Entertainment and technology journalist. Music critic. BComm (Entrepreneurship major) student. Media, news and politics junkie. A&R scout. Music industry and branding consultant. Read more at the bio page linked in the menu below.
Also, don't forget to visit my profiles at various social media websites. Add me, follow me, e-mail me. I love the interaction. The full list of social media profiles is available at About.Me and my e-mail address is josh@joshmcconnell.com.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
In a previous post, Social Media Etiquette 101: The Beauty of the Retweet, I discussed why it is imperative for social media users to give credit where credit is due. I discussed that this sort of interaction, and not stealing the credit, is what has caused social media to thrive in its early days. It brings together the community with a simple gesture of tipping your hat toward others.
The good news is I’ve actually seen a number of friends try to retweet (or “share” on Facebook) more since my last post. That’s fantastic and I applaud your efforts. The bad news is as I step back and evaluate, I’m starting to see another trend on Twitter in the aggregate: retweet overkill.
Despite what others will try to tell you, social media is all about building a relationship with other users. It’s not a one-way form of communication. If that’s all you are using it for, you might as well be in advertising. You need to start a conversation, reply to other people and have some fun with it. It’s not necessarily about numbers, such as the number of followers you have, which is why I personally choose to focus on quality and not quantity. It’s about having a strong follower base with a high level of interaction. I may not have a huge followers list compared to some, but I know the vast majority of the ones I do have trust me, click on links I post and interact with me. That’s more valuable to me than having a large follower base that is simply trying to gain followers for themselves.
So all of this being said, there are those who simply aren’t using Twitter effectively by ignoring completely what social media stands for. The best part of this fact is a lot of them are self-proclaimed “experts” in social media or a similar field (marketing, communications, etc). So what are these “experts” doing? Retweet overkill. I share this with you in hopes that you not repeat the same mistakes they are doing right now.
Instagram has been growing very quickly, adding features often and scaling comfortably. But some are brushing aside the photo sharing service, not fully understanding why they should be using it. No, it’s not just another photo service. It’s a community. Yes, it has great filters to throw on pictures quickly that can be exported to other social media websites, but there is so much more to it. People just don’t quite understand how to leverage it effectively and therefore have their pictures discovered within the service.
Here’s six reasons (in no particular order) why you should be using it if you have an iPhone:
1. It Is Exclusive
If you’ve seen The Social Network or read The Facebook Effect, one of the reasons Facebook took off from the get-go was because of one thing: exclusiveness. People wanted in, but they weren’t allowed and had to wait. Likewise, Instagram is exclusively on the iPhone, and other people want in on the action but can’t. Yet. This is fueling demand so that whenever Instagram goes cross platform, it’s going to explode.
2. Community
Tying into the exclusiveness factor, the small Instagram user base (if you can call 43 million users “small”) makes for a fantastic community. But even better, within this community there isn’t a focus on a lengthy profile or sending out messages to the masses. Instead, you’ve got your photos that speak for you and that’s it. Likewise, you start following other people and making friends strictly based on the pictures they post and your appreciation for them. The art speaks for itself, eliminating all other static noise or ego. It is brilliant. Try searching our local city, for example, and you’ll begin to see new things from different perspectives. You’ll then want to follow the person, not because they are a self proclaimed “social media expert” but because you like what they see.
You can call it karma. You can call it being nice. But I would even go as far as calling it common courtesy. Something that is being lost in the explosion of social media is social media etiquette; which is unfortunate, because it’s part of the reason why we have some so far and so fast.
Having lived and breathed social media — as well as other internet innovations — for well over a decade now, it has been fascinating to see the rapid growth. I remember chatting in IRC chat rooms and message boards when this new site called Friendster hit the web. After Friendster struggled with its own scaling, we then saw MySpace emerge which launched customization and a platform for effective networking. From there, I remember when a little site called Facebook was taking off and having arguments with many friends about why it was going to blow away MySpace (they called me crazy). Then, most recently, a site called Twitter launched and I signed up when the user base was still in the thousands (let alone the millions it is today) and for years I had to try to tell people how it was going to be a very powerful tool. Obviously that is no longer a problem.
Back in 2005, I was forced to take “JoshMcConnell.net” since someone else had the coveted “.com” domain. I was bummed, but moved on. The good news, however, is that I was finally able to take over JoshMcConnell.com in November 2010 and now I’m finally putting it to use.
Despite using Tumblr off and on since its creation in 2007, I have decided to use it as the foundation for my new online home. A site is only as good as its number of users and now the users are actually flocking over to Tumblr. So it only makes sense to give it the spotlight. It may not be as robust as I would like, but thankfully I can still do some HTML tweaking to the layout. Besides, this is only a temporary home until university is finished when I can create a more elaborate website.
Until then, JoshMcConnell.com is mainly a hub to all of my social media profiles as well as a place to occasionally share some of my thoughts, pictures and perhaps eventually videos. Hope you dig it.
