Why didn’t any of you remind me?
Sheesh.
Anyways, I spent my week cleaning the shit out of my house. I mean that literally. My new kitten, as awesome as he is, is having a few litterbox issues.
There’s nothing quite like coming home and finding little presents.
Speaking of presents, this week I’ll be writing about Medium, Twitter fights, privacy settings, and five things a dirty litter box can teach you about about Facebook advertising strategies.
What’s on your agenda for the week?
Have you been paying attention to what’s happening with Twitter and developers recently?
Twitter’s relationship with developers is turning into a social media shit show, and we’ve all got a front row seat.
This storm has been brewing for a while now. It started in 2010, when Twitter acquired Tweetie to be its first official Twitter app. Things got worse from there when Twitter told developers to stop making Twitter clients. This past week, Twitter reiterated that position, laying out exactly which type of software it thinks developers should make using Twitter’s API.
And that blog post pissed off a lot of developers.
Developers have a lot to be angry about. They were the ones who made the first apps for Twitter. They were the ones who made up the @ reply, hashtags, and retweets. They developed software to put Twitter on your desktop and smartphone. Hell, they even came up with the idea to use a blue bird as the Twitter logo.
In short, a lot of what we know about Twitter today is because independent developers took the time to create it based on the first version on Twitter’s API. And now, Twitter is blowing it up in their face.
Arguably, most of this is occurring because Twitter is transforming from a venture capitalist-funded social network into a media corporation supported by advertising revenues. Twitter is slowly rolling out features such as “Twitter cards” to deeply integrate rich media into the code of tweets themselves. This integration creates a more dynamic experience while also giving advertisers better ways to reach users than with a 140 character messages.
Unfortunately, what’s good for the business isn’t necessarily good for the developers. Developers are migrating to App.net, a subscription based carbon copy of Twitter. That means all the smart, passionate people who care about doing cool thing with Twitter are moving away. While I am doubtful about the mass adoption of a somewhat elitist subscription based social network, the migration is an indicator of a larger trend.
We’re in the middle of the biggest shake up since the current crop of social networks began. Just like how social media professionals can’t talk about rainbows and puppies and engagement as business goals, the social networks themselves must prove their ability to make money.
And they’re floundering miserably at creating the massive revenues investors were hoping for.
In response, the once pristine newsfeeds are becoming cluttered with ads. More and more of our friends profiles are becoming electronic billboards with more stuff to click.
Is this the future of social media, where the social network becomes the media corporation, focused on creating a consistent experience to deliver ad units? I’m not sure. But, I do think we’re going to be seeing this shake out over the next few years, finding out what people are willing to pay for access to their social network.
Somewhere out there, some nerd, scorned by the mainstream social networks, is looking at these models and working on a better way to make these social network things both efficient and profitable.
That’s what I’m excited to see and be a part of.
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about what the right age is for your social media manager.
For the past couple weeks many of the major social media influencers have been discussing a two articles. First someone says that every social media manager should be under the age of 25. Then someone else says your social media manger should be older than 23. And then the whole Internet gets into a pissing match over an argument that can’t be won.
As a social media professional, and a young one at that, I think it’s important for me to share my overwrought and extremely important opinion without having read either source article.
How on earth should you, a marketing or corporate communications professional, know what the right age is to hire? How are you going to know who the right person is to manage your social media channels? If you don’t know their age, how can you decide if they’re the right person?
What’s even worse? As the hiring manager, you can’t ask someone their age here in the US. So how are you going to know who’s old enough and young enough to manage social media properties?
The answer is simple. There is no one old enough and young enough to manage your social media properties.
If you need to hire social media professional today the better answer is to not hire a social media professional. You will never find someone eho is simultaneously old enough and young enough with the perfect skill set to be your social media manager.
I know how hard it is to accept that. Once you learn that no one can manage your social media appropriately you’ll learn that it’s better to live your business life without social media.
Still, if we as social media bloggers focus on the age of social media managers, we will never discuss the real things that matter to social media professionals and the businesses they work for. Things that matter, such as measurement and enterprise social media scaling. Things that could get you hired, like real and demonstrable skills. Or things that change the very nature of our work, like the convergence of social messaging and social advertising into paid, owned, and earned media.
But that shit is boring and doesn’t get page views.
So fine. Let’s just focus on age of social media managers. We don’t want to get anywhere productive in our social media conversations. Who seriously wants to discuss what the right skill set is for an entry-level social media position?
And if you’re going to seriously discuss that, I’m going to need a drink.
I’m back.
I missed you. No, not you in particular. The collective you.
OK, fine. I did miss you.
But really though, I’m glad to be back.
I took a break for a number of reasons.
But here I am, back for more. I guess you can say that I’m a glutton for punishment.
There have also been a number of topics that have been bugging me. Social media bloggers have been arguing back and forth about meaningless topics that have no value. We’ve stepped away from critical analysis of the tools and how people and businesses use them. Instead, I see pointless bickering, opinions offered as facts, and critical thinking sacrificed in favor of bite-sized information crammed into poorly designed infographics.
Ugh.
Someone needs to elevate the conversation. And for fuck’s sake I guess it’s going to be me.
So, this week I’ll be blogging about age, the future of social media, Twitter, and lurking. Maybe I’ll throw in a post about cats too, or what diarrhea can teach you about Pinterest marketing strategies.
It’s good to be back kiddos. What’s on your plate this week?
