joshuamurphy

Why social media is BAD, BAD, BAD

Posted by Joshua On September - 24 - 2009

Everyone wants to belong to something. To feel they are part of a group of people and accepted for who they are in said group.

It seems to me that social media only accepts the happy, the witty, the helpful, the dreamer and the cool. If you are not part of this group, you will not be accepted by the masses. You may be online and have some followers or some friends, but that’s as far as it will ever go for people like you and I.

Transparency, for the most part, is bullshit in social media. Maybe if your someone like @garyvee or @joemanna (who I have met in real life, played poker with at 4 in the morning and know that even when there is no one around they are exactly the same) transparency is a real thing. But for the rest of us who are not like that, social media is doing more harm than good.

Infact I once heard @garyvee say that “if your an asshole, your intern is flip camming your career down the toilet” or something to that effect and nothing can be more true. If you are not ready to be watched, judged and generally have your entire online life recorded for all time, stay away from social media. Leave it to those people who are perfect.

I have heard @garyveee as well as others thank his parents for raising him “right” many times. What if you were not raised “right”. What if you were raised to swear, speak your mind, stand up for yourself, don’t care what others think, don’t be a sellout, not sell your beliefs or soul, drink, smoke, raise hell, never settle, be yourself and have real and sometimes negative feelings. What then? What kind of place do you have in social media then?

I get why and how social media works for business, I really do. I understand how it has changed the very nature of customer service, marketing and is a huge leap forward for the internet as a whole.

But if you are not a company or a brand but just a regular human being, I would stay FAR away from the online social media world and here is why.

Throughout the course of a typical day for me I may say 80-100 swear words, laugh about something stupid, say a couple of mean things and while I may really not mean them, they float off in to space and 99% of the time are gone for all eternity.  That is not the case with social media. In this world, everything you say, do, show, laugh about, share or generally think is recorded for all time. All of your friends, family, employers and potential future employers have access to everything you do or say in this world and they WILL use it to make judgments on you. While you are in this world you must be on your best behavior at all times for some of us, especially when you spend as much time online as I do and generally have as many opinions as I do, this is not an easy thing to do.

I have felt myself under a CRUSHING pressure to watch what I say and how I say it, what I share and who I share it with, what I think, what I look for, who my friends are and what I “look like” online.  I have felt like my boss is standing over my shoulder at all times watching every move I make and recording all of my movements, kind of like the movie “Gattica”.

I feel as though I am faced with a choice. Be myself and just don’t care about what others think of me or how I am, or be the person that I think people watching want me to be. Considering the amount of time I spend online and in this space, I feel this is a real decision that I have to make.

For those of you that know me in real life, you know that I am rough around the edges but I generally mean well and am a good guy, but I have found that I take some getting used to for sure. This is a much harder notion in this space because “getting to know” someone is generally out of the question.

I am generally not looking to “crush it” or become the next guru of any sort. I just want to live my life, earn a decent living and be respected in my field and I don’t think that’s too much to ask. I feel however that those types of desires do not fit in to the social media world and are therefore more of a hindrance than anything. Perhaps I just have no place in the social media world and I should exit stage left and spend less time online and more time out in the real world.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how social media interacts with your real life and if you feel the same pressure.

Inspiration, Rants

Talk about passion… This dude is passion personified.

Posted by Joshua On May - 30 - 2009

garyveeGary Vay-ner-chuk is one bad ass motherfucker.

You know, I was lucky enough to attend a conference about a year ago in Scottsdale where Gary Vaynerchuk  was the keynote speaker. I think it was the DMM or some shit, I dunno. I just went because the company I was working for at the time offered and I wanted to go hang out and drink. It was pretty much as I expected. Track after track of sessions where people were buzzing about “best practices” and milling around like the good little workers that they were, gathering as many “terms” and “shortcuts” to take back to and dazzle the boss man with. There were also a few very cool people there that I met throughout the few days, but as anyone who knows me will tell you, I made no attempts to hide the fact that I was not impressed with the conference and its overall tone, but I digress. Anyway, so it’s the last day of the conference and we are walking to go see the keynote speaker. Now I had never heard of this dude, much less every heard him speak but let me tell you, it changed something in me.

After a mediocre lunch in which the “team” of people I was working with conveniently  forgot to save me a seat, I found myself at a table of strangers about 9 feet from the stage. Gary Vaynerchuk  took the stage and proceeded to stand in front of a room full of marketers, hundreds of them (all waiting eagerly to hear the latest “buzz words” and be praised for their marketing genius) and tell them right to their faces that they were ALL doing it wrong. He stood up there and told them to fundamentally change the way they run their businesses, to really and truly be transparent and honest and then he gave examples how he does those things to back up his claims. He did this with such passion and such unrelenting vigor that I ended up yelling out something stupid like “I agree” or ‘Fuck Yeah” I don’t remember which, during his speech like someone “testifying” in church, actually if you find the full keynote online you should be able to hear me yelling towards the end. Anyway, the point is this; that son of a bitch Gary Vaynerchuk  gave me hope. He essentially said on stage to this room of people what I had been screaming for years. He had felt the same way I felt about business and running a business and he turned it in to something successful and this gave me the hope that it really could be done.

I have since been following Gary in all his craziness and awesome ideas on Twitter. He seems to be one step ahead of the crowd at all times and while it’s frustrating as hell at times to watch him be so successful, it gives me hope that business does not have to suck the life out of you and everyone around you.

So, Gary is you are reading this (and you should be because I know you pay attention), I had a blast playing poker with ya, even though I lost my ass, and to this day, your Keynote still resonates with me almost every single day.

Inspiration