The Anti-Social Media

I am a firm believer that people will read your blog or visit your website for one of two reasons:

• They want to learn.
• They want to be entertained.

If you can do one of these well, you will build an audience.  If you can do both well, you can build an empire.

Stop writing or tweeting or whatever because you feel obligated to, and start to think of ways to help people. Can you make them laugh or smile?  Can you teach something? Can you do both?

Stop thinking of your greedy self. How are you helping?

Apple is joining the social network game in two big ways.  The first one is Game Center, which will be launching next week on iPhones and iPod touches with the next updates of iOS.  The second is Ping, which launched today as part of iTunes 10 and will come into iOS as well.

I’ll be bring a full Ping and Game Center review in the coming weeks.  How often do we have a social network launch that’s already tied into hundreds of millions of people?  I like Ping so far, but all I’ve done is set up a profile and connected with one friend.  It’s hard to judge a social network based on one connection and a half hour’s worth of using it.

Still, Apple brings social networks into its fold in a big way.  It’s worth arguing that the great feature of iOS 4 won’t be that Apple finally brought multi-tasking to it’s devices, but rather it brought social to it’s two biggest services, Apps and Music.

Ping is music based right now, but it’s easy to see it scale up to the other iTunes commodities such as TV episodes, movies, and books. That’s probably why the name is so generic rather than music focused.  It’s no surprise they launched Ping the same day they launched the redesigned the Apple TV product.

Ping could easily steal the thunder from Facebook credits and the virtual commerce Facebook is building.  Imagine one place where you can easily see what media your friends and peers consume, what they recommend and criticize, and buy to your heart’s content. It’s hard to imagine a future where Ping doesn’t do all this.  Ping will pay for itself very quickly.

Game Center will revolutionize mobile gaming. It will be the Xbox LIVE for iOS and set the standard for mobile gaming networks.  Similarly to being able to play the games you already have with your friends, just imagine the power Game Center has to recommend. See all your friends are playing Farmville 2, but you don’t have it?  Hop over to the app store, buy it, and then challenge your friends.  The ways to monetize and sell apps are huge.

Both of these social networks will be tied into over a hundred million devices.  Nearly every one of those devices is tied to a credit card.  If they are relatively useful and easy to use in any way, the potential for them to grow and make money is huge.

Apple has come up with a model for social networks that pay for themselves out of purchases, rather than advertising.  Do you think they will last?  Will they be the next big thing from Apple?  I want to know if you think you’ll even use them.

Yesterday, MTV and Foursquare they were teaming up as part of MTV’s Get Yourself Tested campaign.

The idea behind the campaign is that when you check into a clinic, you get the GYT badge (seen above).  It also enters you in a sweepstakes to win a bunch of crap.

People already check into the dumbest places on Foursquare, and STDs are on the rise because people can’t keep their pants on when they use Facebook. Still, are people that interested in getting a small virtual graphic to display?  There is no real value behind any Foursquare badge.  Do people really need to have one displaying that they got tested to STDs?  I understand collecting things, but collecting virtual badges that will never have any monetary value doesn’t make sense to me.

I realize there shouldn’t be any shame or stigma behind getting tested.  Anyone can get tested, and we should focus on disease prevention as a society.  But is a Foursquare badge and a contest really going to solve this problem?

Also, what if someone’s results are positive?  Now someone has to carry a constant Foursquare badge of shame every time they use Foursquare.  It’s a virtual Scarlet Letter.

What do you think of this promotion?  Does it make you feel weird and icky, or do you think it’s a good idea?  Will you be getting this Foursquare badge?  I want to know if I’m going to be getting a Foursquare badge every time I go to the doctor.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.