Hidden Frequency

Beware of anti-social social media

Are you a social media spammer? Do you let applications like foursquare and Farmville take over your Twitter and Facebook account and send updates that are really just marketing messages? Are your friends calling you the Mayor of Doucheville behind your back?

In my opinion, every time you let those services use your social media platforms to communicate something with absolutely no content to your friends, you’re the equivalent of a web newbie passing around a chain email letter of jokes that died in 1996 or a promise that Bill Gates will send money for helping him test out some email thingy.

I have nothing against foursquare. I just have no use for it. I care about the most mundane and ridiculous things in my friend’s lives. I don’t care about what some application like foursquare or Farmville has decided to tweet out automatically. That’s not you. That’s those platforms using your account to spam your friends.

If you’re having a great experience using those services, by all means tweet about it or update your Facebook status to tell me so. But let me hear it from you.

I want to know what you thought about the movie you just saw. Tell me what song you’re listening too. Send me a funny link. I want to hear from you and not the marketing department of who you let hijack your account.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.

Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community.

So Leo Laporte woke up yesterday and realized that his Google Buzz account was broken and nobody noticed. That’s the end of social media for Leo. Paul Carr over at TechCrunch noticed this and opined that all of his twittering has come at the expense of his soulful blogging. Paul too has decided social media has run its course.

With all due respect. I think I perceive social media a little differently from them. It’s about your community, and I don’t mean the community as in “fan club”. I mean community as in the people you have one-on-one interactions with. People whom you have a mutual interest in. The operative phrase being “mutual”.

Leo is an absolute pioneer in online broadcasting and a hero to me. But it’s important to see that Twitter isn’t another form of online broadcasting.

Hint: If you have to use TweetDeck or some tool that lets you follow 1,000’s of people on Twitter then you’re having a different experience than those of us who follow a hundred or fewer people. I read every tweet from every person I follow. That’s why I only follow a few people. I don’t need Twitter to be truncated RSS.

If you treat Twitter as another broadcast outlet, that’s exactly what it becomes. It’s just talk radio with words. Twitter for me at least is like a huge conference call with all my friends.

A tweet from a celebrity with 200,000 followers doesn’t get top billing over a tweet from a friend with 2 followers. And that’s the way Twitter is supposed to work. That’s a very hard concept to understand for people used to a feudal web where one person is the gatekeeper of an audience.

And there’s the difference. Twitter isn’t your audience. It’s your community. It’s easy to tell the difference: The guy on stage at the concert is in front of his audience. The people in the stands are in their community. When the concert is over the audience vanishes but the community continues; with or without the man on stage.

Andrew Mayne is founder of Blurbtastic.com and publisher of WeirdThings.com. His personal website can be found at AndrewMayne.com.