Summers coming - pick your target, then aim further

Summers Coming

Getting back in shape - it's all about targets.

What for? A common enough question, but I'm sure it's one that annoys people who work out, and because I think those who don't train, think that those who do must be a little bit vain, all that looking in mirrors, trying to get the body beautiful.  It's a byproduct for most though, getting fit leads to having an attractive body, and it's far too easy to spend time looking at it, comparing it to others (but if you are one of those, please stop).

And if that's your aim, then good for you, there's nothing wrong in wanting to look good, but is it enough?  I know far too many people who have started training, lost a bit of weight, felt great, then stopped. Why do they stop? It's because they reached their target, and no longer have a reason to train. Got your sexy butt, got your 6 pack, feeling ripped, but soon to feel fat again.

Well to me that seems a bit vain, and I think the search for the better body, will always make them stop when they reach that target.

For me I have a target, and it is a slightly vain one, but the advantage my target gives me is more options and challenges. I also haven't given myself a hard timescale, so I can be flexible. I'm not looking forward to the summsummit looking forward to be able to achieve something. I have no interest in how I look, which is useful as I have no sense of fashion to go with it.

I think what I'm trying to say in a very roundabout way is get a target, but pick one which allows you more options. Don't pick a time to achieve it, just know you want to get there.
 
(In case you're interested, my is a front lever and a planche, it looks cool)

If they keep training, they should be good by now.

Why do I hate train travel and public transport?

Simple, in the UK it never works. As I'm writing this, I'm sitting on a train that isn't moving, all because somewhere ahead 19th century technology has failed. If anyone can explain why in the north of the UK they choose to have overhead power lines, I would love to know. I don't like being someone who talks about how great the South is compared to the North, but if you continue to favour the past over the future, you will always have train delays.

So I'm sitting on a train for at least two and a half hours more than I need to, with the train bore. If you haven't travelled on a train for a while, you may have forgotten about this unusual part of travel, and I haven't seen one in such a long time, I thought they had died out. This is also the problem with reserving seats, when you spot them, you're playing the worst possible type of lottery.

My first clue was what he was reading, 'Train Modelling', and we had both booked a table seat. To be fair, I hadn't booked the seat, and would have chosen just any if I booked it myself (it's a work trip). I had no choice, I had no choice, I had to sit there.

I wanted to say, "I don't care about your hip. I don't care about railway travel around the world."  But I was polite, and talked back politely, and massively resented it. Always have an out option, and sadly for me, headphones weren't and option. He waited for me to visit the toilet, and pounced.

Now I'm writing this, he is breathing heavily, annoyed. But I don't think he's annoyed about the train delays, more about the fact I'm not interested in talking to him. It would have been nice if he could pick up on those social clues that the rest of world pick up on, like, not paying any attention to them.

Still, it makes a change to not be sitting in the office.

(He's just fallen asleep. Thank christ for that!)
11:50am

Update: After 2 and a half hours sitting still, we've just arrived at Peterborough but can't leave the train as we have no idea what's going on. Sadly, the train company are better at updating twitter than they are at updating their guards in the trains. I'm now facing a choice. Do I carry on with my journey, arriving late, annoyed and tired, to have a very long day tomorrow, or do I take the return option?

What's annoying is I have so many plans for things, work plans, but now it's all fucked up. I'm not pleased about this, especially as it will set back so many other plans as well. I will definitely Make sure I hire a car next time, I'd rather drive, and be tired, than sit on a train.
14:17pm

I finally arrived four hours late and not really in the best of moods. At least the next day was not a good one, but a great one.
22:15

Negativity - Everyone's a critic

There's a lot of negativity online and I suppose that most of us have become used to it, but why?

I'm used to a constant stream of negativity and criticism in my personal life, the constant pressure from someone who should be supporting me in doubting my ability in everything I do. It's means that when I get that negativity and criticism online from someone who isn't prepared to reveal their identy, I think, "so what!"  They have a long way to go before they will be able to ruin my day, let alone my weekend or week.

And this is what I want to talk about (obviously because of something that has happened to me, but I wont be talking about that). Why do people feel the need to be negative? Personally I think it's because it's easier to look at faults in others than to see your own faults, it's easier to pick on someone than listen to your own doubts and insecurities.

Social media allows everyone to do that, and criticise anyone, at anytime, but always people they have never met. If you start working in social media, get used to it, it will happen and y need to ignore it. It's far too easy for something you say to be taken out of context, and what ymmight think is a balanced and fair reply, can be twisted and used against you. If a stranger was rude to you as you walked down the street, would you respond?

Of course not, you would carry on with your life. If a stranger said to you that your clothes were ugly, would it bother you?  No, what do you care about their opinion?  It's your life, you live it your way.

You have to treat your business social media account the same way. Rudeness and criticism should be ignored when it comes from an online source.

It's Better To Try And Fail Than Not Try At All

I think it's said best here, and worth a read;

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt, excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic"

Good advice doesn't come cheap, only the bad does

Social Media Consultants - Bullshit Advice For A Bullshit Price

Something funny happened today. I saw something on twitter (by which I mean Hootsuite, I'm a professional after all), which for about ten seconds had me worried. This was a post by a 'Social Media Consultant' which made me worried as it could make my life more difficult by giving a few idiots ideas, which would make them a lot of idiots I would have to deal with. So I had a little look at his website, and the first thing I see was a tip about how to attach a photo to a tweet on the twitter main site.

Really? You charge for advice like that?

This made me smile, but what I then read made me laugh, he gave one of the worst pieces of advice I've ever read.  As I'm sure you know, twitter puts caps on how many you can follow, so as soon as you have 2000 followers, you can follow more than 2000 people. You can have as many followers as you like, and only follow zero. Seems fair.

2000 Is Just A Number

Now if you are following 2000 and have 2000 followers, what is the value of your reach? (Reach is how far your tweets and content can go) These 'followers' are people that follow back, who will follow you if the only content you post is nothing, no postings, no content, not even retweets, as all they want is to be able to say "I've got 2000 followers, how many do you have?"  What value is that for building an audience for your business, or even worse, for a charity as he offered his 'Skills and experience' to them. This is a scary thought as for my job and my trade, these are the cowboys, trying to jump on a staitonary 'runaway' wagon, when the horses have broken loose and are nowhere to be seen.

Quality Not Quantity 

It easy to think in the world of twitter that the only thing that matters is how many followers you have, but it's the quality of them that matters. I would rather have ten followers who are journalists than a thousand who hope that I will become their follower in return.  "But you're not trying to sell anything!" I can hear you say. Wrong. I am trying to sell something, it's just that what I'm selling is advice; be safe, it's your life, help us to help you when you need us. You don't have to spend money, you just have to listen. Try selling that message!

Have good content, share it, see what happens, what they like, monitor, assess,  learn and repeat. It's simple really. kinda.

It's business, not personal

Rudeness. How to handle someone who's rude on social media
This is an interesting area as a lot of people seem to think that because they can use any name, no one will know who they are, but it simply isn't true. I know of one case where someone was beyond rude, and not only was he tracked down, he was stupid enough to post personal details which made it easier to confirm who it was. We're not talking about the police or private investigators or some clever IT people here either. It was just a bunch of kids annoyed that a friend had been insulted. Basically its very easy to find them is what I'm saying here.

So, a few people were very rude to me, but also very stupid. I gave them the chance to back down, they didn't want to because they were too committed to the cause, and were made to look stupid(including an MP, and I really enjoyed that).  Well they accepted that, or at least one of them has, and they apologised.  A couple of others have sort of jumped on the band wago while using it to make digs at me. So now I have a decision to make.

Do I accept the apology or not? I do want to accept the first apology, I think it was genuine and deserves respect. The others............ I don't respect them, they can't say it honestly, so I feel reluctant to acknowledge it, but I want us to take the moral high ground.

I think the problem is that although its business, social media is personal. It's not me they hate, or at least not directly, they hate what I represent, in this respect, they hate the idea of change. But the hate is directed at me, and as I represent the 'whole' on social media, the hate is sometimes directed at me alone. I've been hated by people before and you know what, by deal. I don't care about their opinion. There's a saying that's been doing the rounds online for a few weeks and it really is true, 'a tiger isn't concerned with the opinions of sheep'.

So if you are getting hate directed at you, by trolls or whoever, ask yourself this, do you really care? Who is this person to you? Unless it's someone who's opinion you respect, or someone you care about, fuck 'em!

Just don't do it literally, then they'd really hate you.

Be wrong, lie or be bland?

Sometimes in social media something happens that makes you frown, then turns it upside down. In this case something happened, all normal, nothing special, just routine business. But there's a little group of people who really hate what is happening with my work (this is nothing bad btw, it's about making things better. In this case if I asked you how we worked, you would be so very wrong, but as for how we will, you've just described it).

So this routine thing, someone told someone, who told someone, and the facts became not just a little wrong, but so wrong that it wasn't recognisable, but this group were positive it was true. Even when the people who were there told them they were wrong, they couldn't believe it. 'You mean the emperor is naked? Don't be stupid, I know, I know, I know!'  They are so entrenched in their view they really can't see the wood for the trees. Right now they are arguing with someone online about it, and he is even saying why I will rarely bother to talk to them. Quite simply, they just aren't worth the effort.

And this is my point for social media people, you will always get idiots who think if they shout, you must listen.  Well I've never seen any PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or any device to access social media without a mute button. If I want to, I can ignore them very easily. It's also worth remembering that on social media, you can see everything, they can never hide what they say.

If you get a lot of mentions on twitter, you might think it means something, means you're making waves. But if it's the same people retweeting and retweeting again, and again, what are you achieving? It's not a lot of mentions, you're shouting in a sound proofed room.

But if you open a window and try to shout outside, the first thing you must do is the very thing that every journalist does, check your facts. The only thing worse in journalism than being wrong is to lie (or steal someone's byline, but that's another story).  Both amount to the same thing as soon as you've done either, your credibility means nothing. Everything you say after is called into question because you were wrong. If you lie about being wrong, then you just look stupid.

So my main point here is this, if you run social media accounts for your company, always tell the truth. No one will die if you tell the truth. If you don't want to tell the truth, say nothing.

Would you rather be bland or wrong?

Good content and bad content

Sometimes my job is strange. Today, something happened that shouldn't have. I posted a picture, a collage of seven vehicles with a little safety message tacked on. It was only posted just for a toy company to have a look at our range of trucks and it became very quickly the most successful posting ever on Facebook. Now what is so strange about it is the trucks weren't doing anything sexy, five of them were parked, sitting there doing nothing.

Now again this is just like an earlier blog below, but more stranger. People have liked us and followed us to see what we say, and in this post,mew said nothing, nothing at all. Or at least nothing we hadn't said many, many times before. Which again leads me to one conclusion. Social media is a very strange type of work.

We are all looking for something that will go viral, but no one can say what will go viral. Anyone who makes a viral video on YouTube that was seen by 5 million people in 1 week would probably admit in the bar, when no one is listening that they have 19 videos with 1000 views between them.  If you build it, they will come only works for baseball fields in the middle of nowhere. Social media is much more hit and miss.

If you look at your followers on twitter, ask yourself how many are friends? If you have several thousand, ask yourself how many you already follow? How many of them look at your links, your photos, or even read your content other than cursory look? Odds are not very many, which is a depressing thought, because if you don't care about what others are posting, do you really think anyone cares about yours?

If you have a lot of followers, say well over a 1000, but only following a few, have a look at your avi. Are you an attractive woman? if so, how many of your followers are women, and how many men are only interested when you post a photo of yourself? If you are happy with that, I'm happy for you.

In case you think that I'm jealous, I'm not, I can get love on hate on my work account, pick up 50 followers a day on it.  My personal account is just for fun, and I barely post on it. I'm more proud that I only personally know a couple of my followers and one I've never met is a very good friend now, so that to me is a success.

Sorry, I seemed to have rambled a bit of topic there, this is meant to be about what you post.

Basically I'm saying, that what you post could be anything, there are no rules to what is good, what people are likely to want to see, just content. There is no such thing as good content, or bad content. To paraphrase William Goldman, the screenwriter when talking about the films The Postman and Titanic, "there is content people want to see and content they don't".

I hope everyone always wants to see your content.

(This was an interesting and very honest blog about working in social media, if you want to know what it's like, have a read.....http://socialmediatoday.com/rachel-strella/1255821/5-tips-avoiding-social-media-burnout)

Your opinion is wrong

Social media is kind of weird. You have to keep creating interesting content to keep people hooked, and of course there are the people who get annoyed with you. Everything says you should try and talk to those you upset, but to be honest, I can't be arsed with that. Quite simply some people are too stupid to engage with. A very intelligent man once said, that stupid questions should be ignored. A very wise statement.

So anyway, this very small group of people don't like me, or to be fair, they don't like that their argument is so weak it needs them to shout and be insulting when they don't like the answers. I'm a great believer in science and what it can teach us, and it teaches us one thing, to change our minds. We once thought that we sat at the centre of the universe with the stars spinning around us. We now know that is wrong, and we changed our minds. This is because facts change opinions.  No matter how strong our opinions are, opinions cannot change facts.

It's important to remember that, and that you will sometimes need to change your mind. I'm not an expert,but I understand that if I want facts I go to the experts, who give me the facts that will change my mind. If I don't like those facts, my opinion is wrong.

And this what I'm getting at. If you work in social media, then you have to put up with those people, the trolls. It's a pain in the arse, but then so is sitting on an uncomfortable chair, and I'd rather do that than stand all day.

It's an opinion and a fact.

How to get over a 1100 new followers a month on Twitter.

(From 2500 to over 10300 followers in six under six months with only 756 tweets, including retweets)

There’s a lot written in social media blogs about ‘content’.  And when I say social media blogs, I mean ones written by professionals, those of us who work in social media.  ‘Content’ by the way is what you post, the text, the pictures and videos that you put up on your Facebook and Twitter accounts.  The professionals need to call it content as it makes it sound like a product and to be professional you have to have a product.

Which is why I like what I do. 

As it’s a government account, I’m not trying to sell anything.  I’m also limited in what I can post as it’s mainly used for press reasons, anything else that is posted (content) is just general PR to tell people what we do and make sure they know how to contact us.

So is the ‘Content king’ as they like to say?  Not even slightly.  People do not ‘follow’ or ‘like’ you because you are constantly posting interesting content. 

Why do you friend and unfriend people on your own account?  You want to know what they are saying and you no longer want to know.  The fact that I managed to get so many new followers isn’t anything to do with my creativity in saying the same thing over and over again in different ways.  It’s because people want to know what my organisation is saying because what we say is important to them. 

The same is true if you run a corporate account for a large department store chain or anything where you want to try to sell something.  People follow you because you have something they want, when they no longer want it, they will lose interest.

I’ve read a lot about how much and often content should be posted, but frankly it’s bollocks.  You should only post if you have something to say, and the same goes for your personal account.  I will quite happily unfriend someone who posts a lot of random crap all the time, but the people who don’t post, they become a ghost, someone who is there and I am happy to leave there, as they don’t bother me anymore. 

I’m not afraid of ghosts.

But the ones that put out a ridiculous amount of posts, trying to get new followers and likes, it’s a bit, well, desperate.  It’s like the kid in the playground shouting out “like me, I’m funny!”  They are just another wannabe community radio presenter, a noise in the background no one listens to. 

Maybe it has to be different for them, they have to worry about ROI (return of investment) another word to make it look like content is a product.  They need to somehow make people think that they are generating enough trade to pay their wages. 

And if you talk about annoying TV adverts, then they you talk about the company, so if they annoy you with ‘content’, you’ll talk about it right?

Say what you need to say, when you have to say it, and say it for a reason.