Social Pyramid Schemes

Ryan    Uncategorized     Facebook, Pyramid Schemes, Social Media, Twitter

Found this NowSourcing.com image off of Google Image search: 'social media war'

So while I admit that I’m relatively new to Twitter, I feel pretty confident in some of my other social media platforms, mainly Facebook. By today’s standards however, if you took a look at my Facebook page, you might say otherwise. Maybe this is because I am one of those early adopters… those old fogies who don’t like change in what’s already a perfect system. Who knows.

When I first logged in, and submitted my first tweet on Twitter, I had already figured out that getting followers is the way to really make it in the twittersphere… (The more people who follow me, the more reach I’ll have when I want to say something really important. Good right? At the same time, I should also care about who I follow. Friends, family, role models, yadda yadda yadda)… For me, there was no agenda, no purpose for me to strive to gain followers fast, so I didn’t. I lived in the Twitter moment, and then at times, came out of the woodworks and sparked a little debate here and there. It was fun! Although I soon began to want more followers.

Although there were a couple weeks where I made hardly any tweets, I’ve tried to push my TPD (Tweets Per Day) averages since then, so that I could slowly become more relevant in the twitter aspect that is… ‘popularity’. The events that followed, however, soon began to modify my outlook of how Twitter is really making online computing communication different then what it used to be, or what we perceived it to be. Twitter is a great way to dumb down every day life. For example…

To follow the life of a new Twitter user, would look something like this:

1. Have a friend tell you how cool Twitter is.
2. Have another friend tell you how cool Twitter is.
3. Reluctantly create a Twitter account.
4. Make first tweet/twit whatever you want to call it.
5. Realize this is a waste of time.
6. Have people nag you and tell you you aren’t doing it right.
7. Realize that I should ‘optimize’ my tweets/twits for optimum searchability.
8. Reference someone in a tweet/twit.
9. Get in an argument with a tweeter/twitter(er).
10. Realize you are better then them.
11. Begin your quest to gain followers, in hopes to one day over take your antagonist in ‘follwers’.
12. Devise your own ‘get followers quick’ scheme.
13. Market it on Twitter.

Alright, so maybe that isn’t the way it works, but it might be close.. to some people.

In essence though, this could totally be a reason why Twitter is catching on so fast. Sure friends like to use it to communicate with each other(@noexample because they are my friends), companies and brands like to use it for PR and branding purposes (@starbucks, @zappos), or even news agencies will use it to broadcast each and every damn story they produce down to the minute (@nytimes, @cnn). What about everyone else? Maybe everyone else is just a Social Media Evangelist. “How can I show you the POWER of Twitter? Look at how many followers I have. I must be a professional at this SM stuff. I will show people that you just need to push garbage out of your Tweetdeck and sooner or later, people will think you’re cool and will want to follow you.

The idea I’m trying to convey is that a lot of what is happening on Twitter, is talk about Twitter. I’m not opposed to this! Don’t get me wrong. I just think that in order for this NOT to become the next big Pyramid Scheme… we should look at our actions on Twitter carefully. Hey, yeah I know I’m adding fuel to the fire, but look at the rest of my blog. I’m not a social media evangelist by any means. Although I do think everyone is an expert at it.

Peace.

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