I saw this tweet today. And while it was penned by someone who, in general, has been pretty approachable, all I could think was, “How arrogant.”
I purposefully did not add this person’s name to the tweet because this isn’t really about calling someone out, but more about the dangers of fame, both real fame (celebrities), or microfame (social media type).
I get that when you have a modicum of Internet fame that people are always hassling you to do things for them. But then again, they are the reason you have that modicum of fame.
The relatively recent focus on personal branding is making this worse. I have written about my view of the personal brand, and how I feel that building character and connections are so much more essential than building a brand for yourself. Moreover, my business partner Geoff Livingston outlined the dangers for companies that hire people who are “personal brands.”
When Fame Breeds Arrogance
Nothing quite illustrates this level of arrogance as well as the recent publicity stunt orchestrated by LeBron James as he defected from the Cleveland Browns to the Miami Heat. I was actually heartened to see the uproar over his self aggrandizing move. There was no humility at all in that drama. He tried to soften it a bit by holding it at the Boys and Girls Club in Cleveland and donating advertising revenues from the stunt to the charity. I can see why B&G; chose to take the offer, but his self-centered play is not one that I would want my children to emulate.
Or my peers for that matter.
But we seem to be slowly embracing a culture of rude behavior and self centered action. And I used to be bothered when someone set their voicemail to say, “I will return your call at my earliest convenience.”
I always hated that.
Here are few more for my book of social media pet peeves…
Google Me!
Photo by Dustin Diaz
I have also noticed a few other, less monumental things. When I first attended SxSW Interactive in 2008, someone handed me a business card with their name and the words “Google Me” on the card. I have seen quite a few more since. It was a major turnoff. To the person you hand such a card it says, “I think I am more important than you” and worse “My time is more important than yours.”
Why couldn’t they just give me the information? Heck, if you are having trouble thinking up clever ways to present your business card, Mashable recently wrote, 12 Clever Social Media-Friendly Business Cards, start there.
iPhone Map Me?
Photo by Marco Papale
With today’s announcement that the iPhone 4 will not be recommended by Consumer Reports until it fixes its faulty antennae, I was reminded again of how much I hate that phone. One of the things you can use the iPhone to do is set your Twitter location to the latitude and longitude of where you are at that moment. But please don’t. I want to know where you are most of the time. If you want to do location based updates, use Gowalla, Foursquare, Whirrl, or a number of others.
When I groused about this on Twitter earlier today, Scott Oliver was so kind as to let me know how to translate profiles with Latitude/Longitude locations into real locations. The trick is to paste them into a Google Map and hit search. Which I could have easily found out with a well phrased Google search, but doesn’t that take me back to the last point about making me Google you!?!
So these are my current social media etiquette pet peeves. What are yours? And yes, you can start with telling me that ranting blog posts like this one are your pet peeve, no worries, I can take it!
