"Social Media Bankruptcy"

I started cleaning out my Twitter account yesterday. If you honestly have 20,000 people whose updates you follow on a regular basis, God bless you. I have trouble just keeping up with the movies in my Netflix instant queue. More than two-thirds of the Twitterers I unfollowed fell in one of the following categories:

• "Make quick money"
• "Get out of debt quick"
• Porn
• "Make quick money"/"Get out of debt quick" disguised as porn

Then there are the tooth-whiteners. Some of these people I think are in a pay-for-Tweet program where all they need to do is post a spam Tweet on how to whiten your teeth. Then they get like $25 or something. Or less. Everybody has their own equivalent of seven pieces of silver. Jesus died for your anal-retentive tooth-bleaching fetish.

When cleaning out your social media accounts, one phrase that might pop up periodically is, "who the f*** are all these people?" And it takes so long to do, you might be better off deleting the account completely, announce "social media bankruptcy," and start all over again.

While clearer heads do prevail, there is still a trend in online PR circles that when it comes to Twitter accounts, bigger is better. This only is the case if you actually have something informative/entertaining/original to say. Or if you're @GuyKawasaki, a guy who shamelessly Tweets and Re-Tweets other people's stuff, but who somehow I can never bring myself to either hate or unfollow.


You can have an account with 10,000 or more followers, but are they quality followers? Is your message going out mostly to Twit-bots and the assorted megalomaniacal narcissistic rainmakers, gurus, and get-rich-quick schemers that congregate on Twitter thick like thieves?

Also, are you sending messages on Facebook to people asking them to be fans of yourself? This is how that particular notice looks like in my gmail: "Joe Schmedly invites you to be a fan of Joe Schmedly." For God's sake, hire an assistant to send these messages out from their account, or change up the name of your fan page, or do something.

At any rate, bigger is not better in social media circles unless your account is populated by real honest-to-goodness friends and targeted, quality followers who actually are interested in what you have to say. I learned this on the day when I went to find a particular recent Tweet a friend had posted and scrolled through my account for like 5 pages.

And every once in a while I meet someone who says they don't even read blogs. "Who are these interesting Luddites?" I immediately wonder. Do they entertain themselves and the family at home using shadow-puppets and a shoe-box stage? Or do they actually do things like f**king leave their apartment? And not Tweet about where they are going or what they ate? Is there a "Five Things" quiz they could fill out on Facebook so I could get to know them better?


Along the lines of this topic, I am phasing out my OhSuperheroine Twitter account and rolling everything into @ValerieDorazio. I'm also in the process of taking all my other bloggy concerns out back behind the barn and putting them out of their misery. I'm picking one (that's ONE) social bookmarking site to post actual bookmarks of actual links I want/need to remember (like the html "cheat sheat" I consult on a regular basis), and one image storing site.

Oh, and I'm going to f**king actually leave the apartment.

Here is an artist's interpretation of how me actually leaving my f**king apartment might look like:

I'll be sure to Tweet and blog about how that all goes.