Social Media Mercenary

If you’re a read of Gawker, you might remember the commenter “Jane Genova,” who had a tendency to start every comment with her name.

So, she’d comment on things like this:

“Jane Genova.

blah blah blah point.”

For awhile, she was leaving a link back to her site, but she stopped doing that after a few people-including one of the Gakwer writers-informed her that doing so was a big no-no.

She’s also an excellent teaching tool for going over general do’s and don’ts of blog commenting.

Her actually comments-aside from her clearly promoting herself-weren’t BAD, but it was pretty clear she had absolutely no idea about

• The type of site Gawker is.
• The type of comments and commenters frequently found lurking on Gawker.
• Gawker commenting protocol.

Lesson # 1: Know the site your commenting on.

Look, if you’re commenting under a pseudonym and you don’t bother to look into what the commenting protocol is-as long as you’re not being blatantly disrepectful-it’s not the end of the world.

If you’re commenting under the name you do business with/your legal name in an effort to get your name out there and show the internet that you have a least a vague understanding of your industry, you better make damn sure you know what commenting protocol is.

If you don’t understand the protocol and you leave a clearly out of place comment-you’re not going to look all savvy and knowledgeable-you’re going to look like kind of a dumbass who can’t be bothered to read a few posts and the comments on the posts to get a general feel for the site-which is going to do more harm than good to your credibility.

Most sites have a comment policy that’s pretty prominently displayed near the comments. If it doesn’t, use common sense and other posts/comments as a guideline.

Lesson # 2: Other Commenters Can Tell When You’re Commenting Soley for Self-Promotion. Seriously.

There are a number of benefits for commenting on blog posts that relate back to self-promotion. Most sites let you include a link back to your site, you can leave a thought-out comment that showcases your knowledge, and if you’re a frequent commenter, other frequent commenters along with the site’s writers get to know you. Blog commenting can be an amazing way to self-promote and network without taking a ton of time and effort.

With that said, you’re first priority when commenting should be contributing to the discussions, NOT blatant self-promotion. People can tell when you’re just blatantly promoting yourself and it’ll cause you to lose credibility. Plus, once you get known of a blatant self-promoter, people will stop paying attention to your comments and miss out on your brilliance.

That was a major mistake on Jane Genova’s part-she was CLEARLY commenting to promote herself and was pretty shameless in doing so what with making sure to state her name in every comment and posting a link back to her site’s main page.

Gawker comment’s identified it immediately. Now, on most sites if you do that, other comments will just ignore you. Maybe some of the more vocal commenters or someone who writes for the site will tell you to knock it off. But, that’s about as far as it will go. On Gawker, they will make fun of you. And they did make fun of her. A lot.

Which led Jane Genova to write a post on her experience. A post that showed that she STILL has no idea what type of site Gawker is, what Gawker commenting protocol is, and that she is definitely lacking in self-awareness.

You can read the full posts here and here, but in short, she mainly wrote that she was flamed because she’s old.

No, she was flamed because she was clueless and overtly self-promotional.

In fact, there are a large number of older commenters on Gawker. Seriously. (If you don’t believe me, go Google “site:gawker.com qualuudes” and then read the comments on any of the posts that come up.

Lesson # 3: Have Some Sense of Self-Awareness:

If you’ve started commenting on a site and notice people are making fun of you, it’s probably a good idea to look back over the comments making fun of you, then look over your comments, and see if anything matches up. If Jane Genova did this, she would have noticed that people were making fun of her for being clueless and self-promotional, not for being old.

Don’t notice a correlation? Ask a reliable friend to check for you-they might be able to notice what you didn’t.

Both you and the friend didn’t notice any sort of correlation? Ok, maybe they’re just being mean. Or you’re friend is just as clueless as you. It could go either way.

Either way, just try not to be the Jane Genova of the industry blog of your choice when commenting.

Since Google+ came out last July, ever single blog post I’ve read on it that allows commenting consists of some variation of the same stupid comment:

“Discussions on Google+ tend to be smarter/wittier/more intellectually stimulating, whereas discussions on Facebook tend to be more banal/stupid/make me question my faith in humanity.”

And every time I read one of those comments, I tilt my head to the side and blink-because that’s my confused face and those comments confuse the hell out of me.

Ok, first off, to see someone’s status updates and such in your Facebook news feed you have to friend them. So, those people posting those stupid updates? You added them by choice.

Now, I understand that maybe the person you added you didn’t quite add “by choice”-you felt obligated. And I totally understand-if I recognize the name, I feel obligated to add-even if I recognize the name from someone I was acquaintances with in elementary school and haven’t talked to since.

But just because I understand your reasoning for adding people who you might not necessarily WANT to add doesn’t mean you get a pass to go on bitching about people’s stupid updates.

Because you don’t have to see them.

Seriously, if you see a status update from a person and you don’t want to see status updates from that person again, you can click on the little tab thingy to the right of their update AND FIX YOU SUBSCRIPTION SETTINGS.

See:

So, while that will help you for stories that you come across in your news feed, it’s a bit of a passive approach-you have to wait for a status update that you don’t want to see. What if you want to be a bit more proactive?

1. Go to your Facebook profile page.
2. Click on “Subscriptions.”
3. Click on “x-Number Friend Subscriptions.”
4. Now you can easily go through your friends list and choose from the following options for each friend:

Category 1: How Many Updates?

• All Updates
• Most Important Updates
• Only Important

Category 2: What Type of Updates?

• Life Events
• Status Updates
• Photos
• Games
• Comments and Likes
• Music and Videos
• Other Activity

Or you can just click “Unsubscribe” and never see ANY of their updates.

See?! Problem solved.

I have around 140-something friends. Took me less than 20 minutes to go through and change my settings-and I changed the settings probably around 70, 80 people. So, it’s not even that time consuming. Plus, even if you have 400 friends and wanted to change the subscriptions for all of them and it takes you a little over an hour and a half, that’s an hour and a half up front that will save you time in the future, because now instead of wading through a shitload of updates you don’t care about, you’ll see the updates you do want to see right away.

In conclusion, anyone who’s using the “conversations are so much better on Google+-I NEVER have to see stupid updates!,” needs to stop whining and fix their settings.

In addition, they need to come to terms with the fact that less people are on Google+. The less people, the less people who are making stupid “I’M HAVING TOAST FOR BREAKFAST, HOLLA!” updates. Trust me, when more people join Google+, you’ll see more of those updates.

So, my site’s here now. It’s a long story. Eventually I’ll get the posts from my old site over here, but for now they’re lost in the abyss of the internet.

In the meantime, I’ll still be writing here, most likely still on an erratic schedule. Some things don’t change.