Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity | Magazine. Illustration: Helen Yentus and Jason Booher When it comes to your social network, bigger is better. Or so we’re told. The more followers and friends you have, the more awesome and important you are. That’s why you see so much oohing and aahing over people with a million Twitter followers. But lately I’ve been thinking about the downside of having a huge online audience. When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.
Consider the case of Maureen Evans. Then, in 2007, she began a nifty project: tweeting recipes, each condensed to 140 characters. Why? The lesson? After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters.
Links on "The United Methodist Church" 4 Lies about social media | Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist. Everyone knows that the best way to get a job is to leverage your network. And almost everyone knows that social media is a great way to build your network. But many of you are making lots of social media mistakes. I know because so many people tell me that social media is a waste of their time. They're wasting their time, and continuing to make mistakes, because there's a set of common lies that people believe about social media. Here are those lies: Lie #1: LinkedIn is for networking. LinkedIn is great. Most of you already know I'm well connected—I'm a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. Potential employers like LinkedIn because they can glance at your LinkedIn profile and get a sense of how connected you are and how much money you make. But what you cannot do on LinkedIn is build a network.
Lie #2: Twitter is for conversation. Lie #3: Blogs are personal journals. Lie #4: Social media is no place for business. The same is true online.
Social Media is the New Tattoo | Michelle Tripp: The BrandForwar. Back in those halcyon days of high school my BFF Shannon started talking about getting a tattoo. A nice big one that no doubt was intended to shock her parents, get her officially banned from church, and seal her social identity as a true rebel. I remember briefly thinking how cool it would be to get one, too. That fantasy lasted a whole three minutes. While visions of Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song angel may have briefly danced in my head (yes, I also thought I was a rebel) there was this little voice of reason that chose at that moment to scream rather loudly “DON’T DO ITTTTT!” Yeah, I wasn’t much of a rebel after all. My wonder years consisted of a series of close attachments to more audacious friends who I could live through vicariously.
Heck, I wasn’t even cool enough to let my senior prom date wear a Zeppelin T-shirt under his jacket for fear we’d get thrown out. I don’t know if Shannon ever got that tattoo. Fast forward “a few years.” Let’s compare: What about 13 year-olds with a MySpace?