A group of powerful trends have gathered together and magnified their power–like Voltron except the robot beast is made of Karens–to create today’s tsunami of insanity captured on film.
The first trend? Everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket, connected to the Series of Tubes, with a built-in video camera and microphone. Within seconds, they can push buttons and bear witness to Darwin Award winners, a Florida Man doing Florida Man things, or a doggo being cute.
The second trend? Different tech platforms and social media channels allowing the cross-posting of videos. I can see TikTok videos on Twitter, embed Twitter videos on WordPress and throw YouTube stuff on Facebook.
The third trend is the COVID 19 global pandemic, which has given us 6,943 videos of Karens refusing to wear masks and acting like loons.
I’ll end on a serious note. Sure, smart phones today give all of us the power to be a roaming TV studio, and you can use that power to shoot videos of your dog playing with a baby deer. You can also use your phone to get footage that may change the national and global debate about police violence, or whether the people of Hong Kong will still have democracy and freedom.
Anybody can be a citizen journalist now. And that changes things forever.
Here is an interesting song, and I mean “interesting” in a tragic, train-wreck sort of way.
Because it’s a decent melody by a good band with some of the WORST LYRICS EVER.
And the music video itself isn’t horrible at all. It’s fine. The words, though, they hurt me.
And I say this as a fan of Train, a man who has some of their songs and believes MEET VIRGINIA has creative lyrics for a pop song.
First up: the video, which I hope the evil known as VEVO lets you watch.
See? The song isn’t bad. The video is fine.
It’s the stupid lyrics.
Let the red ink flow.
DRIVE BY by Train
On the other side of a street I knew
Stood a girl that looked like you
I guess thats deja vu
But I thought this can’t be true
Cause you moved to west L.A or New York or Santa Fe
Or where or ever to get away from me
(OK, so far, this is alright. Nothing great, nothing horrible. The horribleness is hiding and saving its strength for an ambush.)
Oh but that one night Was more than just right I didn’t leave you cause I was all through Oh I was overwhelmed and frankly scared as hell Because I really fell for you
Oh I swear to you I’ll be there for you This is not a drive by
(I believe the singer — or whoever wrote these lyrics — is trying to say, “This isn’t infatuation, or a one-night stand, but something longer lasting and meaningful, possibly leading up to a white dress, a white picket fence and three yearsof whitePampers.” Thisphrase means, “A gang murders that utilizes one driver and one or more shooters, who send a wall of lethal lead at the homicide victim while making a rolling getaway from the crime.” So the message is kinda-sorta mixed. People hear this and don’t think of happy love. They think of Glocks and funerals.)
Just a shy guy looking for a two ply Hefty bag to hold my love
(Because the only thing more romantic than a drive-by shooting is the leading national brand of garbage bags.)
When you move me everything is groovy
They don’t like it sue me
mmm the way you do me
(The bad pop trifecta: a word from the ’60s that needs to be retired, a reference to litigation and a crude reference to sex.)
Oh I swear to you
I’ll be there for you
This is not a drive by On the upside of a downward spiral
(If he were definitely referring to NINE INCH NAILS, he’d get bonus points, but he’s not, so he doesn’t.)
My love for you went viral
(A tiny bonus point for not completing the cliche by name-dropping Facebook or Twitter.)
And I loved you every mile you drove away But now here you are again So let’s skip the “how you been”And get down to the “more than friends” at last
(“You didn’t really like me before, and you drove far, far, away, but now that you’re back, please pay attention to me as a boyfriend instead of some man you don’t really care about.” I believe that sums it up.)
Oh but that one night Is still the highlight I didn’t need you until I came to and I was overwhelmed and frankly scared as hell Because I really fell for you
Oh I swear to you I’ll be there for you This is not a drive by Just a shy guy looking for a two ply Hefty bag to hold my love When you move me everything is groovy They don’t like it sue me mmm the way you do me Oh I swear to you I’ll be there for you This is not a drive by
(The songwriter got ALL the bad cliches and phrases of this song into one tidy package right there. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam-bam! Kind of like a emptying the clip during a drive by shooting. No. Just no.)
Please believe that when I leave
There’s nothing up my sleeve but love for you
And a little time to get my head together too
(To woo somebody, it’s not overly bright to hint that you’re not quite right in the head.)
On the other side of a street I knew Stood a girl that looked like you I guess thats deja vu But I thought this can’t be true Cause
Oh I swear to you I’ll be there for you This is not a drive by Just a shy guy looking for a two ply Hefty bag to hold my love When you move me everything is groovy They don’t like it sue me mmm the way you do me Oh I swear to you I’ll be there for you This is not a drive by
(A repeat and recap of all the bad lines from before, in case we hadn’t heard them the first, second or third time.)
Bottom line
A successful band like Train probably hires songwriters for some — or a lot — of their stuff. Which is fine. You need to focus on touring, performing and shooting music videos. None of those are bad things.
The words, though, actually matter. They matter as much as the bass line, the lighting on the set and the type of leather jacket worn by the lead singer.
Spend a little more time and money on the words, because I used to hear “Train” and think of two good songs. Now, the first two things that pop into my head will be “drive-by shootings” and “Hefty bags.” Which is too bad.
Hear me now and believe me later in the week: first impressions matter more than ever.
In the old days, you got to know people because they LIVED NEXT TO YOU, or because you saw them at the feed store when you saddled up Bessie and rode there on Saturdays.
These days, you can use the Twitter or the Book of Face to meet people around the world, except for North Korea and some other places where the Series of Tubes is illegal or the secret police only let you use a pirated version of MySpace or whatever.
Online, people make a first impression about your entire life in less than two nanoseconds, based on three tiny little things:
your profile photo
your handle
your bio
Sidenote: If you don’t understand the headline reference to Achy Breaky Big Mistakey, here’s the original Billy Ray Cyrus video and a link to Mullet Junky, which is guaranteed to make you feel better about your hair. Enjoy.
So, instead of giving you five big Twitter boo-boos, or seven, I’m giving you 30 dumb moves to avoid on the Twitter — ten no-no’s apiece when it comes to your profile photo, your handle and your bio.
I believe, deep in my soul, that ten times three equals thirty, or possibly 30, depending on whether you use the metric system and what edition of the AP Stylebook you sleep with.
Top 10 achy breaky big mistakeys with your profile photo
You see the worst ones on Facebook, but Twitter is not immune from wacky profile photos.
4) Take off your shirt to show us your tattoos or how much you enjoy fake orange Oompa Loompa spray tanning (it makes you look like a reject from Jersey Shore)
5) Pretend to chug tequila or smoke the Biggest Blunt Known to Man
6) Make the duck face while trying to be sexy, flashing gang signs with your hat on sideways, showing us your tattoos and pretending to chug tequila
7) Use a self-portrait shot on your phone, using the mirror in the bathroom (we can tell, and yes, Mirror in the Bathroom is a good tune from the GROSSE POINT BLANK soundtrack)
8) Go with extreme close-up (I see your pores!) or incredible longshot (that might be a person, or Bigfoot) or a weird angle (up your nose)
9) Use a shot with two / four / six different people and make us guess which one you might be
10) Wear sunglasses, hats and other accessories that make it impossible to tell if you’re a 12-year-old girl, a 35-year-old man or a wax dummy
Basically, don’t freak people out or make people guess who you are. And don’t try too hard.
Now, there are some variations that aren’t bad. Random photos and symbols are sometimes bad, but not always. If you’re a writer or editor, go ahead and use a photo of books as your profile shebang. Totally fine. Actors can use the Hollywood sign or the comedy and tragedy masks. WE TOTALLY GET THAT. But the weirder you get, the weirder your first impression will be.
Also: A huge STAR WARS geek can use Yoda as a profile photo. Just remember the first impression — even if you’re a 6-foot-tall redheaded supermodel — will be that you’re a short, 900-year-old frog-thing with wrinkled skin. It is not really a surprise, or remotely cool, for men to be use photos of THE MATRIX, lightsabers, Captain Kirk or Call of Duty 17: Blowing Up Stuff on Mars. Yet it is unexpected, and therefore kinda cool, for women to be into comic books, Spock, anime and all the things that would make you say “dorkahedron who lives in mom’s basement” if a man picked it for his profile shot. This is a paradox, and possibly unfair, but tough noogies. (My AP Stylebook is silent on the correct spelling of “noogies,” so by my reckoning, I’m establishing the correct spelling right here and now, for all time.)
Top 10 achy breaky big mistakes with your handle
Also known as your name, moniker, nickname, special badge for the Series of Tubes and “what Keanu Reeves is supposed to call you when you jack into the Matrix.”
This is more of a Twitter thing, though these 10 achy breaky big mistakeys also apply to what you pick as your email address, blog title or any visible tattoo involving the alphabet rather than a drawing of Wolverine riding a My Little Pony.
Do not:
1) Use a handle that nobody can pronounce, like “puqnI’loD,” the Klingon word for grandson (I looked that up at Klingon Language Institute, which actually exists, and this fact frightens me)
2) Throw in a bunch of slang numbers in your handle like “2legit2quit,” unless you are, in fact, MC Hammer
3) Use lots of random numbers, because everybody really, really wants to be buddies with “fred349829402”
4) Get your full first, middle, last name and favorite hobby in there, aka “LauraIngridHasselbackLOVEShorses”
5) Use initials or whatever to make it completely impossible to know whether you’re a man, woman or cyborg from the future sent to kill Sarah Connor (there is actual science here, and not just me spouting off, but that is a post for another day)
6) Be so obsessed with pimping your business, book, movie or album that your handle is simply the name of your business, book, movie or album, and once you move on to the next project, you’ll abandon that handle anyway
7) Put serious TMI into your handle, as in “singlemomthinksmenSTINK” or “stillunemployedyear3” or “livinginmomsbasementplayingcallofdutyallday”
8) Get all lovey dovey with a handle that’s a bunch of mushy nonsense about your husband, wife, kids, dog, ferret, capuchin monkey or boa constrictor, as in “debbie+fluffy4evah”
9) Appropriate the name of a celebrity, unless it’s to make fun of Snooki, Jonathan Franzen, Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump or any of the “Real Housewives of I Don’t Care” — and yes, you should follow @EmperorFranzen and @English50cent
10) Try to be funny with some kind of gag handle, a la Bart Simpson and “@ipfreeley”
Top 10 achy breaky mistakes with your bio
It’s hard to screw up when you only have 160-characters or whatever.
Despite this challenge, there are bazillions of bios out there which are assaults upon the English language and, left unchecked, will not only tear the very fabric of society, but will rip a hole in the space-time continuum, sending Jean-Claude Van Damme back in time to battle an ancient Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 9: NIGHTMARE AT THE NURSING HOME.
Do not:
1) Try to give your life history, in chronological order, using Every Abbreviation Known to Man
2) Claim to be a pro photographer, Olympic gymnast, black belt in Gracie jujitsu, supermodel, billionaire CEO, secret agent, actor, bodyguard and author who also drives Indy cars–we might believe two of those, maybe three if we’re drunk, but not six or nine
3) Throw in a bunch of wacky symbols and graphics that nobody understands, or use numb3rs & txtspk 2 say what8vr u cld say uzn wrds
4) Share TMI details that nobody needs to know, like how many times you’ve been married and divorced, how many kids you have or the nicknames of your seven most favorite cats
5) Treat the Twitter, the Book of Face or any other social media shebang like it’s a dating website, telling us how you enjoy slow dances, long walks on the beach and all that nonsense — and as a bonus, here is the worst bio page ever
6) Expect us to believe you live on nine different continents by listing your “location” as “London, Moscow, Tokyo, Kenya, NYC, Antarctica, LA and the International Space Station” (yes, somebody is going to comment with a link to Wikipedia proving there are only seven continents)
7) Get all cute with your location by saying, “in limbo” or “everywhere but nowhere” or “right behind you”
8) Turn it into a resume with where you went to college, a summary of skills and your career goals–please save all that for LinkedIn and such
9) Make it completely obscure by writing it in French when you are NOT FRENCH AT ALL, using a Gertrude Stein poem instead of a bio, wussing out by using a quote from a famous person — or Capitalizing Every Word Of The Entire Bio While Not Understanding That People Actually Want To Be Able To Read The Stupid Thing Without Getting A Migraine
10) Trying to be shocking by saying insanely offensive things while packing all seven of the FCC’s seven dirty works in there and working very hard to make your profile form an obscene gesture using ASCII art nonsense
In the future
Will I do the same sort of post for the Book of Face? Nope. Sorry. I do this for fun, and for free, and the Book of Face keeps getting breached by hackers and such, so I’m kinda mad at Zuckerberg and all that.
Also in the future: There will be robots that mow your lawn and space-age looking trikes that turn into flying cars. Just wait. Are you done waiting? Here you go. If Daniel Craig doesn’t already have one of these, he’ll steal one this weekend.
And that’s slow. I type about 80 or 90. Faster, if I have coffee. Even quicker with headphones blasting, or on deadline.
Coffee plus headphones plus a deadline? Fuggetaboutit. That keyboard is gonna sing.
The thing is, all the speed in the world doesn’t really matter.
Here comes the math
Let’s say you write full-time, all day, every day. No day job to worry about, no cramming in writing at 4 in the morning when the kids are asleep or scribbling forty minutes a day on a yellow legal pad (are there other colors? why yes, there are, including PURPLE) as you ride the train from New Jersey to the NYC.
Say you’re not that fast. Fifty words a minute.
Fifty words per minute =
3,000 words per hour
24,000 words per eight-hour day
120,000 words per week
That’s a ton of words. An incredible amount.
Let’s do a little more math to see how much we should be cranking out, if we’re not surfing the net, Twittering our lives away and checking out Facebook photos all day.
Here come the word counts:
200 words = letter to the editor
500 words = five-minute speech
600 words = news story
800 words = oped
1,000 words = 10-minute speech
Up to 3,000 words = profile or magazine piece
Up to 8,000 words = short story
3,000 words = 30-minute keynote speech
15,000 words = screenplay
20,000 to 60,000 words = novella
60,000 to 120,000+ words = novel
Of course, people don’t type every second of the workday.
Let’s say half your day is eaten by meetings, research and other things, and you only write four hours a day, or 20 hours a week. Even then, we’re talking about 60,000 words.
That’s most of a novel, four screenplays, 20 keynote speeches or 100 opeds.
In a single week.
Nobody writes that much. NOBODY.
Not even Stephen King, back when he was fueled by industrial amounts of caffeine, nicotine and other substances.
In fact, writers of all sorts are happy to produce between 500 and 2,000 good, usable words a day.
I know novelists who are happy to produce one good novel per year. If you divide 100,000 words by 52 weeks, you get a smidge less than 2,000 words per week and, I kid you not, less than 300 words per day.
I know reporters who crank out two stories a day, five days a week and columnists who do one or two opeds a week.
There are pro speechwriters, brilliant people I’ve known for years, who take two solid weeks to nail down a 30-minute keynote speech (3,000 words).
Before the invention of word processors, writing gods like Hemingway would pound on their Underwoods and count every word, quitting for the day when they hit 1,000–or even 500–that day.
But let’s be generous and say 2,000 words a day is a good day.
Where are the missing words? Why are all sorts of pro writers–reporters, novelists, poets, speechwriters–producing about 20 percent of what the math says?
Suspect No. 1: It’s not really eight hours or even four hours
This looks like the obvious culprit, because it’s the only person sneaking away from the crime scene with a guilty look and blood on the bottom of their shoes.
Reporters have to cover stories, get quotes from sources and meet with editors.
Novelists need to do research, talk to their agent, go on book tours and so forth.
Every writer, reporter and novelist has to do research, travel and attend meetings. Nobody is chained to the desk the entire workday, pounding on the keyboard like a typist. They need to eat of the food sometimes, and drink of the wine, and have a life.
HOWEVER: A lack of hours isn’t what’s wrong here.
Let’s say even more of the day is toast. Research. Phone calls. E-mail. Lunch with some big important person. Twittering to your buddies.
Fine, let’s go all the way down and say six of your eight hours are toast, and there are only TWO HOURS of actual banging on the keyboard.
3,000 words per hour X 2 hours = 6,000 words a day.
And yet the most writers typically can hit, day after day, is 2,000 words.
Where are the missing words?
Also, I know writers who spend six hours a day in meetings, doing research, returning e-mail and all that — and they still bang on the keyboard at least four to eight hours a day because they’re working crazy hours. A lot of writers work weekends, too. Writing is often a daily habit.
Yet 2,000 words per day seems like a kind of universal wall for writers of all stripes. Why?
Suspect No. 2: We type slower than narcoleptic turtles
This suspect doesn’t even get handcuffed and taken down to the station for a chat.
I used 50 words a minute because it’s the average typing speed of the general population.
Serious and professional writers are typically a lot faster, unless they’re hunting and pecking on an Underwood because that’s what they’ve always done since they first got published in 1926. There aren’t that many authors in that category.
If you dictate your stuff with Naturally Speaking or whatever, it’s more like 100 words a minute.
But let’s be generous again and pretend we all type really, really slow.
25 words a minute = 1,500 words an hour.
Even if we say Suspect No. 1 (Miss Most Hours of the Day Get Wasted) and Suspect No. 2 (Mr. Types Slowly) shacked up in a cheap motel and conspired to murder the creativity of all writers, it doesn’t get us down to 2,000 words a day.
Four hours at the keyboard at 30 words per minute is still 6,000 words a day. Two hours is 3,000 words, which is closer, but not plausible. Professional writers aren’t much slower than average typists–they’re a lot faster.
We need a better theory of the crime.
Suspect No. 3: Writing requires deep, deep thinking
Ah, this one is good. It’s lurking in the shadows.
It’s evil. Hard to refute.
How can you say that writing is shallow and easy?
How can you deny the art required, the creativity?
This isn’t an assembly line. It’s not a factory where we churn out widgets. Writers create something original, whether it’s a 500-word story for the newspaper or a 100,000-word novel.
Except I know better. Because I’ve been watching.
Going off my own experience wouldn’t be proof of squat. Maybe I’m an anomaly. Maybe I type 80+ words per minute (true) and separate writing from editing (also true).
But I know writers of all sorts. Reporters, speechwriters, novelists, you name it, and just about everybody who writes for money bangs on the keyboard at least four hours a day, and they’re all faster than 50 words a minute. That’s 3,000 words per hour.
Even going with four hours a day of actual writing, we should be at 12,000 words a day. Except we’re not.
Suspect No. 4: We’re creating while destroying
This is our killer. I’ve seen him at work.
I’ve helped other writers catch the evil scumbag, convict him and send him upstate so he can’t do any more damage.
We are typing away on the keyboard, and we’re not doing it at 10 words per minute. We are writing fast. It’s just that we destroy those words just as fast.
Why do we writers destroy more than we create?
Not because the words aren’t pretty. Sentence by sentence, they’re fine.
It’s because the structure is wrong.
I’ve looked at bad drafts that hit the roundfile. The sentences were pretty. It was the structure that failed.
We spend so much time trying to fix these things because we nobody teaches us structure.
Oh, they taught me the inverted pyramid in journalism school, which is the best possible blueprint for a story if you want to give away the ending right away and put people in a coma the longer they read.
Creative writing professors teach us characterization and the three types of conflict in creative writing.
Rhetoric professors give us logical fallacies and different types of arguments in speech and debate.
Journalism profs teach us hard and soft headlines and the different types of ledes.
Yet that’s not really structure. It’s tiny bits and pieces.
Building a house one room at a time, without blueprints
They way most of us write is like trying to build a house one room at a time. Winging it, without any blueprints.
Pour the foundation for the front door and foyer.
Frame it. Wire it for electricity. Drywall it. Paint it.
Now dig the foundation for the kitchen and build that.
Where should the living room go? OK, we did that, but forgot to put in stairs to the second floor, so we’ve got to tear it all down and start over.
That’s how I used to write. It’s how most writers I know do it.
You start at the beginning and work your way through it, trying to fix any problems with structure along the way.
My old friend and mentor, Robin, was guilty of this. He’d spend a week on an oped, which is only 800 words. He was a brilliant man, one of the smartest I’ve ever known, and a good example of why mixing research, writing and editing into a single process slowed everything down to a snail’s pace. He’d create and destroy thousands and thousands of words before he had 800 on a final draft.
Doing research, writing and editing all at once is no way to run a railroad. It’s building a house without blueprints, blindly hoping the beginning will magically connect with the middle and an end you haven’t figure out yet.
I’ve had houses designed and built. If a contractor tried to build a house the way we writers work, it wouldn’t take six months to finish it. It’d take six years, or forever.
So this is our killer, our time-suck, our nemesis.
Question is, how do you DO structure — and how do we, as writers, learn to draw good blueprints, so we stop spending 80 percent of our time at the keyboard destroying what we created?
Note: First, let’s celebrate the fact that Alex Jones just got kicked off Twitter forever and ever, which means he’ll be screaming into the void for a long time. Praise the gods. Now onto the meat of this post.
Listen: the advice you see on the Series of Tubes isn’t just bad. All too often, it’s seriously, tragically wrong.
Good info is quickly outdated, especially if it’s about social media.
Even if you do your due diligence–say that three times fast–and read seven different articles about best practices, it may not help.
Whatever article you read will typically be one of three things: (a) conventional wisdom, meaning it’s standard fluff which will get you standard, meh results, (b) bland instruction-manual drivel that won’t help you unless you’re hopeless with technology or (c) some kind of smooth come-on pivoting to a pitch for you to spend $199 on an app or service that promises the moon.
I’m not selling anything.
HOWEVER: I love Twitter, despite its flaws. Nothing is better for learning about breaking news, exploring your favorite niche and making friends.
So let’s talk smack.
1) Don’t treat Twitter like Facebook
Facebook is for friends and family you already have. You don’t take friend requests from 5,492 strangers on Facebook because hey, I’m not letting those people see family photos and all that. There’s a higher barrier to making connections.
Twitter is like a friendly bar where the drinks are always free.
The barriers are low to non-existent. I don’t risk or lose anything by making new connections.
Posts that make sense on Facebook don’t work on Twitter and vice versa.
Facebook is about memories and moments and relationships. Good posts are timeless.
Twitter is about now now NOW, and tweets have an incredibly short half-life. (Note: HALF-LIFE 3 is never happening. Valve simply enjoys teasing and torturing you, and they’ll keep doing it forever.)
On the Book of Face, it’s fine to share personal moments–though don’t get too TMI and become Complainy McComplainface–because your friends and family already know and care about you. So yeah, the clip of your daughter tasting ice cream for the first time is hella cute.
On the Twitter, people will wonder why some dude with Yoda as their avi is putting up shaky video of their labrodoodle puking up two pounds of Easter chocolate on the living room rug.
2) Facebook a little, tweet a lot
You could post on Facebook a couple times a week, or once a day, and nobody would bat an eye. Pretty normal.
Once a month and people will wonder if you’ve gone into hiding.
If you posted on Facebook five to ten times a day, people would start avoiding you like that neighbor who always comes over to chat and won’t escape after an hour of yakking about something you don’t like or understand, like cricket.
The rules are reversed for Twitter.
Post once a day and most people won’t see the post.
Post once a week and congratulations, you’ve invented an invisibility cloak. Patent that thing.
Twitter feeds scroll by crazy fast. Unless somebody follows you, or the hashtags you’re using, and is online THAT VERY SECOND, they won’t see your post. (This is true even though Twitter changed its algorithms to be more like Facebook so your absolute besties on Twitter will see your stuff more often with the IN CASE YOU MISSED IT shebang. However, 99 percent of people will not see your posts unless they’re staring at the screen right that second, which is not happening. The math starts getting cray cray. Say you have 2,000 followers. It’s a good bet maybe 200 of them, max, will say any random tweet you post. Then we get into the standard ratios: If 200 people see it, 20 will actually read it and 2 will respond.)
It’s smart to tweet five or ten times a day. No problem. Because even then, only a minority of your followers will even see it.
3) Forget the usual advice on who, and how, to follow
Conventional wisdom goes like this: figure out hashtags for things you love, or whatever your niche is, and follow scads of people with that hashtag in their bio.
No.
Here’s why this doesn’t get the job done: (a) you’ll miss a ton of people who post to that hashtag and skip having it in their bio, (b) you’ll wind up following an army of zombie twitter accounts of people who have your hashtags in their bio but haven’t tweeted since 1977, and yes, I know Twitter didn’t exist, this is a Dad Joke, just go with it and (c) most of the live accounts you do follow with that hashtag won’t be that active.
Who do you want to follow?
Not just people who care about your special niche, whether it’s Hand-Stitched Hats for Cats or novels about Men in Kilts and the Women Who Love Them.
You want interesting people in that hashtag who are huge fans or experts. You want people who are actually on Twitter a lot, and not as lurkers, but chatterbugs. And you want people who are friendly and take the time to talk with other people, not just use Twitter as a vehicle for self-promotion.
Instead of the hashtag bio thing, this is what you do: Search for a keyword (doesn’t have to be a hashtag) or phrase in the Twitter search box. Look through the most recent tweets about that subject and follow people who are tweeting about it, and talking to each other, RIGHT NOW.
That way, you know it’s not a zombie account. You know if they’re actually having conversations with other people or just pumping out content.
Then follow the friendliest people who like talking about what you love.
4) Never troll, and never feed the trolls
Let’s say somebody invited you to their home for a party. They’re providing the food and wine. You just have to show up.
And let’s say you told them their house is too small, their Ford Explorer sucks and their kids are ugly. You’re gonna get kicked out of the party. Maybe punched in the face.
Sure, being a troll can get you attention. The wrong kind of attention.
There’s a difference between being famous and being infamous.
Still, you’ll run into plenty of trolls on Twitter and other corners of the Series of Tubes, and there’s only one strategy that works.
Ignore them.
No matter what they do or say, never, ever respond. Not once.
Blocking them is fine, because you never have to deal with their nonsense.
Muting them is far more evil and enjoyable, since they’ll keep shouting into the void and won’t understand why you’re an unmovable rock. Why they can’t provoke you, no matter how insane they get.
Mute away. It’s pure torture for trolls.
Also, what Ken M. does isn’t really trolling. He’s a derp, and plenty funny.
5) Retweet, respond and comment 80 percent of the time
With the Book of Face and other platforms, if you’re only posting a few times a week, or once a day, it’s fine to use that one shot to say the thing you really need to say. Go ahead and post that video of Sue Bird losing her mind in the fourth quarter and hitting threes from downtown Tacoma, or put in a link to your latest blog post.
On the Twitter, try to retweet, respond and comment four times for every other thing you say. (Yes, the math works out. Four-to-one works out to 80 percent. I didn’t even bust out the calculator, that’s how certain I am.)
Because like I said earlier, Twitter is like a bar where the drinks are free. There’s nothing friendlier than liking, retweeting and commenting what other people post. And there’s nothing more self-absorbed and lame than only talking about yourself. Wouldn’t fly in real life, even if we were actually in a bar and had done six shots of really good tequila in the last two hours when you said, “Enough about me. What do YOU think about me?”
And that’s the final lesson. All media, including social media, goes back to a basic rule of rhetoric: it’s not about you.
It pains me to see folks place all their faith in the Series of Tubes, whether they’re trying to bust into Hollywood, sell books about Men in Kilts or make a living playing punk rock songs with only three chords.
It’s no skin off my nose if they stubbornly keep on doing it.
As somebody who believes in science, and numbers, and doing whatever works, I’ll just say this: the Series of Tubes is useful for making friends and other things — but it is not a strategy and it is not a plan, not even for Internet Tough Guys.
This is your standard Internet Tough Guy as a child, deep into his training.
Here’s the thing: to persuade 10 people, you have to reach thousands–and to persuade thousands, you have to reach millions.
Which means using mass media, which is a completely different animal than social media or social networking.
Digital alone isn’t a strategy. It’s one piece.
There was a good Seattle blog, staffed with professional journalists and getting 400,000 hits a month, and that wasn’t enough to keep it afloat. Because internet hits may seem impressive, but they can be cheap and fleeting.
Truly reaching an audience means going to where they are, which isn’t your website, Twitter feed, Instagram home or whatever corner of the interwebs you prefer.
Some people rely on the radio. Maybe they’re like me and drive far to get to work and home every day.
Other folks read their local newspaper every morning with coffee, a ritual that I believe to be sacred and noble.
And yes, there are people who still use their television, even if it’s hooked up to cable, Hulu, Netflix or whatever else is hot this week.
The bottom line is this: If you made a pie chart of where people get their news and entertainment, it would be insanely fragmented. Digital is an important, modern slice, sure. But it’s just a slice.
A real media strategy, a smart one, touches every corner of that media pie.
And now I’ll prove those three things to you with one word, a word that you will definitely recognize and understand.
Ready?
Here’s that word:Â SNOOKI.
Does Snooki (real name: I don’t care) have flaws and quirks? Oh yes. She and every other member of Jersey Shore had a solitary talent: creating constant drama, if not fiery train wrecks.
Conventional wisdom is that talent trumps all. This is America, right? The cream rises to the top. No way will somebody like Snooki get magazine covers.
HOWEVER: Just a few miles from the Jersey Shore are 5.82 bazillion Broadway actresses who have more talent, beauty and brains in their pinky fingers than Snooki and all her castmates combined. Some of these Broadway stars approach perfection, being triple threats who can sing, dance and act while looking like supermodels.
Talent alone, though, doesn’t make them into stars.
Are they hidden gems? You can’t say that. They’re on Broadway, seen by millions of locals and tourists in one of the biggest media markets in the world.
If the people who place all of their faith in the viral power of the Series of Tubes were right, all that overwhelming talent plus a few tweets and YouTube videos would be launching people from Broadway into the stratosphere, week after week.
Except that doesn’t happen.
Instead, we have People covers of Snooki getting pregnant and wall-to-wall coverage about the Kardashians, who really need some alone time before we beg Elon Musk to send them all on his first manned mission to Mars.
Here’s why.
Flaws and quirks beat absolute perfection
In the old days, back when we had these things called “papers of news,” some papers ran an interesting contest. Out of a page full of photos of pretty women, the game was picking not your favorite, but the photo you predicted OTHER READERS would choose.
Much more interesting. In the first case, it’s your preference. Maybe you like blondes with short hair. Who knows? Who cares?
The second question — which photo will the most readers choose? — is a lot more fun. It’s the same game played by Hollywood talent scouts, music industry execs, literary agents and model agencies. Put yourself in the shoes of a diverse audience, young and old, city slickers and cowboys. Now bet your career and livelihood by picking not who you like the best, but who you think average people would pay money to like.
With the old newspaper contests, readers went with quirks and flaws. If there was only one redhead on the page, picking her was smart. Because she stood out.
Think about some of the most famous supermodels. Lauren Hutton had a big gap between her teeth. Cindy Crawford had her mole.
When everybody seems equally perfect and wonderful, a little quirk or flaw makes them interesting. Flaws and quirks let them stand out from the crowd and gives the audience somebody to identify with, because average Joe and Jane Sixpack aren’t perfect, either.
A related idea is that quirks and flaws — even train wrecks — attract attention.
If you’re perfectly talented and perfectly balanced and sane, you’ll never make the news for (a) getting married and divorced every 72 days, (b) having spats with other stars, (c) being arrested for being a drunken idiot or (d) going into rehab.
Downey is a supremely talented actor. If he had a perfect personal life, you might hate him. You’d want to see him brought down to earth off his pedestal of perfection. On the other hand, if Downey was drinking Charlie Sheen‘s tiger blood nonsense, you’d dismiss him as an idiot. Instead, people admire Downey for getting clean and sober, because everybody loves a redemption story. He still has an edge — plus flaws and quirky charm — but he’s no Sheen, who’s turned into a punchline.
Contrast also works. If you see somebody who looks great, it raises expectations. Time after time, an ugly duckling has shown up on stage at Britain’s Got Talent, underwhelming anyone watching until they opened their mouths and MADE PEOPLE CRY.
Here is Paul Notts, who definitely played the part of the ugly duckling. And the crowd loves him.
The package matters more than the product
The average person in the 1970s was exposed to about 500 ads per day. Today, it’s up to 5,000 ads per day, all professionally designed by Don Draper  to persuade you that yes, you have to buy that widget RIGHT NOW.
It’s no exaggeration to say that a 1 percent response rate isn’t failure at all. That’s pretty dang good.
If the pros are happy to get something like 1 percent, don’t think that you are somehow immune from the mathematics. Your package has to be amazing to break through all that clutter.Because people are more media savvy than ever. They have to be. If people weren’t such hard targets, they’d blow the mortgage money on a garage full of Shamwows.
This is why you can’t think, “I have 15,000 blog readers and 22,000 Twitter follows, so if they all buy my book / album / fingerpainted portraits of dogs dressed like Elvis, I’m home free.” Not after you do the math. 1 percent of 15,000 + 22,000 = 370.
Packaging is so important that it actually subverts true talent.
Malcolm Gladwell tells a great story in BLINK about classical musicians in professional symphonies. Used to be, the conductor watched people try out. Then he picked who’d be first violin and all that. For the sake of fairness, symphonies switched to having musicians play behind a screen. You couldn’t see who it was. What they sound like is all that mattered anyway, right?
This little change turned classical music upside down. Conductors freaked out, because they were picking women for manly instruments like the tuba, things they believed women couldn’t possibly have the strength or lung power to play.
Also, some people looked terrible when they played, but sounded great. Other people were good-looking and looked great when they played, but they actually sounded bad, when you couldn’t see them.
The screen turned off the connection between our eyes, our ears and our brain.
It’s the same thing that happens when you’re sick and can’t smell. Food tastes entirely differently. Taste isn’t all in the tongue.
Here’s the other thing: a conductor can tell the difference between a room packed with world-class violinists, but you and I can’t.
A professional food taster can tell you insane things about packages of Oreos, down to which factory produced the additives and flavorings. You and I can’t do that.
A scout for the New York Jets could talk to you for hours about how Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are totally different quarterbacks, but to you and me, all we know is they’re both really good and that Peyton has a younger brother who looks like he’s still 12 and plays for the New Jersey/A football team. The intricate technical details about how each quarterback handles seven-step drops when facing a corner blitz, well, that’s beyond our ken. Sidenote: I don’t even know if “ken” is a word anymore.
The point is, when we’re talking about the top .01 percent of talented people, doing whatever those talented people do, the package is more important than the product.
That’s because the professionals who pick winners and losers do have strong opinions, often about technical, high-level stuff, yet those opinions actually don’t matter at all to the people who matter most, which is you and me, Joe and Jane Consumer, who actually buy the movie tickets / books about sparkly vampires (please don’t) / and music singles on iTunes.
The only opinions that truly matter are the uneducated ones.
We don’t care that professionals in the music industry say Madonna and sixteen other pop divas have weak voices. Our eyes are hooked up to our brain, which also communicates with our ears. The whole package matters, not just the voice. So the showmanship of Madonna makes her a star when a zillion other singers with better pipes fail.
Unlike the symphony tryouts, there is no screen in real life.
You can take it further. There are all kinds of actresses and professional athletes who put out albums that objectively stink. Yet they sell far more copies than they should simply because their name ID is crazy high. They know how the publicity game works. And so they get more attention, and sales, than musicians with far more talent who will toil in obscurity.
A great package (name ID, flaws, quirks, drama) + poor talent beats the heck out of great talent + poor packaging (no name ID, no flaws or quirks, no drama).
The same is true of actors, writers and artists. This is why obscure artists suddenly sell all kinds of paintings and such when they die. Their name is finally in the news, probably for the first time. There’s all kind of talent hiding around the corner that you never see.
An easy example: go to your county fair in the summer and check out the arts and crafts displays. I shoot photos and know enough to be dangerous and listen, I was really impressed by all the kids who won ribbons for photos. Then I scooted over to the adult photo winners. Mind blown. Great shots, including a bunch people took all over the world. But you’ll never learn their names or see their work.
Without legs, you are dead in the water
Though I kinda sorta hate reality TV, it is the best possible laboratory for testing evil theories about media and publicity.
The structure of different reality shows makes stars out of people like Snooki and Kim Kardashian while denying fame and fortune to other people with more actual talent and potential.
Here’s why: legs.
Survivor is one of the original reality TV hits, and you probably remember the first guy who won it, the naked man, Hatch, right? (I am not certain about his first name, and yes, the Series of Tubes would tell me, but I believe “naked man” and “Hatch” is close enough.)Â Hatch was an interesting villain, and villains stick in our head better than heroes. But aside from getting in the news for going to prison (train wreck!), Hatch pretty much disappeared.
Same thing with Rupert, a bearded pirate hero who was on Survivor: Some Island Where It is Hot. Great character. Should have been a star. But except for some kind of Survivor All-Star thing, Rupert also disappeared.
Why? Because the structure of Survivor doesn’t give anybody legs. Except for the rare times they bring back people for a second go, you are one-and-done.
Jersey Shore, Basketball Wives and even the crazy stuff on Discovery (Mythbusters,Storage Wars, Southern Men Who Put Their Hands Into Swamps to Catch Man-Eating Catfish) have given us breakout stars not because those people are far more talented. It’s because the structure of those shows gives them legs.
They aren’t one-and-done. The people on those shows are on the Glowing Tube season after season after season.
And it is no mistake that we’re talking entirely about the Glowing Tube so far.
Movies are typically one shots. Unless you’re in a crazy successful series like STAR WARS or HARRY POTTER, a movie doesn’t typically have enough legs to get you even to Snooki status. You’re lucky to get ONE sequel, and that means people see the first movie and see the sequel about two years later. If you’re insanely lucky, there’s a third movie, at least another year or two after that.
This is why TV is king.
First, because instead of once a year with a movie, people can see you every week.
Second, because unlike all other forms of media, the Glowing Tube automatically generates all kinds of extra coverage in newspapers and magazines, blogs and radio, social media and regular old water cooler BSing.
Not accidentally. Automatically.
Sure, they talk about movies and books on the radio when I drive to work, but mostly, they’re talking about TV shows.
So let’s look at American Idol for a second. Actual talent. Big exposure. But it’s one-and-done, right? That should blow my evil theory out of the water.
Except the producers of American Idol understand that their newborn and freshly hatched stars needed steady exposure. They understand the need for legs. So after the season is over, not only does the winner (and some also-rans) have albums released in a hurry. They also send the winner and runner-ups on a big long concert tour and bring them back, repeatedly, to sing on later seasons and such.
Most people actively trying to collecting bazillions of Facebook “friends” are wasting everybody’s time, including their own.
Your number of Twitter followers doesn’t mean diddly.
Just saying these things is heresy to Internet Fanboys, who believe nothing is more powerful than the series of tubes.
If they can only find a way to implant a USB 3.0 socket in the back of their skull, they’ll be able to jack into the Matrix, do insane kung fu kicks and stop bullets JUST BY THINKING ABOUT IT, but they’re too busy looking at the woman in the red dress that they never leave the keyboard, go out in the real world and, I don’t know, kiss an actual girl.
Am I saying unplug from the series of tubes entirely? No. The internets, they are useful for many things.
I’m saying the real world is ALSO useful for many more things.
Why blog hits don’t matter
Everybody wants to be read. I mean, it’s sad to start a blog, put time and effort into writing great posts and have virtually no traffic.
However: let’s get practical.
When I started my old blog, it was to serve a specific purpose: a permanent home for the craigslist ad to sell the Epic Black Car.
WordPress is free. My sister, who is a flipping genius, told me that she loved working with the WordPress, that it was easy and fun. So I popped the ad on there, threw some photos in the craigslist ad and thought nothing of it.
Did it really matter whether I had 50 visitors a day, 500 or 5,000?
No. Not at all. Really, I wanted to sell one car to one person. Once.
The fact that silly ad went viral didn’t matter. Fun? Sure. But that’s all.
How much stuff is in your garage or basement, taking up space?
I feel your pain. Once you put something in a plastic bin and shove it in your garage, there’s a 95 percent change you’ll never open it. You could move across the country three times, loading and unloading those same plastic bins into U-Hauls, and never crack open the seal.
This is wrong. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Though my first social media love remains Twitter, and my affair with WordPress lives on, the useful thing about Facebook is you can connect with local people who’ll pay you monies to TAKE JUNK YOU DON’T USE.
Here are three ads I put on Facebook today for my local group, East Grays Harbor Swap and Shop, or as I like to call it, EGHSS, which you pronounce kinda like “eggs” except slower and in a Danish accent.
ublicity and marketing, including social media, is like the Wild West.
Just about anybody can call themselves a Social Media Ninja (although they shouldn’t) and get away with it, especially if they used the right jargon. Crazy ideas don’t sound crazy when nobody really knows anything in this new frontier.
Social media is still related to publicity and marketing, and even in that old business, the saying was, “Half of all advertising gets wasted. But nobody knows what half.”
Although there’s certainly good practice and bad ideas, there’s always been more art than science to the field. You can’t predict what will work or say, “We’re going to make this viral” and have it happen. Doesn’t work that way.
PETA does it best: they assume most things will fail, which is true. They swing for the fences and try all sorts of wild ideas and PR stunts, because 99 of them can flop if only one of them goes viral. PETA knows you can’t plan viral.
Now, I like the art AND the science, the theory and the practice. You can’t run everything by the numbers, because good numbers are hard to find, and it’s expensive, and you surely can’t run a bunch of numbers and say, “See? This thing will blow up because, you know, science.” Doesn’t work. But you can, and should, grab data where possible and use that to point in the right direction.
So it gave me great joy to see Neil the Patel come through with another great infographic about which words get shared on social media — the Book of Face, the Twitter, Goople+ and even that thing called LinkedIn — and which words get buried. Useful stuff.
The Red Pen of Doom 