The Makings of a Social Media Fruitcake
My Grandmother used to be a fruitcake-making junkie each year when the holiday season rolled around- many friends and family would graciously accept then turn right around and regift “Grandma’s famous homemade fruitcake.” So this got me thinking- social media tools are a lot like a fruitcake. Although thought, care and a little love may initially be baked in, the end result is nuts and the weird fruit candy-like things. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. are the social media kitchens, but often at the end of the day, it’s still the same fruitcake!
Some almost relevant tidbits you might enjoy… Online communities and social networks are becoming more and more mainstream, a part of our everyday lives (both personal and professional). So here is a scary stat: With the ever growing size of Facebook’s 300-million active users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populous in the world.
So in reality it’s fitting how the term ‘fruitcake’ can also reference a crazy person. Every time I see the commercial for Verizon selling phones where the parents and kids are on the back porch and Dad is tweeting: “Sitting on the back porch,” I chuckle to myself about how true this is with some social media updates today. Although I have carefully handpicked the people I follow on Twitter I still see random tweets like “sitting on the plane waiting to take off” or “going out to Mexican food with the girls.” Although these tweets do depict an activity- are they really relevant? I tend to want to follow people that have the same interests as I do- although I have not met most of them face-to-face I can tell a little bit about them just in the way that they tweet. So on a whim I decided to try posting a ‘pointless’ tweet and see what the reaction was. Although there was no reaction after I pressed the ‘tweet’ button, I felt like I had jipped my followers (sorry, loyal followers!)… Here I was, yet another person in cyberspace that had posted a tweet with no real value and was in fact, pointless…who knows I’ll probably see it re-tweeted soon…wish I liked fruitcake…
“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple Verizon commerical- Twitter Updates and Facebook
