Maria Diaz

I Totally Care What You Had For Lunch

The world that I inhabit is not the type that worships the Internet "A-list." or the self appointed group of Twitter addicts that never misses a conference, "Tweetup" or never fails to make posts like "Why Everything You're Doing Is Wrong" or "Using Friendfeed Will Convince Your Girlfriend To Have Anal Sex With You."

Sure, we're sort of early adopters, glued to our iphones, checking in on loopt or foursquare or whatever new system comes around until we tire of it, we use Tumblr and we make references to "thought leaders" in an insidery way. We don't worship people like Guy Kawasaki or Gary Vee or Scoble or re-tweet everything Mashable posts. Which is why I was shocked to see people actually paying attention to those people when I went to SXSW. This is a very different Internet from my Internet (which I admit is mostly sponsored by Nick Denton; the "cool side" of the Internet as once brilliantly mentioned by a friend of mine). But anyway, the following post I read today on Kawasaki's keynote at a search engine conference last week confirmed my decision to largely ignore the "experts" and leaders of thought.

Here's my favorite quote:

According to Kawasaki: either you're a money-grubbing, social-media-abusing pusher of some product, service, or yourself to the waiting Twitter masses, or you're a frivolous nobody posting about your cat, or the new hairbrush you bought, or the fact that you brushed your cat with the new hairbrush. So those are the only two options? Building a genuine professional rapport or exploring mutual interests with a small to medium-sized circle of people? That has no place in Kawasaki's dichotomous world. People who aren't on the A-List are really just nobodies who should be spammed by A-Listers; that's Kawasaki's mental atlas. Funny that's how it is, because Kawasaki wastes a lot of breath trying to say that he feels just the opposite. He protests too much, a lot.

-Andrew Goodman

I think there is a lot of time and energy wasted on the Internet on things like analyzing how many followers you have, your "retweetability index" and a bunch of other nonsense. Who cares?  How to get people to follow your corporate Twitter account? Don't be annoying. How to get people to read your professional blog? Be a good writer and update a lot. And if not, hire someone who knows how to write and do it for you. The whole Internet industry is far more complicated than it ever has to be. This stuff is not rocket science, unless of course, you're paying me, in which case it is.

But seriously, even when I've worked with people on their web projects, I've always told them that less is more. The appeal of social networking and how it can work in business is that there are people around you. So be real, like J. Lo. Don't write for search engines (but do write your titles for them), don't be the douche with 30,000 Twitter followers he can't possibly be invested in and who aren't invested in you.

And all these fake metrics are distracting from the only metric that matters (I learned everything I know about business from hip hop): how much cash you making? I have a small group of followers on my b5media blog on Bravo programming. I engage with them regularly, in addition to feeding my blog feed to it. I've increased my blog traffic significantly thanks to this and have sucessfuly monetized that blog. Do I care about analyzing my followers? No. My method is very simple: I update a lot, I follow leads on gossip people care about, I stay out of comments and I am nice to my PR people. So I get more pageviews and get pizzaid (still a pithy sum but money is money). What I'm doing is working and I'm building a tiny reality tv empire. But I realize that will take time. I'm not going to add 50,000 people on Twitter who had the word "Bravo" in one of their posts. That'll just make me look clueless. And that's the worst of all on the Internet -- just ask Amazon, who is probably having the worst Easter ever.

What I do wish Internet blowhards would realize is that not everyone wants to monetize on the Internet and they don't care about building a "brand." One of the most amazing things about writing a blog about reality television is how my Google Alerts point me to women who keep these meticulous personal blogs about their lives and who totally don't care about SEO or networking. And that's totally okay. There's room for them, too. I love the personal blog and prefer it (it's why I read Tumblr, where the personal blog is alive and well ). There's room to write about your cat on the Internet, still. After all, I love cats.