NOT a Guru!
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Keeping it simple, without the hype. PC tips and Internet advice for mom and pop businesses.
Many years ago, I had rented some office space. The woman that owned the building was in her 60s and was a retired school teacher. She was friendly, interesting and engaging … that is, when I could hear what she was saying. I had a one-on-one conversation with her once, and that’s it.
She had a daughter who had “issues,” to put it mildly.
The daughter was in her early 40s and for some reason, still lived at home and followed her mother around everywhere. She’d accompany her mother to visits to the office. Whenever the mother talked, she started talking. If I called to discuss something going on with the building, I’d initially get the mother, but then the daughter would pick up on another phone and start talking over her mother.
It was next to impossible to understand anything because no matter what the mother was trying to say, the daughter would drown her out and the two of them would start getting louder and louder, each trying to be heard.
I had never encountered anything like this before in my life, and haven’t since. If I’d ask the daughter to please be quiet so I could hear what her mother was saying, she’d nod, pause for about ten seconds and then start again, trying to drown out her mother.
I had not thought about this mother-daughter team in years until I started receiving hundreds of Twitter followers the last few days. They keep rolling in and I suspect they have to do with Joel Comm’s latest make money with Twitter tutorial.
Since having a Twitter account, I tried to be engaging with my Twitter friends. If they followed me, I followed them and vice versa. We actually “talked” with each other with personal tweets. There was some meaning.
With so many new Twitter friends who I am sure are not interested in anything associated with my business or me, the quality of the Twitter experience has gone downhill. There is no way that I can follow the hundreds of new Twitter friends, keep up with what they are saying, or engage in any sort of 2-way communication.
It’s obvious that their only interest is to market their stuff to me. I don’t mind that if it’s kept to a dull roar, but getting blasted constantly, through direct Twitter emails and several hundred Tweets a day are simply a turnoff and I now ignore them.
It’s kind of like the fairy tale about the boy who called wolf. At first, it alarmed his small village. He did it so much to get a rise out of the villagers that when there actually was a wolf, no one listened.
Social networking and bookmarking can be very useful and drive traffic to a website. Like everyone else, I do it.
I don’t think it’s effective in the long run, though.
That’s because everyone’s shouting and no one is listening. Those of us who listen and try to engage are just hammered with more shouts.
What do you think? Are you, too, being shouted at by hundreds of marketers who never listen?
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True, this is the reality in social networking and bookmarking.
Hi Adam – It’s nice to see that someone else feels the same way!