 I've
always been a bit dubious about the whole social media thing. Yes, it
can be a great medium for connecting with old friends and maybe getting
some breaking news, but otherwise services like Twitter seem to mostly
be a time-wasting enabler for people with too little meaningful purpose
in their lives. Achieving the largest number of 'Followers' is now a
lifetime goal in order to assert and prove popularity and dominance
in society. Catering to vanity is big business so as you might expect,
there is a plethora of opportunists who offer to inflate the Followership
of gullible Twits. A recent story in
Inc magazine, one of many such stories in many news reports, illustrated
just how easy it is given even a modest cash outlay to buy Followers
- some charge as little as a penny apiece. Robert Waller, founder of
StatusPeople, created a tool for estimating fake Followers for any given
Twit. If you are thinking of starting a Twitter Follower business of
your own, businesses will also sell you 'verified' e-mails address batches,
Captcha defeaters, and HideMyAss.com will provide bulk IP addresses
that can hide the fact that your claimed Followers all come from the
same place. Ingenuous, it is.
 Twitter,
of course, is not alone. Even more 'professional' social networking
services like LinkedIn are known to inflate their analogy of Followers
(Connections) to the point where numbers are basically meaningless.
I have recently begun posting homepage items on LinkedIn (which
automatically also posts on Twitter) in order to expose more people
to the wealth of useful information that is RF Cafe. To be honest, I
haven't taken the trouble to learn exactly how the LinkedIn system works
or whether only people who are 'Connected' can see my posts.
The significance of receiving "endorsements' by fellow LinkedIners
is also not known. Does it really make any difference how many people
endorse you for a particular skill? I don't know, maybe it does to professional
networkers. Maybe my unwillingness to indulge beyond a casual, sometimes-level
has cost me status and advantage. I have heard from half a dozen or
so people in the last year who claim that in spite of being accomplished
in their engineering careers and having excellent LinkedIn credentials,
finding a different job has been difficult or impossible - especially
for people over 50 years old. Surely there are folks who credit social
media for their success, but I don't recall reading about them.
Then again, maybe I'm just showing my age (55, as of yesterday -
ugh!).
8/20/2013 Update
 OK,
so now I have read about someone who credits social media - LinkedIn
specifically - for success. Judy Warner, of
Transline Technology,
responded to the "Fake Twitter
Follower Factory" commentary that I posted on LinkedIn to say she
has had an overwhelmingly good response from reaching out to and engaging
the LinkedIn community of engineers. In fact, Judy's experience was
so spectacular that in a few short years she went from being a connectionless
marketing exec re-entering the PCB marketing realm after a decade-long
hiatus, to being a sought-after expert in her field. Read her short
article "Does
Marketing Matter?" in the April 2013 edition of the pcb magazine
(page 62). Maybe Judy's feedback to my LinkedIn post means I, too, can
now claim social media success!
Posted August 19,
2013 |
