The Lair

Or, things not to do with your organization’s incursion into social media.

• People find out that you’re not very interesting. Or even worse, people tend to make judgments based on the content appearing in your social media profile.

  Bonus points: hashtag spam on selected high value keywords. Dear god. Please stop. Now.

• Once you establish that beachhead into the brave new world of Twitter, followers/fans become public information.
  Social media is, or so I am told by the experts, all about the networks of connections. Mining the followers of your organizational incursion into social media gives everyone a list of kool aid drinkers that it is probably best to avoid online in most shapes and forms. Win-win all round.

Bonus points: watch a follower count pissing contest develop, as the marketing drones frantically try to astroturf support.

All in all, this is a perfect example of situational irony.

Update: It might also help if said social media site is accessible from within the corporate network. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information: vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally dangerous

The Rise of the TabLog

Ain’t it the truth?

Every culture, it seems, has a seemingly inexhaustible storehouse of axioms, homilies and quotes – usually translated as “rural wisdom”. Some of these homilies are grounded in science – for example, boil cassava roots in an open pot (to allow the toxic cyanides to evaporate).
Who the hell first discovered that? How many people died to figure it out? Those are the things they never teach you in school.

There are other homilies, however, which are probably grounded in science but no one follows these days. For example, when I was young I was strictly forbidden to eat more than one egg per day. No, really. More than that is bad for me, I was told. I will get lower voice into a hushed whisper high cholesterol. Yes, this is probably true but other aspects of my lifestyle (which attract no comment) are probably higher risk activities than eating a couple of eggs for breakfast.

Another one: don’t put too much vinegar on your food (especially the delicious raw fruit mixed with chillie and sugar preparations) because the acid will melt your bones. Wait, what? I don’t understand the science behind that one at all.

Then there is the entire class of things called heaty food – which includes prawns, pineapples and (I strongly suspect) most things which taste good. Eating too much of such things retains heat, and therefore causes all sorts of medical problems. They must immediately be neutralized with cooling food. Again, science? There is probably some in this, but I wonder.

There are plenty more where that came from … but are they really relevant today? I somehow suspect they aren’t