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?

The coffin corner is one of those concepts that I remember reading ages ago but forgot until a recent memory joggle. In this case, the jab to the memory came from a slightly sensationalist analysis of how Air France flight 447 may have been downed.

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets.

With the slight caveat that going a bit too high can cause the airplane to do all sorts of things it shouldn’t be doing – like stalling. Actually, that is sage advice for pretty much anyone, including that dude called Icarus. But I digress. The point is, those kinds of tradeoffs are everywhere.

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