In April 2010, custom social network service Ning decided that they were going to start charging and do away with their free service. Beginning August 20, Ning will charge the following for usage of their custom social network platform:

(Features included in each plan are not shown because of space.)

As you can imagine, this decision by Ning caused (and is still causing) quite a stir among users and administrators of such networks.  Even if it’s only $2.95, many administrators of smaller groups are unwilling to pay for it, and many are struggling to find effective Ning alternatives, especially nonprofits and “cause” networks. There’s even a Facebook group dedicated to prevent Ning from doing so.

Well, have no fear, activists — Switzerland-based Amazee is stepping up the plate and offering FREE Ning migration service to their platform.

What is Amazee, you ask?

Though it hasn’t caught on in the United States (yet), it’s a popular custom platform for projects and reaching goals, whether it’s fundraising or non-monetary aspirations. It’s very popular in Europe, South Africa, and elsewhere in the world.

Here’s a quick video Amazee made explaining the benefits of migrating to their platform:

Welcome, Ning refugees! from Amazee on Vimeo.

From Amazee’s blog:

First of all you’ll get a lot of the features on Amazee which you’ve been accustomed to on Ning*: You’ll be able to post blog entries, upload pictures and embed videos, you’ll have your own forums for discussion, and have a good overview over who’s doing what in your group and on the platform.

Next to that we are taking your Ning experience to the max: There is no limit to the number of members a group can have (Ning only allows for 150), there are no limits on storage and bandwidth (Ning only allows you for 1GB and 10 GB respectively), you’ll be able to set up events and have people rsvp directly in your group (this is not possible at all at Ning) and you can add an unlimited number of RSS feeds and content boxes to your group (Ning has 1 and 3 respectively).

Furthermore we allow for maximum online collaboration and promotion by supporting a solid Facebook integration: You can easily recommend your group on Facebook, if you like you can even sign in to Amazee with your Facebook account. And the icing on the cake: You’ll get a reliable and competent community management on top of all that. For free, of course.

I’ve had an account at Amazee for over a year and have been (minimally) involved on this platform with a few projects in South Africa, and absolutely love the functionality of it. There are other Ning alternatives, like GroupSite and Mixxt, but personally, I don’t find the others very conducive to the needs of collaborative activism.  Amazee, on the other hand, was designed for that very purpose.

So if you’ve got a cause-based community on Ning, don’t fret – head on over to Amazee and they’ll make migration easy, painless, and free.

Have you found any other good Ning alternatives? Please share in the comments below if so. Thanks!

Note: I got no form of compensation for writing this post.

I’m clearly in the wrong field.

See, though some may say I’m rather outgoing, the truth is I’m an introvert. Meaning, while being out and around people is nice and all, I can only take so much. I prefer to be by myself (always have), and usually I’m lost in a deep cloud of my own thoughts. I’m highly analytical and have an uncanny ability to remain objective in most situations & not get too caught up in the thick of things.

In other words, I have a very finely tuned bullshit meter.

So when I say “I’m clearly in the wrong field,” I mean that from my observations, I’m not nearly as social as I should be, nor am I able to sit and be spoon fed the latest ideas, buzzwords, and thoughts du jour without throwing up in my mouth. I just can’t surround myself with people beating dead horses, talking more about the tools they beat them with than the strategies they have to do so.

Unlike the majority of the people I see in this “field” of “social media” online and off, I do not want to be in the spotlight. I understand that to some extent I have to be sometimes, but I don’t go out of my way to win contests, speak at conferences, get my mugshot in the pages of Fast Company, the local newspaper, or what have you to talk about my field or what I do.

Why?

Because I understand it’s not about me.

I got into PR initially because I enjoyed shining the light on others. I don’t need to be on center stage; I’m very happy being a “behind the scenes” person. Enter what we now know as “social media,” the ethos of which is to be social online through various media (plural of “medium” — in case you forgot). Then businesses caught wind.

Suddenly everybody’s a “social media consultant/expert/strategist/ninja/guru/swami/etc.,” thinking they can cash in and help businesses navigate the SM waters, experience and track record notwithstanding.

And suddenly, everybody’s clamoring and practically bashing each other in the knees for the spotlight, because hey, everyone wants to be “famous,” right?

It reminds me of the lyrics in that old Counting Crows song, “Mr. Jones”:

We all want to be big big stars, but we got different reasons for that…

The recent “Influencer Project” experiment/stunt by Fast Company has done wonders for vetting the attention whores from those who are are able to call a spade a spade. If anything, this has become loud and clear:

The majority of this field is more social ME-ME-ME-dia than it is about marketing, than it is about PR, than it is about community, than it is about, well, being social for the sake of getting to know other people and helping them.

What ever happened to that?!

I’m not the only person to notice and point certain aspects of the social ME-ME-MEdia phenomenon out. I certainly won’t be the last.

However, it’s enough to make me want to duck out of it all, keep my head down, mouth shut, and nose to the grindstone and just do my job to the best of my ability. Many valuable people in the “scene”/field have done this rather quietly, and I’ve tried to, but I can’t stay silent on this any longer.

Maybe I’m stating the obvious here, maybe I’m not, but it should be pointed out that in everything in life, those who make the most noise are rarely doing much of the real work.

Social media is not about you, your agenda, or your ego, and likewise, it’s not about me. It can live without me. But if you take “me” out,  as the Latin words will tell you, it becomes “social dia,” which translates loosely to “social day,” which I’m not sure makes much sense. Maybe it would mean that hopefully there will be a day people realize that it’s about connecting with people in genuine, meaningful ways, whether that’s as a person or assisting a brand making that connection to create brand loyalists.

Maybe I’m not in the wrong field. Maybe I’ve just kept myself at a far enough distance from the “social” to recognize the ME-ME-MEdia and finally say something.  Either way, we all need to get back to our roots and figure out what exactly it is we’re doing here and why, else more valuable contributors to the space will be lost.

Image by Anyaka.

There’s nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I’m doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don’t remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn’t following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was “trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy” and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we’re connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about “Twitter strategies.” People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I’ve never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you’ll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won’t see the “Read more” thing.)

I don’t have one.

You read that right — I don’t have a Twitter strategy. I think putting that much time and thought into a fun little tool is silly. Note that I am talking about for personal use and not necessarily if you maintain a Twitter account for a business or organization. Even still, there’s only one rule I abide by:

Be yourself.

That’s it.

I have no agenda, I just tweet random stuff that comes out of my brain. I share things I find interesting, whether they’re blog posts, pictures, or LOLcats. Yes, I auto-populate stuff to Twitter, like my FourSquare check-ins and YouTube favorites, and even on the rare occasion that I do update this blog, but overall? I’m just me. I’ll share with you random thoughts, rants things that bug me, I like to point out absurdities and quote things that I overhear. I just find it fun, and have had some great conversations using Twitter and through it have met some incredible people, both online and off. I ReTweet stuff other people have shared if I like it.

How do I decide who/what to follow?

I have a special folder in one of my inboxes that filters all email from Twitter.com into it, so that’s where my new follower notifications go. When I have time, I go through each one, click the person’s name, go to their profile, and take less than three seconds to decide whether or not I’m going to follow them back.

My only criteria for deciding are my answers to these two questions:

1) Does this person seem interesting?

and/or

2) Can I learn something from this person?

That’s it.

I used to make a point to follow a lot of social media/public relations/marketing people, but after a while, the echo-chamber-ness got to be too much. I try to follow fewer of the type of people in my field and more people that have nothing to do with it whatsoever. It’s those people that I find most interesting. Recently I started following some astronauts, some fake (parody) celebrities, some indie bands, a baseball team, some random brands, etc. I want to see how they use the service, and I want to learn something from them. Sometimes, I just want to laugh.

Once in a while, I use a third-party app to mass-unfollow the accounts that have fallen dormant or spammy. Rarely do I unfollow anybody manually. You’ve got to be super spammy or somehow really offend me to get me to unfollow you, and since it’s pretty hard to offend me (I’m pridefully un-PC), that doesn’t happen often.

So there ya go. That’s my “Twitter strategy,” or lack thereof. Now stop thinking so much about the tool and just have fun.

Image by pmarkham.

Between friends getting married, friends passing away, getting used to a new schedule, and just overall life things, you could say I’ve had a lot going on lately. Sometimes, one can only take so much before wanting/needing to pull the plug on some things that cause more noise than signal in life.

The other day, after attending the funeral of a friend, I decided to quit Twitter for a while.

Many didn’t think I could do it. I’ve tried to “take a Twitter hiatus” before, and have only lasted a few days, at most. This time, however, I was pretty sure that I was done spewing <140 character blurts into the ether for a while. I just needed my “Stacy time,” my time to be lost in my own thoughts without the internet bugging me or me bugging it.

I really thought I could do it.

Fat chance.

It didn’t occur to me until after I had posted the above that even when I have no intention of tweeting, I tweet anyway. I’ve integrated so many webby things with my Twitter account that it’s nearly impossible.

Hitting the “Tweet this” button at the top of an interesting blog post or article after reading it has become second nature to me. BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I subscribe to a YouTube channel? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I just “like” a video on YouTube? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I check in somewhere on FourSquare? You got it — BOOM! There’s a tweet.

You get the idea.

Not to mention, that if somebody chooses to retweet (RT) or reply to one of my auto-tweeted tweets, it’s usually appropriate to say something back to them.

Oh sure, I could manually go and remove all of my Twitter connections/integrations on each app, but really, that’s a lot to go though if I’m only planning on a temporary hiatus. Plus, I’d have to re-hook it all back up when I came back.

So I guess I’m stuck tweeting, whether I intend to or not.

I guess I just find it funny — these days, there are still hoards of people trying to figure out HOW to use Twitter and why; meanwhile, I’m so enmeshed in it that I can’t easily quit using Twitter, even if I wanted to.

Has anybody else had this problem?!

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo about Facebook’s privacy settings lately.  Facebook, which started as a network where people could share their information privately, has loosened their privacy options/settings/system/whatever over the past few years to be everything but private.

Yada, yada, yada . . . I’ve done enough research about this to make my head spin.

However, when it all comes down to it, I’m not sure if the public is freaking out about privacy settings as much as the media says it is.

Regardless, whether we agree with Facebook’s ethics (or lack thereof) in this situation, there’s only one rule you need to know when it comes to online privacy, and this is the rule that I live by:

Don’t put anything online you wouldn’t want your mom to see.

Period.

It’s common sense, people. The internet is a very public place. Clamp down on privacy settings all you want, but if you have stuff online that you would rather your mom not see, you probably shouldn’t have put it there in the first place.

Now, I know there are situations where people will upload not-so-flattering pictures of you and tag you on Facebook. Guess what? You have the option to not let people see tagged photos and videos of you. Look in the privacy settings. Guess what else? You can also remove tags. These were always options, even way before the recent Facebook privacy debacle.

No, this doesn’t mean that incriminating stuff of you won’t be seen by others, there are always the friends of the people that uploaded it in the first place, but still — you’ve got a better chance of covering your own hide this way than fussing over what Facebook is deciding to do with your information this week.

Are there some embarrassing pics on Facebook of me that I didn’t upload? You betcha. But my mom is my friend on Facebook, and she can’t see them. Nor can my dentist, my former college professor, or Jerrod Niemann. There’s nothing my mom can’t see that anybody else can.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t comment things like “Please don’t get any more tattoos…” when I post pictures of my friends’ new tattoos, but hey . . . shes my mom! She’s supposed to be worried about that kind of stuff! (And since a good friend of mine owns a tattoo parlor, she’s got every reason to.)

So I’m wondering, are you freaking out about Facebook’s privacy flip-flopping lately? Why or why not? Or is this being overblown by the media?

. . . or “The post in which I really date myself.”

Gather ’round, kids, Grandma’s got a story to tell. Get comfy …

So I’ve been in a funk lately, as you may or may not have gotten from recent posts and encounters with me in person (or lack thereof). Common wisdom says that if you’re in a funk, a change of scenery will always do you some good. Saturday I found myself with a bit of cabin fever and some time on my hands so I did what any self-respecting redhead in a funk would do — I took a road trip.

Totally on a whim, I pinged a long-time online friend of mine, Lindsay M. Allen, who just moved from Mt. Pleasant to Midland for a job. Lindsay and I had been meaning to meet for a very long time and that day seemed as good a time as any. In a direct message via Twitter, I said, “I’m feeling spontaneous & need to get out of the house. whaddya doin’ today? I’ll come up & meet ya for coffee …”

Within an hour I was on the road, embarking on an 80 mile mini-road trip to Frankenmuth (sort of midway between us) to meet my online friend for the first time in person and have pizza.

The spontaneity was refreshing, as was the feeling I had when I got off the expressway and had to drive through the country to reach my destination. Wide open spaces of cornfields sprinkled with red barns hither and yon, this country girl felt right at home. I had almost forgotten that just driving around in the country was one of my favorite things to do.

Meeting Lindsay was great. We had lots of fun having conversation over pizza and amazing dessert, and walking around what is arguably the most touristy town in Michigan.

On my drive home, I couldn’t help but think about how much things have changed in our culture the past dozen years or so, especially with the maturation of the internet. These days meeting someone in person that you met online first is no big deal. We do it all the time, and with careful planning. We organize events on Facebook, have tweetups, sometimes sell tickets on EventBrite, give everything a hashtag, etc. and it’s all organized. Today, this is called “social networking,” and the organization of it has made it rather mundane (for me, anyway).

I remember when it wasn’t always that way.

That reminds me of back in St. Olaf . . .

A dozen years ago, it was hardly this organized or widely accepted. A dozen years ago, to meet up with somebody you had only interacted with online was usually called “Are out of your goddamn mind?!” That was back when people on “the other side of the computer” were all assumed to be axe murderers and child molesters.

Yet, a dozen years ago, I did it anyway.

In 1998ish I made many friends online through Yahoo Groups, BBSing, chat/IRC, AIM, and good ol’ fashioned email. Usually the common thread we all shared was a favorite musician or band. From there, other common threads were found and friendships were formed. I would fly (or drive) out to the Washington D.C. area many times to hang out with my friends, go to concerts, and even have road trips, some more spontaneous than others. It was not uncommon for me to have a few days off and just hop in my car and drive 12 hours to Baltimore for a concert and a gathering with my friends just because I missed them, and because they were just as crazy as I was.

This was “social media” before social media as you now know it.

We didn’t have the convenience of Twitter and Facebook – if we wanted to organize something, it was all done through email lists and IM correspondence. There was no such thing as a hashtag, no such thing as a blog (although LiveJournal was just around the corner), and we actually talked on our phones to each other, because texting didn’t exist. Even having a cell phone was more of a luxury than a necessity, and those that had them had to carry them in bags. Without the convenience of the social networking tools we have these days, we were able to coordinate and meet up via our available technology, have plenty of road trips, parties, good times at concerts, and form long-lasting friendships, many of which we still maintain today, twelve years later.

Were we crazy, perhaps naive by doing all this back then, or were we early pioneers in social media/networking?

Yes.

In many ways, I think it was more social that way. We didn’t call our methods of communication “social media,” nor did we make much of a big deal about it. It was just the way we communicated. We called our gatherings “gatherings” and “parties” and “concerts” and “road trips” — because that’s exactly what they were. There was no need for sponsors or anything fancy — it was just what we did. And we had a blast. (I still have at least one book about those days to publish — I’ve still got the manuscripts.)

Had we known then, that a handful of years later, this would evolve into a big movement called the “social media revolution” to emphasize communication over the internet and forming relationships, doing business through the internet via those relationships, and events would be organized through the internet to celebrate that we did these things, complete with sponsors and labels (hashtags) for each one — we’d have laughed our asses off at the absurdity.

Now that I think about it, I kinda do.

My pioneering social media days further validate that if you’re really out to “form relationships” in this digital space, your tools really do not matter. People will always be social, using whichever tools/media available as only a means to an end.

And you know what? Most of my best memories, best friends, and most amazing adventures back then were the product of not really planning or organizing online at all — I just got up and went.  Much like what I did on Saturday when I drove 80 miles to meet Lindsay.

That night I stumbled upon a series called “Remember Who You Are” that cartoonist and author Hugh MacLeod is running with a bunch of guest bloggers. “Remember Who You Are” is his new theme, and each post I read struck a resonating chord.

I couldn’t have found this series at a better time.

What I did that day — spontaneously going on a road trip to meet an online friend, no planning at all — helped me remember who I am. I’m a dozen years older now but I’m still that random redhead that doesn’t think twice about a spur-of-the-moment road trip, that loves driving in the country with the windows down and the radio up, that loves live music and will drive to the ends of the earth to see a good show.

I’m still that damn redhead that maintains close friendships she made twelve years ago by having the audacity to to meet people via a strange medium called “the internet,” that while strange, scary, and unfamiliar to most, was simply the way she communicated with people then, just as it is now.

… and I still think that people make way too big of a deal about it.

In the meandering, ever-changing saga that is Facebook’s user experience, once again the mammoth social network made some abrupt changes without warning to its community.

On April 1st, Facebook changed their rules again and unleashed “community pages,” in an asinine attempt to “simplify” the already confusing issue of Pages vs. Groups.

This was not an April Fool’s joke, either.

The goal of this new “feature” is to weed out the unofficial brand pages from all the “official” ones on the network, and retain fan pages specifically for businesses, brands, public figures and official spokespeople for any of them. For example, if one wanted to make a page for a random cause or to make a statement, it would fall into the “community pages” category. Once the community page hit a certain amount of users, Facebook would hand admin privileges over to the community, thus creating a Wiki-like platform.

In every past instance of Facebook making big changes, users have protested within the network by creating hundreds of “Bring Back the Old Facebook” groups and even a few pages. However, this time there appears to be very little protesting in the social network by the addition of “community pages.”

Not because users don’t want to, but because they can’t figure out how.

“I don’t like it at all. I wish they’d bring back the old Facebook, and so do all my friends,” said Sarah Jones, a die-hard “Bring Back the Old Facebook” online protester who admins several groups. “I’d start another protest on Facebook but I can’t figure out if I should make a page, a group, or now one of these new community pages!”

Others are more suspicious of Facebook’s motives.

“I think it’s a conspiracy, Facebook is trying to confuse us so that we can’t protest all the change,” said one Facebook user and avid Obama supporter who declined to be named.

Indeed, as of this writing there are a few anti-community pages fan pages, but none have any more than three fans.

To make matters worse, Facebook also decided they are soon going to replace the “Become a Fan” button on fan pages with a “Like” button, citing better conversion on the “Like” feature within the network and increasing engagement without implication of commitment.

“I’m not a fan of removing the ‘become a fan’ button, and I don’t like the idea of just having a ‘Like’ button. Would fan pages become ‘Like’ pages?” asked one concerned Facebook protester, “I was going to make an anti-Like Button page but it wouldn’t even have ‘fans’ anyway… now I can’t figure out if it should be an anti-Like button group or page or community page to protest removing the ‘become a fan’ button AND the addition of the community pages!”

Many users have said they’re giving up and going back to MySpace, but are wary, as they got lost on the way to Facebook the last time.

It is uncertain what Facebook will decide to change next, but one thing is certain: They’ve finally found a way to quiet all the noise of whiny protesters within their network.

Image via Blackrage.org.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.  You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.  ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 17

I’ve been noticing something on Facebook lately that absolutely irks me – regular people who are neither celebrities, nor an otherwise public figure, are deciding they need fan pages. I don’t understand why, and I finally tweeted about it last night after I had had enough.

I got a lot of interesting conversation out of it, mainly with Juanita Chronowski, who maintains a fan page for her writing as a way to separate the personal from the professional. OK, that I can understand. Ari Herzog does the same thing. But people who are NOT public figures in any way, shape, or form? Unless somebody else made the page out of appreciation or as a joke – my friend Jen had it right when she said, “that’s flippin’ weird.

Facebook allows personal profiles up to 5,000 friends, and if you actually have more than 5,000 friends then perhaps you do need one. Perhaps you are somewhat of a public figure, and if that is the case, then go ahead and make yourself one.

Call me a purist, folks, but if you are not famous except in your own mind, YOU DO NOT NEED A FAN PAGE. Regular people having a fan page for themselves screams of an ego problem and “look how self-important I am!” — and frankly, makes me question why I would be friends with that person in the first place.

I’m tired of regular people thinking they’re special, unique snowflakes and deserve their own fan page just to boost their own egos. Non-public figure fan pages cheapens the value of fan pages for those who actually are public figures. Don’t believe me? Fan my cat. She’s more of a celebrity than most of these conceited people.

What do you think? Am I wrong here? Am I missing something? Is there a reason regular people who have not exceeded the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook and are NOT public figures should have their own fan pages? This is such a turnoff!

[If you know me in person, chances are you've heard this before, but I'm at the point now where I feel it just needs to be written down.]

I hate the term “social media.” Really, I do. Why? Because it’s too hard to define. I’m definitely not the first person to blog about this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. But here’s the truth:

All media is social media.

Media, at its very ethos, is social. Cavemen didn’t paint cave paintings and not talk about them. Egyptians didn’t carve hieroglyphics just because they were pretty pictures — they told stories. Radio never really was one-way — it encouraged interaction with people calling in. TV may seem one-way but do people not sit around the TV and watch it together? Do people not talk about their favorite shows with each other?

All media always has, and always will, encourage social interaction. Whether it’s immediate as what we understand “social media” to be nowadays or not is a different story.

The only difference between “traditional” media and “social” media is that “social media” makes two-way (or one-to-many, or many-to-many) communication a helluva lot faster. And let’s just face it – this is simply the way the world communicates now.

However, like those folks I linked above, I understand that there is no one, true definition of “social media,” and that alone is a problem, illustrated by a story a few friends of mine relayed to me recently:

A colleague of ours, a rather big name in the “social media world” and a bigwig at a rather large, world-famous company, was to speak about social media at a local event. I did not attend said event, but my colleagues did, because they wanted to hear what he had to say about how he’s used “social media” in/for his company. Based on the questions from the audience, however, it became more of a Twitter 101 class, and my colleagues admitted they were a little embarrassed for him. This was not a marketing fail, as the event was promoted appropriately. Or was it?

My colleagues’ definition of social media was and is much more complex than that of the audience. They were expecting how this guy applied “social media” for marketing/PR purposes. The audience was apparently expecting how to use a tool or two, which is a lot different.

Social media is the new smurf.

Smurfs used the word “smurf” for just about anything, and it was understood without question. Or they used it when they couldn’t think of any other word for something, which is where we are now with “social media.” Hell, any kind of interaction via the internet or mobile now can be considered “social media,” and I can’t believe that for a society as chatty and as articulate as we are, we can’t think of any other words for what the heck we’re talking about.

We need to expand our vernacular.

I was taught that you shouldn’t complain about something without proposing a solution, but honestly? I don’t have one. What I do know is that the more we use “social media” as a term for just about any kind of communication these days, the more confused people get, and the more smurfy things become. I like to be more specific when I speak of expedited communication through ever-changing technology, but I realize that sometimes it’s easier smurfed than smurfed. I know that many times, I still go over peoples’ smurfs and they still don’t smurf what I’m smurfing about, even when I think I’m smurfing on their level.

So what do you smurf? Is “social media” too smurfy these days? Should we be more specific and throw that term out the smurf? Or is it fine and smurfy? Leave your smurfs in the smurfs.

I can’t believe I almost forgot it was Festivus today. I was reminded by Rico Thomas Rico, who posted his airing of grievances on his blog. Knowing I’m long overdue for a blog post, I’m following his lead and now posting my 2009 Airing of Grievances. Enjoy!

Dissappointing me this year in the world of social media were …

1) Auto-dmers. People on twitter who automatically follow you with a direct message when you follow them. A very amateur move. Especially disconcerting when said person claims to be a social media marketer, or even worse if it’s a “Thanks for following, click my junk!” type of DM.  You people should not be allowed online.

2) People who claim they won’t join Facebook “because they don’t want everybody to know all their business.” Grr … that’s what the privacy settings are for, idiots.

3) On that note, people who over-protect their stuff on Facebook so much that they appear as a faceless “Facebook user” when commenting, and refuse to share ANYTHING. OK, seriously? I’m all about the privacy settings but if you think you have THAT MUCH to hide, that’s called paranoia and there’s medication for that.

4) People who claim to work “in social media” but then say they can’t stand gossip. I got news for you — gossip fuels social media. In a very big way, social media IS gossip. Can’t handle the heat? Get the hell outta the kitchen.

5) Places that start their e-newsletters that I receive with “Dear Communicator” - I have a name, and if YOU were a communicator, you’d know that. You’d also know the %name% function in your email client to insert it so that it wouldn’t sound so generic.

6) People who say they “do” social media as their job. Do you say you “do” the copy machine? Do you “do” the phone? Do you “do” a word processor? No, those are tools you use in order to do your job. Use it as a means, not an end.

7) People who assume I’m a graphics designer just because they hear that what I do has something to do with the internet. I don’t know how many times I hear “I know a guy who needs a graphics designer, I referred him to you…” That’s great, but I’m admittedly artistically retarded. I’ll have to give them a referral to one of the 1000000000000000 graphics/web designers I DO know.

8 ) All these “life coaches” who insist on following me on Twitter. What — you couldn’t figure out what to do with your life so you decided to tell people how to live theirs? For real — go away.

9) Those who do not question “thought leaders.” There’s a term for you that’s not as nice as “thought follower,” it’s “sheep.” See this post.

10) SEO people, especially those who feel the need to put “SEO” after their name. OK, here’s a newsflash — SEO is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Having said that, if you are in the Cult of SEO (a.k.a. those who believe you have to be in some kind of secret society and know some kind of secret handshake in order to get SEO), YOU DO NOT NEED TO PUT SEO AFTER YOUR NAME. SEO is NOT a PhD. You do not need a doctorate degree to figure it out, and if your name is “John Jones, SEO” on LinkedIN or Twitter, it does not make you look credible, it makes you look like a douchebag.

Disappointing me this year in the rest of the world were …

1) Whoever took Randa Jawhari. This person is actually at the TOP of my list. My hometown of Fenton has a hole in it because she has been missing since February 2009. It won’t be filled until she’s found. Please give her back.

2) Traffic weavers. I hate you. You people are DANGEROUS. And you know what? Danica Patrick does it a helluva lot better than you. And she’s much better looking.

3) The people who live above me. I haven’t lived here for long but I’m convinced they think their living room is a mosh pit.

4) Kanye West. Do I have to even explain why?

5) People who toss cigarette butts out car windows. Dude, if you absolutely HAVE to pollute your lungs, don’t pollute the planet, too.

6) That guy who warns everybody about being “that guy” but doesn’t realize that HE IS THAT GUY. You know that guy.

7) Ghost bloggers/writers. Pardon me for being a purist, but I find it highly ironic that the very things that would get someone expelled from college (plagiarism) are common practice in the professional world today. That’s nothing but B.S.

So there we go. My airing of grievances for 2009. There’s no doubt in my mind that I have more, but these are the ones off the top of my head. Now I ask you — what are YOUR 2009 Festivus grievances? Leave ‘em in the comments.