s for our “benefit”. No matter what you think about this, you can’t dismiss the reality that privacy is dead, and there really isn’t any getting out of it, no matter what Google or Facebook may try to make you believe. Here’s Google’s video about it:

Social media can be one of your best friends. I’ve met many people I’d have never had the opportunity to talk to because of social media. It allows me to blog and get my opinions off my mind and into the open. It allows me to experience things that I’ll never experience in person, both good and bad. I’m one of those people that would be lost without social media; thanks for being around.

Social media can be your worst enemy as well. You can be bullied and made fun of. Your “private” information can get out there; heck, it’s already out there for the right price. You can be made fun of, you can be outed, you can be castigated, you can be introduced to things you probably didn’t want to know (who remembers the 2 Girls & a Cup thing a couple of years ago; ugh), and you can be scared to ever get on a computer again.

Here’s the thing; social media, in the long run, it just like everything else. There are always two sides to something, and depending on who you are, they’ll have the ability to affect you differently. Kind of like peanuts; some people can eat them without worry, others have allergies that can kill them. Which side of the peanut fence are you on? By the way, how many times have you ever seen the phrase “peanut fence”? 😉
 

Business, Social Media

Social Media & The Concept Of ROI

17 Comments

I belong to a consultant’s group where monthly we have a presentation on something that most consultant’s probably need to know for their business.

A few months ago I was the presenter, and I gave a shortened presentation of the one I did back in 2010 on social media, which was a 5 hour presentation. I had to strip it down to 50 minutes, which wasn’t all that hard since I concentrated only on certain things for these folks, most of whom are older than me.

It’s that “older than me” part that makes it interesting because I always get the same question from the same guy: “Have you gotten any business from it?” When I say I have the next question is “what’s your ROI?”

That, for the uninitiated, stands for “return on investment”, and for many businesses it’s a critical question that has to be addressed. For instance, if you spent $25,000 on a print campaign that involved paying someone to create flyers, going to the printers, mailing everything out, and it resulted in an overall loss or a profit of less than $5,000, you’d probably have to say that your ROI was pretty bad.

When it comes to social media, evaluating ROI is much different. If you’re going to base everything on costs, they could end up being minimal or costly; it’s up to you. For instance, you could start a campaign of Twitter posts and if you do it yourself there is no cost, assuming you’ve already got everything else in place if you’re sending traffic somewhere. The same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, or anywhere else, even if you own a brick and mortar business.

Or is it cost free? See, with social media, even if you do it all yourself there’s an inherent cost; it’s just how you decide to evaluate it. The cost is in time and what your time is worth.

Let’s look at this in two ways. One, do you count the time if it’s outside of 40 hours, which is the American standard for working hours? Some might, since many of us (yeah, even me) work more than 40 hours if we own our own businesses. Some might not if they stick with traditional times and consider anything else as free time.

For someone like me, based on which business I’m doing at the time, I get paid anywhere between $50 and $250 an hour; yeah, I’m like that. Anyway, this means that if I’m putting in a 10-hour day and 2 hours of that happens to be writing my blog posts, which you might not think about like this but at least 4 of them I consider as business related in some fashion, then it’s costing anywhere from $12.50 to $62.50 each time I write a blog post (I average 10 to 15 minutes per post most of the time). If we look at one of my business blogs, where I try to write a post every 3 days, that averages out to around 120 posts a year, and if I use the lower figure it means it costs me about $1,500 a year of an investment towards writing that blog; that’s not counting responding to comments (I don’t have a lot yet so y’all need to go check it out).

Since posting a link to these social media platforms takes almost no time whatsoever, this pretty much means that I need to generate at least $1,500 a year from that business to break even. Of course I just started that blog in August, but already I’ve made that much, though it wasn’t from blogging, but it doesn’t matter. The thing is that as a marketing campaign, one isn’t always sure where they’re getting their business from, but even if it was related to the blog I could still say that, based on time, I’ve about tripled my initial investment.

Here comes the next stage though. What if you want to pay someone else to handle certain social media aspects of your business? For instance, say you hired someone like me to write your blog posts for you. I’m not saying this is necessarily my fee, but say it costs you $400 a month for a certain number of blog posts, and those posts automatically go out to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (although I know Facebook just shut down one program and I’m not sure if there are others still working right now)? The approximate cost to your business is $4,800 a year; do you have the kind of business to overcome that amount of outlay? Is there the possibility that your business will generate that kind of money online, or will it come from offline sources?

That’s just it; you don’t know. Do you consider it offline if someone found you on Google and called you up, as opposed to contacting you via email? I don’t, and we all know that more content on one’s site helps them gain more prominence on the search engines. If you’re someone like a Marcus Sheridan, whose business is swimming pools, how many sales would he have to make because someone called him because they found him on Google to have made back all of his money if he paid someone to write his posts (which he doesn’t)? For that matter what’s his ROI now from blogging and obtaining business? I’m thinking it’s probably pretty good.

Every person has to evaluate for themselves whether they think they’re getting out of social media what they’re putting into it. However, you can’t make an evaluation if you don’t try. So, what are you waiting for?
 

Marketing

Our Reluctance To Market Ourselves

37 Comments

I love social media. I love how there’s just so much going on and so much information being shared by so many people. I love sharing information myself, which is why Twitter is my favorite place to be, because you never know what someone will share there and there’s lots being shared.

Dad and Me

You know what I also notice? I notice that there’s not as many people actually sharing their own stuff. I’m guilty of that myself. I often believe that since my blog articles automatically post when they go live that I don’t have to do anything else to promote them, hence, I don’t have to do anything else to promote myself. Man, how wrong I am, and those who believe as I do are.

I first touched upon this question back in May 2008 when I asked the general question How Far Are You Willing To Go For Promotion. That was based on something a local guy did (he’s now retired) where he wore certain types of clothing and a gold badge everywhere he went to always be promoting himself, and I wondered if anyone else would ever have the guts to do that. Seems the answer was no.

Over the years I’ve asked a lot of questions about marketing. I once asked if we could stomach sales. I once asked if we hate marketing so much because of what we’ve seen others do. I’ve talked about reasons why we don’t trust salespeople, and thus don’t want to become them. I once even announced that I was about to step up marketing efforts; that didn’t last, if it ever came to fruition or not.

What turns out to be interesting is just how little most of us end up marketing ourselves. A funny story from last week is that I was talking to my buddy Beverly Mahone about writing something for her that would help promote both of us. I put it together and sent it to her, exactly what she asked for. The next day she called and said I didn’t write a bio; I said she hadn’t asked for one. She also said I didn’t add a title page and I said once again she hadn’t asked for one. In essence, what she was saying to me is how could she promote both of us if I hadn’t given her anything to promote myself. Now that’s a shame.

I tend to believe that many of us miss opportunities to promote ourselves, our blogs and webpages, and our blogs. If you ask me, I think a lot of people end up doing it wrong on social media when they go through social bookmarking sites like Visibli before trying to push their content themselves first.

None of us likes “pushy”; I think that’s fair to say. We don’t want to get hammered daily, sometimes even once a week, with a sales message to buy something. I was reading yesterday where Sharon Hurley Hall wrote that she was unsubscribing from a number of newsletters that no longer suited her purpose. Probably a lot of those newsletters were marketing something on too consistent of a basis; that’s why I’ve unsubscribed from so many.

But there are some truths. One, we all need more outlets to advertise or market ourselves and our wares, and we have to be willing to do it. If you can’t advertise in your own space every once in awhile, if not have something ready on a 24/7 basis, well, how fair is that?

I have some products on 4 of my blogs that anyone can buy if they so choose at any time; is it wrong for me to want to have the ability to make money here and there? To the right, by the picture of me and the bird, I have links to some of my other pages where I’m selling stuff; will people hate me for having the audacity to try to make money that way?

Let’s talk about blog posts, or articles. How many times to you promote your own articles and posts on Twitter, where there are literally millions of people saying stuff every day, we have at least hundreds if not thousands following us, and yet we all know that the same people on at 10AM are probably not always the same people on at 8PM, or even 2PM. Who says you can’t pop your own links out more than once?

IMAG0360

Me & writer Don Yaeger

If you have a Facebook page, are you taking advantage of it by sharing your content, or every once in awhile sharing a product of yours? What about your Google+ page? None of these things are aggressive enough for anyone to gripe. Now, if you’re doing it once an hour or more, yeah, that will get irritating pretty quickly. But here and there… do you really care if a few people begrudge your opportunity to make a living?

Quick story. I was telling Beverly that I knew a local TV news personality but felt strange talking to him about things I do because I felt it might be manipulative in some fashion. She said I should contact him because people in the news are always looking for experts in different fields. I figured I had nothing to lose so I sent him a private message on Twitter, telling him I do things with blogging and social media and could possibly offer an older point of view on these things. He wrote back thanking me for telling him because he hadn’t realized that I did this type of thing. Will it end up with me on TV? Who knows, but at least I’m now known by someone in a prominent position for this sort of thing.

Most of us have to be ready to talk about ourselves, share our links, sell our products, let people know we and those things exist. I’m just as bad so this is a joint project. Sometimes we can do it while we’re supporting others; do you think I didn’t feel I was getting some benefit when I was helping John Garrett market his book How To Deal With Stupid Clowns? What about when I helped Beverly market her book Don’t Ask, or my artist friend Isaac Bidwell market himself and some of his art? Anyone see how that kind of thing helps me and them at the same time?

We can get this done. We can double our efforts, which pretty much means if you’re not doing it already anything you do will be a major step forward. Even if you’re not trying to sell something, if you’d like more visitors to your blog, go ahead and put your link out there somewhere, in a space you have more control over, and get yourself known.

And I’ll try to do it as well. 🙂