Archive for Editorial

sempei13 | July 7, 2011

Rules for Followers; and the 3 types I don’t follow back

I’ve decided to quit fighting the inevitable.  So, on Thursdays I’ll blog about social media.  I’ve even set up a category called “Social Media Thursdays.”

As I’ve been building my twitter followers I’ve noticed that I’m getting the attention of different types of followers.  Most of whom I don’t follow back.  I want more followers, but I also want engaged followers in the church tech niche.

Type 1: Pretty girl with no profile and no updates.  I don’t know who they think they’re fooling, but I don’t want porn spam showing up in my follower list, so I’m not following them back, no matter how many times they unfollow and follow me.  A variant of this it the person who has one update.  Sorry, but that’s still not enough.  I need to know that you’re real and what your interests are for me to follow you back.

Type 2: Random businesses.  I guess they have someone telling them that social media is the key to their business, but I’ve never been to Delaware, so I’m not interested in real estate there.  The same goes for people who have the business model of selling ebooks on single-column websites with tons of text.  If I followed you by accident; I’ll unfollow you real quick when I see those links.

Type 3: “So and so uses TrueTwit…”  This service is the scourge of twitter.  There is no white list, so the only way not to go back over and over again is to use it and make your followers jump through the same hoops or pay money.  I used to @ reply these people and explain my position.  Some followed me anyway; most didn’t.  I’ve gotten tired of it, so I’m ignoring anyone who auto-DM’s me what I’ve started calling TrueTwit spam.

How about you?  Are there any rules you have for following people back on twitter?  Do you follow everyone back? Do you follow no one?  How do you handle it?

Paul

Category: Editorial, Social Media Thursday |
sempei13 | June 27, 2011

The Why behind the What

You may not know that I have a newsletter. I do and you can sign up for it for freehere. The following was a post from it that I thought I’d share here:

Not everyone knows why I’m doing this so I thought I’d share. In November of 1982, I gave my life to Jesus. Not long after, I read about the church in Acts 2. I wanted to be a part of a place like that where lives and eternities were changing. I also knew that I was born when I was for a purpose, so I gave up on that idea.

Years passed and I felt like God wanted me to give the best hours of my day to Him. He had a purpose for my life and I trusted that, but didn’t know what it was. I went to college where I first thought I should become a musician, until I realized that I had no musical talent and then a philosopher, until my plans for grad school fell through. I finally landed at a seminary in my home state where I learned that technology and ministry weren’t mutually-exclusive. I loved it. I’d had quite a problem with procrastination in the past, but now I had trouble getting to other work when there was a video to complete. I found out there was a video job on campus and got it before they could find anyone qualified.

As part of a leadership class we visited a local church and I recorded the meeting for the distance learning students. I couldn’t believe that such a church existed. They were actually impacting people. Adults who’d led hard lives (and ones who thought they had it all together) were coming to know Jesus. On average, every week someone was coming to know Jesus.

My wife and I started going to that church and were amazed by what we saw. I quickly joined the tech team and started making videos. My first one was cited by a guy named Jim as the reason he’d given Jesus a second look. I was hooked. God had used my oddness to help bring people to Himself.

Our church was growing, but couldn’t hire me, so I took other jobs: at a local television station, in event technology, in technical support, but nothing quite fit right. When my church was in a place to hire a tech person, they were looking for someone with a different skillset than I had. The same thing happened with the video director. I continued to volunteer, but my heart longed for the day when I could do what I’d felt called to some 20+ years before.

This past November, I took up the challenge of “Write Non-fiction in November” month and wrote Podcasting Church. I didn’t know why I wrote it when I did, but I had to know if I could. After a lot of editing, I released it on June 2 of this year.

My last job was with an audio/video manufacturer. They decided to move my job from Kentucky (and the church I so loved) to California. I knew immediately that I wasn’t supposed to go. They gave me a generous stay-on bonus to stay through the transition and I used the time and money to start TrinityDigitalMedia.com, llc. Now, I get to spend my days helping churches take the next step and I’ve never been happier.

Starting a business is stressful. I sometimes don’t know where the money will come from. Still it’s worth it to know that I’m doing what I was made to do.

Paul

Category: Editorial |
sempei13 | June 23, 2011

5 Twitter annoyances

Last Thursday, I wrote about ways to grow your follower list. Today (I don’t think Thursdays will be Twitter day, but we’ll see), I’m writing about some things that make it harder to use.

5. Spam: Let’s just get this out of the way first. I hate spam. I hate when I’m somewhere and I get an @reply from someone and I click on it and see porn. This actually happened to me in church once. I thought it was something important, but boy was it not.

4. Long tweets: Sometimes people tweet things that are just too long for the medium.  I get it when you’re writing and you either aren’t paying attention or you think it’s shorter than it is.  That’s one thing.  Using a service like TwitLonger is something else.  I don’t want to read twelve paragraphs about your dog’s intestinal issues.  That’s what a blog is for.  ;) Use twitter for the little things that pop into your head or stuff that can add value to others.  I’ve already convinced one person to stop this.  I try and do this nicely.  I think it’s the wrong genre.

3. Accounts with no tweets: If you joined twitter just to read other people’s stuff, that’s fine, but please put that in your profile so that we know not to follow you.  I had someone follow me and she had zero updates and 500+ followers.  I didn’t want to assume she was a porn spam account, but I didn’t follow her back (even though I tend to follow most people back) because I thought the chances were more than average that she was spam.

2. False advertising in the profile: If your profile says you’re a videographer tweeting useful video links, do just that; don’t tweet about get rich quick schemes to the exclusion of other stuff.  I love following people who share interests with me, but am very bummed when they don’t actually.  If you never tweet in English, don’t make your profile English.  I don’t mean that to be xenophobic.  I mean it to be accurate.  I would feel the same if the roles were reversed.  I speak English and French; if you never tweet in those, I still like you as a person.  I just can’t understand your language (which is beautiful, but I just don’t know it).

1. Don’t annoy would-be followers: I want to follow everyone in my niche.  I can’t because of some limitations.  That means that when someone autoDM’s me telling me they want proof that I’m not a bot, I’m a little unhappy.  I’m more unhappy when they use truetwit (who won’t get a link from me). I understand the hatred of spam, but if you go to their site, you have to fill out a Captcha for each follower you want.  Is there a whitelist?  Nope.  Is there a way to permanently validate? Yep.  Just use TrueTwit yourself and bug your would-be followers.  Can you turn that part off?  Yep, for a small fee.  That’s right. If you use play the truetwit game, you have to spread their crap by signing up and either bugging your possible followers, paying money, or do a captcha every time you follow one of their people.  To be clear, they have great customer service because I emailed them and they got right back to me. If they add a whitelist of people who’ve completed captchas, I would gladly do one.  I just can’t do that to the people I want to follow.  I’m sure they’re not mean, but need to work on their business model.  When they do, I’ll remove this from my list of annoyances.

What about you?  What are some things that annoy you about twitter?  I don’t want this to be a complaint session, just a way to think about solutions to these problems.  I using some tools to make sure I don’t follow people with no status updates.  What about you?

Paul

Category: Editorial, How-to and DIY |
sempei13 | June 21, 2011

Are You Always On, Too?

What professions are always on? Police, Firefighter, Doctor, Tech guy?  Yep, tech guy.  While what I do isn’t life or death (I respect the others like crazy and what I do isn’t nearly as dangerous as emergency personel), I do find that wherever I go, tech problems seem to be there.

I was with my girls at a parade last year (actually we were in it). Their daycare had a float and they wanted to ride along.  So there I am in the back of a hay trailer waving an American flag when it happened.  The music from the truck pulling us started turning on and off by itself.  The solution that the guy with the truck thought up was to unplug and replug the wires.  After a little while, I hopped off to take a look at it.  I thought that maybe the speakers were in parallel instead of in series and that the amp couldn’t handle that low of resistance.   Turns out they were in series, but it was either an amp issue or they had a short in one of the speakers.

Whenever I visit my in-laws, my mother-in-law always has me take a look at her computer.  Last time it was that her anti-virus had expired.  Sometimes it’s a driver issue; sometimes malware.  No matter what, I’m on for tech support quite a lot.

I’m not complaining, I love what I do, but I’ve never seen a lawyer tell his kid to swing on the swingset at a park while he wrote up a quick lawsuit for the two people arguing in front of him.  I’ve never seen a painter, at the grocery store, stop and pull out a paintbrush to take care of some flaking paint in the produce section.

I guess it’s just the nature of tech that we see something wrong and either want to fix it or are asked to.

What about you fellow techies? Do you get called into action at family events and during your spare time, too?  Let me know in the comment section.

Category: Editorial |
sempei13 | June 20, 2011

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