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One of those social media buzzwords I hate it authenticity.  Your tweets need to be authentic.  Your Facebook page needs to be authentic.  Your authenticity needs to be authentic or your audience won’t believe you.

I have strong beliefs of what certain people should do with their online identities, how they craft them, and then continue to use them.  I’ve written previously about why I hate your politics, your awkward foursquare check-ins, or a number of other internet faux pas.  All of these things add to what makes up what everyone thinks of you online, and often, people

As much as I can hate some of these things, I realize they are what add up to what makes a person unique.  If you don’t do them too often, and they are balanced into your regular flow, I see the snippets of a person.  Without the mistakes and madness, you become a robot, the unfeeling automaton of a company pushing its marketing agenda.

Odder still, what is authentic to you may not be authentic to me.  I can think the ABC’s company’s Facebook is stiff and dull, and impersonal, while you can think it’s the greatest thing.  I can think your tweets are awesome, but my friend might hate them.

How you use social media is the right way to use it.  It’s not all about tweeting one way, or using Yelp to rate every time you eat out. You are authentic, regardless of what other people think of what you post online.  They can judge what they see, but in the end its all one opinion versus another.

Create what is unique to you.  Create what you want to see.  Every piece of social media is a tool.  What you do with the tools is up to you.

Sex Diseases Soaring Due to Facebook Romps:

If sitting and staring at Facebook all day wasn’t enough of a threat to your health, now you can apparently get sex diseases from it.

Social media is already a disease in some ways.  It touches everyone.  It won’t stop spreading.  And now it leaves unsightly warts that you have to explain for the rest of your life.

I thought checking into strip clubs on Foursquare was dangerous.  Today is the last time I log into Facebook without wearing a condom.

I have a lot of friends on Foursquare.  It could be the people I hang out with, but we’re all there, sharing where we’re going and who we’re with and what we are doing.

Sometimes, it gets out of hand though.

Recently, my friends have been more outlandish with where they are checking in.  I’m not naming any names, but I’ve started seeing people checking into tattoo parlors, strip clubs, and places for personal grooming.  While I am glad to know I am not the only one with a hairy seedy underbelly to my life, I don’t see the point of sharing this stuff with the entire world.  I don’t need to know when you are adding a tramp stamp, paying to see some young ladies tramp stamp, or removing the hair off your tramp stamp.  If you’re a social media professional, you should know better, and I’m sure your clients don’t need to know that either.

What purpose does checking into places like these add besides making me feel better about my life?  The line between sharing over-sharing has always existed online; we now can find out where your kinky fancy strikes.

Given these incidents, here is my rule for FourSquare:  If I can tell Mom I went there without feeling embarrassed, I will check in there.

Let’s all try and follow that rule.  Don’t disappoint my Mom, and stop creeping me out.

There was a time when social media was fun.  You’d get on Facebook, and reconnect with old friends, catch up with the new ones, and laugh and learn.  Or maybe you’d jump on Twitter to see what your friends were up to, and what was going on in the neighborhood.  It was easy!  It’s fun!

Then, it starts taking over.  You have to check it several times a day because there’s drama between your two friends.  You have to tweet about something that just happened, only it’s really only funny to you.  You need to keep your LinkedIn profile current and relevant.  Your phone needs to be smart so you can see all the goings on, all the time, and you spend more time tweeting and commenting and liking.

The good news?  None of this is true.

Unless it’s your job (and if you’re here, it might be), you don’t need to spend every waking moment finding something interesting to tweet.  If you miss a few Facebook posts, they will still be there for you to see when you get near a computer.  As long as your cell phone make calls and texts, it can connect with most of these services in ways you can update it if absolutely necessary.

Still, it takes time to go through these services.  Surveys say people spend 55 minutes on Facebook A DAY.  That’s nearly an hour of your life, on one website, each day.  If you did that, by the end of the month you’re spending a whole day of your life each month on Facebook.  Now add time for Youtube, Google Buzz, Twitter, and whatever other network strikes your fancy.

You hold the power to make it easy or hard.  You control whether you are sacrificing face time with real people, or are hardwired into your iPhone.  Don’t make social media your entire life.  Make social media work to be a part of your life.

So, I’m following my Facebook and Twitter streams right now as a lot of people are talking about Health Care Reform.  It’s even more insane than watching C-SPAN during the debate.

You want to share your opinion. I get that. I also get you want to influence people to your political side.  That’s what politics are about.  You want to win friends and influence people so you can run things your way.

What I don’t get is your overdramatic language.  It’s easy to pack a lot of implied sentiment in 140 characters or one status update.  It turns off me, and I bet it turns off a lot of your other followers.

Everyone gets to share their opinion online, but all the screaming and madness in your text just puts you in my cone of ignorance, the place where I don’t real what you say.  If you are any kind of professional, this is very bad.  If I’m ignoring you, I’m likely to unfollow you, and thus disregard whatever professional opinions you have or whatever you might be trying to market or sell to me.

That’s not to say you can’t have emotions and strong opinions. Nobody wants to see robots taking over their social networks or bland, emotionless interactions.  Rather, I don’t want to see you spew out things like “Today is the day America died.” or “That’ll show the Tea Party Klan!”  You cross the line from opinion into ideology.

We go onto social networks to make connections, share ideas, and learn from one another.  There’s enough rhetoric in every media source.  If you start sharing it, I’m going to start ignoring you.

Twatter (AGAIN):

This is another service called Twatter. Unfortunately, this is not a real service.  It’s just a fake log in that makes fun of Twitter.

If you get tempted to go onto Twitter, consider going to this page instead of logging into Twitter.  It will frustrate you and force you to go be productive.

Twatter:

Twatter calls itself “The Anti-Social Network.” I don’t know if it’s the little flames in the background, or the tiny devil horns on the “a” of Twatter, but it attracts me like an angry Geocities website.  It only seems Anti-Social because it’s awkward and no one knows exactly what to do with it.

The premise of the site is exactly like Twitter.  You get 140 characters, and you can put whatever you want into that message.  See why it’s not that appealing?

Consider using Twatter as a way of killing off your Twitter feed for Social Network Purging Day.  It’s the exact same service without the possibility for useful content coming your way.

The other day I was browsing around Youtube while watching a bunch of completely random videos.  I found this guy, Skyy John who had a series of really awkward videos that had a seemingly disproportionate number of views versus what actual content what was in the video.  In my search to find out what made him popular*, I visited his site to see what he was about.

I was browsing the page when I saw the link at the bottom reading Sign my Guestbook!

Seriously?  A guestbook?  In 2010?!

Keep in mind, Skyy John’s website is a blog with comments.  Additionally, all his content is on Youtube, with comments enabled. He also uses Twitter and Facebook.  This guestbook says to all his visitors “I can’t bother to check comments on all these other services, why should I check this?” That mentality shows.  He only has one post in the guestbook, and that post is sadder than his grumpy gray site.

The guestbook used to be relevant online.  For a long time, web pages were static, you couldn’t easily set up commenting abilities on individual pages like we do now with blog posts.  Guestbooks offered the ability for you to go to a site and say “Hey I think you’re cool. Check me out.”  Then you could post a link to your site and hope people would check your content out.  Also, even if they didn’t post a link, you could get an idea of what kind of people were visiting your website and why.

Now, all the major blogging services have built in comments, or you can easily add comments with a service like Disqus.  You can leave relevant information on the page it relates to, rather than outsourcing it to the guestbook.  And any webmaster worth his or her salt can set up basic analytics software to figure out who is coming to the site and for what content.  There’s no practical reason to use a guestbook.

With all this in mind, a guestbook looks outdated on your site.  It shows you can’t keep up with the times online.  If nothing else, you have to stay ahead of the social media curve to look cool, let alone stay relevant and communicate with your real friends.

*I eventually realized all his videos are popular because they are about sex and sex and the internet have been hand in hand since the internet was born.