Rants

Will the real rockstars please stand up?

Posted by that damn redhead on Aug 5, 2009 in Featured, Music, Rants, Social Media | 12 comments

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!I’ve noticed that these days, the word “rockstar” is thrown about pretty darn freely. There are social media rockstars, rockstar scientists, rockstar entrepreneurs, even rockstar baristas. Essentially, anybody who is popular and good at what they do is anointed the title of “rockstar” by consensus of others in their field. I encounter this in my world of geekery so much that...

Are you creating bad “social currency” on Facebook?

Posted by that damn redhead on Jun 22, 2009 in Rants, Social Media | 10 comments

Courtney Engle pointed me to this awesome video by Scott Stratten of UnMarketing and it was too good not to share. Scott’s talking about bad “social currency” and the annoying stuff people do on Facebook: I can totally empathize. There are many people who say that there’s no wrong way to use social media tools, but I think that’s a bunch of baloney. If you do the things that Scott’s describing, you might not think you’re doing anything...

Social media is not your brand’s “natural male enhancement” pill

Posted by that damn redhead on Jun 11, 2009 in Funny, Rants, Social Media | 2 comments

Remember these commercials? You either loved Smiling Bob or you hated him. I thought these commercials were hilarious at first, but after so many euphemisms for “natural male enhancement” and cheesy double entendres, every time I heard that annoying whistling song and saw Smiling Bob’s unnatural-smiling face, I wanted to reach through my TV screen and punch him in the teeth. However, in a conversation about companies and social media yesterday, Smiling Bob popped (no pun...

Tweeple: Pwease stop tawking wike Tweety Bird

Posted by that damn redhead on May 28, 2009 in Rants, Social Media | 3 comments

Since the advent of Twitter, and especially the ever-increasing popularity of its API, there has been an explosion of third-party applications using “tw-” as a prefix. We can list ourselves and find people by profession on Twellow, measure somebody’s Twinfluence, watch and tweet Twiddeos, and if we have OS X, tweet from our dashboard via Twidget. The list of apps is practically infinite. Of course, just as naturally, I suppose, has our lexicon increasingly been speckled...

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are NOT the Holy Trinity.

Posted by that damn redhead on Apr 20, 2009 in Rants, Social Media | 12 comments

I might be slaughtering a few sacred purple cows here. It seems I can’t go anywhere online to any of my networks without seeing advertisements or invitations for workshops on “How to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for Business.” Join a few groups on LinkedIn and you’ll find announcements for these things all over the country. I’ve been to a couple, and they are very helpful for those that are just dipping their toe in the social media waters. However,...

Please do your homework.

Posted by that damn redhead on Apr 8, 2009 in Rants, Social Media | 5 comments

Would you buy a car from a salesman who didn’t have a drivers’ license? Would you take tennis lessons from somebody who first picked up a racket last week? Would you hire a nanny without first doing a background check? Would you take singing lessons from Marge Simpson? Didn’t think so. So then, why would you pay to take a class on “How to Use Twitter Effectively for Business” by somebody whose Twitter ratio looks like this: ? Whose Twitter stream was only...