I briefly mentioned Tana last month, which is a new note-taking app that I’m playing with. I’m finding it to be a very powerful tool, but their “Supertags” feature might be the best part.
Rather than try to explain it to you, here is a short video that I created to show how it works:
It’s really making me rethink how I organize my notes. It’s a great tool, and you can visit the Tana website to learn more.
In conversations that I have, I tend to mix the terms “social networking” and “social media”. According to Ian Bogost of The Atlantic, I probably shouldn’t.
With all of the recent chaos on Twitter, Bogost spent some time in a recent article to unpack those two words, and how our shift from Social Networking –> Social Media has become so problematic. Here is the crux of his argument:
That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.
Early social platforms had a heavy focus on the “network”. Connect with your friends, but live your life. Few remember, but the first two years of Facebook had no news feed. If you wanted to see what your friends were up to, you needed to visit their each of their profiles individually. When they rolled out the news feed in 2006, people weren’t ready for it (it caused huge backlash and threats of boycott), but users learned to get used to it, and now can’t live without it.
The ability in the last 15 years for us to all become publishers is indeed a great thing, but it’s also the cause of many of our issues today.
So what’s the solution? There’s not an easy one. Now that people are used to being publishers to the world, undoing that will be very slow and difficult, if not impossible. As Bogost says near the end of his article, “It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century.“
I encourage you to check out his full article to learn more.
As time goes on, I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with unexpected interruption-based marketing. I’ve mentioned before that I’m fine with ads during TV shows, podcasts, and other areas where I expect it. I don’t like them, but I recognize that it’s part of the deal and it’s my “payment” for the content. Fair enough.
However, as cold email becomes more and more prevalent, it seems that many view the solution as simply pushing their message even louder and more frequently. It’s a cycle that is spiraling in the wrong direction, and I hope that you aren’t part of it.
The better way is to find people that actually want to hear from you. Not “I have this great product that they’ll love, so let’s spam them”, but people that genuinely respect what you have to say.
Seth Godin recently put it this way:
“Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers who don’t.”
It’s more effective, for sure, but it’s also a lot more work. Buying email lists and randomly messaging people on LinkedIn can feel easier, but taking the time to provide real value and build a faithful audience will work much better in the long run.
I’ve followed Gary Vaynerchuk for quite a few years now. He can be a bit abrasive, and I don’t love everything he puts out, but he tells it straight and has built some big businesses.
The part that stands out to me, after reading a few of his books and consuming dozens of videos and podcasts over the years, is that I’ve never heard a single sales pitch from him. Not a tag at the end of a podcast, or in an email, or in the “1 out of 5” social posts that should be a hard sell. None. Gary strives to serve, and it’s worked out very well for him.
I think it can be ok to include a soft sales pitch in your messaging from time to time, but that should never be the focus. Those that say “social media doesn’t work” tend to be the ones that are constantly pitching. Who would want to follow that?
If you can produce thoughtful, helpful content, people will learn to trust you, and that is the best possible outcome that you could hope for.
In the past few months, I’ve seen a few situations on social media that were odd to me.
First, a few months friend of mine shared a fake story related to George Floyd and his family. After he posted, it was shared a handful of times by other friends of his. Eventually someone pointed out that the story was false, and so he simply deleted his post.
This means that others that shared it still have no idea that it was fake, and the story continued to spread.
More recently, another friend of mine shared a fake “free vacation” story (a “like farm”) and she had gotten some good interaction on it. Some of her other friends had signed up for it as well, but when she found out it was fake, she simply deleted the post and left everyone else none the wiser.
In both of these cases, I think a bit of pride was the issue. They didn’t want a record of them having posted something wrong, and I get it. However, I feel like it would have been much more effective if they had simply edited their post to explain the issue and therefore help everyone become a smarter.
That said, I understand why they did what they did, and I can’t say for sure that I’d do it any differently.
I would hope that if that happens to me, I’ll be big enough to leave the fake news up with an explanation of what’s really happening, but we’ll see.
Have you ever posted something that you later found out wasn’t true? How did you handle it?
In an episode of the Cortex podcast (#122: State of the Apps 2022), one of the hosts expressed his desire (and near achievement) to “filter the entirety of my internetting through RSS“. As that’s something I’m chasing as well, I thought it was an interesting statement and something worth unpacking a bit.
First, some of you may be confused by what he even means. RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a means in which to get feeds of data from websites. Not algorithmically-sorted feeds like on Facebook, but just a raw feed of information. In most cases, this is blog posts. If you sign up for an RSS feed from a blog you get every post of theirs. It’s fantastic.
This is something I’ve been writing about for nearly 14 years, and my RSS reader is still something that I use every single day. When I talk about things like controlling your inputs, this is a huge one. Rather than letting social media dictate what I see through a never-ending list of content, I can get updates from precisely the sources I want — no more, and no less.
In the past few years, I’ve been working to make my RSS feeds more personal — fewer companies and more humans. It’s been excellent.
The main problem, of course, is that most of the people that I want to keep in touch with (friends and family, particularly) don’t have a feed to follow. You may be one of them. If someone only uses social media to post, then I can’t subscribe to them via RSS. I still hop on social media a good bit, but ideally I’ll be escaping it more and more.
I still fully believe that more people should be blogging (the POSSE concept is perfect) simply for the fact that they can better own their content. However, regardless how easy it might be to set up a blog, publishing on social media will likely always be easier, and that’s where most people will default.
I still have a dream of someday having the “entirely of my internetting” filtered through RSS, but it’s unlikely to get 100% there. For now, I’ll keep pushing forward and keep moving more of it over a little bit at a time.
If you have a desire to get a blog going for yourself, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.
I heard the title of this post on a recent episode of “The Long and The Short Of It”, and I’ve been pondering it ever since then. Here is the full text of what Pete said on the show:
It was in the health and fitness space, there was a strength coach that I follow that said something like, “The best coach in the world probably has less than a thousand Instagram followers.” And that really resonated with me for many, many reasons. But just that, if you’re the best strength coach in the world, you’re probably not spending your time scrolling social media because you’re reaching the people that you need to reach in other ways.
When I first heard it, I completely agreed. His logic made sense. However, I think there are some amazing coaches and thinkers that have huge social media followings without spending time on it. If your ideas are solid, they’ll spread on their own.
I think a great example is Seth Godin. He’s famously not on social media, other than a Twitter account that auto-posts his latest blog entries. It follows two people and never interacts in any way. By all measures it’s a “bad” Twitter account. Despite all of that, he has 785,000 followers on there.
Ultimately, I agree with the premise of what Pete said. A great coach isn’t spending time scrolling social media, but rather they’re learning and teaching and working to become better.
That said, if they’re indeed a great coach then they likely have amazing insights to share, and many likely have huge followings with just a modest amount of effort.
We are faced with a problem that was unthinkable until just the past few decades — we have too much information at our fingertips.
Really, it’s not the issue of what’s at our fingertips but how much is being thrust at us. As I shared with my “Facebook still isn’t listening to you” post, each of us sees between 5,000 – 10,000 ads every day. Couple that with social media posts, news articles, podcasts, emails, text messages, etc, and it’s a unfathomable number.
At times, companies seemingly use this to their advantage to help bury otherwise useful information. In his book “Homo Deus“, author Yuval Noah Harari puts it this way:
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
Learning what to ignore is very powerful. Control the inputs in your life. Learn to say no when it’s appropriate.
We can’t control everything in our path, but we can work to carve a path that is much quieter, and it’s often in our best interest to do just that.
If you’ve watched much of the TV show “The Office”, you’ve likely heard of WUPHF. It was a company started by Ryan, where the app would send your outgoing messages everywhere all at once. I’m not talking about double-posting to Facebook and Instagram at once, but sending a direct message to a single person across literally every channel they use.
Here’s a quick clip that explains it:
The brilliance of including that in the show is that WUPHF almost seemed feasible, and kind of looked like where we were heading with social media. I’m so glad things never developed that way, because even small glimpses at WUPHF in the real world are just awful.
For example, most medical appointments now end up with me getting at least three reminders — a phone call, a text message, and an email. I get it, they’re trying to reduce no-shows, but it’s at my expense. It’s like they’re saying “Because some people won’t show up when they say they will, we’re going to bug you a lot even though you’ve never missed an appointment.“
Or a few days ago, I got a text from a business coach that I follow online. I already get his emails and follow him on social media a bit, but the text was completely automated:
“Hello from xxx, I would like to send you text messages from this number, would that be ok?
Reply YES to receive texts, and STOP to deny this request. MSG and data rates may apply.”
That was a very easy “STOP”, and now I have less respect for him. I indeed text with our current coach, but for someone I barely know to try to open up yet another channel (and do it automated) is simply not acceptable.
Back to WUPFH, can you imagine if something like that really existed? Someone could send me a single message and have it light up every device I own? That would just be so so bad…
For The Office, it was a creative and funny business for Ryan to start. In the real world, I hope nothing even close to it ever comes around.
As I’ve been working to improve my content on my LinkedIn profile over the past few months, I’ve learned a lot about how their algorithm works. For a while I was trying to tailor my posts to better suit their algorithm, but I’ve learned to (mostly) ignore it and focus on providing great value.
For example, LinkedIn tends to show posts to more people if there aren’t any links in it. This makes sense, because it’s less likely to be spam, but it leads to weird outcomes. Either people omit links that might have brought more value to the post, or they do the cute “link in the comments” thing to get around it.
That’s not a horrible idea, but it’s silly to have to play those games.
For example, in this post about mistakes I discussed a study from the American Psychological Association, so the post was more valuable if I included that link.
Or in this post about anchoring your new product to an existing idea, I linked to a podcast from Seth Godin and a link to an article on Compio that provided more context.
I’ve also recently talked about the growing trend of sharing screenshots instead of links. That’s often for dubious content that would be unraveled with a link, but it’s along the same lines. Algorithms that discourage links are also discouraging context for posts, which can be very problematic.
If all of these links start burying my posts on LinkedIn, perhaps I’ll change my mind. I hope not, though, as I’d rather focus on bringing valuable content than worry about what LinkedIn’s algorithm thinks about it.