twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
Quick! Get Alanis on the phone!
From Dictionary.com
i·ron·ic/i’ränik/
Adjective:
- Using or characterized by irony.
- Happening in the opposite way to what is expected, thus typically causing wry amusement.
The word “ironic” has been posted a lot today, when people talked about this tweet:
The horrible, hateful person who wrote it meant that tweet exactly the way it was written. The fact that it was written on an iPhone isn’t ironic. It is, however, pretty hypocritical. If there is a God, a heaven, and a hell, how surprised will all these haters be when their brief time in front of St. Peter is followed by a quick trip downstairs? Just saying…
We’re still scratching our collective brains to try to figure out exactly which sins Steve Jobs taught us. We must have missed that day in Computer Science class. The most important innovation he gave us was a user-friendly interface so that non-technical people could use computers. Although a lot of those people now use computers to view porn, we’re pretty sure Steve didn’t have to teach them that part. Pervs are pretty darned resourceful.
The next noteworthy misuse of “ironic” comes from Brand Link Communications:
BrandlinkComm sent Jenny (@thebloggess) the kind of pitch all bloggers get and hate. They thought she would be thrilled to write a blog post about an overexposed celebrity doing something that none of us care about. Jenny responded with her usual wit, by sending them a picture of Wil Wheaton collating, and “Jose” at BrandlinkComm called her an effing bitch when he hit “reply all.” (Go read the whole story here: The Bloggess & Jose – we’ll wait)
Technology did not fail Jose. Jose failed in the use of technology. The fact that this happened the same day Steve Jobs passed away is not ironic. It’s just coincidence. Nonetheless, for Jose, pretty unfortunate. Just like all the other unfortunate things in Alanis’ song
Even more unfortunate for Jose was that he lit a spark that started a PR firestorm when he said, “…maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all…”
We should all feel flattered to receive PR pitch spam? Many of us just hit the delete button and move on. Thankfully, Jenny takes the next step, and brings us along for the ride.
Oh, and Jose? By the end of the day, Jenny will have more comments on her blog post about this than you have followers on Twitter. That’s Relevance. You should be so lucky. (That’s ironic.)
Fool me once
It doesn’t hurt to go through the list of people you’re following every now and then, to see who is still worth it, and who is wasting your attention. We’re reminded of this policy when we notice that people we initially followed because we thought they might be interesting, turn into social media douche-canoes.
Example of social media douche-canoe activity: Filling their timeline with ads. Sometimes, you don’t realize they’re doing it, until you innocently click a link to what you think might be an interesting story, and you get directed to somewhere completely different.
Like this:
Every one of the short urls in this timeline goes a product he’s selling. After clicking on one, we remembered why we like the “short url preview” feature. It saves a lot of aggravation – hover over a short url, and it shows you the real destination. We won’t fall for that trick again. (Disclaimer: We don’t know him. He may be a nice guy, but we really hate bait and switch tactics. That’s not very social.)
And, another thing: The words “internet marketer,” “social media marketer,” and other such terms make us cringe. They’re titles often latched onto by people who are selling you a system to make you look more popular on social media, or automate your online marketing, which they guarantee will get you first page ranking for any keywords you want, or some other “make money by giving me yours” program that usually has an affiliate program attached so that other people will do their marketing for them.
Here’s the news: Social media works by making connections, and having conversations with others. Automate your social media, and you miss the whole point. And, nobody can guarantee you first page ranking for any keyword you want. Correct that.. they can guarantee anything, they just can’t deliver. (Read what Google says about such guarantees: Scroll down to: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
We’re going to take the advice of @jackassletters and lighten our load. We’re going to look through our list and see who isn’t really social anymore. Following fewer people, and having fewer followers will help us keep the “social” in our twitter social media experience.
Social Media and Real Life are Two Different Things
Your “friends” on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are your social media friends. If you haven’t met them IRL (in real life), they are not your real friends. Before you hit the comments, we’re going to give you a case in point: @treypennington.
If you don’t know who he was, join the club. We heard of him, quite some time ago, when he followed/unfollowed/followed/unfollowed us. Chalked him up to be yet another “social media marketing guru” who was building his follower count. He had tons of followers (no surprise), and most, if not all, of those followers thought he was their real friend.
Shortly after posting the following tweet, Trey went to church and killed himself.
Now that he is dead, there are thousands of tributes on twitter, as people share their shock and grief.
We’ve lost 3 very important people in our real life recently, so we know grief. It’s not up to us to tell people not to grieve over someone they really didn’t know, but YOU DIDN’T REALLY KNOW HIM. You never had coffee together, or went to a barbeque at his house, and he never once helped you move. You watched his videos, read his blog, or retweeted his social media insights. You saw what he wanted you to see.
Our hearts go out to his family, who can’t believe they missed the signs, his wife, who will blame herself for his decision, and his children who will wonder why Daddy didn’t love them enough to stay. They bear wounds that will scar, but never truly heal.
Depression is a mental illness that encompasses the entire body and mind. Suicide is not the answer. Committing suicide in public? We want to curse him for hurting so many people who knew him, thought they knew him, and others who witnessed his death. He spread his personal pain far and wide while ending his own. We want to point to the fact that he’s trending on twitter as his final hurrah.
But we won’t. What we will do instead is remind you that there are some awesome people around you. Walk away from your pc or mac, turn off your social media apps, and talk to someone IRL. Invite a friend to dinner, or to come over and watch the game. Call your dad. Stop by grandma’s house. Surprise your girlfriend with flowers. Have conversations and give out hugs. Touch base with the important people in your life so that when one of them needs you, you can be there for them. And so they can be there for you.
If there is one message to be learned from death, it is this: We all die. Some, sooner than others. Every time you think you’ll talk to them “later,” you’re missing an opportunity that might not come around again. Your twitter followers can’t hold your hand. That’s something only your real family and friends can do. Go live life. Do it now.
The Bloggess is Not a Douche-Canoe
In our last post, we used the phrase “douche-canoe” to describe an idiot we regretting following in the first place. You probably know it’s our practice to avoid following “online marketing superman” and “social media guru” types, but occasionally, one sneaks in without us realizing it. Usually, they start out as normal people, just making connections on twitter, and then they play the follower game until their numbers make them appear to be influential, and their ego grows in a direct relationship to their inflated follower count. When we discover we’re following these posers, we unfollow, but in the case of this particular douche-canoe, it wasn’t soon enough
Unfortunately, to at least one person, it appeared as if we were calling @thebloggess a douche-canoe. Not even. We think she is awesome, and read her blog religiously. In fact, since we haven’t been to church in years, you might say The Bloggess is our religion.
We failed. The reason for the confusion is totally ours. “Douche-canoe” was originally coined on the now defunct (and we miss it terribly) column: Ask the Bloggess. We wanted to link to the definition, and since that column is now gone, we searched backwards through her entire blog, and found the first reference was November 20, 2009. Although we thoroughly enjoyed the research (she says douche-canoe a lot), it didn’t seem appropriate to link to that blog post, so we linked to her blog. Without explaining why we did so, it looked like we were calling her a douche-canoe.
No way. Jenny is awesome. Read her blog, and you’ll see why everyone loves her. It’s not just us.
PS: Jenny isn’t the one who thought we called her a douche-canoe. It was @jackassletters, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. We don’t want to do anything that might make Jenny feel stabby.
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