You know the feeling you get when you’re showered and freshly wiped and yet the inside of your butt cheeks still feel wet and you irrationally think it might be poop even though it’s probably just moisture? Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.
I’m barely hanging on to the twitter train. Twitter to me is kind of like a puzzle. I can see the picture on the box and it’s pretty and I want to put it all together, but then I shuffle through the individual pieces and I just can’t figure it out.
I signed up for twitter for the same reason I signed up for facebook. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I am a writer. There’s something to be said for being able to connect with fans of all ages. For entrepreneurs, social networking represents a free way to advertise your wares. All you do is generate a shortened url to a product you are selling, and presto, tweet the link to your followers / post the link to your wall and you’re in business. But for someone in the public eye, it is also a convenient way to extend your reach. You can interact with your fans in short, contained bursts that have a minimal amount of drain on your day to day life but maximum amount of impact on expanding your brand.
But you might have noticed what I didn’t say. I didn’t create my profiles in order to meet new friends. I didn’t create profiles in order to find people from high school that I had long since buried in the graveyard of people I barely remember, whose names spark only the vaguest recollections of times long since passed. I didn’t make a profile so my parents could keep tabs on me, or I could post photo albums from last weekend, or to become a fan of my favorite bands. All of that stuff happens, but it’s ancillary to my intent. And it always has been.
When I first started using twitter, I would post jokes as I thought of them. Then I started to post when I was drunk. Then I discovered the hashmark and started posting things like
Woke up at 1am to I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody blaring and thought ‘What are my roommates doing?’ Wasn’t them. #falselyaccused
Then I realized that since I am a writer, I should be advertising my books. So I started posting links to the sales page, and updating my followers on the writing process, and tweeting every time I wrote a new blog post. Then I started taking random pictures and posting them with a caption (like this morning, the one of the car I parked next to with the trash barrel in the passenger’s seat and some kind of alien glob coating the side mirror). And finally, after all this time, I just tweet about whatever random thing I’m doing at the time.
But here’s what I don’t get. Why do you care? I barely care about the minutiae of my own life.
The latest wrinkle is follower-farming. Essentially, huge lists of followers who will follow you back. It’s a great idea, I guess, if gathering together a huge following is your thing. But what’s the end game?
The only way to find out is to try it. So I gamely signed up to follow 1,000 new accounts, and lo and behold, just 24 hours later, I have whopping 1,000 new followers myself. It worked as promised. But as far as I can tell, the vast, vast majority of the people I’m following don’t post any original tweets. They retweet crap from other people, post advertising links and sometimes just post lists of their own followers. Over and over and over again. Then there are the select few that tweet quotes from famous people. Over and over and over again. What the fuck? Why? Please someone explain it to me. First off, how is that a good use of the tweeters’ time and energy? And second off, really I mean really who is actually reading your tweets with genuine interest?
Let’s forget about social networking as a means of personal expression. If you’re the kind of person that regularly updates your facebook status or tweets about your day – that’s a legitimate use of the tool. Instead, let’s talk about entrepreneurship. My friend, someone I respect greatly, has said more than once that twitter (and facebook) are free means of advertising. But the message is untargeted and gets lost among this vast network of people who aren’t using the social networks for what they were intended for. Am I wrong? If I tweet a link to my book to 1,000 followers, have I succeeded in piquing their interest in my product or my brand? Are my 1,000 followers, themselves ostensibly entrepreneurs, as interested in my product as I am in theirs (if so, hooboy! I’m in trouble.) I really don’t get it. Not only do I not get it, I’m reasonably certain that my advertising attempts through social networking aren’t going to result in book sales except from people who were already inclined to buy my book in the first place.
Despite all this, I really like connecting with people through facebook and twitter. For every five or so friends or followers I have, there is one that I’m glad to be in contact with. For the rest of it though, I just don’t know what to think. The twitter train is moving pretty fast, but I’m not entirely certain that I even need to be on board.
The publication of my next book is still a few months down the road, but I got a few friends together to create a special promotional video to get people thirsty for more! However, the outtake (our test run) was actually funnier.
The publication of my next book is still a few months down the road, but I got a few friends together to create a special promotional video to get people thirsty for more!
Dying for fame? Dreaming of riches? Want to be among the social elite? That is so last century. This century it’s all about branding. Your brand name is your fame, it’s your privacy policy, your public profile, your media spin. Most of us have nothing to offer but ourselves. You think you’re special, and damnit, it’s about time you start proving it to the world. Start selling yourself today and make your mark tomorrow. And remember, you only have yourself to brand! Get started with…
Step 1: You ain’t got a name, you ain’t got a life
Name is everything in branding. It becomes the way people recognize you, something that distinguishes you from the rest. You can use your real name, a variation of your real name or make some shit up, but if it’s not memorable, you’re already dead in the water.
The savviest individuals sass up their name with just enough vroom to catch people’s attention. So throw away Miss Sally and call yourself Miss Salle! Your brand name should roll off the tongue and stick in their throats. It should blaze on paper and sound like the coming of the new dawn through the microphone.
Step 2: Become an e-medium
Remember, you’re selling yourself, not some product, not a book you wrote or a t-shirt you designed. You are selling you. And these days, you’re nothing without your network. Spread the word through every conceivable form of electronic medium known to man. Never heard of twitter? You’re six months behind. Not on facebook? That was two years ago. MySpace? Four. Haven’t bought your own website? Ten years ago, the best were already putting their stamp on the internet with their brand.
Go now and buy the damn website with your brand name on it. Already taken? Buy a different. Make it short, clever and spell it right. Don’t know what to put on it? Leave it blank then, but do not, whatever you do, leave it out there for someone else to snatch up.
Step 3: Do it Stupid
People win over fans by making themselves out to be total asses. Your brand name succeeds when you’re the biggest ass on the planet. Don’t be a wuss. Your brand is driven by your ability to do something totally bullshit and then film it and put it on YouTube. That’s how people know that for that one precious moment, you were the king of total assholes. They won’t even remember what you did, only that you were the mofo that did it.
And get on it because people are doing stupider and stupider shit all the time. Pretty soon we’re gonna run out of stupid shit to do and then you’ll be stuck a nobody. Is that what you want!
Step 4: Beat It
Branding helps you carry the momentum of your accomplishment into the future. It’s the hook that keeps people back for more. Everyone is forgotten. All your accomplishments are for nothing 15 minutes later. But damnit, your brand can live on forever. Put it all over the web, spread it through the hot fingers of your friends and people you’ve never met who will obsess about you. Take pictures.
Remember, they aren’t forwarding just a YouTube clip, they are sending your brand all over the internet, spreading it like butter on bread. And the way to keep it up is to beat it into the ground. Twitter yourself into a frenzy, tag yourself in photos on facebook. Make a blog, start a photo album, add another video clip. Do whatever it takes to feed more of yourself into the world wide web until we are stuffed so full all we shit out is you.
You can’t ever let up! You can do it. The minute you stop, the minute you rest on your reputation, the minute you take a breather, you risk ruin unless your brand can carry you through to the next triumph. Only through the power of branding can you sell forever the one commodity that you actually have to offer the world…that commodity is you and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!
I’ve never been great at picking guys who are ‘good on paper.’ Despite my two very expensive degrees from a reputable university, I’ve never dated someone who has put in more than a few semesters of community college. Despite the fact that I’ve been pretty much on my own since 18, I’ve dated many, many men who still live at home and whose mothers still do their cooking, dishes, and laundry. While I often spend summer evenings enjoying a bottle of wine and a good book in my backyard surrounded by my potted plants, I generally date men who would rather be playing Xbox with a six-pack of PBR in their parents’ basement.
Select friends tell me that my choice in men is a reflection of my being white trash (which, for the record, I am not). I’ve gone out with men who are ‘good on paper-’ who grew up in Connecticut, went to Ivy League universities, and are given lucrative stock options at their corporate firms… but these guys just aren’t my cup of tea. I mean, I’m the child of a foul-mouthed cop who always had a case of Bud in the fridge and a pack of Marlboro reds in his pocket… I can’t bring any-old pansy-ass home to mom and dad, and I wouldn’t want to.
Admittedly, when it came time for college, I packed up and moved away from my hometown to live in the city, and I do have quite the collection of designer clothes (from Filene’s Basement and Marshall’s, of course), and I do enjoy an al fresco Sunday brunch on Newbury Street or a night at the theatre… but that doesn’t mean that I want to date, in the words of the Governator, a ‘girly-man’ who does the same. I would much rather a man who can pinpoint the strange noise that my car is making, who can build a shelving unit for my books, and who wants to throw back a few pints after we do some yard work on a Sunday afternoon.
Perhaps when I hit my thirties my priorities will have shifted and I will be looking for a man who can’t take one hand off his blackberry to take his suit off and f*ck me, but for now, I’ll be at the neighborhood bars looking for every unshaven, Guinness-breathed, Boston-accented mechanic, carpenter, and state DOT worker who will mow my lawn and give it to me good once he’s already worked up a sweat.
Lunch today was chicken noodle soup. It was a small victory since soup options run the gamut of enjoyable to acceptable to downright tragic.
I have become something of an expert at quickly identifying a soup that will satisfy. I can look at the surface of a pot of soup and know instantly whether it will ever touch my lips. Sometimes, I can even tell just by the name. Here’s a pop quiz, see if you guess which flavors of soup would ever fill my gullet:
Usually, soups are a good option for lunch and I can find something in one of the two large vats at the end of the salad cart that does not look regurgitated. True, sometimes the options are between “death in a soup bowl” otherwise known as Manhattan clam chowder and “yesterday’s overcooked leeks floating in a miasma of goop” otherwise known as Italian wedding soup. Other times though, it’s rich beef barley versus vegetable medley (though I’m not a vegetarian, I can usually survive the vegetable medley because everything tends to fuse together and become an almost meat-like symbiote not unlike all things soy).
I’m fond of the chicken noodle soup because I think it’s two primary ingredients are hard to mess up. It does require that one explore to the bottom to find pieces of chicken, spiral noodles, mushy carrots and the occasional celery bit. Though it’s not quite the most flavorific soup ever (nor for that matter, the warmest), considering its institutional origins, I am usually pleased. In fact, today the chicken pieces were quite hearty, another surprise, since there is really no sensation in your mouth like overcooked, sloppy wet chicken globs.
Every week, at least one suspicious flavor shows up on the menu. The dining commons tends to cover up deficiencies in their mass soup cooking methods by using generous amounts of pepper which end up floating along the top of the soup like vagrant seaweed. So imagine my surprise when I see on the menu “pepperpot soup” which is, what exactly? Broth and pepper? That’s pretty much like serving like serving a slice of buttermilk bread and calling it bread and butter because it was baked with margarine. Then one day, I see this prime option: chicken double noodle soup. So to disguise the lack of chicken, we’re doubling up on the amount of noodles. No one is fooled.
The non-vegetarian option soup choice is too often just yesterday’s leftovers in broth. (Hello, Caribbean jerk chicken soup. Really?) Plus, I think the vegetarians are screwed on an almost daily basis. The cream of mushroom soup is a cop out. I’m not wild about the dijon wild mushroom dill soup because too much of it gets in your teeth. And if you think you can’t go wrong with split pea soup (classic!) I would recommend you rethink it. Or try it yourself. I’m pretty sure soup is supposed to stain your teeth green.
Fortunately, at least once a week there is something simple (chicken noodle or beef noodle) to sooth over the rough spots (is it clam bisque or an opportunity to make full use of your health insurance with an emergency room visit?) Any time I can score a soup that runs from edible to hey this is almost decent, I consider it a small victory. And if I’m on top of my game, I run, run, run far away from the rest.
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