Spike Jones at Brains on Fire has been one of my favorite bloggers for years. Today, he posted a post to beat all posts. Here’s how it starts:
Noise. Noise. Noise. You should be on Facebook. You should be on Twitter. Noise. Noise. Noise. Make a viral video. We should blog. Noise. Noise. Noise.
Leave it to the advertisers – and those with the old ad model thinking – to take social media and push out messages. It’s becoming a “listen to me” model. A contest for attention. A numbers game.
In other words, it’s the same old shit. People and companies pimping themselves with no end in site. Here’s one in a multitude of examples (and one person’s not unexpected response to it):
Another of my favorite writers, Grant McCracken, saw a wonderful presentation by Faris Yakob at the BrainJuicer event in NYC, where Yakob noted that some people now groan when the term “Twitter” comes up in conversation.
I know I groan when people around me keep referring to Facebook and what they saw or did there. If I wanted to know that information, I’d look to Facebook for it. I also cringe when I hear people debate whether they ought to accept a friend request. It’s okay to say no, people. Seriously.
I think that twitter, facebook, and the like can be very useful in a myriad of ways. However, when the ad companies and wanna be ad companies just push content over quality it can dilute the more useful and entertaining aspects of social networking.
Amen, brother Burn. And the fact that I’m one of your favorite bloggers in indeed humbling.
In reference to SM, I’m gettting fed up. And I think I know why. Looking over my friends list on FB and my follwers/follwing list on Twitter, it’s just a whole bunch of marketers talking to marketers. I need to get rid of all of them and follow REAL people. Then we can start to unlock all the potential there.
Or not. Whatever.
1.) Use Tweetdeck if you have the RAM in your machine. Changes everything.
2.) There are actually people out there using this stuff for interesting things. But people follow others just because they have a lot of followers and not because they are actually interesting. How do you get a lot of followers often? You tweet a lot to a lot of people. So it becomes noise. I routinely unfollow people. It’s awesome.
Saying social media is noise is like saying cell phone conversations are just noise. Quit listening to boring people and it will change everything.