If you live in the Portland, Maine area, and you use Twitter, you have probably heard of SMUG.  For the uninitiated, SMUG stands for “Social Media Usability Gurus.”  It’s a parody blog, Twitter account, and Facebook profile page that mocks so-called Social Media experts.  The owner of the account is not afraid of offending anyone, including local internet micro-celebrities and social media aficionados.

SMUG keeps his real-life identity a secret.  I imagine that it’s so he can hurl his snarkiness without fear of retribution.

The first SMUGup

On September 9, SMUG hosted the first ever “SMUGup.”  The big draw was that SMUG would finally reveal himself/herself/itself to the attendees.  I was in attendance, and like most of the people I spoke with, was skeptical that we would actually get to see the real SMUG.  As it turns out, our skepticism was warranted.

Disappointment

SMUG was not revealed.  We were greeted with a bevy of professionally produced low-grade swag (pens, business cards), posters, programs, and surveys.  And we were shown a video, allegedly a live feed of SMUG addressing the attendees:

Clues to SMUG’s true identity

Has SMUG grown too careless?  The recent event revealed many clues about the perpetrator.  The first clue is what I’ll be addressing in today’s post.  SMUG, or an agent of SMUG, disguised his voice in the video address, but it seems like he used a simple pitch adjustment.  If you want to adjust the pitch back, well, there’s an app for that.  So I took the liberty of adjusting the pitch on the audio.  Unfortunately, I can’t identify the voice – it must be someone I don’t know very well.  But perhaps one of my astute readers (and I know there are a lot of you!  Hi, mom!) can figure it out.

Without further ado, I present to you, the unaltered voice of SMUG.

Why I Am Doing This

I don’t have any problem with SMUG.  Although he/she/it has been a little caustic with me on Twitter, he’s been a lot worse to other folks.  I find the whole thing pretty funny.  I think a lot of the “experts” have no idea how desperate they look while trying to cash in on something they barely understand, and SMUG puts them in their place.  But I love a challenge.  I think it takes cojones to think you can pull off hiding in plain sight, in the tiny world of our small city’s social media community.

Part of me is reluctant to even try to figure this out, because it might ruin the fun for me and for everyone else.  But I also think SMUG needs to be knocked down a peg, and shown that it’s not that easy to hide behind an anonymous account.  He can’t hide forever.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you have heard about or participate in Twitter (no disrespect to those annoying, ubiquitous Geico cavemen.  Hell, they are probably on Twitter now).  If you do tweet, then you probably know about #followfriday.  For the uninitiated, #followfriday is a tradition whereby you tweet your recommendations of fellow twitters worth following.

What started as a quaint concept in a single tweet by Micah Baldwin (@micah) avalanched into an internet meme.  You can read about this phenomenon’s history in a great article on Mashable and on Micha’s own blog.

Fellow blogger, Portlander, and all-around great guy Rich Brooks (The Rich Brooks) posted some advice on his company’s blog on how to properly do follow Friday, and I think his points are worth repeating.  At the risk of sounding like a social media curmudgeon, here is my take on how best to do #followfriday:

DO: Post an explanation on why someone is worth following.  I might be following you because you live in my hometown.  If you follow someone else because they share your hobby, then they might not make a good match for me.  Tell me why I should care about your friend.  The tweet below says I should follow @staffphoto for photographs (I think).  Well done, @lucaseditor!

DON’T: Retweet other people’s #followfridays, especially without any explanation.  An occasional “oh, I agree, @reallycoolguy is worth following” retweet is one thing, but some of the #followfriday’s are getting downright spammy:

Above – what is this?  Spam?  A bot? I can’t even tell.  Below – who are these people?  And why is this particular list so special that it’s worth parroting twice over?

DO: Tell us about interesting twitterers that regularly make you chuckle, teach you something, or share interesting links.  Tell us about the people who make you love twitter and keep you coming back.  And it doesn’t hurt to use a catchy “teaser” that makes me want to check out a profile:

DON’T: Worry about offending your friends if you don’t mention them in your #followfriday. Worry about the quality of your tweets.  If you’re rattling off a list of people in your friends list because you’re afraid of otherwise offending them, then you’re diluting your own credibility and the quality of your tweets.  And don’t sweat it if you have nobody new to recommend this week – you’ll be inspired next week!

DO: Share people who you would want to have learned about sooner.  When #followfriday actually works, it’s a beautiful thing, just ask MsLatina and Nachhi:

DON’T: Please don’t fill your entire feed with #followfriday’s for several hours in a row.  I followed you because I thought you were interesting.  I agree with this guy, @ajayshroff:

DO: If they’re interesting, it’s definitely okay to help out a new friend on twitter who doesn’t have a lot of followers yet.  We all have to start somewhere. #Followfriday is all about spreading the word about interesting people.

Conclusion

I don’t claim to be a “social media expert” or “twitter guru,” so take all of my humble suggestions for what they are: opinions from a crotchety old grump with a blog.  I actually really do enjoy #followfriday, and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t lose its usefulness because it isn’t used as well as it could be.  What are your suggestions?

I’m a big fan of Nate Weiner’s Idea Shower. He recently wrote a really good blog post entitled “What Will the Web See When You Die?” In it, he wrote about the death of a snowboarding colleague, and how the traditional media publications cobbled a rather terse biography of the man by copying some of his profile information from a company website. His post was a good read. Go read it. Check out his other stuff, too, he’s brilliant.

Anyway, the story reminded me of one of my former colleagues who committed suicide a few years ago (in fact, I left a comment about it on Nate’s blog… most of this post is just an expansion of that comment!). He died several years after we had drifted apart (he had moved out to the west coast, and I moved back up to Maine), so I didn’t find out about it until months after it happened.

After I found out, the first thing that I did was go to his web site. There he was, smiling at the camera for a blog entry about how his and his girlfriend’s guacamole dip recipe. I found it rather eerie that his web site stayed up for so long after his death. I found myself re-visiting it days later, perhaps I was half-expecting new content to magically appear. Eventually the site just disappeared into the ether.

At the time I wondered if I should keep a copy of it and host it as sort of a tribute to him, but in the end I decided it was better to let the site go with him; keeping it was like the parents you read about who lose a child and can’t bring themselves to redecorate their room. I doubt he would’ve wanted that.

In this age of caching pages and leaving parts of yourself scattered over the social web, it’s interesting to think that digital bits of your life will live on long after you die. Our lives are far shorter than the magnetic tapes and spinning disks that prop up the web. In fact, my friend’s pages are still in the internet wayback machine, so I didn’t even need to save them.

Photo Credit: ReefRaff

I’ve been a fan of Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog for awhile now. So I was a little horrified when I read today’s article “Amateur Hour Over at Twitter?” The article was about the departure of Twitter’s Chief Architect, Blaine Cook. In the article, Arrington doesn’t pull any punches, and takes Cook to task for Twitter’s scalability problems:

“Cook was directly responsible for scaling Twitter, and he very much failed in his job.”

I’ll set aside the question of whether or not this claim is even true. And I won’t even consider the legal ramifications of levying such claims. Perhaps Arrington knows a lot more about rapidly scaling realtime communications systems, and the inner-workings and politics of Twitter, Inc., than most of us do.

This amateurish outburst made me ponder the rock-star status to which we now elevate some programmers and system architects. There are a lot of geeks to whom we bestow a (perhaps unhealthy) share of idolatry, many of whom don’t even need their full names to be recognized: DHH, Guido, Linus, PG, Scoble, Spez, Steve (and his evil twin, FSJ), and, yes, even Arrington. I could probably name dozens more. Many of us pay a lot of money to be in the same room with these people, and hear them speak.

Was Blaine Cook at this level of stardom? Probably not. But he did give talks and apparently kept a blog about the challenges of scaling a project so quickly. He was Chief Architect of arguably the hottest social service on the internet. Perhaps that’s enough to become a target.

Arrington’s job is to attract eyeballs. Eyeballs sell ads and (presumably) promote speaking engagements. At its essence, TechCrunch is not that much different than a traditional magazine. From where I sit, TechCrunch gleefully taunted a guy who left his job, forceably or otherwise. What company does that put TechCrunch in when compared to traditional media? Who follows the real rock stars around, revelling in their success and revelling even more when they crash hard?

Michael Arrington needs to decide what TechCrunch is. Is it The Wall Street Journal? Or is it The Star? The tabloids at the supermarket checkout get lots of eyeballs by celebrating the latest misery of Britney or Lindsey or Brad & Angelina. If that’s what TechCrunch is selling, then I ain’t buying.

Photo Credit: Eric Mutrie