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Archive | August, 2010

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3 Instant ways to make your Social Media Better

  1. Treat people the way you want to be treated. Be nice.  There are more people online than you.  If you piss them off they will win on sheer numbers alone.
  2. Be a human.  People connect with people, not brands or robots.
  3. Be yourself.  If you’re a depressed pessimist who likes to write angry rants about people tweeting as they use the bathroom, be that.  Don’t try to be cool.  Don’t try to be someone else.  Just be your most awesome self.

What do you do to make your social media suck less?

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The Complications of the Facebook Relationship

Relationships were never easy.  Facebook made them ridiculously harder.

Back in 2004, before Facebook had news feeds and was for college kids only, my friend had a Facebook stalker.  When she ended her relationship, she changed her Facebook status from “In a relationship” to “single.”  Within an hour, she had received two calls and a texts from that stalker asking her out, while condolences poured in slowly over the next week.    

Things only got worse for relationships when Facebook’s news feed came along. Suddenly, your relationship status now played publicly for any of your “friends.”  Instead of people finding out slowly when a relationship has fallen apart, it now is blasted out for the entire internet to read and comment on, whether directly or indirectly.  This isn’t anything entirely new.  People have always gossiped and talked about other people’s affairs, but it now we can read and react instantaneously.

In the age of personal branding, it seems such a strange piece of very intimate and personal information that is out there for people to “like” and comment on.  Facebook is fun, but where’s the fun in dragging your relationships out in front of the whole internet?

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The One Way to Fail in Social Media

Sometimes, when my traffic is sinking, or I don’t get any comments on a post, I feel I failed as a writer and social media commentator.  If people ignore my posts, what’s the point of writing?  If I can’t attract an audience, should I even be in this world of “Look at me! Look at me!  LOOK AT ME!” social media?

And then I remember that there is only one way to fail in social media: Quitting.

Quitting is the end of communication.  It’s the point where you decide it’s not worth it to send out messages, but rather shut up and pack up.  Instead of trying something new, or sticking to what you do best, you stop and let it decompose, like a corpse in the middle of the street.

Giving up allows other people to tell your story.  Can you trust what they will have to say?

You do not need to communicate all the time, and you do not need to be on every social network.  Sometimes you have to let go of a social network and go to another one.  Stick to your principles and what you enjoy.  That will take you far.

You have your own story to tell.  Write your own story on the internet, and don’t let it die.

Whatever else you do, don’t quit and let other people tell your story for you.

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I made this video about my WordPress Woes last night, but…

I made this video about my WordPress Woes last night, but YouTube decided to keep meddling with how the audio was synced with the video.  If it was really bad, i would have kept it as is for comedy’s sake, but the video was maybe a half-second off, so it was just annoying.

I wish I was kidding when I said this, but I had dreams last night about getting WordPress Plugins to work.  I DREAMT ABOUT BLOGGING SOFTWARE.

Developers: there’s something wrong when you have to dream about software to get solutions.

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Computers

I’m having so many issues with computers this week, it’s like living the book of Job, if Job had install WordPress and upload YouTube videos. I’m having such crazy issues right now I’m having to blog from my iPhone, which is terrible because I can’t edit worth a damn on this thing.

Why do we still have such crazy issues with computers? It’s 2010! We don’t have Windows 95 anymore. Our phones are as powerful as our laptops from ten years ago. Still we can’t make computers easier to use?

Blogging and creating content needs to be easier. People getting frustrated just makes the experience worse for everyone.

Why does the Internet make it so hard just to blog? If you can tell me, or make a better blogging platform, there’s a million dollars out there for you to make.

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What the Hell is Your Favorite Social Network

I want to know what your favorite social network is.  Do you live for Facebook?  Is Twitter the bomb dot com?  Can you Orkut it?  It’s not me, it’s YouTube?  It’s well-documented that I hate Facebook, but I know I get a lot of readers here from a bunch of strange places, and I want to know what social network they value more than their right thumb.

Even though my heart is cold and bitter with social media rage, my favorite social network by far is Twitter.  I’m a writer, and I’m a writer who loves concision.  I was the kid in college who was always driven nuts by the professors with lengthy page limits because I always struggled to add relevant information.  Now, I get to thrive in an environment where every letter counts.  The pressure is so worth it.

My other favorites, in no particular order, are tumblr (even though I am leaving it as a blog platform), flickr (because a picture is worth a thousand words), and LinkedIn (even though I come across as completely unprofessional here).

I want to know where you’re spending your time online.  What’s giving you decent relationships and value?  Angry social media users want to know.

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Announcement: We’re Moving! (Kind Of)

If you follow my personal Twitter account, @JayDolan, you know I’ve been wrestling with tumblr, and recently, WordPress.  Tumblr is the blogging software that runs The Anti-Social Media. I love tumblr, but it’s starting to prove it’s time to move on.

There are a lot of aspects why I love tumblr.

  • tumblr is dead simple to use.  You log-in and it presents anything you could want to post and makes it as absolutely easy as possible.  You don’t have to think, you just click and go from there.
  • tumblr is pretty.  There are a lot of awesome designers on tumblr, and they make lots of gorgeous themes.  If the free themes don’t suit you, there are even a bunch of great and relatively cheap (under $50) premium themes.
  • tumblr is free.  Tumblr pays for all your hosting.  So, unless you use an actual domain (like theantisocialmedia.com, for example), you don’t pay anything.  It’s an easy way to blog quickly and without having to worry about setting up your server.

Still, tumblr has been driving me nuts recently:

  • My scheduled posts are never posted on time.  You can imagine how horrifying it is to see something you wanted posted at 8 am doesn’t show up until noon or later.
  • When my scheduled posts do appear, they are posted as private. Blogging for myself isn’t any fun.
  • It’s really hard to add new features to the site.  Granted, I don’t want to add a lot of clutter.  I hate cluttered sites.  But I hate messing with code and destroying the entire site even more.

So, I’ll be transferring the blog to WordPress.  I’m not a WordPress fan, but it will solve the vast majority of my problems.

I just want to post and share my content.  I want the site to look exactly like the preview when I install it, and then just need to insert the code and user ids that are necessary to make certain things run.  I’m not a designer.  Wordpress is nice, but with great power comes great insanity.  It took me six hours to get my personal site going on WordPress, and its not near the exact way I want it.

What does this change mean for you?  If you’re subscribed via RSS, you shouldn’t see much of a difference at all.  Otherwise you’ll be seeing a new site soon.  It should look awesome.  It should do awesome things.  It won’t solve world hunger, but it will make me happy, and then we can keep talking about how crazy social media is.

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We All Hate Facebook Places Already

I don’t think I ran across a single blog yesterday that thought Facebook places was a great idea.  We all know it was derived from Foursquare, Gowalla and their cousins.  People detest “friends” being able to check you into places, and privacy groups are waging another war with Facebook.

I think enough has been said about how stupid of an idea this is from Facebook’s end.  My major problem with Facebook places was when I tried to launch it, I got this:

Facebok Places - This feature will be available soon.  Thank you for your patience.

Before I complain about a feature, I’m willing to at least try it.  However, Facebook apparently released the version of the iPhone app that didn’t work (3.2), and I had to later install a new version (3.2.1) to get Places to function properly.  Facebook, next time, launch the version of the app that actually works.  Your users will thank you.

Regardless of that blunder, Places worries me.  The logo, which my friend Maura pointed out, is a square with a four inside. FourSquare, anyone?  There’s evil genius at work.

Thankfully, for every person that checks you in somewhere you can always send them this threat, so wonderfully articulated by my friend Laurie.

Laurie Ruettimann - Don't check me on Facebook or I will check you into strip clubs and Wal-Mart

You got that?  We will start checking you into Wal-Mart if you misbehave.  You’ve been warned.