Category Archives: Social media

Sorry about the LinkedIn thing, friends…

I slipped and did something the other day that I didn’t mean to do.

Normally, I keep two browsers running (with multiple tabs going on each) at the same time, and it helps me keep track of what I’m juggling. There are certain things I only do on Google Chrome, and certain other things I only do on Mozilla Firefox. An example of how that helps: On Chrome, I have myself permanently logged in to my Twitter feed, so that when I click on my Twitter bookmark, it’s up and ready to go (although actually I use Tweetdeck mostly for composition of Tweets, I find the regular browser version easier to use for looking up followers and such). On Firefox, Twitter thinks of me as the author of ADCO’s feed, so I’m automatically logged into that one.

Earlier this week, I broke protocol. For some reason, an invitation to do something on LinkedIn came in on my ADCO email (Firefox). That was weird, because normally I deal with LinkedIn only on Chrome. And I thought LinkedIn only had my blog email address, which I only look at via Chrome. Some prospective connection must have manually entered the ADCO address on an invitation; I don’t know.

In any case, since it had never come up on that browser before, LinkedIn treated me like someone who had never been to the site before, and among other things invited me to send invitations to all my contacts. I’m quite sure that, faced with the prospect of invitations going out to a couple of thousand people, I clicked on the option that said not to do that. I did it quite deliberately.

But I must have clicked on something wrong at some point along the way, because all week, ever since that day, I’ve been getting responses to LinkedIn invitations from people I never (with intent, anyway) sent such invitations to.

Which is fine, on some level. Some of these were people I probably should be connected to in that way, as part of a balanced social media strategy. But others were nice people, friends of mine, who are just not into that kind of stuff at all. People I would never dream of bothering with such a request.

Some of them took the time to write me thoughtful emails (and in one case, a voicemail) thanking me for having thought of them (which, I hereby confess, I had not done, at least in this context), but explaining as nicely as they could — letting me down easy — that they just didn’t do stuff like that.

My first instinct, in each case, was to write back and apologize for having bothered them. But then they would know that I hadn’t been thinking of them, and that might make the situation even more awkward than it was.

So I did nothing, except to write, “That’s all right” to one or two of them.

This happened on Monday. So far, I’ve heard from about 40 people, either accepting the connection or politely refusing. I don’t know how many are still hovering out there.

I don’t know about you, but so far, LinkedIn hasn’t done much for me. Twitter and Facebook have helped me build my blog readership, and I just really enjoy Twitter as a medium of expression. But LinkedIn… smart people tell me that it’s an important part of a professional personal brand strategy, so I have dutifully recruited 863 connections so far. But I have yet to get anything out of it that I haven’t gotten from other social media tenfold.

Anyway, if you are one of the unfortunate who received an invitation this week, I didn’t mean to send it. Not that I don’t think of you all the time. I just wasn’t thinking of you that way…

What I was doing all weekend

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Gerrita Postlewait, Fred Washington, John Simpkins and Terry Peterson discuss "Education, Poverty and Equity on the Ground in South Carolina" with moderator Mark Quinn.

Y’all probably think I haven’t blogged in days. I have; it was just microblogging. One of these days I’m going to get social media totally integrated into this blog so y’all can immediately see my posts on Twitter, because when I’m away from my laptop, that’s where I’m sharing observations.

From Friday through Sunday, I was at the Riley Institute’s Diversity Leaders Initiative graduate weekend in Hilton Head. When I arrived, Cindy Youssef of the Riley Institute asked me to Tweet as much as possible, and to use the hashtag #onesc.

It’s dangerous to tell one of the Twitterati to Tweet as much as possible. There were others putting the word out there, but I was probably the most manic, as you can see by looking at the hashtag results. There was a respite of a couple of hours when I took my iPhone up to my room to recharge it, but other than that I didn’t slow down much.

Here you see most of my Tweets from the weekend. I left out some asides that had nothing to do with what was going on, but also left a couple of those in, for flavor.

For a complete roster of who was there, you can look here.

Most of the Tweets were when people said something I agreed with, although not all (as I’ve explained before, I favor single-payer NOT because people have a “right” to health care, but because it’s a more rational system for society overall than what we have now; but I thought it very interesting that Ed Seller thinks it’s a fundamental right).

When someone else’s Tweet is quoted, I use that person’s handle in front of it, and then insert my own as it goes back to my voice. I hope that makes this easier to follow.

Anyway, enough explanation. Here you go:

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

Listening to Marlena Smalls singing to Riley Institute Diversity Leadership graduates in Hilton Head… He’s Got the Whole World…#OneSC

I was listening to Ken May talk about folk art traditions in SC when the coffee started to kick in… #OneSC

Just had an enjoyable political chat with Alston DeVenny, husband of Susan & law partners with the uncle of @fitsnews in Lancaster.#OneSC

Will Folks aka Sic ‏ @fitsnews

@BradWarthen ha! my uncle Robert is a good dude …

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

Don Gordon talking about the need to transform the two South Carolinas into One… #OneSC pic.twitter.com/PQNaC7Qc

Harvey Peeler ‏ @harveypeeler

What is it about Starbucks that makes people want to tell you they are there and does the Drive-thru count ?

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

@harveypeeler @Starbucks is awesome, they have time to kill, they’re caffeinated, and no, it doesn’t count.

In reply to Harvey Peeler

Harvey Peeler ‏ @harveypeeler

I think I can remove my “Tweeter training wheels ” when @BradWarthen pays attention to what I Tweet.

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

“Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Rudolph Virchow, quoted by Ray Greenberg.#OneSC

MUSC’s Greenberg: Problem of people not getting needed meds because of cost is getting WORSE… #OneSC

MUSC’s Ray Greenberg: People with higher levels of educational attainment spend more on alcohol… #OneSC

Greenberg: Stats indicate I-95 corridor is SC’s stroke belt… #OneSC

Greenberg: In many rural counties in SC, there’s not a single OB/gyn. “Deserts” of care… #OneSC

Greenberg: SC is No. 1 in people living in mobile homes. Whoo-hoo! One-fifth of us! #OneSC

Greenberg: Health disparities are NOT the result of bad habits of the poor. #OneSC

Forrest L. Alton ‏ @YoungGunCEO

Sitting at table by @BradWarthen, master tweeter… I can’t keep up, guy is good!! #OneSC #watchandlearn

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

Ed Sellers: In SC, income does not rise with age, but health cost rise dramatically, for blacks and whites. #OneSC

Ed Sellers, formerly of Blue Cross Blue Shield: Access to health care is a fundamental right… #OneSC

That parenthetical interjection on the last Tweet was mine, not Ed Sellers’… #OneSC

Literally jumping the shark: “@CBSNews: Video: Reporter swims with sharks – without a cage (via @CBSThisMorning) bit.ly/wAhfsQ”

@wesleydonehue @harveypeeler When it comes to @Starbucks, I take a backseat to no man!

Heads up, folks: “@AnitaGarrett: Ed Sellers: “There are 55% more whites than black that will be on Medicaid.” #OneSC”

Carolyn Wong Simpkins: In US, we have best & worst health care.#OneSC

Ed Sellers: $24 billion spent on health care in SC annually. It goes up a billion a year… #OneSC

Ed Sellers: Other countries control health care costs by controlling growth of capacity, which (irrationally) is anathema to U.S. #OneSC

Simpkins: We are SO concerned to make sure no one undeserving gets care, we overcomplicate the system… #OneSC

Wanda Gonsalves highlights the crying need for primary care physicians, a “dying breed.” #OneSC

Watching a film that exhorts us to respect barbecue. But I don’t have to be persuaded… #OneSC

The takeaway: Don’t trust a barbecue pitmaster who doesn’t choose and cut his own wood… #OneSC

Huge applause for Pitmaster Rodney Scott of Scott’s BBQ in Hemingway, SC. #OneSC

BBQ Pitmaster Rodney Scott: Hemingway isn’t in the middle of nowhere; “It’s in the middle of everywhere.” #OneSC

Doug Woodward: SC productivity shot up from 90s thru early 00s, leveled off. And our income is FALLING, even when economy is good… #OneSC

Woodward: We must educate more of SC population at a higher level to be ready for 2030, when only 1 out of 6 will be working… #OneSC

Woodward: If we raise educational attainment to national average by 2030, personal income will rise by $68 billion. #OneSC

Jim Hammond ‏ @restlessboomer

#onesc Economist Doug Woodward: If we’d followed the policies Gov. Riley for the past 18 years, we wouldn’t have this (increase in poverty)

Brad Warthen ‏ @BradWarthen

Woodward: Key to prosperity — attracting and keeping the creative class… #OneSC

Steve Morrison quoting someone on poor towns in SC: We built Interstates so we wouldn’t have to look at them… #OneSC

Steve Morrison: If you want a safer and more secure South Carolina, teach a young man to read. #OneSC

Steve Morrison: We must get the greatest teachers to the students with the greatest need… #OneSC

Morrison: Recent trend in education in SC — cutting funding, while passing unfunded mandates to the districts… #OneSC

Morrison: Can we agree that teachers matter the most? #OneSC

Morrison: Take that tax base along the coast, and share it with the poor districts… #OneSC

Morrison: It’s great to have good private schools, but public education MATTERS… #OneSC

Morrison: The child gets off the bus at 5 years old with bright eyes. He’s not defeated. Yet. #OneSC

John Simpkins: The opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s indifference. (“My kids are fine; yours aren’t my concern.”) #OneSC

To paraphrase Terry Peterson, we need not just a love of justice, but a hard-minded understanding of what economic dev. requires. ##OneSC

What this conference keeps wrestling with is what to do about the total triumph of “I, me, mine” in SC politics. #OneSC

Ex-Gov. John Baldacci of Maine says Riley Institute is “kind of like a focus group for the state of SC.” #OneSC

Baldacci says on his first visit to SC, “I was really blown away” by downtown Greenville. (Something for Columbia to aspire to.) #OneSC

Baldacci: “The very basic foundation of our democracy is education.”#OneSC

Baldacci: As dysfunctional as our politics may be, what we have is better than what most people have had throughout history. #OneSC

Baldacci describes the surreal experience of being in Congress on 9/11/01… #OneSC

Baldacci: You can go anywhere in the world, but you can’t become Chinese; you CAN come here from China & become an American.#OneSC

Baldacci: “You’ve gotta be yourself; you’ve gotta tell the truth and you’ve gotta work hard.” (Father’s advice.) #OneSC

Baldacci: “We all have to get over it, folks… We have to realize that we have a greatness here if we work together…” #OneSC

Baldacci exhorts us to treat people as Dick Riley always has… with dignity and respect. Amen to that; we could have no better model.#OneSC

Others call Dick Riley “secretary.” I call him “Governor.” For SC, that means the most (to me, anyway). #OneSC

Apparently, I'm even Tweeting while talking at the barbecue with Clare of the Clare Morris Agency and Susan DeVenny of First Steps.

Harris Pastides takes the Twitter plunge

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I was very interested to see Harris Pastides take the plunge into Twitter today. His first Tweet? Here:

Can’t wait for the baseball journey that begins tomorrow. Tweet the Three-peat!

And I think most of us would be happy to reTweet that. I did.

This is interesting to me because it was in a meeting with Harris that I first became a convert to Twitter. It was back when I was doing a 90-day consulting gig with the university right after I left the paper (right after I got canned, for those of you just joining us). At the time, there was a lot of discussion about how the university in general, and the president’s office in particular, needed to communicate in a social media age.

Lee Bussell from Chernoff Newman, a competitor of ADCO (you are all free to boo and hiss at this point if you feel the urge), brought in some of his people to give the president and some of the university’s communications folks a briefing on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and the like. (It should be noted that various departments in the university were already making use of such media, although there was no overall plan to it.)

For my part, I nodded sagely during the blog parts, being a four-year veteran who had just retired one blog and started this one. But I became impatient during the Twitter and Facebook bits. They seemed pointless and frivolous to me. Why fool with 140 characters when you can get into a subject as deeply as you want (with none of the finite restrictions of print) on a blog?

After the meeting, I said as much to Tim Kelly (“Crack the Bell,” “Indigo Journal”), whom I had just met for the first time, even though we had interacted in the blogosphere for years. He told me I should give those silly-sounding media a try. Why?, I asked. Because you can use them to promote your blog, he said — just post your headline and a link, and it will grow your readership.

So I tried it, and promptly got hooked. It’s like… well, you know how they say video poker is the most addictive form of gambling (particularly for women, for some reason), because of something the flashing images and quick rewards do to your brain? Well, Twitter is the crack cocaine of written communication, and probably for similar reasons. You can follow the very first stages of this conditionstarting back here.

That’s the bad news. The good news (aside from the fact that I am revered as one of the Twitterati) is that the readership of my blog now is about five times what it was at the newspaper. Did I mention that I set a new record in January, with 272,417 page views? (And as long as we’re talking numbers, I’m up to 1,643 followers.)

Here’s hoping my friend Harris doesn’t develop a serious addiction problem. I doubt that he will. After all, he managed to hold out three years longer than I did in starting. Besides, he’s a very sober, solid, serious academic type — very grounded, and even less given to faddish enthusiasms than I.

But it will bear watching…

First, they came for the Tweets…

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I’m not usually persuaded by “slippery slope” arguments, deeming them intellectually lazy. But I have to confess to being a little bothered that Twitter is announcing it has the capability, which it is willing to apply, to censor Tweets by country.

Twitter still maintains that “our policy and philosophy about the importance of supporting free expression has not changed.” But it doesn’t answer the question of whether it would have helped Egypt and other regimes suppress the Arab Spring.

It does draw the line at making a devil’s bargain, as Google did for a time, with China.

Twitter offers the example, to make us feel better, of cooperating with Germany’s anti-nazi laws. So… we’re supposed to feel good that they’re willing to suppress fascism, but personally, that’s a bit outweighed by the fact that the first country they come up with as an example is German. No offense, meine Kameraden.

This makes me wonder… something I am not at all happy about is that the most-viewed video (65,281 views) I’ve ever put on YouTube is a clip of neo-Nazis saying “Sieg Heil!” on the State House steps four years ago (and two make it worse, two other, longer clips I shot at that same rally rank fourth and fifth, which really creeps me out). So I guess that would have been censored, had Twitter been in charge — in Germany, at least.

I like that Twitter is trying to be, if this isn’t too much of an oxymoron, transparent about its censorship:

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page,http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

But I’m still not thrilled about it. You?

Look out, SC! You’ve been chosen as site of the GOP Götterdämmerung

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Perry. Rick Perry...

Yikes! I didn’t expect this. Perry just faked everybody out. After sounding (and looking) like a loser last night, and mumbling about going home to lick his wounds and reassess (with New Hampshire a week away), suddenly Rick Perry tweeted this out:

And the next leg of the marathon is the Palmetto State…Here we come South Carolina!!!

Oh, and the above picture was included with the Tweet. I think he’s trying to give a James Bond impression. Like he just climbed out of that pond, and he’s going to take off that wetsuit-looking thing and have a tux on underneath or something.

Here’s what National Journal is reporting:

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa –- Just hours after announcing via Twitter that he would be continuing his presidential bid in South Carolina, Texas Gov. Rick Perry blasted Iowa’s caucus process and blamed it for his fifth-place finish.

“This is a quirky place, a quirky process to say the least, and we’re going to go into places where they have actual primaries and there are going to be real Republicans voting,” he told reporters. “Not that there aren’t real Republicans here in Iowa, but the fact it is was a pretty loosey-goosey process and you had a ton of people who were there that admitted they were Democrats voting in the caucuses last night.”

Sshhh! Don’t anybody tell the governor that we have open primaries here, and don’t register by party! Let it be a surprise!

By all means, let’s ban kids from ATVs

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Admittedly, not quite all kids use ATVs this way, it was the best freely-available picture I could find to illustrate the post. attritubion: Royalbroil

I got a bit of a debate going on Twitter this morning when I reacted to this tragic news:

HENDERSONVILLE, SC (AP) – A 12-year-old girl has died after a wreck on an all-terrain vehicle in Colleton County.

The Post and Courier of Charleston reported rescue crews were called to a home near Hendersonville shortly after 1:30 p.m. Monday.

Colleton County Fire and Rescue Director Barry McRoy says witnesses said some children at a birthday party were driving two all-terrain vehicles in the woods behind the house when 1 of the vehicles rolled over.

The girl was treated by paramedics and was flown to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where she died. Her name has not been released…

My reaction was simple, and straightforward: “Why is this legal?”

My rhetorical question was quickly reTweeted by two or three users, with Tyler Jones adding an answer: “Rednecks in the Gen Assembly.”

Palmetto Record added this elaboration, “The under-16 helmet law was signed earlier this year — should kids now be banned from ATVs altogether?”

To which my answer is, yes.

But the libertarian view was represented, as it always is. This time, my friend Bryan Cox played the Mark Sanford role, saying, “I’ll bet more kids die riding in cars than driving ATVs. Ban those too? Risk is inherent to freedom.”

For me, that was easy to answer. Riding in cars is an unavoidable risk, in a society that lacks adequate public transit. Riding an ATV is absolutely unnecessary. Big difference.

Bryan elaborated on his point by saying:

If govt should ban those under 18 from activities deemed an unnecessary risk — why not skiing, swimming, football as well?

My reply? I merely expressed my weariness with the “We shouldn’t do A unless we also do B” argument, which is always presented as a way of preventing us from doing A, never as a way of advocating that we do B. In fact, B is generally deliberately chosen for its utter lack of political viability.

Bryan added, “The judgment ATV riding isn’t of value, but football is = opinion. Govt making those arbitrary content calls isn’t freedom.”

No one can ever accuse me of valuing football. But I also know there is little point in trying to ban football, in this society. There is a chance of banning ATV riding by minors. So we should do it, and at least save the lives we can.

That’s because that’s what government is — communities deciding for themselves what they will countenance and what they will not. It’s not some entity out there imposing something. It’s us. And I know my neighbors. They won’t even consider banning football. So I’ll say it again: Let’s save the lives we can.

Tweeting the GOP debate, in reverse

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Anybody see that movie, “Memento”? Well, here are my comments from during the GOP debate in Spartanburg — what I could see of it online (and here I thought I was smart, watching it from home).

And they’re backwards because that’s the way they look on Twitter. It’s just faster to put them up this way:

HeardinLondon This bloke is a thief. When he stops running, try and click above his headhttp://www.selfcontrolfreak.com/pakken.html via@RosieHighlight

And the next leg of the marathon is the Palmetto State…Here we come South Carolina!!!

To say the Cain campaign is acting like a bunch of amateurs is an insult to the amateur community.

HeardinLondon
This bloke is a thief. When he stops running, try and click above his headhttp://www.selfcontrolfreak.com/pakken.html via@RosieHighlight