The popularity and growth of social media in the past few years has been immense. Businesses from the local independently owned clothing shop to the big corporations have found taking part in two way communication with consumers, when done correctly, can have its benefits. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, being among the most popular. But what does it does for the regular human being that has nothing but themselves as a person, to promote?
For example, if you aren't trying to promote a business or product, what do you tweet about? You can tweet about what you're doing, where you're eating, and what kind of mood you're in. But how much personal info about a person can we take before they get boring, annoying, or both? One way to keep it interesting is to keep letting people know (your facebook friends or twitter followers) just how how fascinating you are. I'm guilty of falling into this trap. I follow a person because I like to know what he's doing. He knows what's up and coming and he always tries to be the first at the scene of a popular event, the first to try the latest gadget, or the first to comment on what the media finds newsworthy. No matter, what it is, he always has to put in his two cents. Overall, fascinating guy to follow.
The problem is he's quite cocky. If there's a hockey game on tv, he will remind us he watched that team take the gold medal home live last year. If he fell on the dance floor on his birthday cuz he had a few too many, he will take a pic of the dance floor and tweet about it. And people love it. I find him to be egotistical. Always trying to be the first one on the latest trend, and making sure to let everyone else know, that "you heard it here first". In marketing, we call these kinds of people early adopters. He would probably call himself, the pre-early adopter, just as he's referred to himself as an "internet evangelist" before. And why? Because people eat up what he's dishing out.
I recently found a very young local kid who tweeted he could "single handidly make things trendy in Winnipeg". Right. Maybe in his circle of bbm friends, sure. Kids are always looking for someone to imitate. I've also seen both these individuals go out to clubs on the weekend and tweet about their every move: "on the dance floor", "at the bar", "doing a shot", fell and and I can't get up because I had to tweet first. (Okay the last one I made up, but it could just as well be true.) Never mind the fact burying your nose in a smartphone of the day is rude and disrespectful to the friends you're out with, but do they really need to justify how "cool" they are by letting everyone else know their every move. Sometimes you need to live your life, instead of tweeting every moment of it. #JustSaying
But what did these two individuals do before they could spread their self-proclaimed depths of knowledge to the rest of us? Does being able to hide behind your blackberry or mac give you the confidence to refer to yourself in such omnipotent terms?
In a related note, the LinkedIn blog released the 10 most overused buzzwords on LinkedIn profiles in December of 2010. "Evangelist" didn't make the cut, but entrepreneurial and dynamic were on the list. I immediately printed the list out and will refrain from using any of those words. This transfers to twitter and facebook, where I see countless individuals describe themselves as "mavens" or "guru's" every single day. I want to be unique, not join the trend of self-proclaiming your own almighty-ness. I'm going to let my work speak for itself.
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