Social media professionals depend on one thing: being able to bullshit about engagement and take home a ridiculous paycheck.
And yesterday, The Oatmeal went and ruined that.
Motherfucker.
Now we all have to actually try. No more cat photos. No more thought leadership. Just actual work creating cool shit, and we all know how that goes.
Fuck you, Oatmeal. Fuck you for making me have to try and be more creative
Oh, and here’s your damned tank.
Everyone wants to be a badass on Facebook Twitter and Pinterest because it seems cool. You look popular even though you’re just another lonely soul with a laptop.
Sadly, we all can’t be bitchin’ like Mike Stelzner. I’ve had several thousand Twitter followers for a year now, and you know what it’s gotten me? Jack shit.
My order at McDonald’s is still fucked up. No random strangers stop me on the corner asking for autographs. Klout perks are overrated crap from China.
But LinkedIn is a different beast. When you’re influential on LinkedIn, you get better jobs. Better jobs mean more money.
It pays to be influential on LinkedIn. Literally.
So, here are 7 ways to be an influential badass on LinkedIn:
Those are just the basics. But now you’ve got the tools to be totally awesome. Get off Facebook and do some social networking that might actually make a difference in your life.
How are you going to be a LinkedIn badass?
Facebook introduced a crap ton of new ad products last month.
As to be expected, they are a ton of crap.
The ones that seem the worst to me are the log out ads.
Maybe I just have too many secure personal computers, but who logs out of Facebook?
People who log out of Facebook need to be sharing a computer. So these people are either broke and using a computer at the public library, or they’re kids using their parents’ computer.
Great, the poor and young need more terrible marketing messages thrust at them so they can buy more crap.
Still, even then, who hangs out on the log out screen once they’re logged out?
So, here are my questions: Do you log out of Facebook, and if so, why?
I want to know if these ads are even worth their ones and zeroes.
Yesterday, Facebook bought Instagram.
Instagram is a service that lets you take photos with your smart phone and upload them. For the longest time, it was only on iPhones because they were hipster douches too elitist to make it for Android.
There is some hype around some crappy filters and blingee effects you can add to the photos, but beyond that, it’s a photo uploader.
Oh, and it’s never made a single penny. But, Facebook paid $1 billion for it.
Another reason to love capitalism. You can create a generic idea that’s never made money and sell it for a billion dollars.
Now, someone go offer me a billion dollars for this damn blog. I’ve got cats to feed.
LinkedIn is a total badass of a social network. LinkedIn does one thing and does it well, and tells the other social networks to fuck off.
But LinkedIn is starting to look like a dinosaur. It layout is cluttered and it looks old, like a house from Hoarders.
It’s design has nothing really going for it, or against it. There are a million features no one uses. The only people who have ever used them are “personal branding experts,” and it’s questionable how much they got out of them.
The biggest thing that bugs me about the profile design is it’s more disorganized then five year old’s toy box . Everyone’s profile is like the world’s longest list of self-promotional crap. And if you’ve ever had more than one job, then it goes on forever. And ever. And Ever.
Don’t even get me started about people with a hundred recommendations.
So let’s fix it. LinkedIn, figure out a way to make our information relevant and easily accessible, but without looking like it’s going on forever and ever.
It can be done. Most people’s careers aren’t that interesting. Make things collapsable. Make users prioritize which information is useful to them. Figure it out before we all become inundated with overly long and boring professional profiles.
Otherwise we’ll all look like bunch of digital career hoarders, and I don’t want a TV crew from A&E going through that shit.
YouTube used to be a mecca of user-created cat videos. You’d go there and watch as much stuff as you could before your eyeballs fell out.
It was awesome.
Now, I go on YouTube to watch videos that are only a minute long, and I am subjected to commercials. 30-second commercials. 15 second commercials. Commercials I can skip. Commercials I can’t skip.
What the fuck?
I get that YouTube needs to make money. It takes a shit ton of electricity and energy to run all the servers to deliver all that HD goodness quickly around the world. That stuff doesn’t pay for itself.
But where is the line between convenience and profit? Why am I forced to pay attention to a boring commercial that is almost as long as the video? And why can I skip some commercials, but I’m forced to watch other commercials entirely?
Just make up your damn mind already YouTube. Either make us watch these crappy commercials, or don’t. And whatever you choose, be clear about it to us, the users.
For the love of God, just let us watch our cat videos in peace.
I do a lot of my writing at Starbucks.
Crappy coffee, hipster music, and overly dramatic conversations in public fuel my hatred of all things social media.
But ugh, I am so sick of teenagers at Starbucks.
Teenagers at Starbucks don’t pay attention to one another. They pull out their iPad or their computer and then stare at it, giggle, look at each other, and then continue to giggle obnoxiously while staring at their computer.
It’s like they aren’t even a foot away from each other.
You start wonder what the hell they are doing on their laptop that they couldn’t do at home in front of their parents.
You wonder about their social skills, and how if they can’t talk to heir friend they are sitting right next to, what the hell they will do when they have a job.
What’s even worse is when they are on Skype with each other, wasting the precious bandwidth that is already being eaten alive by the freak show in the corner playing World of Warcraft.
Fuckers.
Look, I’m all about meeting your friends at Starbucks, but when you meet them to stare at your individual laptops, what’s the point? SHouldn’t you just stay home?
Fuck you teenagers. Fuck you for making me worry about the social skills of the future, which look like they are failing miserably in the face of unrelenting technological changes.
Jay Dolan writes The Anti-Social Media, which is the best social media satire on the internet. Ever. Read more
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