Tag Archives: Social Media

Is Social Media Better at Getting You Fired, or Hired?

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Khristopher J Brooks on Tumblr In what may be a record for journalists getting fired for their social media activities,Khristopher Brooks was sacked yesterday before he even started his job with the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal. What was his offense? Writing on his blog about getting the job, and using the newspaper’s logo and quoting from the offer letter without permission.

Brooks played a small role in a post I wrote earlier today on the New-Media Survival Guide website suggesting that journalists should write a Firing Manifesto. The idea, basically, is to know when you should choose between saving your job and saving your career.

Though he didn’t have any say in it, getting fired may turn out to have been a positive development for Brooks’s career. In a piece in the Huffington Post, which I read after posting my article, he reports that in the aftermath, he’s received a number of job offers and other opportunities. We won’t know for a while, but it seems social media has done his career more good than harm.

The Tyranny of Images: Why Instagram and Pinterest Worry Me

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This photo has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this blog post. Which in this case, oddly, is precisely the point.

Today’s news that the mobile photo-sharing platform Instagram has been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion underscores a trend that’s been gnawing at me for the last few months. Mark Zuckerberg clearly understands that images are an increasingly important element in social discourse. So do the founders of the visually oriented Pinterest, which in less than a year has leapt from obscurity to become the third most popular social network on the web.

Why should this worry me? I’m a reasonably visual guy. I’ve been a serious photographer since my childhood, and my years as a magazine editor taught me the importance of balancing words with images.

I guess I fear that the emphasis now being given to the visual is upsetting that balance.  Increasingly, words alone are seen as inadequate or insufficiently appealing. As Joel Friedlander says, explaining why he plunks a large photo into the top of every post on his blog, “it’s a given: blog articles attract more interest with photographs and other images.” Pinterest only intensifies this need for images. In fact, as Tony Hallet pointed out last month, if a blog post has no images, it essentially doesn’t exist in Pinterest’s eyes.

Knowing this, any blogger that wants to be read will find an image to go with the words. That’s great when an image enhances or reinforces the meaning of the words. But all too often it doesn’t. Finding a picture that explains an abstract concept is difficult, especially if you limit yourself to images you have a clear-cut right to use. As a result, bloggers frequently face this choice: go without an image, or settle for one that looks good but has little to do with your topic.  Increasingly, they will have no reasonable option but the latter. It’s the tyranny of the image.

I agree, as Tony Hallet says, that “it’s arguably the photographer, the illustrator, the graphic designer, maybe even the infographic creator who will hold the key to much of what lies ahead.” It’s another question, though, whether the key opens the right door.

More Lessons from My 10-Tweets-a-Day Challenge

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Chart showing tweets per day for February 2012In the beginning of February, I challenged myself to post at least 10 times a day on Twitter. As I explained in the blog entry announcing the challenge, I had a variety of reasons for undertaking it. Mainly, though, I wanted to make better use of my Twitter account.

Now that the month is done, how did I do? And what, if anything, have I learned?

Unlike my previous challenge to publish one blog post a day in November, I didn’t quite achieve my goal this time. The main reason for my shortfall was a vacation in San Antonio, Texas. As the accompanying chart shows, I fell short of 10 tweets for all 5 days of the vacation. On one lamentable day, I managed only one tweet.

Overall, I sent out 301 tweets, for an average of 10.4 a day. Humble though that number may appear, it is 10 times my daily average for the previous six months.

My aim was not just to tweet 10 times a day, but to make about one-third of the tweets promotional (linking to something I’d written), one-third curatorial (linking to something elsewhere on the web), and one-third conversational (where there is no link, just a comment). Despite having just self-published a book (the New-Media Survival Guide), my usual reticence restricted my promotional tweets to just 12% of the total for the month. Conversationally, I was closer to my target, at 24%. More than 6 of 10 tweets was curatorial.

A couple of other metrics are worth noting. My lifetime average for daily tweets, as determined by How Often Do You Tweet?, has risen from 0.7 to 0.9. And my net number of followers has increased by 28, to 283. Though I can’t say for sure whether my stepped-up activity is responsible for the increase in followers, I gained 45 in February compared with 29 the month before.

Midway through the month, I noted a few of the things I’ve learned about Twitter and myself in the course of this challenge. I would add a couple more.

First, I’ve found that tweeting about articles and other Web content is a good way to keep track of them. I don’t often remember to bookmark things I like. But since my Pinboard social bookmarking account records links in my tweets, I don’t have to remember to bookmark them if I’m tweeting actively.

Second, both the quality and quantity of my tweets are related to those of the people I follow. On days when a lot of them were sharing great content, I didn’t have any difficulty meeting my quota. On other days, there wasn’t much worth retweeting or commenting on.

Recognizing that this review of my challenge is of interest primarily to myself, I won’t draw it out. But as I noted two weeks ago, it’s been a good experience for me.

Will I maintain my average of 10 tweets a day in the coming months? I can’t guarantee it. But I will try. Stay tuned.

A Leap-Day Special

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To mark the auspicious occasion of leap day, I’ve marked down the price of the e-book edition of the New-Media Survival Guide to just 99 cents (or, if you’re outside the United States, the equivalent in some other currency). This is just a one day sale, more or less, so if you’re tempted, don’t wait. I don’t anticipate another discount for some time.

Managing one-day sales, it appears, can be a bit tricky. You can already buy the discounted e-book on Smashwords; but Amazon requires a review of all changes, so it may not take effect for the Kindle version until leap day proper. Likewise, the price might not return to the regular $2.99 until a few hours after leap day.

Atoms being what they are, I haven’t discounted the new paperback edition of the book. However, that handsome version has its own charms, well worth the $6.99 cover price.

Though there really is not much risk in spending 99 cents, you can find out more about the New-Media Survival Guide before you buy it at NewMediaSurvivalGuide.com.

Twitter Challenge Update: 3 Things I’ve Learned So Far

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Now that I’m halfway through my self-imposed Twitter challenge for February, it’s time for a progress report. My goal is to tweet at least 10 times a day, balancing three types of updates: curatorial, conversational, and promotional. (Rather than explain the details here, I refer you to my original post.)

So far, I’m more or less meeting the goal. I’ve produced the minimum number of tweets every day so far, though doing so did require a couple of late-night efforts. I haven’t analyzed my output by type, but I think I’ve done well with both conversational and curatorial tweets. I’m still a lousy self-promoter, however.

Putting myself through this for the last two weeks has been an enlightening experience. I’ll revisit and perhaps expand the following list at the end of the month, but here’s some of what I think I’ve learned so far, both about myself and about Twitter.

  1. The more you put into Twitter, the more you get back. Twitter pros will find that statement painfully obvious, but until you actively and consistently participate in the conversation, you don’t really get Twitter.  Passive consumption of your Twitter stream is like admiring a beautiful strawberry without ever tasting it.
  2. To make the most of social media, you have to loosen up and take the bad with the good. It doesn’t pay to be a deliberate, careful writer on Twitter. You must accept typos, ill-phrased witticisms, and banalities, along with the occasional bon mot and cogent insight, as the price of being a fully fledged Twitterer.
  3. Interaction increases your appreciation for the people you follow. Given my requirement to retweet (and my reluctance to retweet just anything), I’m looking more closely at what people are saying and sharing, and have been blown away by how smart, helpful, and generous they are.

Even if I learn nothing more in the next two weeks, this challenge will have been worth the occasional inconveniences it created. Twitter was already my favorite social media platform; now I have a better understanding of why.