• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Pro Blog Service

  • Business Blogging
    • Blogging and Content Marketing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    • Social Media Strategy and Consulting
    • Blogging Services
    • Content Factory
    • Need a Law Blog or Legal Blog?
    • Download Our Whitepaper: ROI On Hiring a Ghost Blogger
    • Pro Blog Service Books
  • Blog
  • Speaking
  • About Us
    • Erik Deckers
    • 4 Simple Rules for Guest Posting on Our Blog
  • Get Ghost Blogging Quote
  • Link Sharing/Contributed Articles
You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts / Social Media / Twitter

Twitter

February 25, 2013 By Erik Deckers

What We Can Learn About Social Media Marketing from The Onion

It was a rather shocking tweet. Someone who was in charge of The Onion’s Twitter account basically called 9-year-old actress and Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis the C-word.

It was so reprehensibly awful and terrible that Twitter just beat the holy bejeezus out of The Onion for it. Within an hour, they deleted the tweet. (This was remarkable in itself, given the fact that these guys never back down or apologize for anything.)

A LOT of angry discussions on whether The Onion should have apologized or not. The angrier ones seem to be on the
A LOT of angry discussions on whether The Onion should have apologized or not.
This morning, even as the Internet was storming Castle Onion with pitchforks and torches, their CEO, Steve Hannah, even went so far as to post an apology to their Facebook page.

Dear Readers,

On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting.

No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire.

The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.

In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible.

Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

Sincerely,
Steve Hannah
CEO
The Onion

From a social media marketing standpoint, this gives rise to a bigger question: when do you blame an entire company for the acts of a single person? When does one person’s views reflect the entire company? And should they ever?

Let’s face it, what this unnamed person did was reprehensible. You just don’t call little girls that word. (Actually, you don’t call any women that word, but there’s a very wide line between being a sexist a-hole and the worst person in the world, and the unnamed person managed to keep one foot planted on either side of it.)

Now The Onion is bearing the brunt of that one person’s poor judgment.

In a lot of cases, people will forgive a company for the missteps of a single person. If you have a bad waitstaff experience at your favorite restaurant, you don’t boycott the entire restaurant. If you received a damaged package from your favorite online bookstore, you don’t stop ordering books. Yet, there are thousands of people who have un-liked and un-followed The Onion on all their social properties, because of a single tweet by a single person.

But this isn’t entirely unexpected. During the presidential election, when someone from a candidate’s past 30 years earlier does something mildly offensive, the other side will scream that this proves that candidate is the anti-Christ or a fascist. When the CEO of a corporation says or does something awful, consumers scream that this kind of attitude pervades the halls of that company.

There’s an awful lot of screaming going on, and people are understandably and justifiably outraged. What this unnamed person did was awful, but the entire organization didn’t sit down at a table and vote on what to tweet.

Are people overreacting or are we justified in screaming at The Onion? Did one bad apple spoil the entire bunch, or should we look at their entire body of work, and forgive them in the end?

This Shouldn’t Stop Companies From Using Social Media

The problem is that whenever anything like this happens — at least the problem for social media professionals like me, Jay Baer, and Doug Karr — is that potential clients look at this and say, “See, we can’t trust our employees not to do something stupid and boneheaded like this.”

It makes our job harder, because they’re worried that their punk intern just out of college is going to start tweeting about his drunken antics at his cousin’s wedding. Or she’s going to launch into some profanity-laced tirade about how her basketball team couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat.

So we have to remind these clients of a few things:

  1. If you have employees like this, you have a hiring problem, and that’s your fault, not social media’s. Those people would act like this even if Twitter had never been invented.
  2. You need to hire people with several years of experience and common sense to run your social media campaigns (these two traits are sometimes mutually exclusive in some people).
  3. You already trust employees to count and handle your money, take trips to faraway places, and even answer the phone without you hovering over them. You need to trust employees on social media this same way.
  4. You need to have a clear-cut social media policy about things you cannot say, words you cannot use, and ideas you cannot convey. At least then people will know why you fired them for violating numbers 1, 2, and 3.

For companies thinking about social media marketing, you need to think about these things:

Will people do stupid things? Yes. It’s in our nature.

Did you hire those people? Yes, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Did you hire them to do those stupid things? No. Otherwise, that would make you as stupid as them.

Will people blame you for it anyway? Yes. Because we all want someone to be outraged at.

Does this mean you shouldn’t do something, like use social media? No. Because people do stupid stuff with all kinds of technology, but that doesn’t mean we don’t 1) use computers, 2) use fax machines, 3) use phones, 4) use cars, and 5) hire people.

We still do all those other things, we just make sure they’re used properly.

That’s how it needs to go with social media. More than half the country is using it. More than half the country is expecting you to be on it. And despite the bone-headedness of some people, it’s still a good and decent place to reach an audience.

People make mistakes. Big, goofy, bone-headed, dumbass mistakes. That’s all just part of the rich tapestry of the business world, and everyone does it. Some are just worse and more crass than others.

The question is, will you stick your head in the sand because of what someone else did, or will you embrace the latest technology and learn from other peoples’ mistakes?

Filed Under: Books, Communication, Content Marketing, crisis communication, Marketing, No Bullshit Social Media, Public Relations, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: content marketing, social media marketing, Twitter

January 16, 2013 By Erik Deckers

How to Decode Twitter Bios

Twitter bios are becoming more complicated and harder to understand, thanks to all the hashtags, code words, acronyms, and phrases people use to describe their background in 160 characters. Here’s a handy guide to help you understand what people mean by what they say.

Writer: I wrote a blog post once. Somewhere.Fake Ernest Hemingway Twitter account bio

Health & Fitness Enthusiast: Soy-milk drinking, vegetarian-eating “foodie” who will take pictures of my “food” and share it to brag about how “yummy” it is.

Health & Fitness Nut: Health and fitness enthusiast, but I’m a jerk about it.

Living the Dream: I will pester the shit out of you about buying my MLM program.

MLM: I’m new to the whole multi-level marketing and Twitter thing, and still believe you’ll be interested in it when I put it in my bio. I haven’t learned to say “Living the Dream” yet.

Network Marketer: Sounds fancier than MLMer, but it means the same thing. It impressed my friends at my high school reunion though.

Affiliate Marketer: Former MLM marketer. I didn’t know that stuff could be so hard.

Passionate about: Take your pick. I have a) misguided priorities; b) no family; c) no life; d) no idea what “passionate” actually means. (hat tip to @Ed for this one.)

Foodie: I have an iPhone and a Tumblr account. I take pictures of my restaurant food.

Social Media Consultant: I play on Twitter and Facebook. I buy Groupons. I’m also a Writer.

(Any motivational quote): I believe the Successories posters.

Tweets Are My Own Opinion: My company is run by fearful lawyers who think that my every tweet is being pored over by the national media.

Conservative/Liberal: It’s about to get insufferable in here. Mute me during the entire presidential campaign year.

Life Coach: I got laid off last year.

(Uses special characters and dingbats): Hey everyone, look at me! I’m creative!

Location: The Universe/Everywhere/Someplace not real: Location: My mom’s basement.

Christ Follower: Oh yeah, you’re going to Hell.

Actor/Singer/Dancer: I want to be an actor/singer/dancer.

YOLO: I’m 18 and my parents aren’t on Twitter.

Loves to party: See YOLO.

(Bio written in third person): He has a manager to deal with this stuff. No really. His name? Uh, his name is Johnny, uh. . . Keyboard. Yeah, Johnny Keyboard.

#TeamFollowBack/I Follow Back: I’m soooo lonelyyyyy!

#Uses #Lots #Of #Hashtags: I read somewhere that hashtags are important. So I hashtag every word in my bio, even though it never ever shows up on #hashtag #searches.

Filed Under: Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: humor writing, Social Media, Twitter, writing

October 30, 2012 By Erik Deckers

Five Pieces of Blogging Advice I Wish You’d Stop Giving

I don’t know why I bother sometimes.

(“I don’t know why you bother ever.”)

Whenever someone writes a “five blogging secrets” post, I keep thinking, “maybe this is it. Maybe this is the one. Maybe this blog post will have at least one useful blogging tip that I can use.”

But it didn’t. It doesn’t. It never did. It was written, just like every other post on blogging, for the absolute beginner, who, given the constant bombardment of amateur advice, no longer exists in this world. We’ve polluted the Internet so much with useless, remedial blogging advice that it’s gotten into the water, and our children are born knowing the five most important steps to successful blogging.

I’ll admit, I’ve given this advice. Hell, I still give it in talks, depending on my audience and who I’m writing for. But everyone is giving it. I’m seeing it all over the goddamn place, and if I see much more of it, I’m going to scream at someone.

So, please, if not for me, then for the good of the country: stop it. Just stop it. Stop giving the same damn advice over and over and over again. Stop copying and pasting each other’s “five blogging secrets” posts.

These are the five pieces of blogging advice I want you to stop giving.

  1. Write good content: Blah, blah, blah! People say this like it’s The Most Important Advice Ever. It’s stupid, vile, and utterly useless, because everyone a) knows it, and b) thinks they do it. “I think I’ll write completely utter crap,” said no one ever. The problem is, everyone already thinks they write well, and that their work is just as good as everyone else’s. Even the conspiracy theorists who write 10,000 word treatises in a single day think what they’re producing is gold, and they’re surprised the world isn’t beating a path to their door. Telling people to write good content is like telling people to breathe or chew their food when they eat. It may be important to hear for anyone who’s brand new to blogging, but the people who know enough about the Internet to find the blog post where you shared this little piece of dreariness have already seen this more than once.
  2. Grow your social network: Really? I thought having my brother and a couple friends from work following me on a Twitter account I rarely use was a guaranteed step toward social media rock stardom. So you’re saying that the more people who read my stuff, the more success I’ll have? BRILLIANT! Give that man a Pulitzer prize for extreme cleverness! Next week, check out my new wealth creating blog post, “buy low, sell high.”
  3. Find your niche/passion: Okay, this one might not be such a Duh! piece of advice, but I’m tired of it. Anyone who has a barely detectable pulse has heard this one before, so it’s nothing new. Combine this with item #1 — write passionately about your content — and Tony Robbins will personally punch you in the nose.
  4. Erik's Tumblr Feed
    Alright, alright, fine! I have a Tumblr feed. But I have it ironically.
  5. Create value: Value is in the eyes of the beholder. And if you’re giving advice like this, there’s a whooole lot of beholders who are more than a little annoyed with you right now. Everyone perceives value in their own way. While I might think your literary comparison between Dr. Who and Mr. Ferrars from Sense and Sensibility is completely useless, there are plenty of Dr. Who/Jane Austen fans who would disagree with me loudly. No matter what you create, there will always be someone who finds some value in it, somewhere. So as a piece of advice, this is value-less.
  6. Blogging is Dead: Muh-huh. And what are you reading right now? That’s right, a blog. And what’s that place where you share all your photos and pithy little comments about your friends and their quirky hats and ironic bow ties? That’s right, your blog. What’s that? You have a Tumblog, and that’s not a blog? The hell it’s not. That’s exactly what Tumblr is, a blog for people who can’t read more than three sentences without their lips getting tired. One day, when you grow up and move out of your mom’s basement, you’ll start writing longer pieces of content, like a job application at a coffee shop. Until then, stop telling people blogging is dead. If your world view can be summed up in 140 characters and a retro photo filter, that tells me it’s not a world view worth listening to. Stick to bumper stickers on your fixed gear bike.

Just once, I would love to see someone share some useful blogging advice that did not include any variations of these five completely useless tips. While I know many people are still new to blogging, I don’t think anyone would ever knowingly violate these little “gems.” You can stop sharing them, and move on to the next lesson.

Filed Under: Blog Writing, Blogging, Business Blogging, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: advice, blog writing, Blogger, Social Media, Twitter

October 16, 2012 By Erik Deckers

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.

 

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: humor writing, Social Media, Twitter

September 21, 2012 By Erik Deckers

Twitter Screws Up IFTTT.com For The Rest Of Us

I love Twitter, except when I’m pissed at them.

Today I’m pissed at them.

Twitter, for whatever reason they’re spouting — I can’t really understand what the hell they’re talking about — is no longer going to allow IFTTT.com to use tweets in their recipes.

ifttt Twitter recipe
I’m going to lose this little gem, thanks to Twitter.

IFTTT.com is a great site that’s built on the logical construction of If This, Then That. If this condition is met, then that action will take place.

You can use it to create recipes like “email me whenever someone uses ‘No Bullshit Social Media’ in a tweet. (Or to put it in their vernacular, if “No Bullshit Social Media” is used in a tweet, then email me.)

Except now you can’t.

That’s because Twitter continues to drop brick after brick into their garden wall so no one else can use their tweets except them. It’s stupid things like this that make me glad I backed App.net when I did. (I’m user #264 or something.)

Here’s the email IFTTT sent out to all their users, from CEO Linden Tibbetts.

In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.

At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.

We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.

Linden Tibbets
IFTTT CEO

* These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).

Sadly, IFTTT’s comments are the same hopefully-optimistic-trying-to-be-calm happy face that every other third-party developer has had to put on after getting royally screwed by the messaging giant. That, “we really think they’re bastards, but we’re too mature to actually say so” tone that people adopt after finding out their spouse tells them they want a divorce and you have to leave the house.

Times like this, I fire up the App.net page and start using it even more. I worry that Twitter is going to turn into another Facebook, where they can’t see beyond their own success, and think they’re immortal.

I really do want Twitter to succeed, but it’s days like this that I wonder if they’re going to be around in a few years. Networks like App.net are constantly baying at their heels, like a pack of hounds trying to bring down the stag. The stag may be a badass, but one day it’s going to trip, and the hounds will overtake it.

Filed Under: Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter Tagged With: App.net, Twitter

August 9, 2012 By Erik Deckers

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.App.net screenshot

  • 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

  • Read Dalton Caldwell’s Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg. It explains so much, and gives an insight into how Facebook runs its business, and what we are seeing from Twitter.
  • Veteran Silicon Valley Developer Accuses Facebook of Bully Tactics
  • Here’s Why People Are Backing App.net
  • The Twitter Rebellion: App.net Offers a Hacker’s Alternative
  • Dalton Caldwell On App.net’s Plan To Build A Dependable, Ad-Free Version Of Twitter

Filed Under: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: App.net, microblogging, Twitter

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 8
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe via RSS

Categories

Tags

advice bloggers blog writing books book writing business blogging citizen journalism Communication content marketing copywriting crisis communication digital marketing Ernest Hemingway Facebook freelance writing ghost blogging ghostwriting Google grammar Jason Falls journalism language Linkedin marketing media networking newspapers No Bullshit Social Media personal branding public relations public speaking punctuation ROI SEO Social Media social media experts social media marketing social networking storytelling traditional media Twitter video writers writing writing skills

Archives

Footer

Recent Posts

  • A Quick and Dirty Editorial Calendar
  • Stop Saying ‘In These Troubled Times’: 5 Amateur Mistakes Content Marketers Keep Making
  • Sportswriters, Don’t Give Up Game Recaps for Social Media
  • Writing the Old Fashioned Way (GUEST POST)
  • Jargon Words Are the Hallmarks of a Pretentious Ass

BUY ERIK DECKERS’ LATEST BOOK

Erik Deckers' and Kyle Lacy's book - Branding Yourself now available at Amazon buy button for Branding Yourself book

Request a Quote – It’s easy

We write blog posts, manage social media campaigns, write online press releases, write monthly news letters and can write your website content.

Let's figure out the right package for you.

DOWNLOAD FREE WHITEPAPER

Looking for a cost effective way to business blog

Blogging in house can be expensive and time consuming. Professional Blog Service can cut costs by up to 80%.

Find out how much your company can save with ProBlogService.com with this FREE Whitepaper.

© Copyright 2020 Professional Blog Service, LLC.

All rights reserved. Use of this site indicates your consent to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

1485 Oviedo Mall Boulevard Oviedo, FL 32765
Call us at (317) 674-3745

Contact Us About