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Social Media for Seniors: Find The News You Want

Every so often, I will feature guest posts from writers who actually have important and interesting things to say. My friend, Daniel Bell, is an up-and-coming copywriter based in Orlando and has written a few blog articles I’ll include on this site.

You can do a lot of things on the Internet. Play games with strangers around the world, check e-mail, take an online class, laugh at funny videos. But most seniors do not want t get wrapped in all of that. They’re keeping up with family on Facebook, but that’s about it.

So what if you wanted to get your favorite news, whenever and wherever you chose, in the places you want it?

Here are a few tips on how to make that happen:

1. Open A Social Media Account

The first thing is to learn is what a social network is: It’s basically a site where you can share, read and search public information. You can also interact with people both privately and publicly. You’ll have the ability to do this once you have created your own profile with your own information about yourself.

According to Elise Moreau, a social media expert and contributor to Lifewire.com, the top 5 social networks that people use are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Every one of these can be accessed through a laptop or a mobile device. You can use a website or even the network’s own mobile application.

Every site is easy to join and they have help right there to help you get started. Just follow along and you’ll be fine.

2. Follow Your Favorite News Stations

News stations are constantly sharing breaking and slower news online. And because people love to use social media, news stations have created their own profiles that people can follow. It’s a great way for people to see what news they have first before anything else. And you can build your entire social media stream to contain nothing but news.

For example, let’s say you wanted to follow your favorite news station on Facebook. I live in Orlando so I might want to look for the local FOX station.

On Facebook, you would need to search in the Facebook search bar, like this:

Facebook search bar, looking for WOFL Fox 35

After you press enter, you will see the top results. More than likely, the top one will be the news station you’re looking for, like this:


To actually get the content the station posts on their Facebook page, you need to click on the “Like” button.

Repeat this for as many news sites as you would like to receive the news from, and any time they post news stories, you’ll see them.

You can do the same thing on Twitter, although you would click the Follow button instead of the Like button. Search for your terms in the Twitter search bar, and visit the profiles that come up.

Understand What Trends Are

A trend is something that is widely mentioned or discussed on the Internet, especially in posts on social networks. Basically, a trend is a topic that is popular on the Internet at the present time. It could be a sporting event like March Madness or the World Series, or a particular political event or current event.

Breaking news is a good trend to follow, because random stations will post their own #BreakingNews hashtags. You can get news from all over, and you don’t have to follow any particular stations to do it.

If you put #breakingnews (don’t forget the #) in the search bar of your favorite social media sites, different profiles that post breaking news with that hashtag will appear. You can search for it occasionally and see what new news is coming up, and it’s like having your own 24-hour breaking news newspaper at your fingertips.

There’s a lot more to the Internet than just searching for news, but this is a good way to get started, to keep up with what’s happening in the world, and to learn how you’re going to use it all so you can navigate it and see what it has to offer.

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Bring Social Media Tourism 2013 to Indianapolis (#SoMeT13US)

This is a little embarrassing. Indianapolis is currently ranked 8th in the Elite Eight in the Social Media Tourism 2013 conference competition.

SoMeT is a creation of Think! Social Media, a digital agency in the tourism marketing world. This is the fourth year of SoMeT, and they are selecting the host city based on a March Madness style bracket system. And Indianapolis has a real chance of winning this, but not if we keep playing the way we did!

To get into the Elite Eight, we barely squeaked into the competition, finishing in 8th with 657 votes. Seventh place Grand Rapids, MI had 735 votes.

Seriously? Grand Rapids?! I don’t even think there are 735 people in Grand Rapids, are there?

Okay, a quick check on Google shows there are roughly 190,000 people in Grand Rapids. But that’s less than one-fourth the size of Indianapolis, and we got out muscled. That’s like IU getting beat by Davidson College at, well, anything.

Here’s how the final votes went down:
1. Huntsville, AL – 2,361
2. Missoula, MT – 1,606
3. Milwaukee, WI – 1,328
4. Cleveland, OH – 1,231
5. St. Pete/Clearwater, FL – 882
6. Branson, MO – 799
7. Grand Rapids, MI – 735
8. Indianapolis, IN – 657

Seriously? We got 8th?! I swear, if I had a folding chair, I’d hurl it.
Because of our 8th place finish, we face off against #1 seed, Huntsville, AL (183,00 people?! COME ON!) on Thursday, March 21 from 10 am to 10 pm. Whichever city gets the most votes within that 12 hour period goes on to the Final Four. The winners of that bracket face off against each other, and the final winner will play host to SoMeT13 in November.

As the biggest city in the competition, we should not be in last place with the voting. We should be hammering the competition by sheer size alone. We need our people to carry the city. We need you to step up, make the plays, and get the job done.

On Thursday, March 21, please pay attention to your Facebook and Twitter feeds. And when you get the call to vote, we need you to click the link, click the photo, and help bring this country’s tourism professionals home to Indianapolis.

We’re Indianapolis, dammit! Let’s show them how this game is played.

The Elite Eight Tournament Times are as follows:

  • Monday, March 18 – 10:00am to 10:00pm Eastern Time – #3 Milwaukee, WI v #6 Branson, MO
  • Tuesday, March 19 – 10:00am to 10:00pm Eastern Time – #4 Cleveland, OH v #5 St. Pete/Clearwater, FL
  • Wednesday, March 20 – 10:00am to 10:00pm Eastern Time – #2 Missoula, MT v #7 Grand Rapids, MI
  • Thursday, March 21 – 10:00am to 10:00pm Eastern Time – #1 Huntsville, AL #8 Indianapolis, IN

CLICK HERE TO VOTE FOR INDIANAPOLIS!

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Five Social Media Jokes That Make Me Want to Poke You In The Eye

Please stop making these social media jokes

Some days, I believe anyone can make up their own clever jokes and make the world laugh.

Other days, I weep for humanity.

Humor is a dangerous thing in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing. And apparently, that’s a lot of people, especially when it comes to making jokes about current events.

They deliver the line — which, believe me, I’ve heard hundreds of times before — with an expectant grin like they’ve said something hysterical, and they’re waiting for me to laugh.

(Pro tip: If you tell a joke, never use the “TA DA!” face, like you’re pleased with yourself, or are in a recorded-in-front-of-a-live-studio-audience sitcom. Act like what you said was not a joke, so that when it bombs, you can continue on like nothing awkward just happened.)

So if you’re making these social media jokes, stop it. Just stop it.

  • Twitterererer: Said with a confused look on the person’s face, like they don’t quite get it or aren’t really sure what to call people who use Twitter. They act like they’re so unfamiliar with the word — even after three solid years of it being a pop culture mainstay even the Amish are aware of — they’re not sure how many “er” syllables there actually are. They’ll go on for five minutes if you let them. Because nothing is funnier than feigned confusion and stupidity.
  • Calling Twitter Users “Twits”: “But people who use social media aren’t actually called. . . oooh, I get it. Ha ha ha, that’s so FUNNY! ‘Twit’ is a name for a stupid person, and you’re saying people who use Twitter are stupid.” Whatever. People who say this think “working hard or hardly working?” is also funny.
  • Saying “Hashtag-__________” in regular conversation: As in hashtag-that’s-funny or hashtag-hilarious. Seriously, hashtag-shut-the-hell-up. I hate it when people use text speak in real life (although I really do like The Instagram Song, below), and I say “O! M! G!” only when I want to make fun of someone for doing it.
  • “Smart phone? No, I just have a regular old dumb phone.”: When people say this, I want to say something I learned in my years of woodworking: “There are no bad tools, only bad carpenters.”
  • “I don’t want to know when people are going to the bathroom:” I don’t know what kind of people you hang out with, but no one I know ever discusses their bathroom habits in polite conversation, let alone broadcasts it to the entire Internet. Maybe you need to hang out with a better class of people. Also, I don’t think anyone anywhere has ever said this ever. But if you think they have, by all means, show me. Dive into the social media deep end, find a tweet where someone said they just went poo, print it out, and show it to me.

 

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App.net Could Be a Twitter Killer

It could be the Twitter killer.

App.net, the open-source Twitter competitor, could be the thing that defeats and replaces Twitter, at least for those people who are starting to look at Twitter the same way a married couple begins to realize that the honeymoon ended 10 years ago.

We all assumed — at least those of us who have been on Twitter for a few years — that Twitter had the same do-no-evil attitude that Google did. That they were going to be cool.

But over the last 12 months, the sheen has come off and what were once cute little quirks have become full-blown annoyances.

  • Twitter bought Posterous for an talent acquisition, not a technology one. Expect your Posterous blog to go away one day.
  • They bought TweetDeck, and we all feared they were going to kill it, but instead, they made it suck.
  • Twitter has been shutting out third-party app and api developers, presumably to bring things in better alignment with their brand.
  • Twitter had a great relationship with Google where you could search for real-time tweets. That relationship was not renewed when it ended. Sort of like an actor whose contract isn’t renewed for the upcoming season.
  • They blocked off Instagram access, meaning you can’t find your Twitter friends on the photo sharing too.
  • Most recently, Twitter shut down the account of a British journalist who was critical of NBC’s crappy Olympic coverage. It was only after a huge outcry that they turned it back on.

Twitter keeps turning more and more into Facebook every day. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

Entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell, a rock star prodigy among the A-list tech entrepreneurs, told ReadWriteWeb that these are the “classic symptoms of an online media company failing to fly. ‘Media companies are starving,’ Caldwell says, ‘and that’s why they do crazy things.'”

So I was very excited to hear about App.net (app dot net) as a possible new Twitter alternative.

The best part? It costs 50 bucks a year to use.

50 bucks?! But Twitter is free!

Yes, Twitter is free. Yes, Twitter has more than 500 million accounts on it, and is the most widely accepted microblog on the planet.

But here’s what App.net has that Twitter does not.

  • It’s decentralized. That means no one person can control it or make unilateral decisions that piss everyone off. It’s like WordPress or Firefox.
  • It’s open-source, which means developers can make their own apps work with it any way they want.
  • It’s ad free. So no sponsored tweets. (I don’t find it to be such a big deal on Twitter, but I’m also willing to pay for ad-free.)
  • 50 bucks will keep the spammers away.
  • There will only be serious users of the tool. Imagine, no spam, no porn, no MLMers showing you how to make money in your spare time.

The problem is, these guys need $500,000 in order to launch. You pledge your $50 (or $100 for developers or $1,000, if you’re so inclined), and Caldwell will launch the app. But there are 4 days left — you have until next Monday — and App.net is at $295,500 as of this moment.

If you’re tired of Twitter and wish there was an alternative, check out App.net. If you like what you see, pledge your $50, send Dalton (@DaltonC) a tweet (yes, I’m aware of the irony of that), and once you’re in, start communicating. I’ll be at the Blog Indiana conference for the next two days, sharing what I learn on Twitter, but also on App.net.

Hope to see you there.

Background reading on App.net

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One More Reminder Why You Shouldn’t Put Your Eggs in Facebook’s Basket

Michael Koploy, an ERP analyst for SoftwareAdvice.com, wrote an interesting article — Adding a Pinterest-Twist to Fix Facebook Commerce — about why companies shouldn’t put a lot of effort into their Facebook pages, like setting up an ecommerce site (or as Koploy calls it, an F-commerce site — ‘F’ for Facebook).

Many experts have weighed-in on why Facebook storefronts are often unsuccessful. A large part of it simply boils down to the fact that Facebook isn’t an e-commerce site. This results in a contextual disconnect.

“Most people don’t go to Facebook wanting to purchase something,” says Josh Davis, social media strategist at ITFO Communications and blogger at LL Social. Davis believes that retailers were initially excited by the advertising potential, but are now realizing shopping-intent isn’t there.

In short, the context for F-commerce is wrong. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru accurately likened F-commerce to “trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Facebook’s core focus is clearly stated on its login page: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Facebook is not about shopping. And it’s not about retailers. But Facebook is good for connecting people to each other.

Last week, we discussed why it’s a bad idea for companies to quit blogging to go with Facebook: Facebook owns the channel, you don’t. When they change their rules and their interface, you’re screwed. When you change your blog, you can decide what, where, when, and how.

But companies like Gamestop, J.C. Penny, and Nordstrom all pulled their F-commerce efforts after failing to receive any kind of pay off. And that’s just a year after investors swore up and down that F-commerce was going to put the hurt on online retail giant Amazon.com.

I hate predicting failure of new ventures, and pointing my finger and going “neener neener” at people who tried something and failed (unless they’re complete a-holes; then they deserve it). But I’m not surprised, and am rather pleased, that these companies got smart and cut their F-commerce efforts before they lost their shirts.

The big surprise they would have had — and it’s the same damn surprise that businesses who put a lot of money and effort into Facebook always get — is that one day, Facebook will decide, “we don’t want you to have X on your page any more, so we’re going to ‘improve’ the network.”

They did it with FBML in 2010 (Facebook Markup Language, which companies spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on to design these gorgeous sites). They did it with Groups, after begging organizations, companies, and loose collectives to spend all their time and effort to get people to join. And they did it with the non-Timeline iFrame pages, after people spent hundreds and thousands of dollars to recover from the whole FBML fracas.

Orangutan feet. I don't know what orangutans read for inspiration.
Mark my words, it will happen again within the next 12 – 18 months. Someone’s going to spend thousands of dollars, get their page looking all pretty and just the way they want it, and WHAM! Facebook will change it yet again.

Facebook, like Koploy reminded us, is a place to connect. It’s a place where friends gather. We don’t hang out with our friends at the bar to buy stuff. Companies that are doing F-commerce need to pull out before they get the big F-U.

Put your money into improving the SEO of your ecommerce site, doing more social media marketing, and using Facebook for what it’s intended for: posting Instagram pictures of your feet and gag-inducing GIFs of your favorite inspirational sayings typically found inside the doors of high school lockers.

Photo credit: Abandoned storefrontColes County Tales (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Orangutan feet Macinate (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Bad Idea: Companies Quit Blogging to Go With Facebook

The number of companies that maintain blogs dropped by nearly 25% from 2010 to 2011.

That’s not a very smart move.

But it’s a growing trend. According to an article in USA Today, more companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead, the percentage of companies on Inc. magazine’s fastest growing 500 dropped from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011. And only 23% of Fortune 500 companies had a blog in 2011.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, the UMass Dartmouth professor who wrote the report, and world-class social media academic, told USA Today that blogging may not be the panacea that businesses thought it would be.

“Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation,” she said.

The problem is, the companies are taking their energy and efforts to Facebook instead. That’s not a dumb strategy. After all, at 800 million+ users, you have to fish where the fish are. And there’s a whole lot of fish on Facebook. [Read more…] about Bad Idea: Companies Quit Blogging to Go With Facebook