Tag Archives: Social Media

Rockin’ Robin (Tweet, Tweet)

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I sometimes have a hard time titling my posts. Today’s was easy because I’m taking you back to the world of Twitter, and pretty much anyone in the Eastern part of North America is wishing for Spring. Hell, we’re practically begging for it. That first robin sighting will be a monumental event, and what do robins do? They tweet. At least the rockin’ ones do if you believe the Jackson 5.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VCUbL7jsc?rel=0]

Okay, that’s enough of an explanation as to how I got the title for the post. Now on to the content!

Way back in May/June of 2011 I wrote a series of posts centred around social media – specifically Twitter. I had been on Twitter for a few years by then and still hand’t quite figured it out.

In all of this, however, I neglected to get to the actual key to Twitter effectiveness. Engagement. Now, in my defence, I was new. I was still amassing followers and followings. It wasn’t until I was following close to 500 people that I began to realize that the Twitter sea could be a cold and lonely (and useless) place unless you had some sort of system. So, I started using lists.

I had thirteen lists then. Today I have seven (including a mysterious “People Not in a List” list). A couple of familiar lists are still kicking around: “Writing” and “Community”, and yesterday I made a few observations:

So, I’ve covered how I got the title of this post, and now I’ve explained how I came to arrive at this topic for this week. I suppose the only thing that’s left is to get to the point.

The first observation was interesting because I don’t tend to pay attention to who’s following me (which is a partial lie because when I made this writer following-to-followed comment a couple years ago Margaret Atwood started following me on Twitter and to this day it makes me absolutely giddy). I find it interesting because I find writers are great at reciprocating the Twitter follow, more so than any other group of people, I think.

I started thinking about why that would be when I came across my second observation: self promotion. Look, I get it. We’re all trying to sell stuff, and with the state of publishing and self publishing being what it is competition is at an all-time high and royalties are at an all-time low. The problem I see with this is that it’s an awful lot of noise.

I don’t know about most people but I follow an awful lot of writers, most of them not well known, so I’m not sure the average Twitter user has the same view of things. One thing I do know though is that I’m way more likely to re-tweet or comment (engage!) when someone’s stream isn’t just a a constant flow of “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” Naturally, unless Tweeting is your full time job you can’t respond to everyone all the time – that’s just not a sustainable practice. You can, however, take a good look at who you’re following and what those people have to say and find out where you can add value to that conversation.

Hey, I’ve certainly been guilty of shameless self promotion on Twitter. If you were to check out my feed from the last year and a half you’ll see mostly links to photographs I took or blog posts and very little “other” stuff. It sucks, and I’m not proud of it. Which was my third observation, and the reason for this post. Now that my life is settling back into somewhat of a normal routine, I started thinking about how I wanted to start engaging more on Twitter and get back to the good old days when it was entertaining and informative. I hope you’ll all join me.

Finally, and this is probably the most important thing you’ll read all day:

Don’t be an asshole. 

It’s Oscar night and three years ago a friend and well respected member of the Toronto media, Neil Hedley, had some words for people tweeting insulting and bullying bullshit about movie stars on the red carpet at the Oscars. I wrote a post about thinking before you tweet that was well received. Last year a few actors even did a parody sketch on this as part of the opening segment. Regardless of how many people point out that slamming an actress for her body image amounts to bullying (and generally being an asshole) there will still be throngs of people who do it. Don’t be one of them.

~ Andrew

Once Upon a Hashtag

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LOL, OMG, SRSLY, #WTF

Between text messaging, social media, and dictionaries adding the most absurd “words” it is clear that the English language is changing at a torrid pace. If I’m being honest, I can say that I purposefully avoid anything to do with all this gosh darned newfangled hogwash poppycock. My text messages contain full words only interrupted by the occasional smiley face or ampersand (to convey a specific emotion or provide a more logical grouping of words) and the same goes for my social media posts.

Listen up: I’m a writer. If I can’t say it using Oxford English Dictionary words from before the year 2000 then I am failing miserably at my craft and should feel embarrassment and shame.

Keep in mind that I am also human, which means I am also imperfect. A quick search of my Twitter feed for the two most common non-words that are now words (LOL and OMG) came up with the following:

(The tweet at the top links to this particularly funny cartoon, the second tweet from the top is a conversation between myself and Christine Reid – that makes absolutely no sense to me today, the second from the bottom links to this old blog post of mine with a shout out to Wren Emerson, and the bottom tweet links to an old Hockey News article I dug up in my archives)

I think that’s a pretty damn good track record. Out of more than 7,600 tweets there are exactly 4 that use stupid acronyms (none in the last 18 months when, arguably, I started to get more serious about writing). If you’re into percentages, that’s somewhere around 0.05% I think I’m going to start creating badges to put on blogs and profile pictures:

Like anyone else I have my vices and whether it’s on Twitter or on Facebook I have a habit, an addiction really, to all things hashtag. Hashtags, as they kids are saying, are all the #rage.

For those not so well versed on the nuances of social media here is the definition from our friends over at Wikipedia:

 Hashtag

A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol #.[1][2] It is a form of metadata tag. 
Short messages on microblogging and social networking services such as Twitter, Tout, 
identi.ca, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Google+ or Facebook may be tagged by putting “#” 
before important words, as in: 

#Wikipedia is an #encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag
and get the set of messages that contain it.

Well that clears that up.

It’s probably best to look at a few examples of what the hashtag provides in terms of added value. I took the liberty of doing a hashtag search on the most popular site for hashtags (Twitter) and one of the newest sites to start incorporating the hashtag (Facebook). Naturally the hashtag I chose to use as my search was #hashtag:

If you take even a cursory glance at the results you’ll be able to see that some people are using the hashtag #hashtag in their posts for no other reason than to have a hashtag in their post. I wonder if they think they’re being clever? #lame

So what’s wrong with just searching for any old word? Context. Not that there is a lack of context, but plain text searches tend to give you more of it than you need. The hashtag acts as a consolidator to group similarly contextual posts together so that not every one that contains that word shows up in your results (though Twitter will often return search results from all the other text in the tweet as well. #sigh)

For a while, Facebook refused to get on board the hashtag train. In fact, some people would get downright angry if you happened to drop a hashtag into a status update or comment. When it was introduced a few months ago there was a flood of hashtag use and I have to admit, even this hashtag lover was mildly #annoyed. What’s more, I did a quick check on searches for hashtags of a questionable nature on Twitter and Facebook and the latter is censoring their search results to a much higher degree (not cool, Facebook. Not cool at all.)

That aside, in my tweets and Facebook statuses, and yes even in the occasional text message (this is how you know you have a hashtag problem) I will continue to use, and advocate the use of, hashtags. Right or wrong, for better or worse, it’s the path I have chosen. #YOLO

As far as this post is concerned I just can’t take it any more, so I make this promise to you now: you won’t see any hashtags in future posts or formal writing of mine ever again. Never mind the fact that I won’t feel at all bad if someone catches me breaking my promise. That just means someone is actually reading my stuff, and I’m perfectly okay with that. Cleverness #FTW!

~ Andrew

The Power of the Internet

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I am fortunate enough to have experienced the creation of one of the greatest inventions of all time: the Internet. Granted, there were a whole lot of events that had to transpire over several decades before it became accessible outside of military or academic circles, but when it did… it’s hard to argue that it didn’t have a major impact on society.

Image Courtesy Wikipedia

Much like anything else it didn’t take long for the Internet to become commercialized. Rest assured (and if you read my last post this won’t come as a surprise) if there’s a newer/better/faster/easier way to sell you something then the people selling it are going take advantage.

Then something interesting happened. People started using the Internet for something that wasn’t commerce. Of course, traditional media outlets began (and continue) to use the Internet as a cheap and easy way to get your attention, driving you to their paid services and racking up page views to satisfy deep-pocketed advertisers, but ordinary people also started to use it to share their message. They quickly realized that there was the potential to reach a tremendous audience and in less than a decade the Internet became the greatest resource the world has ever seen.

As with anything that’s publicly available and unregulated you’re going to get quite a wide collection of individuals involved. The Internet user community is, unsurprisingly, just a reflection of society as a whole. One quick peak and you’ll find:

  • the innovators; 
  • the salespeople; 
  • the socially conscience; 
  • the clueless; 
  • the intellectual (and the intellectually deficient); 
  • the radicals; and of course, 
  • the liars and the cheats. 
If you need to put “fair & balanced” in your logo
I have news for you…

It’s not just corporations like FOX News that are in on the game either. Sometimes our cravings for attention and the insatiable need for our 15 minutes of fame take control, and sometimes the less honourable see an opportunity to take advantage of the good nature of others. If you’re on Facebook you have most certainly seen the posts. The ones where some tear-jerking picture is accompanied by some text that reads “If I get a million ‘likes’ then…” or “So and so or this and that needs your help!”

Some of these are undoubtedly true… and some most certainly are not. I choose to focus on the good. It takes a bit more energy but the end result is worth it (my favourite sources of truth are currently Snopes and Skeptophilia). With just a little bit of research and minimal digging the same Internet that brings you the lie also brings the lie and the people behind it to light. Just as easily, the Internet can be used to affect positive change, and as it turns out there are more people out there using their powers for good instead of evil.

I firmly believe in the power of the Internet and all of its social media sub-components. Aside from allowing everyday folks like myself to have a voice, it can bring people together and affect change like never before.

Just ask Egypt.

~ Andrew