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The Passing of Dooce, and Why Social Media Has Failed Us All

If you joined social media in its early days, say 2005-2009 or so, there’s certain words and phrases that will resonate with you, that others who started using social media later just don’t understand.  Such as:

  • Friendfeed
  • Technorati
  • The Summer of Plurk
  • Fail Whale
  • Dooce (also “You’ve been Dooced!”)

Dooce is the online name for Heather Armstrong. Heather was one of the first ‘mommy bloggers’ and for a period of time around 2008 or 2009, she was likely the most popular blogger on the planet.

Earlier this month, Heather passed away. According to her boyfriend, the cause of death was suicide.  Heather was 47 years old.

I wasn’t a regular Dooce reader. But you didn’t have to be to immediately see that Heather had a very acidic wit. She had personality, she had flair. She could write in a way that captivated the attention of her readers. And she cussed a lot.  It seems pretty obvious that she was using her blog as a way to attempt to cope with the issues she was facing in her everyday life. I think all bloggers do this to some degree. She bared her struggles and triumphs for all to see, and that generated a lot of attention for her, a lot of fans, and a lot of success.

And with success in social media, comes criticism. The AP article I linked to about Heather’s death doesn’t specifically state this, but it heavily implies that the hate she received over the success of her Dooce site contributed to her issues. It’s an insanely weird thing to see people that have no idea who you are, criticizing you. Leveling personal attacks at you.  Based on nothing more than simple jealousy.

When I announced I was writing Think Like a Rock Star back in early 2012, the amount of criticism I got for simply announcing I was writing a book was stunning to me. I suddenly had industry peers attacking me. I wasn’t qualified to write a book, I was copying my idea from another author. I had one industry guy I was following specifically tell someone on Twitter to NOT buy my book, that I wasn’t qualified to write on the topic. My first thought was ‘Buddy, you have no earthly idea what you are talking about.  You have no idea what clients I have now, which ones I’ve already worked with or what work I’ve done for them.”

And he didn’t. All he knew was that I was writing a book, and that made him jealous cause he didn’t have one.

I’ve watched this same scenario play out countless times on social media over the last 18 years with countless people. When you are building your network, there will always come a tipping point at which you suddenly become ‘big’ enough to attract detractors.  These people reach a point where they have achieved more success than they should have.  Now they are open to criticism.  Because someone decided that they didn’t ‘deserve’ that much success, and that opens them to criticism.  From strangers that have no idea what they are talking about.

The AP article above says that Dooce.com had 8 million monthly viewers at its peak. I can only imagine the amount of criticism and attacks she would have to endure from strangers, at that volume.

From strangers. Anonymously.  On the internet.

I started blogging in 2005. What really attracted me to blogging from the start was the idea that blogging gives everyone a voice. If you have a blog, then you have a way to share your voice with the world.  When I first started blogging, every day I would track new links using Technorati (see the list at the start of the post). One day in late 2005, I saw a link from what appeared to be a Chinese site. I did some investigating, and the link was coming from a 13 year-old girl in China that had linked to my blog from hers. That alone opened my eyes to the potential of blogging. That people of all ages, locations, and backgrounds, all around the world, could connect and engage and share ideas and build friendships.

At least, that was the promise of blogging and social media. But over the years, I saw that promise increasingly give way to a reality of spite, anger, trolls and harassment. Strangers attacking other strangers just because they could.

We never fully realized that promise of blogging and social media as a way to bring the world closer together, to support each other. In fact, we missed that mark so badly that many people now question if we would have been better off if we never had social media.

But social media didn’t cause this, we did. Blogs and social media are just the tools we used to be bitter and jealous towards each other. Ironically, as I am writing this, a friend has PMed me on Facebook about an instance of them being attacked on FB because of their opinions.

We are better than this. I made a mistake in the title of this post, social media didn’t fail us.

We failed each other.

Goodbye, Heather. You are one of the pioneers of blogging and social media, and you opened doors for many more who came after you. I’m sorry for criticism you had to deal with, but I would like to think that you were aware of the impact you had on this space.

There will never be another Heather Armstrong. But right now, there is a blogger who is about to get her big break. Maybe she’s about to get her first sponsor, or her first job due to her blog, or maybe her first book deal.

When that happens, let’s be happy for her. Let’s assume she deserves it, and let’s not give in to any jealousy we might want to entertain. Instead, let’s cheer her on, and let’s try to learn from her and apply it to our own efforts.

Because with any luck, we might be the next blogger that makes it big. And when success arrives, let’s hope kindness and congratulations accompanies it.

Because we deserve it. And we deserve to be the person who is good enough to treat others as we would want to be treated.

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Your Mindset is Everything: The One Mistake I’ve Made That’s Held Me Back For 15 Years

I want to talk about two people, both facing the same challenge in their personal and professional lives.

The first is a friend of mine who I’ve known and worked with for years. We talk often, and almost every time we do, she complains about her job. Most of her complaints are about how her employer can’t seem to get out of its own way. Unforced errors, inefficient management, constant pressure to hit quarterly deadlines. She laments that the company seems to have no long-term strategy in place. She often makes suggestions to her boss and other executives for how the company can turn things around and begin to grow.

Her suggestions are either blown off, or she’s told that the company needs to get on better footing before it thinks about making ‘big’ changes. Every time I talk to her, she laments ‘I really don’t know if I will still have this job in a year’. She worries about the future of the company.

I ask her why she doesn’t consider another job? She is far too qualified to be in such an unhappy role, and her current employer clearly doesn’t appreciate her talents, or know how to leverage them within the company. She always says she doesn’t want to ‘start over’, and she hopes the company will figure out what it needs to do to turn things around.

My friend and her employer are both stuck with a survive mindset. The company doesn’t want to plan for the future, the CEO and her bosses just want to make it through this year. Then when things start to improve, then they can consider making changes

At the same time, my friend is also focused on a survive mindset. She’s unhappy at her job and knows she can do so much more. But at the same time, she doesn’t want to look for another job.  Maybe she fears the process or landing in an even worse position.

When you’re only focused on the short-term, whether you realize it or not, you are simply surviving.

Here’s another example. I have a wonderful network of professional friends that I lean on for support and guidance. I talk to them often about what I’m working on, what I’m focusing on, and where I want to go.

All of them always ask me when I am going to write another book, and when I am going to start podcasting again. I always tell them I appreciate them asking, but I can’t focus on those things right now. Both would take too long to show results, I have to focus on what will work right now.

Without realizing it, I was also adopting a survive mentality. I always dismiss the idea of writing another book or restarting my podcast, simply because those efforts would take months to bear fruit. I need results today! I need income today!

Recently, I did a little exercise. I thought of a number, an amount I’d like to make over the next year from my business. It was a BIG number.  And I asked myself ‘What would I need to do in order to hit that number?”

And I started brainstorming internally, and one of the first thoughts I had was ‘Well I would need to write another book, and I’d probably need to start podcasting again.”  Without thinking, I went straight to doing the same things that my friends had been pushing me to do.

The light bulb went off. I had been sabotaging my own ability to thrive, by adopting a survive mentality. I was focusing on just getting through this month.  Then next month do it again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I was focusing on getting immediate results, anything that wouldn’t see results for a few months, or longer, was being put on the backburner.

And I’m sure my friends could sense this, that’s why they kept suggesting I do things like write another book, or start podcasting. Because they wanted to see me THRIVE!

 

What’s the Difference Between Surviving and Thriving?

Surviving is what happens this month or this quarter.

Thriving is what happens 5 years from now.

 

Recently, I finally had a chance to read Simon Sinek’s wonderful book Start With Why. In Chapter 6, he talks about the turnaround at Continental Airlines that happened under CEO Gordon Bethune in the 90s. Prior to Bethune’s arrival, the entire working environment at Continental was very toxic. The employees were always stressed and in bad moods, and they treated the customers poorly as a result.  I thought this quote from page 84 really resonates with the Survive vs Thrive mentality:

Some would argue that the reason Continental’s culture was so poisonous was that the company was struggling. They would tell you that it’s hard for executives to focus on anything other than survival when a company is facing hard times. “Once we get profitable again,” the logic went, “then we will take a look at everything else.”

How many of you have heard this at your own company? How many of you have heard it in your own household?

Focusing on today isn’t how you create a happy tomorrow.

And let’s be honest, focusing solely on the present, always adopting a survive mindset, is exhausting. It beats you down, it can steal your hope and your happiness.

But just shifting to a thrive mindset, empowers you. Suddenly you are filled with hope, you have a sense of control over your personal and professional life.

When I wrote that BIG number down, my first thought was to revert back to a survive mindset.

“That number’s too big!”

“There’s no way I could hit that!”

“Let’s be reasonable!”

I told myself. Then I calmed down and thought ‘But what if I could? What would need to happen in order to hit that number? What changes would I need to make?”

Before I knew it, I had a long list of things I could do to hit that BIG number.

Suddenly, that unreasonable number that I could never reach…looked possible. Just sketching out a rough plan made it seem more…real.

It was empowering, I must say.

Think about your job. Hopefully, you love your job and look forward to going to work everyday and changing lives for the better. But for those of you that are dis-satisfied with your job, like my friend above, what needs to change?

Do you need a bigger salary? Do you need to perform different tasks that take better advantage of your skills? Do you need more time off?

Think about what YOU want from your job, then list out what would need to happen in order to make your wants become reality. For instance, maybe you wish you were making 30% more. Ok, then how would you get there? Maybe it’s something as easy as switching jobs if you are underpaid. Or maybe you would need to get a promotion to make 30% more. In that case, think about the changes you would need to make to justify the promotion. Maybe you need to learn new skills, or maybe you need to gain a new certification, etc.

Before you know it, you have a plan in place, and can go to your boss and ask for additional training that can improve your skills.

It’s so empowering! But it starts with accepting you are settling for just surviving, when you really want to thrive. Once you shift your mindset to thrive, then you want so much more for your life, and you become excited about planning out how to achieve more.

When your friends ask you why you don’t apply for a better job or why you don’t pursue this or accomplish that, understand that they are pushing you to thrive. They can see that you are stuck surviving, when you could do so much more. Surround yourself with a support group that pushes you to thrive!

If this last year has taught us anything, it should be that life is too short to be miserable. We are not meant to just survive, we are meant to thrive!

 

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Stop Listening to People That Always Tell You That You Are Wrong

Yesterday I saw someone share this tweet:

 

This is horrible advice. In other words, seek out people who will:

  • Tell you that you are wrong
  • Tell you that what you are doing is wrong
  • Tell you that you are acting inappropriately
  • Tell you that you haven’t thought through what you are saying or doing
  • Ask you to rethink if what you are claiming is really as you think it is

 

No. Hell no. If I have learned one thing over the last year, it is to surround myself with people who believe in me, and support me. None of us have to look for people who will tell us we are wrong. None of us have to look for people that will tell us that we aren’t thinking about what we are saying, or that our behavior is inappropriate. None of us have to look for people who will ‘challenge’ our ideas. And 99% of the time, the people that will do these things are NOT acting out of ‘love’ for us.

In 2011 I attended and spoke at the first Content Marketing World in Cleveland. The keynote was actor/filmmaker/content creator Kevin Smith. His central message was to believe in yourself and surround yourself with people who believe in you and will support you. At one point he said (I’m paraphrasing here), no one needs another person who asks ‘Why?’ when you tell them about your idea. We all can find people who will challenge us and give us reasons why our idea won’t work. What we all need are people who say ‘Why the f*ck not?’ when they hear your idea. The people who believe in you and who push you to pursue your dreams. Those are the people we all need in our lives.

He’s exactly right.

Remember that famous adage that you are the combination of the 5 people you spend the most time with? I think there’s a lot of truth in that. Think about how your life might be different if the 5 people you spend the most time with always challenged your ideas. Told you that you were wrong. That you aren’t thinking through your ideas, and that your actions may be inappropriate. And when you asked those 5 closest people if they liked your idea, they said no, they didn’t.

How would that make you feel? How would that change the way you lived your life?

Now think about how your life would be different if the 5 closest people to you always encouraged you to dream. Told you that your ideas had promise. That your actions were helpful and making a positive impact on the lives of others. What if 5 closest people said ‘yes’ when you asked if they liked your idea?

How would that make you feel? How would that change the way you lived your life?

Now, this isn’t to say that your ‘inner circle’ should only consist of people who will always agree with you. But it damn sure shouldn’t consist of people who only tell you that you are wrong. Seriously, who wants or thinks they need that in their lives?

We all need that friend that will ‘keep us in check’ and tell us what they really think. But more than that, we need friends who will support us and who will believe in us.

That’s what it means to come from ‘a place of love’ in regards to our friends and support group. Very few of us need to add people in our circle who will say ‘why’. But I think we all could use more confidants who will say ‘why the f*ck not?’ when they hear our idea.

Don’t seek out people that will always question you. Those people will find YOU. Seek out the people who will support you, who will encourage you to follow your passions, and to dream big.

Those are the people that will push you to reach your true potential. Those are the people that will help you lead a happy life. Treasure them like the gold they are, and do everything you can to support them as well.

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Why We Worry and How to Stop It

I think most of us can agree that one of the biggest sources of stress in our lives is worrying. For the most part, we worry about the future.  We worry about tomorrow. We worry about how we will deal with something that is either coming in the future, or that we suspect will happen in the future.

And that’s important to note, because often, we find out that what we were worried about happening, never did.

I recently linked to an interview that Kobe Bryant did shortly before he passed away. It’s a great interview on many topics, one of which was playing for legendary NBA coach Phil Jackson. Phil is known to be pretty quirky, and Kobe was discussing some of the ‘odd’ things that Phil would do during practices, teaching breathing exercises, having meditation sessions, holding certain poses to release stress, etc. Kobe said that at first he thought all this was crazy, but then he noticed that Phil had completely bought into these teachings, so he decided to give it a try. Kobe said that he eventually realized that what Phil was teaching the team was how to live and play in the moment. Don’t worry about what will happen in 5 minutes, focus on running and executing the current play to the best of your ability. Kobe added that if you watch Phil’s Lakers teams or his Bulls teams with Jordan, that they never get rattled at the end of the game. They are always focused on the moment and they don’t let what could come next overwhelm them.

These comments reminded me of what Alabama football coach Nick Saban says he always stresses to his players. He says that he tells his players that “every play has a life of its own” and to never look at the scoreboard. He teaches his players to execute each play to the best of your ability, then immediately drop it and go to the next play. By doing this, he’s teaching his players not to focus on the last play or what they need to do on the next play. Focus on THIS play.  Focus on the moment.

My uncle has a condominium near the beach, and every time I visit, I always look forward to walking on a nearby beach. It’s incredibly relaxing for me. In thinking about what Kobe and Saban said about ‘playing in the moment’, I realized that when I walk on the beach, I completely focus on the water.  Watching it come in, watching it go out. In other words, completely living in the moment. So I’ve been trying to do more of that in my day to day life, focusing more on what I can do today, versus worrying about what will happen tomorrow if I don’t do what I need to do today.

So that’s what I plan on doing from now on, focusing more on the walk on the beach, and worrying less about how I will get home.

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The Magic of Being Second and the Spontaneous Hillside Dance

Years ago I saw a video from an outdoor music festival. The video showed a crowd of fans sitting on a hillside enjoying the concert. After a few seconds, one guy stood up and started dancing. By himself. He continued dancing, awkwardly, by himself for a minute or so. A few people nearby watched him but for the most part he was ignored.

Then after about a minute, a nearby person stood up and ran over to him and started dancing, awkwardly, next to him. When this happened, everyone around them started looking around at each other like “what is happening?” After a few seconds, a third person jumped up to join them, then a fourth, then a fifth. Within a minute or so, the entire hillside was dancing, awkwardly, together and enjoying themselves.

This spontaneous hillside dance wasn’t triggered by the first guy that got up. It was triggered by the SECOND person. When there was just one guy dancing, it was easy to dismiss them as simply being that weird awkward-dancing guy. But when the second person joined, then they were a group. Suddenly it became much easier to join them if you wanted to. Then when a few people started joining, the dynamic flipped from being weird to being cool.

I was remembering this spontaneous hillside dance yesterday when I re-watched Simon Sinek’s brilliant TED talk on the power of why. You have likely seen this talk, but even if you have, it’s worth another view:

If you think about how most companies can tell you what they do but struggle to talk about why they do it, it seems to be rooted in this desire we all have to promote ourselves or talk about ourselves. This is what’s important to me.

But the ‘why’ gets to the heart of why your idea can hold importance for OTHER PEOPLE. That’s where the magic happens. When other people see the value in your idea, they become invested shareholders of that idea. They help nuture it, they help grow it. They share it with likeminded people and invite them to nuture and care for it as well.

When you think about companies, who they are and what they do and WHY they do it, can you more easily describe the WHY or the WHAT?

I can describe the WHY for Red Bull, but only the WHAT for Monster Energy Drinks.

I can describe the WHY for Patagonia, but only the WHAT for Columbia Sportswear.

I can describe the WHY for Pedigree, but only the WHAT for Alpo.

 

But at the heart of all this, we are talking about what’s important to the customer, and putting that first, and putting ourselves second. As Sinek has said “People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

Which goes against human nature. We want to tell others how they can help US first, and after they do, we then ask “Ok how can we help you?” But the magic lies in putting yourself in second place and putting the person whose money or attention or time you want, putting them first.

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Fighting For Your Passion

One of the pieces of advice we are all given to having a happy life is to find your passion, The idea is, if you can find that one thing (or things) that you are truly passionate about, that moves your soul, especially in a work context, you can live a much happier life. If you are lucky, you can figure out what you are passionate about at an early age, and build a work history and even life around those passions.

But some people are different. Some people know what they are passionate about, and they let that passion be their fuel to be the best. They aren’t content with simply doing what they love, they want to be the best at what they love.

The late long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine once said “To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift”. This is one of my favorite quotes, as it is for many people. But there’s an underlying message in this quote that many people miss.

Consistently giving your best requires sacrifice.

If you look at people that are great at something, then you look at the people that are recognized as ‘the best’, the difference typically isn’t talent, but ”The best’ were willing to make sacrifices that others were not.

Being elite at anything comes at a cost. Not everyone is willing to pay that cost. But a few rare individuals value their gift enough to give it their all.

We lost one of those people on Sunday. Here’s who Kobe Bryant was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64OsZNYhp0

That was the final 3 mins of Kobe’s final game,. When this video starts, the Lakers were down by 10 points. Kobe scored 17 straight points, including the game-winner. Then he finished the game, and his career, with an assist.

And he is exhausted. He can’t catch his breath, he is wobbly as he comes off the court each time. If you’ve played basketball, you know that when you get tired, the first thing that happens is you start to miss jump shots, because your legs can’t give you the normal amount of lift that they do when you are rested.

Yet Kobe continued to hit long jump shot after long jump shot. He blocked the fatigue and even the pain, out of his mind, and dominated.

Because he owed it to his fans to give them a show in his final game. But he also knew he owed it to himself. He owed it to the gift that God gave him.

I’ve always admired the sacrifice that Kobe was willing to make to be the best. He could have given half the effort and he probably still would have been a Hall of Famer, he was that good.

But he didn’t want to be good, he was driven to be the best. I think that’s the lesson I will take from Kobe, and maybe that is his lasting gift to us all: It’s not enough to simply find your passion, you owe it to yourself to let that passion consume you and make you be the best you can be.

Rest in Peace, Kobe. Thank you for the sacrifices you made, and the example that you left us with.

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Social Media Demands Perfection and Punishes Mediocrity

I have a small list of political reporters that I follow on Twitter. I avoid political coverage on mainstream media at all costs since I know most of it is propaganda, but I follow a few trusted sources for actual political news. One of the reporters I follow is a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. She tweets almost daily about their exploits, the home runs, the clutch wins, everything. I haven’t watched a pro baseball game in probably 20 years, and know nothing about the league. But from her tweets alone, I assumed the Cardinals must be one of the best teams. Yesterday she tweeted that the team had fired their manager.

For years, I was a big Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan. I promoted him on all my social media accounts, including here and even on my podcast. Last year after a frustrating race in a frustrating season, I left a rare critical tweet about Dale, which earned my first and only response from him:

To be fair, I took his advice. The whole episode reminded me of this scene from A Christmas Story, and I had pretty much the same reaction that Ralphie did:

Years ago, I was added to a private group on Facebook for frequent business travelers. At first, the group was incredible, several professional travelers sharing advice and tips on how to make business travel more convenient and efficient. I loved it, and the advice of the group led to my making several travel-related purchases (Social Media ROI). Unfortunately, the group quickly devolved into a game of social media one-upmanship as people began to use the group to brag about their first class travel or the upgrades and perks they were getting. The utility and value of the group decreased as the bragging increased.

A few weeks ago I was watching a particular Twitch streamer who constantly creates YouTube videos of his game-playing, which are very popular, mainly because of how well he plays in the videos. This particular streamer had just completed a game where he didn’t perform very well, and one of his followers asked him if he would be posting that game to YouTube later. “Hell no!”, he replied. “I didn’t get enough kills!”

There’s a common thread running through all these stories. The promise of social media was always in its ability to connect everyone to everyone. Everyone gets the chance to have a voice and we all get to see the world as it really is.

Social media has delivered spectacularly as a way to foster connections, and it has failed miserably as a way to show the world, and our lives, as they really are. To be fair, much of the sharing problem is of our own making. We are trained to only share our ‘highlights’ on social media. We brag about our ‘wins’ and never mention our ‘losses’. Every moment is viewed through the lens of “will this make a good picture on IG?’ instead of simply living IN the moment.

The problem with the ‘perfection’ of social media is that it’s too easy to compare yourself to a completely warped view of other people’s lives. I especially worry about the impact this can have on teenagers and millenials. In fact, many studies now suggest there could be a link between the rise of social media usage and the stark increase in teenage suicides over the last decade or so.

Ironically, when social media first began to take off on a widespread scale about 10 years ago, one of the unwritten ‘rules’ for brands using social media was ‘be authentic’. It seems like that’s a great rule for the rest of us to follow as well.

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The Hate Game: Why No One Wins a Race Looking Sideways


I’ve been following Amanda Palmer for a while now, she was one of the major music case studies in Think Like a Rock Star.  Not because I’m a fan of her music (it’s honestly not my thing) but because of her marketing efforts and how she relentlessly connects with her fans.  In fact as early as 2009 I was blogging about her using Twitter to generate $11,000 in 12 hours.  Amanda constantly leveraged Twitter as a playpen for impromptu parties with fans, to giveaway tickets to secret shows, and the like.  She was everyone’s DIY music marketing darling.

Then, that Kickstarter thing happened. Amanda created a Kickstarter project to fund her break from a major record label to go indie.  The project was her attempt to raise $100,000 to fund the release of the new album and a tour to promote it. She raised $1.2 Million, making it the most successfully funded (at the time) Kickstarter project ever.

And then the criticism began.

Overnight, she went from being a scrappy indie artist that was hustling to make a few thousand here and there by connecting with her fans, to a millionaire that was taking advantage of others and manipulating/lying to her fans.  The comments in the link above (in the tweet) just had me shaking my head.  Everyone loved Amanda until the Kickstarter project’s success, then the trolls came out of the woodwork.  And the punchline: She barely broke even on the Kickstarter project, spending most of the money she got on fulfilling rewards to backers.

Success, even the perception of success, creates jealousy and hate in some.  As I was reading the comments left at the Stereo Gum article, I was reminded of how we see the same thing happening in ‘the social media space’.  I’ve been active in this space for a decade.  In that time I’ve seen some people go from complete obscurity to penning New York Times Bestsellers.  I’ve seen bloggers go from no one reading their posts, to Fortune 100 brands courting them with sponsorships and giveaways.  Success changes people.  Sometimes it changes the people that success smiles upon, but more often, it changes the people that feel themselves being overshadowed by the success of others.  Instead of being happy that peers are succeeding, some want to discredit the person, and their accomplishments.  We all know a few ‘thought leaders’ in this space that are constantly attacked for being ‘too successful’.  And we all know how the same few people are usually the ones doing the attacking.

The time I spend worrying about how someone else is running their business is time I could be spending on building my own business.  The great irony is that the same people that will lecture companies about creating content that’s useful to their customers will write regular ‘gotcha’ posts about how this consultant isn’t following the rules, or how this agency is charging ‘too much’ for their services.  Posts that their potential clients will never read or care about.

Stay in your lane and run your race.  And if someone is faster than you, shake their hand at the finish line and start training for the next race.

 

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Creating Content or Memories; Is Social Media Warping Our Priorities?

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In 2008 I spoke at a small business conference and during the event for the first time I started tweeting takeaways from the sessions I attended.  The attendees, many of who had no idea what Twitter was, were floored.  They couldn’t believe that there was a conversation happening inside the session they were attending, yet there was an online conversation happening about that same session.  They were hooked on Twitter, and I was hooked on live-tweeting conferences.  I gained dozens of followers an hour.  I looked forward to going to events just to live-tweet the sessions, cause I knew that if the session had a big name speaker, I could possibly gain 100 followers in an hour’s time.  Just from tweeting key takeaways to people sitting at home on their coach.

But after attending a few events I began to realize that while I was expanding my Twitter network, I wasn’t expanding my learning because I wasn’t paying attention during the session.  I told myself that my live-tweeting was a sort of digital note-taking, but the fact was, I wasn’t ‘present’ in that room and involved in the learning that was happening there.  I was on Twitter.

In 2009 I attended SXSW and one of the sessions I couldn’t wait to attend was Kathy Sierra’s talk.  As the talk was getting ready to start, I realized that I had to make a choice between live-tweeting the session, and actually paying attention.  I knew that Kathy’s talk would be wonderful, but would demand my attention.

So I turned off my laptop, and pulled out my notebook.  I took about 10 pages of notes and it was one of the most informative sessions I’ve ever attended at any event.  From that point on, I stopped live-tweeting events and decided that it was more important to be present.

It seems that for many of social media’s heavy users, documenting the moment is more important than living the moment.  Facebook and Twitter has created a culture of narcissism where creating content trumps creating memories.  The allure of Likes and Favs is too great for many of us, and I’m just as guilty as anyone.  Last year I was at an Alabama football game and Bama was about to score and I had my camera out trying to take a picture as they did, and I suddenly realized that I might get a picture of a touchdown, but in the process I will miss seeing it happen.

It’s important to document our experiences, but not if they get in the way of us having those experiences.  It’s a fine line to walk between creating content and living life.  How do you walk that line?  BTW VentureBeat has a fascinating study on this topic.

Pic via Flickr user Andrew Vargas

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Skateboards, Sex, and Why We Are Always Chasing Numbers

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Last night I watched a Frontline episode called Generation Like.  The episode followed several teens that were learning how to use social media and learning how to create content that brought them popularity.  Switching from interesting to depressing, the show walked us through how teens were training themselves and each other to learn what type of content drove social sharing online.

From a business standpoint, the episode focused on how teens were building audiences for their content, then leveraging those audiences to secure payments (typically in the form of sponsorships) from brands.  Often it was in the form of products that would then be used in their videos, but sometimes cash was involved as well.  The story that I thought was quite telling (and also depressing) was of a 13 year-old skateboarder that was trying to create videos of his skateboarding that would be popular enough for him to make money off them so he could help his impoverished family.  He started out making videos just of him performing skateboarding tricks and stunts, but found that those only generated enough views on YouTube to land him sponsorships from companies in the form of skateboarding gear and clothes.  So he had to find a way to get more views for his videos (because more views means more money).  He started (again, 13 year-old boy) adding older girls to his videos, showing him dancing provocatively with them and performing sexual poses, basically videos that had little or nothing to do with skateboarding.  He would also make videos where he went around doing all sorts of silly stunts with complete strangers.  These videos had far greater reach than just his skateboarding videos, which meant he could make money off them, versus just getting product for his skateboarding videos.  The kid then talked about a friend of his that was a far better skateboarder than he was, but the friend admitted that he couldn’t get high views for his videos (even though his tricks and skills were better) because his videos didn’t include the sexual overtones and raunchy humor that were making his less talented friend’s videos more popular.

These teens are getting a crash course in a basic reality of this social media age: If you build an audience for your content, that opens doors for you.  It’s no different from how I leveraged this blog’s readership and my Twitter following to help land a book deal.  When I was talking to publishers about Think Like a Rock Star, they wanted to know about my online audience.  Every readership and following stat I could show them pointed to a greater online reach and the ability to more easily move people toward a piece of content.

But aside from the business implications, the episode also touched on how the teens wanted and even needed to see their content be Liked online.  Teens would dissect each other’s Facebook pages and question why one girl’s cover photo got hundreds of Likes compared to the others.  At one point a small group of teens were analyzing each other’s Facebook content and they all agreed that when the girls posted selfies that these would get more Likes than when the guys did.

The race for Likes is a race for validation.  Just as the teens do it in their circles, their parents are as well.  Everyone reading this blog knows that in general, if you have bigger numbers (more followers, more Likes), your content is typically viewed as being more trustworthy.  As I was talking to Daniel about last night on Facebook, the best content doesn’t always get the most exposure, it’s typically the content that’s shared via the largest platform that spreads further.  We want to see bigger numbers associated with ourselves and our content because it helps to validate that we are helping others, and quite honestly, we need the external validation that the numbers provide on some level to enhance our own sense of self-worth.

Yet our need for numbers to provide external validation isn’t a social media condition, it’s a human condition.  This is a popularity contest that’s been around much longer than Facebook has.  When I was in 9th grade I attended an extremely small country school that didn’t have a student body large enough to go past the 9th grade, so it ended there.  My ‘graduating’ class in the 9th grade had 9 students and only 6 of them went on to the 10th grade.  Moving onto the 10th grade meant literally changing schools, and where I lived, there was only one option, transferring to the much bigger high school in a nearby city.  While the school itself offered a much better education, for a shy introvert it was at first a nightmare.  I went from having 8 classmates in the 9th grade, to having 175 in my first year of high school in the 10th grade.  What’s worse, the kids at the high school had already made their friends in the 9th grade, so everyone had established friendships and even cliques by the time I arrived in the 10th grade as a complete outsider.  In fact my 10th grade in high school was definitely one of the most miserable of my life.  But by midway or so through 11th grade, I started making friends, and got to be a bit popular with classmates.  I remember that in 10th grade I bought an annual, which students would get to sign for each other.  I hated my 10th grade annual because I only had a handful of signatures from classmates, but I loved my 11th grade annual.  By then I had made friends and I got a lot of signatures.  Those signatures were my ‘numbers’ and external validation that I was no longer an outsider.  I still to this day remember asking someone to sign my annual and they said ‘Wow Mack, you have so many signatures already!’, and I remember how proud I was of those signatures.

Looking back, I realize now that everyone else was doing the same thing I was, they were seeking signatures from each other, the more the better.  If you went to sign someone’s annual and they already had a ton of signatures, that mostly meant that they were popular, and that everyone wanted to sign their annual.  Nevermind that most of the signatures were a result of me asking them to sign it (follow me on Twitter and I will follow you back, so both our numbers go up).  Ironically, I see the same thing happening today.  Often I will have a stranger tweet me ‘Hey Mack I followed you, will you follow me back?’  The need to raise our numbers, and the sense of self-worth we tie to the numbers, is always there.

With any luck, either from enlightenment or simply tired legs, we learn to stop chasing numbers and external validation.  We begin to realize that we don’t need others to tell us things about ourselves, that we should be confident in our own abilities and value.  I’m not completely there yet, but since those days as an insecure 10th grader I am relying less on strangers to tell me things about myself that I already know.  I hope you are as well.

Pic via Flickr user LeoHidalgo