It's rare for me to blog about sport but this is something I want to get off my chest. It's important to me and this is my blog.

If you didn't know, I support Liverpool. Historically a great club. Recently, not so much. This is where the meat of this post lies.

It's been a bad season for Liverpool. After Roy Hodgson leaving the club in a bit of a mess, former player manager Kenny Dalglish stepped up to sort things out. Expectations were high and he failed to meet them. He spent lots of money on questionable signings and left us at the end of the season in our worst league position since... well... before I was born. He has now left the club. Nudged, obviously. Rightly.

It's not all down to the manager though. The team as a whole are not as good as they could be. You've got Steven Gerard who, although very good in his own right, is a true square peg. With him, mostly an army of average players all trying to fit around him. In my opinion, he needs to go too.

Anyway, that's enough about Liverpool, let's talk about England...

The England squad have a new boss. Woo and yay. It's that man that left Liverpool in tatters, Roy Hodgson. Because that wasn't all his fault, I thought I'd give him benefit of doubt on his new position...

That was until I saw his squad selection for Euro 2012.

Our new national captain is square peg, Steven Gerrard. Right. That'll work... Not.

Not only that but also seems to have drawn heavily upon Liverpool generally. Why? Where is the sense in that? And why Downing?

That's it. There's my crisis.

About 18 months ago, my iPhone decided to quit life and leave me phoneless. Unfortunately this was 2 days before Christmas so funds were tight but due to being away from the office for the next week, I needed to replace it but with something cheap. With that I proceeded to ask Twitter what I should do and like a flash, @JonChoo gave me a solution. The Sony Ericsson Xperia 8. On his advice, I went out and bought one.

Does any of the above bother me? Not really. It did at first but these days I spend more time looking up, looking at the real world, rather than looking down at my phone.

If I go out for the day, or even just an evening, I turn it off altogether because the battery will die if I leave it on (yes I know how to switch off background data etc.)  and I might find I need it.

So as much as I complain about my phone, the reason I haven't replaced it with something better is that I've learned to appreciate the value of looking up.

I'm sure you know exactly what I mean...

When it first appeared on the scene back in 2010, the idea behind social network Path was that you could have a more personal space, for sharing moments with those really close to you. This being the all important factor, you were limited to only 50 friends. The other (almost) unique factor was that it was exclusive to mobile use.

Fast forward to 2011 and Path announce version 2. With an improved timeline, an Android version that is as good as the iPhone version and no friend cap, Path became much more social.

Along with the above changes, they also improved the ability to share outside of the network and made privacy easy to manage by keeping how you share things a very simple process.

Another nice feature is the way you can very easily show your sentiment for a piece of content by simply choosing an emoticon.

All in all, this mobile social network is a nice way to share your thoughts or moments with your peers in a simple hassle free manner with few distractions.

The only problem with Path is that it will probably fail in the long run due to a lack of monetisation. It's probably fair to say that they are attempting to address this by way of brand partnerships, like their recent pairing with Nike but is that really scaleable? I don't think so...  I personally couldn't get whatever it is they did together to work on my phone and the news came and went in an evening so I'm not sure it's had the desired effect for anyone.

I would love to see Path flourish because it's a great social experience and a pleasure to use but if they don't find more commercial options soon, I fear it will be no more.

Fingers crossed!

I've been using Posterous as my main blogging platform for several years and in my opinion, because of its simple interface, ability to post via email and share everywhere, it's the best and most social blogging platform around. In case you hadn't noticed, this very blog is powered by Posterous.

The acquisition

Last night I learned that Posterous had been acquired by Twitter. The announcement on Posterous' own blog says that "Spaces" (this blog is a Posterous Space) will remain open but they will be creating a process for export, should anyone wish to take their content elsewhere.

While they did effectively say it would be business as usual, they didn't say how long for. This concerns me. I have a horrible feeling that this very blog will end up homeless soon...

Speculation

Of course, at this stage I can only speculate and who knows, Twitter may keep things running in a way that suits me; though I doubt it.

At this stage I'm hoping Twitter will use the service "as is" but bring it into their platform. As long as the link structure stays intact, I'm fine with that. I've put a lot of effort into making this platform work for me and it's worth a lot in terms of SEO (search engine optimisation).

That of course leads me to the "what if". What if they do shut it down? Sure I'll be able to export my content but will there be an easy way to preserve my link structure? Will I lose all those years of hard work?

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Keep this frequency clear.

Why did I stop?

It was a complete accident really. I guess life took over. I suppose I lost momentum. I kinda lost interest. I could always use the old "I don't have time" excuse but seeing as I have a smart(ish)phone and spend a lot of time on trains, that doesn't really cut it.

Why am I starting again?

I had forgotten what blogging was all about... I left that behind, chasing stats, raising my profile etc. Every blog post was linkbait, socialbait or something equally vulgar... yuck!

Recently I've seen several blogs where the author just writes about whatever suits them. No particular focus or direction, just words by someone about stuff that matters to them. Yes. To them. Not Google, not Bing, not <insert influential twitter user> but them, the author.

So that's where I'm at. My phone won't let me add links with nice anchor text, headings or bullets so you'll get what you're given and like it. (Although I can and did come back and edit)

If you don't like it, I don't really mind if you go away and don't come back. I'm writing this for me but thank you for visiting. Please close the door on your way out.

The worn out and trite epitome of simple marketing suggests that “People buy from People”, although a quick google for this phrase suggests it may not have a single author to its credit.

Rarely has anyone ever said to me “Google tells me this is an excellent product”, instead recommendations come in the form of ‘I’s and ‘they’s  and often the qualification of a single show or celebrity to add to its endorsement.

So it came to pass that search engine marketing , a now bloated and waddling exercise in flagulation by phrases, has peaked and the overflow of eager and frankly ill informed <QUOTE>consultants</QUOTE> seek a new revenue stream and opportuntiy.

Enter the Social Media Guru, the Social Media Manager and the Social Media Expert. Consultants and salespersons whose core skill sets is to hear the jingle jangle of the bandwagon passing and leap unabashed onto the jockey box to proclaim their skills and expertise in guidance and direction.

They have a distinctive characteristic and it is one you would do well to look closely for lest P.T.Barnum be proved right yet again. The characteristics to be wary of are often at an inverse to your expectations; Lets look at a few classic examples.

Twitterers

On Twitter they appear with profiles exclaiming ‘Social Media Expert or Guru’ and when you look closely you see that despite Twitter's lifespan they have only been using Twitter for the last few months. Quite possibly they have a large amount of people they follow and few following back. Although their conversations tend to be self promotional they find a network of similar thinking “professionals” with whom they self promote and congratulate. Often they link to their own blogs ( see bloggers ) where they repeat many trite and obvious idioms all the while encouraging you to call their number and get their advice.

Facebook

Indeed as with twitter so with they have just arrived ( how long has Facebook been going ? ) and they have friends ( who suspiciously also attended the same ‘how to be a social media schill’ course ) who also post and ‘like’ and share the same articles and tripe that they keep churning in the hope they gain credibility.

Bloggers

Similar to their twitter histories these experts have blogs which go back only months. quite possibly with incomplete "about me" pages or just as possibly with incomplete blogs created as tacked on afterthoughts to their own website, which no doubt has a 20 second Flash Splash page intro, possibly with kittens. Rarely do you see any examples of ‘media’ usage beyond the desire to overpopulate their sidebars with plugin after plugin after plugin.

And thats about it.

You are unlikely to see these ‘Social Media’ experts with posterous accounts running alongside their projects or flickr and instagram accounts highlighting conferences, tweetups and events they have experienced. You wont see them curating and collating content in Youtube or Vimeo and as for podcasts or Audioboos? Suffice to say you might start seeing them from today since they have seen this post but until then it simply has not occured to them to use and promote these tools for themselves or their clients.

Put simply these "bandwagon jumpers"  these gurus, experts and ‘professionals’ are not going to help your business or your projects. They do not know how to take risks. They do not know how to go out and explore the internet and live on the frontiers of change and live as the outriders of  opportunity. They are sharks and buzzards feeding only where the shoals and masses congregate and picking at the flesh of business the chunks they can get away with.

Do not rely on them to take you places where your customers maybe or for them to climb the mountains of competition to view ahead into new pastures for your business.

For more on the humanity of good social media take a listen to the first half of 'Social Media White Noise' Episode #62 Cloud Trouble where Nik Butler rants about the tendency of these experts to use tools over experience to appear professional.

About the author

Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) was on twitter in 2006 and has been blogging since 2004. He makes no claims to being an expert, guru or professional but likes to be known as 'A Digital Roadie'. He has tremendous expertise in getting things done and has the client testimonial page to prove it.

Related blog posts

• Social media science will kill our creativity
• Social media suicide - @LStacey is dead, long live @LStacey
• A Twitter follower is for life, not just for Christmas
• Twitblock - winning the battle against spam on Twitter
• Actually you're probably all wrong
• How to get retweeted

Yes, the topic of this blog post (and probably the content of the tweet you followed to get here) are completely loaded, horrid, spammy and designed to go after easy traffic. The thing is, and we all know this secretly, these things work. Along with the attention grabbing headline, I'm also begging for twitter users to retweet... something I hate doing but sadly something that also works.

Why would I do these nasty spammy things?

There are two reasons for doing this. Firstly, I wanted to share social media scientist, Dan Zarella's "Science of social media" video with you because if social media marketing (or personal brand posturing) is your thing, you'll do well to listen to what he has to say if you want to get your message out there. A lot of it you'll already know but won't necessarily like. Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself:

Secondly, I actually have an issue with these techniques. Sure, they work, and they work well but does this make it right? By doing this are we just upping the noise level? This actually relates nicely to the mini blog post I wrote yesterday on cutting through the noise. Not only does it up the noise level but if we start applying too much formula to our marketing message, it can become a little dry... but who cares if it works, right?

Related blog posts

• Social media suicide - @LStacey is dead, long live @LStacey
• A Twitter follower is for life, not just for Christmas
• Twitblock - winning the battle against spam on Twitter
• Actually you're probably all wrong
• How to get retweeted
• Twitter ID is the new dot com

Follow Lee Stacey (@LStacey) on Twitter

This is one of those blog posts where I make an observation in the real world and apply my thoughts about it to social media. I'm not going to bother you with lots of statistics or tell you that your Twitter or Facebook marketing strategy is wrong or that I know better than you, at least not today. Today I will just leave you with my thoughts and let you work the rest out for yourself. Please share any thoughts you have in the comments area below the post.

My thought of the day

This evening I was walking through my home town of Burgess Hill and a plane flew over, I'm guessing it was at around 10,000 feet. I heard the plane coming and looked up. Nothing funny or odd about that at all. I heard a plane, I looked up, I saw a plane. There were two other people walking on the same street that did the same.

Earlier today I was walking through London to work, just happened to be looking up and saw a plane fly over at what I'm guessing was about 3,000 feet. There were literally hundreds of people on the same street as me and not one person looked up, at least not that I noticed. One thing that was different was that I couldn't hear the lower plane because London is a lot noisier than Burgess Hill. London is noisier because (once you get to the root of it) there are more people.

Related blog posts

• Social media suicide - @LStacey is dead, long live @LStacey
• A Twitter follower is for life, not just for Christmas
• Twitblock - winning the battle against spam on Twitter
• Actually you're probably all wrong
• How to get retweeted
• Twitter ID is the new dot com

Follow Lee Stacey (@LStacey) on Twitter

Twitter's recent(ish) developer crushing announcement got me thinking. While a lot of independent developers might not like their new rules, Twitter do have the right idea in as much as they want to deliver a consistent experience across all platforms and devices. Shame there's no sign of that in their own mobile & web apps just yet but that's another conversation.

Consistency

These days I'm an Android user, not by choice but I'm going to live with it for now. I used to have an iPhone and since switching I've (where possible) downloaded the same apps for my Android that I had on the iPhone, only to find that they are in every single case so far, completely different. Why are they not the same? Where is the consistency? Why should I have to learn how to use something all over again? I shouldn't. The same app, even if offered on a different platform should offer the same user experience.

Cross platform is an after thought

I suspect the reason for this lack of consistency is that going cross platform is an after thought for most developers. A developer will make an app, say for iPhone and if successful will then go about creating an Android version or getting someone else to do it for them and so on. This leads to two (or more) completely different apps which share one commonality, their name.

Getting it right

Getting it right by creating a consistent experience across devices isn't going to be easy because the development platforms and the physical limitations of Operating Systems and their associated SDKs vary so much but that shouldn't make it impossible. Surely it's just a case of sitting down and planning your app first with all options in mind. Think about how each feature or function would work and what you would have to do to achieve that same experience across all platforms.

Am I wrong?

I'm certainly not an expert in mobile app development so I'm happy to hear any comments from those that are and wish to put me right on this one. I'd also like to see some examples (if they exist) where there is complete consistency across devices.

Like this? You may also be interested in some of my other posts:

• I am now an Android user
• MiFi as a home broadband solution
• The iPad = the perfect home computer?

When I hit the "Publish" button on my blog post"Social media suicide - the conclusion" the other day I thought I was done with that topic. I had found out what I wanted and it was now time to move on... that was until I found myself sat on the train tonight, reading my feeds and sharing the stuff I like with my Twitter buddies, such as I do.

Sharing is caring

On my phone I have this great app called my6sense which by way of clever algorithm surfaces content from my RSS feed subscriptions that is most likely to be of interest based on what I've previously shared using the app. I scan, I read, if it's good I share. The more I share, the more the app knows about the kind of stuff I like. It's just full of shareable win. In fact today, it would appear that it was a little more full of win than normal as my good friend and colleague Hamid (@HSirhan) got all excited and came as close as you can get on Twitter to looking like something from Dawn Of The Dead but with a hankering for links rather than brains. This was what got me thinking... he was loving it but was everyone else?

Like it or lump it

Prior to my social media suicide experiment I took the view that if someone didn't like my content, they could simply unfollow. If they are not interested in what I like, they aren't interested in me and that's fine. No skin off my nose. I really didn't care at all but now my network is smaller and the relationships I have with those that are a part of it is essentially stronger, should I perhaps reassess this? Perhaps it's time I dropped that ridiculous, egotistical attitude. While I know I can't please all of the people all the time, I could probably do better in trying not to piss them off. Because my followers aren't all 30 something male tech geeks with a passion for social media and digital marketing, chances are that when I spray Twitter with links that interest me, most of them are probably of no interest to most of my followers and in some cases may even flood their timeline. This would piss me off if I were in their shoes.

What about those that do like it?

Amongst those that I'm connected to there are a few (Like Hamid) that really do like the links I churn out and there are even a few folks that follow and engage with me because we have those things in common. If I were to stop sharing these links, they would be missing out on the cool stuff I really enjoy sharing with them. Often it's a conversation starter and that's where the real value in all this social stuff really is, right?

I have actually been here before

It's not the first time I've had this little moral tug of war. I've been here before. A while back I even set up a Twitter account exclusively for sharing links and sharing links only. Conversation over here and links over there. Everybody's happy. Of course, it didn't work because the content and the conversation actually go hand in hand. It was a silly idea.

The solution

I've not really got a solution; that's why I'm writing this rather rambly blog post. With a bit of luck you might leave a comment and help me out on this one. I will be doing a couple of things differently from now though. Firstly, I'm going to share a bit slower. Bombarding my timeline with links probably isn't a good idea. Secondly, I'm not going to rage so much when someone I follow bombards me with irrelevant links. I now understand this and know that they are only doing as I once did.

The moral of the story is simple:

Treat your followers as you wish to be treated by those you follow yourself.

If you liked this blog post, you may also like:

Should I commit social media suicide?

Tweet silly!

A Twitter follower is for life

Blogging for normal folk