There. I’ve said it.

Social Media Makes Business Owners Stupid. (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way).

I was reading up today on someone who Klout considers a star (his score is 55, mine is 53, for what it’s worth). One of the key factors they believe he’s a star is because he uses the GKTT (Guy Kawasaki Twitter Technique), or what I like to call the HERP.

Horribly
Egregious
Repetitive
Posting

Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop is hurting the web. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Guy himself, he’s a great human being as far as I can tell. Looks very huggable. However, hiring armies to “aggregate” (read: scrape like a meth addict) content from the web, reposting an excerpt on your own site like you created it, and promoting the crap out of it over and over and over again with different titles so your web properties show massive traffic is not just downright dishonest, it damages the web.

Remember why Digg took a massive geek-cred hit a while back? They added a “landing” page so you -had- to visit Digg at some point before you visited the content that people actually wanted you to see.

And it works, because you fall for it. Like an alzheimer patient oscillating between two Starbucks on opposite corners – we keep on clicking on. And on. And on. Have you tried their Salted Carmel Mocha? It’s delicious. But if you’re in Fort Collins, nothing beats the Honey Vanilla Latte from Cafe Ardour.

Let me ask you something: what happens when you see a brand new hilarious commercial on TV? (that is, if you don’t skip past them pretending to be some evil DVR-toting timelord). You laugh, right? Maybe you laugh so hard, you have to change your pants. Hey, it happens.

What happens an hour later when you’ve got your new pants on, and you see the same commercial again? …And again five minutes later …and again when you change the channel …and then again on every channel?

If you’re anything like me, you start wondering if the remote is sharp enough to perform Seppuku.

I’ll say it again: social media makes business owners stupid. Drunk with our own power at rummaging up hundreds or thousands of people who’ve decided at some point to click “follow” or “like”… the tendency is established that at some point, we’ll lose our minds. Just look at APlusK.

Enter: repetitive, slightly modified tweets. Observing, and consequently catching, the HERP. Writing banal blog posts to net SEO gains. Pitching discounts indiscriminately on every channel when times are slow. Ignoring industry standard rules because it just doesn’t look as good. Comic sans.

What’s worse: when one business owner shares this horrible advice with another. The cycle continues. Look, here’s the deal. What I like to call the “where’s the beef” of social media (because that other list of 10 things was taken by some dude who got freaked out by a brushfire):

1. Thou shalt not assume any random assclown shall care about thy Tweets.
2. Thou shalt worry about the number of meaningful conversations thou is having, not the number of thy followers.
3. Thou shalt not make life or death decisions based on thy Klout score nor any other social media “metric”.
4. Thou shalt seek either fame and fortune or meaningful conversation. Those who seek both are destined for pain and warm rootbeer.
5. Thou shalt blog with fresh, insightful, meaningful, funny, touching, or otherwise “fucking great” content, else thy can discontinue thy bitching about thou’s lack of readership.
6. Thou shalt not expect thy customers, family, high school friends, or other random folk to giveth a crap about your overly repetitive marketing messages.
7. Thou shalt not attempt to automate socialization or thou shalt be smited mightily.
8. Thou shalt not attempt to utilize “social media” as a one-way street, bullhorn, billboard, or glorified RSS feed.
9. Thou shalt not scrape social media sites for mine email address and then opt-me-in to thy mailing list against mine will.
10. Thou shalt not flood every medium with the same message. Show respect and shake it up, mine dawg.

And a bonus, for those of you paying attention:

• Thou shalt avoid YouTube commenters no matter the cost.

All sacrilege aside, before you do anything on social media, you should consider The Golden Rule. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. Work with people the way you’d like to be worked with.

Everything else is blasphemy.

(Header photo: Boy by Jacob Johan)

I’d like to clarify a bit on my post about getting your website done right. I came off as way, way too cynical and not very helpful.

My intention was not to skewer the people who are well-meaning or beginners. I -did- want to point out, there are unscrupulous individuals out there who will take advantage of people not in the know, willing to charge you thousands of dollars for work that’s not up to par: these are people whose intentions are skewed.

When I first started, my websites sucked. For real. I’ve drawn a quick visual aid to help me illustrate my point:

For those of you who are visually impaired, imagine walking through a hallway filled with roses which leads into a manure factory and someone’s propped the door open. Lots of potential, horrible execution. Now… you can make of that what you will. It’s taken me 13 years and I think I show some marginal improvement.

My point is this: as a small business owner, you’re going to make the best business decisions that you can, when you make them. There’s no reason to think you could have known better when you’re looking back. My first website… it was awesome (for me) – at the time. If I’d stopped there, though… The lesson is, If you get hosed, you get hosed. There’s people who can help – that’s the reason I teach the Digital Gunslingers. It’s why I offer ridiculously low-cost hosting. It’s why… well, you’ll get to see something new from me in a few weeks.

And, it’s why two of the people who comment on this post requesting some help will get a free, thirty-minute phone consultation from me in how to jazz up your website behind the scenes, no matter what the source code looks like. We’ll cover analytics, SEO, and usability. They’ll also get a free copy of Head First HTML and CSS.

What kind of story do you tell about your business? I know what mine is.

If there were ever any question about what I stand for – how I do business, how I think businesses should do business – just look toward my Ignite videos. There was one in particular that caught my eye yesterday.

(click here if you’re viewing this through the RSS feed)

I don’t take my cues from the prim and proper. I take my cues from people like Katrina Pfannkuch, Erika Napoletano, Naomi Dunford, Logan Zanelli, and other business bad-asses. (Katrina probably wouldn’t label herself a bad-ass, but she’s rockstar like Lisa Loeb. And even the burliest construction worker breaks down in tears to Stay.)

I Aim to Misbehave. It’s high time for a new kind of storytelling in business. I thought of myself for a long time as The Geek Superhero. The more I think about it, the more I realize I’m telling the stories of business superheroes every day. I’m going to dedicate my professional life to re-direct attention to the people and products that matter and away from the businesses that treat us poorly and waste our time. Color me a web marketing Robin Hood. All that’s left is to fight a pair of tights.

(Header Photo: Robin Hood, Men In Tights by Jameson42)

Before I was laid off, I had purchased a Flip Ultra with the plan of making a “Superhero” series of videos in the style of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  My superhero name – Nick The Four-Eyed.  My “costume”? The WiFi shirt from ThinkGeek.  The only thing standing in my way at the moment: scripting.  I don’t like making one-offs, so “Nick The Four-Eyed” is going to be a two-part series, at least.

I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll be singing.  If I do, it’ll probably sound something like William Shatner’s version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (see the YouTube video at the end).

I created a topic for Ignite Fort Collins – and my topic, “Digital Frontiers – Psychotic Resumes and WTF Marketing” was voted on pretty heavily.

It’ll be a great topic if it’s chosen – how to turn yourself into a digital gunslinger and brave the “digital frontier” of social media and the internet.  Sounds like a goofy topic but I hope to make it really funny.  I’d really like to get a millennial presence at the event and anyway, public speaking has always been something I enjoy.

Dan Schawbel also graciously accepted my invitation for an interview for the Psychotic Resumes podcast.  We talked for about 15 minutes on his new book, Me 2.0, what personal branding is, and what graduating college students should focus on.  It ended up being a really good discussion, which I will put together in podcast form and publish for Wednesday.

I had the opportunity to meet with Amanda from DolphinFeet this week.  We had a great time talking about life, jobs, social media and general nerdery.  I’m looking forward to teaming up with her for some branding-based shenanigans!

Last night I went through all two hours of audio auditions for new Star Trek: Dimensions parts.  We’ve selected the players for the new parts and I’m very excited to have *real* voices to complement the ones I had in my head.  At least now the dialog sounds much less creepy. Ha!

Lots of fun projects to work on in my “spare time”… including my Twitter eBook, which I hope to finish by the 20th.

I know that I can be passionate about programming (judging by the stack of books I have in my possession). I probably just haven’t found the right fit for me in that world yet and the improved skills could come in handy if I can find an entry-level/intermediate-level programming job.

I have an interview tomorrow for a web/e-marketing specialist position that I’m VERY excited for!

On the agenda today: post my resume to a few of the Andrew Hudson job listings, Monster, and Craigslist.  After that: I’m going to finish writing my Twitter eBook and focus on Head First C#.

If I finish with that, Head First Ajax.  Once I’m done with those, I’ll jump in on Pro Silverlight and Head First JavaScript.

In between, I’m going to record “No, Really…” – a fake news podcast and see if I can get the old Two Chicks and Nick recordings turned into podcasts.  Gotta make my added value apparent!