A few weeks ago, a woman swallowed a bottle of pills in an attempt to commit suicide. (see: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/01/06/facebook-friends-mock-womans-suicide-message/)
Fortunately for her, she was not alone. She had 1,000+ Facebook friends, and upon learning that she had ingested a fatal dose of medication, these friends sprang into action. As the woman’s final minutes approached, her “friends” sat behind their keyboards and ridiculed her until she slipped away into unconsciousness, never to return.
So … how many social media friends do you have?
If you died tomorrow, how many of them would attend your funeral? If you got in a car accident, how many of your Twitter followers would show up at the emergency room?
If you’re like me, the answer to all of the above is: not many. I doubt a single one of my social media friends or followers would shed a tear were I to leap out of my window right now.
The world is becoming an increasingly superficial place, and in my opinion, nothing is accelerating this trend more than social media. Social media is taking terms that used to be reserved for the select few, and is applying them to anyone and everyone that seeks the label on even the most cursory level.
It’s not just “friendship”, however.
Advertisers, marketers, and PR firms are now being victimized, bamboozled, and hoodwinked by the very same social media companies that have given us all of our ‘fans’ and ‘friends’.
Let me give you an example:
Last year, I was covering an event in Las Vegas. As the event was happening, I decided to send a few live pictures from my cellphone to Twitter.
While there, I recognized another “Internet personality” (for lack of a better term) covering the event with me. Unlike me, however, this person was very heavily into social media … in particular Twitter.
How heavily into it?
At the time, the person was following around 15,000 people, and in return, about 20,000 people were following this person back. Twenty thousand is a lot of people reading your messages in real-time. It is so many readers that, this person was actually getting paid by PR firms to tweet live from the event. It’s good work if you can get it.
I, on the other hand, was at the opposite end of the spectrum. At the time of this little hoedown, I had maybe 300 followers, if that. At one point, I remember that I actually put my phone away and stopped taking shots. I figured it was completely pointless. If you have 300 followers, and you are broadcasting Twitpics beside someone with 20,000 followers, clearly your efforts will be completely overshadowed. After all, the numbers don’t lie. 300 vs. 20,000 would be like airing a commercial on the WB during Fox’s live broadcast of the Super Bowl.
At least this is what I thought at the time.
The next morning, about 12 hours after the event, I decided to log on to Twitpic in order to delete the shots I had sent up. When I got to the first photo, I noticed that it had over 700 views, more than twice the number of official followers that I had. I paged through the half dozen or so shots I had sent up, and they all had views of somewhere between 500-1,000 over a twelve hour period of time.
Cool. It seemed that my efforts were not completely in vain.
Still, I figured, this was only a pittance. If I got seven hundred views, imagine what 20,000 follower guy had.
Out of morbid curiosity (and a penchant for self-flagellation) I surfed over to Social Media Superstar’s (SMS) Twitpic account to see what kind of numbers he had put up. In my own head, I was estimating somewhere between fifty thousand to a hundred thousand views.
With that in mind, imagine my own shock when I arrived at his first picture and found that it had received only 200(ish) views.
Two hundred views?
How was this possible?
This person had 50 times more followers than I had, but more people actually viewed what I sent up. Surely, there must have been an error.
As I paged through the SMS photos, I found that all of the views were under 300.
It made no sense. None at all.
Fortunately, I had a “real” friend that was heavily into the big twit, and I asked him if he could explain my findings. He could. He explained that if I too want big follower numbers, I could have them in only 5 easy steps, and those steps are as follows:
1) Follow a ton of people
2) Most of them will follow you back (apparently this is considered “polite”)
3) If they don’t follow you back, unfollow them
4) If they do follow you back, unfollow 50% of them
5) Start all over
Within only a couple of months, it should be simple for anyone to have thousands of followers … even if you do nothing. Even if you are a grapefruit. There are even paid applications that you can buy which take care of steps 1-5 for you.
For the most part, social media numbers are the art of the con.
Think about it, how could you even legitimately follow 1,000 people on Twitter?
I follow 4, and even I get annoyed sometimes that my phone is overwhelmed with messages. Sometimes important things that I want to read get knocked off my screen before I even see them. How on earth can people legitimately pay attention to 500 different tweeters?
The answer is, they can’t, and they don’t. 99.999% of what happens on social media is noise.
If you think about it, it’s all so sad.
There are people out there, right now, who have 1,000 followers on some social media site … yet do not have a real friend in the world. These very same people are often obsessed with increasing these fake fan/follower numbers.
Why?
Because in a purely superficial world, the illusion of followers, the illusion of fans, and the illusion of friends is all that matters.
In a superficial world, those same fans, followers, and friends will sit, watch, and say nothing while you die.
Simone Back found this out the hard way.
social media is a scam, and i’m dabbling in it, despite this knowledge. makes me an idiot, eh?
reports show tweets are mostly a waste of time. i don’t “mobile” my facebook account, or anything else, so i suppose twitter would be of use to me if i connected it to my FB page. i could text my status/tweet to twitter and it would then show up via FB.
but like you said, social media is noise. i follow about 500 mostly random people via the jukebox twitter. (it doesn’t look like you can access said jukebox thru this blog any more.) when i log in to twitter, i look for interesting comments people have shared with the masses and respond to them. i often don’t get recognition, because people don’t care about most of what’s going on in the twitterverse. not sure why they care about having that precious presence and announcing to the world that they’re going to need to start wearing spanx after the thanksgiving feast.
Social media is the next tech bubble, it is already busting.
Facebook survives because it helps people be less social, all of those little games (that I used to play) suck the life out of you. They are wastes of time.
Twitter works as a communications tool in limited doses with people that understand how to use it. I follow a few celebrities but I drop the ones that just do noise, same for PR people.
Rex, if you ever find yourself stuck somewhere or in need of help with something, you can text me or call me and I’ll do what I can. I’d do the same for any of my friends.
I think the big difference between your 300 followers and his 20,000 followers is that your 300 sought you out to follow you.
Thanks, Sprunt. Ditto.
first off, for the first haf of the article, i say “ha ha”
if you really want to commit suicide, then just do it and don’t tell anyone, except where to find the body. if you need to put up a “i’m gonna kill myself tonight won’tBRB” then you weren’t serious to begin with.
and we all know why people have hundreds of followers –
1. so you can stalk people you went to high school with that you still pine for/masturbate while thinking about.
2. try to see provocative pics of your coworkers/friends/former schoolmates that you still pine for/masturbate while thinking about.
Some celebrities have staff tweeting for them ALL DAY LONG. I followed one person because honestly it was interesting to me. Suddenly I found a deluge of irrelevant tweets, all with a URL link and all of them redirecting twice to show inflated Web hits for that person.
There are also services that allow you to buy large blocks of Twitter followers. That boggles my mind.
Maybe it is just me but I can’t get excited with the Twitter thing. I have an account but can’t see it as much of a benefit. I think Twitter’s days are numbered and will eventually collapse under its own weight. Things change…Rupert Murdoch’s “My Space”, the first widely used social network, just fired half of its global workforce. Facebook will meet a similar fate when the “next big thing” comes along.
Coolpacific is right about the lipstick thing. One can throwaway or burn a shirt. Lots more to be concerned about now! Those incriminating pixels don’t disappear easily.
I have had some of my friends from college send me a link to join Facebook and I tell them I will be down there (at Illinois State, where I graduated from in 1989) for homecoming and hopefully they will be there. My two friends who live close to Normal, Illinois show up and usually that is it. So at homecoming we are at a bar drinking and having fun and I guess the Facebook crowd is having fun on the computer. To each his own.
Very thoughtful and well written Rex – a good lesson too.
He he…warped minds think alike. Just the other day, while watching a news segment comparing the iPhone on AT&T and Verizon, I asked my wife why the news people keep promoting the iPhone the way they do. She didn’t have an answer either.
I never got the point of waiting in line for hours to buy something. After all they want my money.
So as long as I can’t walk into a store, grab the item of choice, pay and walk out in less than 5 minutes altogether my wallet remains closed.
As a current Verizon customer I am holding out for one of the 4G android phones coming out in a few weeks (most likely the HTC Thunderbolt).
I’m sure the launch was fine for people who understand that you can get these things shipped directly to your home. Who the hell needs to stand in line, except the homeless?
People who want iPhones have mostly already switched to AT&T. The rest of us want Androids.
Orlando does something similar in the University of Central Florida area. It’s limited to UCF students with ID to keep them from driving drunk, but free is free.
Oh, I’m curious how many of your readers get the Edgar Winter reference.
Rex,I agree with your article 99%.
However, I could only have followed the recent Egyptian Revolution via Twitter.
Otherwise, it is a gossip stream of hog excrement.
LinkedIn is a great way to keep professional connections and hopefully reduce resume and reference hardcopies in the future.
However, many people simply strive to accumulate as many connections as possible for mass effect. A classic case of quantity vs. quality.
Facebook is good and dangerous. Nuff said about that.
You know, deep down inside a feeling human being (not the merely biological types), there is a voice that tells them how superficial their life really is. Regardless of social media illusion, that voice cannot be silenced.
nice – a free ride AND some pics of young girls in pleated skirts.
Did you ask them if there was grass on the field?
The Jobstards already have an Iphone. Now if Verizon came out with one in a limited edition exclusive color, the minions would have been around the block a week in advance.
There is the same thing in downtown Calgary for the LRT and they clearly make announcements that you are leaving the free fare zone and need to purchase a ticket. We stayed at the Edgewater in November an thought the free bus service was awesome, we used it to go to the Seahawks game and back
I was in Las Vegas this week. I popped into the Apple store to see about a replacement case for my iPhone 3gs. The store manager looked at me like I was an alien. “we might have a few old cases in the back..let me take a look”. What the hell..my phone is a year old and they act like it was made by Alexander Graham Bell. This programmed obsolescence stuff sucks!