Here’s how I’m playing my part to find a cure

I saw this twice in my newsfeed on Facebook today:

♥-♥♥—-Put this —♥♥—♥♥—On Your —♥♥—♥♥—status —♥♥—♥♥—іf уоυ кnоω —-♥♥-♥♥—-ѕомεоnε —–♥♥♥—–ωно нαѕ or —-♥♥-♥♥—-нαѕ нαd —♥♥—♥♥—Cancer♥ I wish for the cure of cancer. 93% won’t copy and paste this…will YOU?????

No.  No I won’t.  Absolutely, positively never will that be my Facebook status.  Why?  Because it’s all wrong.  I want a cure for cancer too.  Pasting that into my status does absolutely nothing.  How does it raise money?  How does it encourage people to get checked for prostate cancer or breast cancer?  How does it encourage awareness, story telling or healing?

It doesn’t.  It’s a spammy chain letter that’s now made it’s way onto Facebook.  And it’s the worst way you can possibly use it.  And what’s with the guilt trip?  “93% won’t copy and paste this…” Of course they won’t.  There are better things to do with our status updates!  It’s almost as bad as campaigns spamming Twitter with hashtags.. but at least they were raising some money while spamming the rest of us.

I get that you want to make a difference.  I get that you want to feel like you’re doing something… except copying and posting that into your status isn’t actually doing ANYTHING.

Here’s what I’m doing instead.  I have 363 connections currently on Facebook.  My status as of a few minutes ago is the following:

Here is my cancer awareness post: Facebook says I have 363 connections. For each of those connections that shares a memory of someone in their lives touched by cancer by commenting on this status or leaving a note on my wall between now and December 31, I will donate $2 to the Canadian Cancer Institute (I wish I could do more… but it’s a start)..

And those that are contributing are sharing their stories.  Through sharing our stories, we unite more towards a cause and we feel GOOD about it.

Note:  It’s the people who share their stories on my Facebook wall or post that I’ll contribute the $2 for.  When I’m rich enough to be able to make it limitless… well then I surely will.

Story telling.  Sharing.  Engaging. Encouraging.  Making our lives better because of the interactions we’ve had with one another.  That’s at the core the successful use of social media.  Not spammy.  Not leaving people guilt ridden into sharing something that isn’t of use to anyone else.

I get that you want to make a difference.  But think about your networks, and think about what will make an impact… versus what people are just going to ignore.

Hey McDonald’s, here’s what I think would make this ad #awesome

Last night, I was playing around with my camera and taking shots of a candle flame.  (Don’t judge, it was filling the whimsy of the pyro in me).  What I didn’t consider was the temperature of the flame and the proximity of my lens.  I melted the front just a wee little bit.  So this morning, I was thinking about whether I was going to keep on with this camera… it still seems to work okay, or if it would be a good excuse splurge for an upgrade.  I considered what I wanted in a camera.  I still want a small one that I can take anywhere, but I want a small one that takes uber awesome photos (you can’t get more awesome than that).  So, I turned to my favourite pass time.  The Internet.  And I searched for “ultimate mini cameras”.  Most of what I came up with were spy devices, not particularly what I’m looking for.

Now, it’s also 945 on a Saturday morning.  I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, nor have I had the drive to get the coffee percolating.  I click on one of the search results and I see this:

McDonald's Breakfast web ad

Damn.  Now I want one.  And McDonald’s is just down the street.  Except the weather outside is like this:

Image grabbed from the Weather Network, posted by somebody named Debbie

Sorry McDonald’s, I’m not going outside in that.  Even though you’re a block away, I’m a huge winter wuss, and I’m just not.  But here’s how your online ad would’ve sold me a breakfast wrap… heck, I’d probably order a couple of egg mcmuffins, 3 hashbrowns, one huge cup of coffee and a cinnamon bun to polish it off… and polled the neighbours in the building while I was at it.. (“Hey Stuart, I’m putting in a McD’s order, do you want anything?  What about you  Sally?”… hello capitalizing on the snow storm).

And this is how I would sell me a McD's breakfast on a blizzardy morning.

I’d probably change the tagline too… but seriously, if the McDonald’s down the street advertised that for me?  OMG… not only would I be drooling at the beauty of how well that was delivered in terms of geo targeting, thought, precision, etc.  I’d be a customer for life.  At least for the one down the street.

FREEZE… I’m moving ahead by standing still

I think that if I were to try and count the amount of ideas I have in one day on my fingers… I would soon run out of fingers.  And if I kept going, I would run out toes.  Unless you’re willing to loan me your fingers and your toes to continue counting on…

With so many ideas, it’s difficult to know which ones to pursue, which ones to shelve, and which ones to let go of completely.  Especially if you’ve seen me think.  In an instant my brain can explode all over a whiteboard and so many new projects and opportunities are born that I need to borrow more than just your fingers and toes to keep track of them all.

I believe that I’m not alone in my abundance of ideas.  And also, not so alone in my conundrum of not knowing what to do with them all.  Part of this is the reason I blog, the idea has an outlet, and maybe somewhere down the road I’ll come back to it, or somebody else will find it and do something even more marvelous with it.  This really doesn’t have anything to do with why I started this post, however.

This post is supposed to be about sticking with one idea, although I’ve just figured out the link from the previous paragraph.  People (and by people, I mean me) are figuring out that the web is the place to try out new things, new ideas, new concepts, new inventions, new everything.  The web is the place to try more and fail faster, to move on when something doesn’t work, to tweak, to grow, to get back up on that bike… except the next time it might be a bike, or it might be a horse, or a carriage, or a car… what I’m getting at is that I think people (me) are beginning to understand how easy it is to try out an idea, but I think that they (me) may have so many of them that when it fails, instead of sticking with the same idea, they (me) jump on down the line to the next one.

I’m musing a bit with the concept that the strategy to success on the web might be sticking with one idea.  Letting the rest go into the unknown to find other homes.  Picking one and failing many times with the same one until I find the model that works for it.  It’s still about failing faster, trying new things, innovating, changing and adapting, just a little less all over the map.  So, in an online world where everything changes at lightning speed and people can’t keep up with even what’s out there today, let alone with what’s going to be out there tomorrow… perhaps the people that will be successful are those that stick around in one area for a long time.  As everyone else rushes around to try out everything just because they can, we can be the ones going further by not going everywhere.

If the web is about choice…

… I choose to pay less attention to those who get noisier and add less value to my day.

In the past, I’ve said that the thing I love most about the internet is the ability to create my own experience, like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.  I can follow those I want to keep up with on Twitter, I can create my own daily paper of blogposts with feedly, I can hide the game playing updates from certain applications on Facebook… my experience online really is a direct result of the effort I put into personalizing it and creating value for myself from the content produced by others.

With Twitter specifically, tools like Tweetdeck allow me to further segment the people I follow and weed out tweets I’m not particularly fond of hearing much about.   I use the Groups feature to segment those I’m following into topics.  For example, I’ve got a group for “core” which are those I correspond with regularly, “social media” for users who typically talk about social media, a couple of search columns to keep tabs on specific hashtags and topics, and then the usual @replies and DMs columns.

Customizing the users in each of these columns is an ongoing task to keep them relevant.  I’m always adding and subtracting people from these without turning them off completely.  So when all of their recent tweets are updates from FourSquare… well, that’s not really why I’m on Twitter.  That adds no value to me.  And so I change the direction of my adventure… actually I keep it more on track to the information I want to know about, but tuning such users out of my main view.

There are so many different ways to use such tools, and so many different goals that people have.  So with that, I think in order to get the most out of any of these platforms, it’s important that we each define how it is we want to use them, what we expect to gain from them and how much effort we’re each willing to put in to get the outcome we want.

What do you think?  Have you attempted to customize your online experience?  What rules do you participate by?

To tweet or not to tweet… how important is it really?

Brian Solis tells us in his post  “Guess how many tweets fly across Twitter each day” that

According to new data from Pingdom, Twitter users are averaging 27.3 million tweets per day with an annual run rate of 10 billion tweets.

So with 27.3 million tweets per day, how much of an impact can one of your tweets have?  I mean really.  27.3 million.. and you put out even 10 tweets a day, that’s like 0.000037% of the content on Twitter in a day.  And tweeting 10 times for many people is alot.  But what if you’ve got 301 people following you?  All of a sudden, your world is a whole lot smaller.  Hubspot says the average number of tweets per day per user is 4.422.  So if you’ve got a community following you of 301 people and we assume that they see the average number of tweets from the people that they follow, there are 1,331 tweets a day for them to read.  Now you’re 0.07% of what they see at 10 tweets a day.  It still doesn’t seem like a lot, does it?

I’m going to make some assumptions here based on my own behaviour on Twitter.  Let’s assume that out of the 400 people you follow, you actually only pay attention to about 20-30 people on a regular basis.  This happens in any crowd, you’ll naturally tend to draw a few people who pay more attention to you than the masses.  To the masses, your tweet probably isn’t that important.  But to the few who follow what you say more closely, your tweets are everything.  Knowing who these people are is important, it’s identifying your influencers, your torch carriers.  And if they don’t like what you say, I can bet you’ll lose them over time.  And online, that time can happen fairly quickly.

How important are your torch bearers?  I’m not sure.  That depends on you and your goals.  It depends on where you want to take yourself.  The influencers you have today may not be the correct ones.  If this is indeed the fact, spend some time changing your voice and your message.  Decide on who it is you want to build closer ties with and then talk like them, because if the internet has proven anything to us, it’s that like will always find like.

Take a good look at your objective with Twitter.  Is your purpose to self promote?  Is it to add value and share information?  How do you want to be seen?  Do you toot your own horn a lot?  Or are you more subtle and let your good work speak for itself?  Think a little bit about these things as your looking at your network and your tweeting habits.  In a world where all many people have to go on are the updates and information you share via platforms like Twitter… Are they helping you?  Or are they hindering you?