Written for October 5th, in commemoration of National Storytelling Festival Day…

Aristotle wrote in his treatise Poetics that there are seven golden rules to being successful in telling a story – plot, character, theme, dialogue, chorus, décor and spectacle. Learning to successfully balance these important essences of any story will make it desirable to the one taking part in it through reading or viewing it.

Did you know that you are both a story, and a storyteller? We’re all storytellers, aren’t we?  Pacing around on life’s stage, bringing attention to ourselves in the way we act (or don’t act,) in what we shout out to the “back rows” (or based on our abject silence,) in our moods and inconsistencies.  We practice all seven of Aristotle’s rules in how we live our lives and express ourselves out in the open, for all to see. Some more than others.  There are a few experts out there, balancing all of the essential parts of telling their story, and we simply love to sit back and watch them live.

You’re reading this because you are involved in some way with social media, whether as a writer, reader or sharer.  How do you get Aristotle’s seven story rules into balance, so that your social networking story is interesting to your friends and followers? You’ve got an interesting life, whether or not you think so.  How do we draw others into your very interesting life story using Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus?

Seven Ways to Make your Life Interesting in Social Media

Plot – This is way more than simply what’s going on in your life, or what you’re up to right now.  Get a plot already, and let others know what direction you’re going to take us on, from first page flip to climatic end.   Why did you take the time to create a social networking account in the first place? What are we all going to see on this wild ride?  Give us a steady, consistent stream of 140 character mini mission statements.  My ticket to your show was to follow or friend you, and I very much would like to know that you’ve taken some time with your life’s storyline…

Character – This is where you tell us about you as a person. It better go a lot further than your favorite colors, your favorite foods, and whatnot.  This is the part where you take stands in life, and decide that you are going to be YOU, absolutely and unequivocally yourself, on social networking sites.  You are going to tell people what you think about the issues in the news, and wait quietly while the rest of us figure out whether or not to mock you, okay?  Let us know your deepest philosophies about life and how we ought to treat others. Stand up and tell us your philosophical, religious, loving, caring, demanding stances.  Do you wear weird hats?  Got too many cats? Got an issue with taxi drivers? I got the ticket to see your performance, to hear your story, so I want the real McCoy.

Theme – This is your social media mood, so to speak.  Are you a serious blogger, tweeter or Facebooker, taking strong stances in life and demanding justice?  Are you a bit of a comic here, telling one joke after another for that fleeting laugh?  Do you lecture to me about what I should be doing or supporting? Do you coach me in life, putting your arm on my shoulder and helping me grow? Or do you flitter in between status updates, using that keen sense of timing to make the rest of us think, laugh or cry? Let me get lost in your pages.  Make me follow you so deeply my fiancée has to order me to shut the laptop and pay attention to the family…

Dialogue – Hey, if you can find others, you can talk to them, right?  Isn’t that the point of social networking – to dialogue with others – to be, well, social? How do you speak to others online?  How often? Do you seek out different opinions, and are you respectful when you actually hear them? Do you take the time to dig deeper into the stream of information and share in other people’s celebrations and problems by responding and resharing? Sometimes the tiniest of acknowledgements can mean the world to another.  Engage as many as you can stand to, because the most interesting stories are those that have characters we learn about slowly, page by page, their lives woven into a beautiful tale we just can’t put down…

Chorus – How often do you repeat the basic backbone of who you are?  How often do you remind your friends and followers what a wonderful person you are? How often do you log into your social media presence, even if only once a day, to just say hello and reconnect?  The reemergence of a little-known character, the reintroduction of one’s unique flavor into our daily social bread, can bring so much joy to life.

Décor – Every house should take on the character of the one living in it.  Figuring out how to decorate is one of the essential joys of moving in, right?  Have you decorated your social media space, and provided a basic mood for your visitors? Does your background image and avatar reflect your personality, or did you put up something just to make you look good?  There are a variety of places you can visit and download a decent background, as well as websites that can teach you how to “tweak” your social “brand” even more.  Is your social networking home made of stucco or wood siding?  Spend some time already!

Spectacle – Do you provide additional multimedia opportunities to get to know you? Adding photos and albums to your status updates is a terrific way to begin bringing people deeper into the story that is your life. (Okay, the pic to the left might be a bit excessive…) How many times have you watched a movie before reading a novel, and when finally getting around to the reading, have found it so much more fulfilling to have a mental picture of each character?  Adding photos to your social media space allows people to see you in their minds when reading your status updates or tweets.  And how about recording video and placing it on your site? Or even voice recordings?  The richer the spectacle, the more emotional the attachment, the longer your story is remembered…

Hey, we can’t all be an Aristotle, but even he was interested in people all around him – the ordinary folk, like you and I.  What is important is putting yourself out there, to share with others…

Let’s start your story, already!

Grandma Moses in her painting heyday

Grandma Moses Day

September 7th is Grandma Moses Day, a celebration of the incredible, metamorphic, creative life of Anna Mary Robertson Moses.  Later in life, Mary gave up a career in embroidery because it inflicted too much agony in her hands due to arthritis.  Did she retire and kick back in leisure?  Feed the birds and cats and visit the grandchildren?  No…

At over 70 years of age, Anna Moses took up painting.   She painted night and day, figuring out how to replicate the forms and colors all around her.  Her early pictures were rough-hewn gifts to family and friends, who cherished them, despite Mary’s lack of formal artistic training.  Her art improved over the years, although remained in the eyes of many as simplistic and out of perspective at times.

Sharing an incredible life

So what did Anna paint?  She did what many an artist does when choosing a subject for a new medium – she drew from her life’s experiences, from what she knew.  And Mary had a lot to draw from, having lived a hard and painful life.

Thunderstorm, by Grandma Moses

The mother of five children, Anna gave birth to five more who all died in childbirth.  Not wanting to dwell on her losses, she immersed her adult life in taking care of her children (and grandchildren,) all the time finding joy in the daily pleasures of a simple life.  The kind and thoughful people of her life, the beautiful natural scenery she knew, the laughing children were all at times subjects of her paintings.

Becoming Grandma to the Art World

Her works began appearing in store-fronts, and eventually made their way to far-away metropolitan cities, where Anna became known as Grandma Moses.  Art collectors saw in Anna’s works the echoes of a cherished era rapidly disappearing — a simpler, slower, more natural form of living.  The subjects knew who they were, what their place in it all was, and where they were going.  I’m sure was found to be comforting to those surrounded by a faster-paced, ever-shifting landscape.

Ivy Bean, Twitter’s Grandma

Social media is becoming, rapidly, the dominant form of expression in our lives, and has been taken over, with sometimes reckless abandon, by the “younger set.”  Middle age folks are there as well, and are reminding everyone how to behave civilly in this new environ.  But what about the elderly?  What about those with the most life experience to draw from and share?

Ivy Bean, world's oldest Twitter user

In mid-July of 2010, Ivy Bean passed away, quietly, at Hillside Manor care home in England.  Ivy was 104 years old, and at the time of her death was the oldest Twitter user in the World.  Ivy moved from her Facebook account (which she started at the age of 102) to Twitter, because she found it easier to maintain.

From her modest home in Bradford, Ivy shared short 140-character messages with her almost 60,000 followers, who did not seem to mind that Ivy broke Twitter protocol in sharing a number of rather mundane aspects of her life.  She tweeted about what she had for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and provided guidance and advice when she saw fit.

Sharing another incredible life

Peter Andre and Ivy Bean meeting

Ivy talked about winning a gold medal in her care home’s over-75 Olympics, and about how much fun she had bowling on the home’s new Wii.  Ivy also shared her fondness for young pop star Peter Andre.  (After Peter found out, he visited Ivy with flowers, and called her on the phone daily.)    I adored Ivy’s spirit, and whenever I saw a Twitter update from her, I treated it like gold…

Ivy Bean, for me, was everyone’s Twitter grandmother.  I needed my grandparents as I grew up, holding my hand and loving me, no matter what.   I turned to them when my parents positively baffled me (and vice versa.)  Grandma and Grandpa found ways to provide me same guidance my parents did, but I actually listened when it came with some lemonade, snickerdoodles and smiling eyes.  And hugs, lots of hugs.

We need our grandparents here, too

Can we keep this up?

Social media is in need.  It needs our grandmothers and grandfathers.  We need their voices, their smiles and hugs, their loving support and words of wisdom, to bring us down from the cacophony.  We need them to take up blogging, and remind us what life was like oh so many long years ago, and why it was that way.  Help show us what true social sharing is, as only a person who lived before computers (and perhaps even televisions) were invented can do.

We need more Ivy Beans to remind us not only to be civil, but how to talk to one another.  How to listen, especially in social forums that seem to be filled with mindless shouting from the rooftops.  Grandmas and Grandpas, join with us, and remind us how to be quiet again.  Please.

As our time online becomes more metropolitan, distancing us further from the beauty of real life on the outskirts of our computer monitors, let us hope that we find more Ivy Beans and Grandma Moses’ who allow us to collect a few careful brush strokes of natural, mundane, wisdom-filled simplicity.  We will miss you, Grandma Ivy.  God bless.

In social media, it’s all about the followers, isn’t it?  Have you ever come across someone providing status updates and information on Twitter or Facebook, without anyone listening?  For social media to work for us, to be interesting, we need to develop relationships with others, to provide something of value in our written words, and keep it up.  It’s always nice to have others learn about you and decide to listen too – social media is a very large campfire to tell our story around.

DUNBAR’S NUMBER

The Guardian newspaper in the UK in a 2009 article stated that the average Twitter account holder had around 126 followers.  I’m sure that the average has gone up since then.  Recently published research by Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford, underscores the long-held belief that the average person can only successfully maintain up to 150 relationships, even when looking at interactions in social media.

THE NUMBERS GAME

Up to a year ago, I had over 4,000 followers.  I’m not bragging, so bear with me.  I suppose I was doing well, if one provides a greater emphasis upon the number of followers as a measure of tweeting success.  I began to wonder about my actual level of interaction with my followers, so I searched for a few tools to help me measure my true interaction level with(or influence on) these people.

One of the tools I found and used (and I recommend you try it out too,) is Friend or Follow, which provides you, without having to log in, a clickable listing of:

• The people you are following that are not following you back (Followings)
• The people who are following you that you are not following back (Fans)
• The people you are following that are following you back (Friends)

Each of these listings provides a grid of avatar images.  A pause over each avatar shows each person’s:

• Full name
• Number of follows and followers
• Location
• Date last tweeted
• Date their Twitter account was created

Why am I here?

Pretty cool stuff.  A question that arose in my mind was “What was I trying to get out of Twitter, anyway?”  After all, who you choose to follow creates your social media experience, right?  So what happens out there? What (and who) exactly do we all have to choose from in Twitter?

Not long ago, Pear Analytics of San Antonio, Texas analyzed 2,000 tweets from U.S. accounts over 2 weeks, and broke down what they saw as follows:

• News-related tweets from mainstream media accounted for 3.6% of the tweets
• Spammed content was being sent out 3.75% of the time
• Shameless self-promotion by companies made up 5.85% of the traffic
• Pointless babbling (incoherent on their own merit messages) were passed 40.55% of the time
• Conversation-based messages made up 37.55% of what was seen
• Passed-along retweets of others’ content constituted 8.7% of what was found

WHAT DO YOU NEED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA?

I know what I want from social media.  Relationships.  Friendships.  Community.  Just how much of this was happening with my 4,000 followers?

I discovered that almost half of the people following me (2,000 people!) hadn’t tweeted in over a month.  The average length of time someone keeps a Twitter account is about 18 months — had so many simply given up on Twitter?  Over 1,000 of them hadn’t tweeted in more than 3 months, and hundreds hadn’t said anything in practically a year.   How could I build a relationship with someone who wasn’t even on Twitter anymore?

I also found a ton of spammers, self-promoters, and a fair share of people who simply babbled on without actually responding to people who replied.  Among these accounts were a few jewels, shining examples of people who were using Twitter in the manner for which it was designed — to actually interact with others.

REBUILD IT – THEY WILL STILL COME

I began pruning my followings carefully over many, many hours, with an eye for the people that I either cared to listen to (regardless if they followed me back,) and people who actually conversed with me on a regular basis.  I got down to following around 800 people, (20% of my followers) and waited to see what happened.  Over the next 3 days, I lost 400 people in response to my actions, and not one contacted me to ask why I had dropped them.  Not one.

I was still unsatisfied that I was meeting my needs in social media.  After all, I still had thousands of followers who weren’t really there.  I decided to take a much bigger leap, and created a whole new Twitter account – an absolute do-over, documented here.  I followed everyone important to me, then tweeted invites to anyone listening for a solid week.  I then deleted my old account.  I was a new man…

I’m up to 1,500 followers now, almost 50% of what I had before.  And you know what? The level of interaction is the same as before.  Although my followers have relatively more recent accounts, only about 10% of them actually say something to me once in awhile, Dunbar’s magic number of 150.  And I am okay with that, because I simply adore these people, and I know they wish to build a relationship with me.

I still have my share of spammers and self-promoters following me.  I’ll welcome anyone who wants to follow.  I like my new, albeit smaller family.  We share our joys and trials together, and care about each other.

JOIN ME!

Are you courageous enough to follow too?  To interact with someone who will ask you questions about your life, who will provide assistance when asked, who will laugh, cry, think and pray with you in times of need?  Who will never ask you if your teeth are white enough, or if you’d like to see photos of me being naughty? Are you ready for some community-building?

If the answer is yes, then why not take a chance on me?  What are you waiting for? Please join me on Twitter today!

Mulligan. In Golf, it means if your very first swing is a bit off, you can ask your fellow golfers for a do-over.  The term has become synonymous with do-overs in all areas of life.  There are a number of times in my life where I wish I could have a Mulligan…

Oddly, if the second shot is worse than the first, the term for that is a Finnegan.  Why is there so much meaning behind Irish names?

We all built it, and they are coming (and asking some serious questions)

Twitter is still popular, because we made it so; but as more people step into social media, straighten themselves up after climbing the learning curve and look around, questions come up.  Newbies are beginning to ask why it is that some unknown guy in Pakistan who stopped tweeting 6 months ago has over 45,000 users, while they are fighting to come up with original multi-media content that connects them with their (average user follower base of) barely over 130 people?

Twitter’s errant first swing

Twitter’s been around for 5 years, and has proven to be one of the most successful social media networks in the World, with an estimated 10,000,000 users interacting with each other.  It’s incredible simplicity in design has allowed for its growth to be directed organically by its many users.

Because of the desire to keep things open, a number of abusive practices have occurred on Twitter over time, and we have simply grown used to them while we say “hello” and “how are you” and “I can lick my own elbow” with our friends…

The stranger behemoths - We’ve all seen these guys.  They stomp around on Twitter with their insanely huge followership, but don’t say anything of value.  They’ve developed and played systems designed to artificially inflate their numbers, rather than earn it through making comments people actually appreciate.  To them, it’s all about the big, shiny rodeo belt buckle…  We are not impressed.  Planning to cash in those followers for some cold, hard cash someday?

There are tens of thousands of Twitter accounts held by these otherwise unknowns that have for years driven up their numbers by auto-following a thousand people daily, and unfollowing those that did not automatically follow back.  The process is repeated daily, as Twitter allows for up to 1,000 follows a day.  How daunting it must be to a new Twitterer to see these large, lumbering beasts of false renown!  And how frustrating to see how hard it is to quickly connect far and wide.

The recommended list - Newbies upon account creation are provided a list of celebrities, authors, chefs, social media mavens, sports figures, former MTV spotlight-mongers and whatnot that Twitter has hand-picked as desirable to begin with, to simply get the conversation started.  Although I’m not sure how much @sockamillion the cat will actually listen to what’s happening in your life, and stop to chat with you.

There’s an issue with the Recommended List.  Many on its occupants don’t necessarily tend to follow or talk back to all the newbies coming in, so no conversations really get started by following them.  C’mon, someone with 450,000 followers and 147 follows simply isn’t going to talk with you, even if your avatar is completely naked and you’re smokin’ hot.  Okay, maybe he’ll follow you. Being on this list can also inflate one’s numbers in a fairly rapid manner, with no actual social work required.

The auto-bots – If you joined Twitter years ago, you got your share of Britney porn-bots, and blocked dozens of them on an almost monthly basis.  Businesses began monitoring tweets using the search feature or creating monitoring systems.  If you so much as mentioned Starbucks, you got a follow from them.  If you talked about how much you loved chocolate, Ghirardelli showed up as a follow.  If you say you can lick your own elbow, there’s this woman in Milwaukee that will start coming on to you…  Sorry Sadie, but someone had to say something. It’s getting embarassing.  So please stop DMing me.

Anyway, the gist of what I’m saying is that if you are new, there are many who came long before you and have found ways to gain vast followerships, and they drive those Cadillac accounts around town proudly, tooting that horn and shouting “Orálé!”  I have no idea what that means.  They also try to sell you their SEO-Godlike “proven techniques” for gaining a following, despite knowing they used a below-the-counter method to gain theirs.

Twitter has done quite a bit lately to tone down this activity.  They’ve recently shut down open account access to applications that allow you to bulk auto-follow and auto-unfollow users, so you will never be able to game the system like that guy in Pakistan (and so many others) previously did.

But what to do about those people that already bulked up their accounts artificially? Hmmmm…..

Should Twitter get a Mulligan?

Socks is not happy with this!

I’ve seen posts begin to emerge asking if Twitter should have a Mulligan of its own. Should @Ev and @Jack and the other folks who brought us this wonderful means of sharing rich multi-media simply hit the reset button?  How would things look if everybody, from the new guy with 28 followers to the social media moguls with over 4,000,000 lost all their connections, overnight?  What if all the follows and the followers disappeared, and we all had to start over from scratch?

Oh, it sounds enticing, doesn’t it?  Or downright scary.  Some reading this have already peed a little in their undies.  Sorry. As you can see, @socksamillion is not happy with this concept. The stranger behemoths would lose all of their fine work, and may even have to resort to tweeting again.  The celebrities to be sure would see their following return again, fans being what they are.  You might see the auto-bots more readily if all you had were 200 followers for awhile…  And it would be difficult to pretend I was a social media powerhouse if all had were 137 followers, and those “proven” techniques I previously bragged over and over about to “connect” and “gain a following” seemed to be missing the mark…

Those that honestly worked hard to obtain their following would see all of their fine work lost overnight, and to me that seems to be such a waste, a great hardship to bear for them.  I’m sure they deserve their following, and to reap the benefit of these relationships built over time.  So how does Twitter allow for a more even playing field, while allowing those legitimate hard Tweeters to keep their social media structures?  I’ll explain a possible method in a moment…

My Personal Twitter Mulligan

Last year, I broke a big Twitter rule.  I jumped off the online cliff.  I did a crazy thing.  I thumbed my nose and flew in the face of Twitter conventions.  Just what terrible catastrophe did I willingly wreak upon my social media existence?

I announced to my followers that I’m going to drop my old Twitter account.  That’s right, I started all over, and informed my 3,400 followers. Yes, a whopping 3,400.  LOL. Those of you who are social media heavyweights with 200,000+ followers, you can stop your snickering now.  Like you’re reading this blog anyway… I created a whole new Twitter username.  And avatar.  And background image.  As the social media pundits call it, I de-”brand”-ed.  Woot.  Can you hear the crickets in the background? Skreek, skreek, skreek…

To be sure, I am not starting over completely from scratch.  I invited everyone who wants to follow me over in this transition to please do so.  A handful did so almost immediately.  Because I took the advice of Twitter heavyweights, I previously used an auto-follow feature with my old account, and had to meticulously pour through my reciprocated 3,500 follows.  I chose 500 to follow with my new account, and sent out a general invite.  It’s a joy to see what these amazing people have to say without the distractions of others selling me something, asking me if my teeth are white enough, or trying to show off their thong.  Okay, I think I saved her, but she is really nice, and a Democrat…

The process was humbling, to say the least.  By doing this, I found out who was actually listening to me, appreciated what I had to say, and wished to continue interacting with me.  Less than 10%. When i formally closed down my old account, I dumped almost 3,000 businesses, porn accounts, SEO “Gods,” serial RTers, stranger behemoths, recommended favorites, auto-bots and more generally people who continued following me only because I auto-followed them back.  To me, it was the equivalent of leaving the huge ballroom, drink in hand, and inviting the pretty girl to step outside on the balcony, into the fresh night air…

Twitter 2.0

I believe the discussion about a Twitter reset has a lot of merit, and wish there were an environment where we can take all of our lessons learned and begin anew, all from scratch.  I also understand the need to reward those that worked hard for their current following.

Here’s how to keep both intact…  Twitter could:

• Purchase another URL, like http://www.twittertoo.com
• Load Twitter’s code on this new place.
• Current accounts are automatically reserved in Twittertoo.com, so people won’t have to worry about losing their cool Twitter name suddenly, and people won’t be able to pretend they are @aplusk in the new environment just ’cause they got there first. No tweets in 6 months? Your account is closed and your name opens up…
• Twitter.com will stay up, and people can continue to stay there if they please, glaring at the lumbering giants or blocking the spambots.
• In Twittertoo.com, everyone begins with zero follows and followers from the start.  Develop your connections as you normally would.
• People may go to Twitter.com and invite their followers to follow them to Twittertoo.com
• Bulk transferring of follows and followers from Twitter to Twittertoo will not be provided for or allowed in the coding process.
• There will be no recommended lists.  Find people on your own, dude, or provide everyone 20 randomly chosen people from a survey of what their interests are.
• The new partnerships with desktop apps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic will be controlled through closer partnerships and monitoring.  No open authorization for reciprocal follower websites.
• No bulk-following or auto-following, to remove the incentive for stranger behemoths, auto-bots and spammers.
• We must approve our followers by manually clicking an approval button.

I believe that by Twitter asking us for a Mulligan, and using careful new controls, those who make the move to this new and improved Twitter environment will find many people there working hard to develop relationships, same as in the old Twitter.  And they will enjoy the new quiet as the spammers and behemoths stay in the old environment, working their dark, evil magic.

Those that worked hard to achieve their merited following will be able to invite their following to successfully follow them over.   If they don’t all move over, then they weren’t listening anyway, right?  C’mon, how about a reality check?  Prove your cinnamoney sweet SEO magic works.

I believe celebrities, legitimate news providers, wonderful personalities and individuals of renown will see the same large tide of followers vying to interact with them, sharing their tweets with others and enjoying the social media realm.  People with little to say will still not “get it” and have a limited following.  Social media flowers will blossom, just as they did in Twitter, version 1.0

Until then, I will send my invites out to my new account, and enjoy all of the wonderful people who have joined me in the cool, night air…  Let’s hope that I didn’t pull a Finnegan…

You can humor and follow me at @YouKnowSteve on Twitter.  I’ll find you pretty easily, trust me…

January 25th is Speak Up and Succeed Day, dedicated to helping you actually get what you say you want in life, to help you reach your goals by opening your mouth and asking for it.  Or in the example I’m about to introduce you to, by using your smart phone.

I have had the pleasure of recently talking with Peter Ma, website and mobile app developer.  Peter was recently invited to attend the 2010 TEDGlobal Conference because he was the grand prize winner of Snaptic’s first Move Your App! Developer Contest.  The contest encouraged application developers to use their skills to create something specifically designed to get people outside and exercising with others.  The contest was also sponsored by famous television chef Jamie Oliver (pictured with Peter.)

Peter Ma is a very active man, and enjoys participating in local pickup sports games.  His problem with this?  His friends sometimes bail on him at the last minute.  Sound familiar?

Peter decided to use his programming skills to create Pickup Sports, a website and mobile app that brings together people who live close to each other for shared sports and workout activities.

“My ideal goal is to educate people and get them to be active, this way people become more healthy and we’ll have a better world. Spreading information about local activities is the first step to reach that goal.”  - Peter Ma

To join and find an exercise workout partner or put together a local soccer (or any other) pickup game, visit Pickup Sports and connect it to your Facebook account.  You can also download the app from iTunes, the Android Marketplace, or WebOS Store.  Find your location and choose to create a new game.

A simple drop-down menu will allow you to pick from popular sports activities, hitting the gym, running or other activities. Others in the same area who are interested in finding someone to exercise or play games with will come across your information and can respond.  Simply pick a good time to meet up and follow through!

Think hard, my friends.  Remember what it was like to not have to squeeze into those old slacks, or to not have to suck in that tummy whenever someone cute walks by?  Why not use that Facebook account to do something more than simply tell people that second helping of twice-baked potatoes was “da bomb?”  Why not give Pickup Sports a try, use it to speak up to people in your area looking for help too, and see if it can help you succeed, too!

To learn more, you can follow Pickup Sports at its Facebook and Twitter page.  You can say hello to Peter on Twitter here.

On this day in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed today National Bill of Rights Day, on the 150th anniversary of the introduction of the document by James Madison to the First U.S. Congress.

Did we even need a Bill of Rights?

So, why do we even need a Bill of Rights?  Didn’t we have a Constitution signed just a few years before 1791? Even when the Constitution was being written, there were deep disagreements about whether or not to explicitly list what our rights were.  To keep everyone in line, a proper listing of rights was left out of our founding document, in part to cobble together enough signatures on it.

The Cons

Alexander Hamilton stated a concern that by listing our rights, we were actually limiting them.  What happened to those rights that someone failed to list?  Were they now lost?  Did we only have those rights that were in the document?  Hamilton’s argument was that what was being created was typical in a relationship between royalty and their subjects.  In those situations, a Bill of Rights was often abused by those that held the power to define them.  Hamilton wanted an approach more like that of Britain’s Common Law, which drew from Natural Law, or the belief that we had rights inherent to our very presence in the World, and those rights were equal in stature to all others alive today.  Any changes to an inherent right required the lawgivers to prove to the people the need for change.

The Pros

On the other side of the argument was Thomas Jefferson, who stated simply and pragmatically “Half a loaf is better than no bread.  If we cannot secure all of our rights, let us secure what we can.”  Jefferson and others were deeply concerned that a strong, emerging centralized government would work quickly to limit and/or remove the rights of all Americans.  Jefferson viewed the then-strong Presidency as possibly becoming akin to a Kingship.  Those rights secured now were less likely to be taken from us later, while we worked on those rights identified in the future as needed.

Covering rights not documented

After much debate and subsequent modification, the Bill of Rights was brought forth, providing ten proposed Amendments to our Constitution, each one securing and defining the limits to our fundamental rights.  To appease those that agreed with Hamilton, the 9th Amendment stated “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  Basically, if it’s not in our founding documents, it’s still a right unless proven or legally argued otherwise.

Facebook and Social Media rights

Over the last year, Facebook has significantly changed its user privacy settings, opening up status updates and photo albums for all to see too, unless we logged in, went back into our privacy settings, and changed them.  Millions of Facebook users with protected content who had not been informed, or had not logged into Facebook for awhile, were angry, to say the least.

A not-so-public change was a privacy setting allowing search engines to farm your content.  A new check box disallowing this sort of behavior quietly made its appearance in your privacy settings, but was defaulted to allow it.  Yes, that’s right.  The ability for Google to deliver your content to everyone well outside of your friends network was kept defaulted to “Yeah, I’m okay with that.”  To remove this, you have to go into your Privacy Settings and click on the Search icon.  Then click to uncheck the Allow box.

To be sure,  you will find far greater granularity in defining who gets to see what content you place in Facebook these days, but introducing new privacy settings needs to be published widely and openly….

So what’s next?

As social media continues to grow in popularity, and advertisers continue to smack their chops over peeking at what we say to each other, you will likely begin to see your shared content being offered up to mass marketers.  Some of the handing over will be done very publicly, and you will have to make a choice about what to do with your privacy settings.  What worried me more is what might get shared without my knowing, as yet another check box makes its emergence under dark of night, allowing what I say to you to be whispered far and wide…

What to do, what to do…

It’s about time for us to devise a simple Bill of Rights for the citizen living within the borders of Social Media Land.  I’ve put together a few starters below.  Please read them and let me know how they should be modified.  Adopt them if you’d like and use them when determining whether or not you are going to create another account somewhere online.  Retweet or share them as far and wide as you’d like, and challenge social network owners to review them…

The Social Media Citizen’s Bill of Rights

Equal voice - Social media sites must not be configured in a way to inherently favor one religious viewpoint, sexual orientation, gender or race over another.  We are to be allowed equal access in the ability to share our lives and exchange our viewpoints.

Attempts to infringe on free access by others, to cause hostility or exhort others to create a hostile sharing environment, may result in account closure and suspension from the site.

All site features are available to all equally — no user, regardless of social stature, shall receive special account handling or unique features.  Premium paid-for services shall be made widely available.

Fair use – If methodologies are found to be used by users to unfairly “game the system” in one’s favor, fair warning shall be posted throughout the site.  Design changes shall be enacted in a reasonable time period to remove any reported unfair methodologies used.  Those found continuing to game the system may have their accounts reversed, limited, closed, or may be banned from the network.

Content freedom - Social media sites must not prohibit or limit our freedom of speech or ability to share multimedia information openly (or privately) with others.  In order to protect us from material we deem offensive, social media sites shall provide the ability for us to limit, hide or block another user’s content.

Social media sites will work to ensure that as new features are activated, the new features do not circumvent personal content limits we previously put into place.

Bias-free content - Social media sites must allow any organization to share and disseminate multimedia information to us in an equally fair and timely manner, without censorship or the provision of favor to any particular viewpoint or bias.

Rules and Redress - Social media sites must list, in an accessible location, proper site use rules, as well as an easy-to-use method to redress grievances or rule violations.

Privacy - Social media sites must provide to its users the ability to protect the privacy of their content, and to limit its viewing by others to the maximum extent possible. Changes to privacy settings and sharing of our use data shall not occur without timely public announcement and our express individual permission.

All site modifications should endeavor to default in such a way as to leave in place equal or greater privacy settings.

Legal circumventing of our privacy settings shall not be performed without a warrant showing probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and shall describe in detail the content to be searched.

Demand your rights!

If you agree with these rights, then share them far and wide.  Let people know that they can demand that the natural laws of social media allow us to expect certain unalienable rights to privacy and protection from network providers!

batteries. You’ve probably noticed the growing number of people on FaceBook and Twitter mourning the hostile takeover of their social media accounts.   I’ve helped a few over the phone, going over the basics to lock the offending individuals out and restore that warm, fuzzy feeling of security. Thank God for AT&T’s Nationwide plan.

There are a variety of ways your social media account can be taken over.  The US-CERT (Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team) warns of two common methods of Cyberjacking Social Media accounts – via hackers and through malware.

Hackers “hack” away at your account by figuring out your login information or exploiting known weaknesses in an online website or application.  This was the case when Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email was hacked into during the last Presidential campaign.  Using a well-known exploit of Yahoo’s password reminder feature and a looksie at Google and Wikipedia, it took just 45 minutes for a college kid to get access to all of Sarah’s emails, and to block Sarah herself out.  The details as to how this was accomplished are well-documented…

Malware is a bit of software code designed to look in certain places that personal and private information is typically saved.  Many of us allow our web browsers to save our popular website login information for more rapid access during future visits.  This information is saved on a text file in a default location, easy to find by a software “worm” sniffing around on your machine.  To get the malware, simply download it by visiting an infected website…

Let’s talk about some ways you can protect yourself in Social Media from both hackers and malware:

PASSWORDS

The most important (and private) bit of information about your social media account is the password. Here are 6 tips to creating and maintaining a relatively indecipherable password:

1. Don’t use passwords based on personal information that can be figured out elsewhere (blogs, tweets, Facebook status information, Wikipedia.)
2. Don’t use a word that can be found in the dictionary. Any dictionary.  Some hackers use specialized software that will run through every single word quite rapidly.
3. Use both lower- and upper-case letters when you can.
4. Use alphanumeric combinations, and even special characters if allowed.
5. Don’t use the same passwords on everyplace you go on the Web.
6. If a passphrase (a pass-sentence vice a pass-word) is allowed, go for that instead.  It’s more complex to figure out.
7. Change your password every 6 months.
8. Avoid allowing your browser to save your login information.  This is especially true when using a shared or networked machine.

PRIVACY

After establishing your Social Media account, make sure that you have the level of privacy you desire.  FaceBook has a variety of settings to limit who can see your profile information, status updates, and replies to others.  Twitter allows you to lock down your tweets so nobody can see them unless logged in and are one of those you personally follow.

Try to strike a balance that provides the protection you feel you need while leaving the ability to network with others.  If you are a very private person, then I would suggest visiting these settings immediately after creating your account, as by default your comments are left pretty wide open for viewing…

Ticked off someone recently?  Then lock down your viewing settings until things cool down…

CONNECTIONS AND APPLICATIONS

Those games on FaceBook are pretty enticing, aren’t they?  I closed my Café World and let my field in Farmtown go fallow long ago, but here’s nothing wrong with enjoying the games, and they easily snap into your account by sharing login authorization information.  Be aware that many of these applications are 3rd-party, which means they weren’t created by FaceBook.  They were made by another organization, and although their security level may be good enough to have gotten FaceBook’s seal of approval, if their servers are ever breached by hackers, your Social Media account information might be compromised too.

Your Facebook applications can be found by clicking on the Applications Settings under the Settings tab.  There you can delete or limit what the application can do.

There are a variety of web-based applications that tie into Twitter and enhance its desirability as well.  Twitpic, 12Seconds, Blip.fm, Tweetmic and other applications add photos, video, music and even your voice to the Twitter stream, making it a true multimedia experience.  To tweet the multimedia to your followers, you have to link the application to your Twitter account.  This means you are either sharing your Twitter username and password or allowing the application to connect using a special process the application’s creator and Twitter have agreed to.  The application then can draw information from your Twitter account or tweet something for you when desired.

The list of applications (or Connections as Twitter calls them) can be found in your Settings tab.  You can revoke access to a given application any time you want, and I do recommend that you go now, review the Connections you have made in the past (and long forgot,) and revoke Connections used only rarely, to limit liability if one of the great new tools you are using gets hacked itself…

DM LINKS

We’ve all seen them on Twitter by now.  The wonderful links in our Direct Messages telling us to check our IQs, or that we are in a funny video, and to please click here to see it.

These are often examples of the second method of account compromising, Malware.  The DM itself has been sent from an account that has itself been hacked, and forced to send out more versions of the original message that got this guy in trouble in the first place.

If you click on the links, they will take you to a website with a file that’ll sneak itself onto your machine.  If your browser security settings are low, your machine will allow the download. In your browser’s Tools settings, you should be able to find a security setting which will force the browser to ask you before anything is downloaded on it. An explanation of browser settings and adjustments from CERT are here… The code snippet contained in the downloaded file will sniff through your computer, looking for saved login information, and may even record every keystroke you make on the keyboard.

If you follow the bad link you may soon find your social media account hacked into and tweeting out whatever the hacker wishes to send on your behalf.  You may also find your bank’s Internet address and financial login information passed on if you are not careful! Best to never, ever click on the link in a DM, even if the DM came from someone you trust, without first clearing the reason for sending it openly on Twitter or via another method.  For the untrusting, McAfee offers a free download, Site Advisor, which will allow you to scan websites before visiting them for viruses, malware, or adware.

RECENT TECHNIQUES USED

The DM links have begun to move into the Twitter stream now, as hackers use automated Twitter profiles to tweet you what appear to be personalized links.  They always throw me off, as I’ve never spoken to (or follow) the individual(s.) These links will do the same damage as those that were once sent via DM, so steer clear of them, unless you know who sent them, and again have determined why.

The addition of hash-tagged trending topics in tweets containing bad links has shown some resurgence, as hackers try to get you to find their links by clicking on a trending topic.

The creation of accounts using names nearly similar to popular heavyweights on Twitter, in order to lure you into trusting their information.  Danny Devito created an account on Twitter  last year, and immediately a fraudster created an account using the same avatar and a similarly-spelled name.  Make sure you are following who you think you are!

Methods to hack you or Phish (Internet slang for fishing for your private information) you will continue to evolve in Social Media, so take the time to read and heed the warnings that come through on the stream.

IF YOU ARE HACKED

So you have received a tweet stating that someone following you received a DM with a suspicious link, and you know you never DM’d them.  You can’t get into your FaceBook account anymore, and you see things on it you never typed in.  Now what?

Where you go from here depends on whether or not you can still login yourself to the account…

If you can get into your account still:

• Immediately verify that the email attached to the account is correct. If not, change it back.
• Change the password, logout, and then login with the new password.
• Take a look at the Twitter Connections or FaceBook applications and delete those that are suspicious, or revoke their access.  Remove access for those that you know you don’t need.
• Consider yourself lucky as you delete the undesirable comments and apologize to everyone.

If you cannot get into your account anymore:

• Contact customer service immediately with the problem, and be both persistent and forceful about getting them to verify your account information and reset the password for you.  Be prepared to provide any information asked of you to verify your identify…
• Customer service for Twitter
• Hacked account service for FaceBook
• After you get in, immediately verify all personal profile information, all login information, change your password and remove all unauthorized applications.  Then remove undesirable information and let everybody know what happened, to warn them…

I hope that this information helped you somewhat.  Don’t wait until you are hacked like Britney Spears, Guy Kawasaki, Bill O’Reilly, Rick Sanchez (right,) and thousands of others on Twitter and FaceBook to fix things. Here’s a great article by TechCrunch detailing a number of celebs who had some pretty embarassing things placed in their name by hackers…

Go look now and make the needed adjustments, because I want to keep reading what YOU have to say, not what some Cyberjacker makes you say!  I always knew Rick’s smile had something special behind it…

As usual, when discussing what day it is, I had to put some thought to how the remembrance and/or celebration of this popular character’s storied life can be tied to our existence in and use of social media. And I believe that the celebrated Mouse ties in quite nicely. Read and decide for yourself!

You can’t control how you come into a scene, but take hold of your future!

Mickey Mouse simply wasn’t really supposed to be. You see, Charles Mintz of Universal Studios hired a young Walt Disney and his staff to draw for what became the lackluster Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series. When Walt asked for an increased budget to support his staff, Mintz went behind his back and hired all of Walt’s staff out from under him, then offered him a paycut in reply. Walt, of course, was angered and began formulating his exit.

Walt finished out his contract, swearing to control his own destiny by creating his own original works and always retain the rights to them. He began working with Ub Iwerks, and asked him to come up with some interesting character ideas. Animals were popular in cartoons, so Ub drew frogs, dogs, cats, cattle and horses, but none of these appealed to Walt. Looking through some old sketches, Ub discovered that Walt loved mice, having had a pet during his childhood on a farm. Ub went to work on a few and presented them to Walt.

Walt loved the mice, choosing one in particular, and naming it Mortimer. His wife Lilian didn’t like the sound of the name and encouraged him Walt to reconsider. Legend has it that after a chance meeting with Mickey Rooney, Walt decided on Mickey Mouse.

In social media, you have the opportunity to spend some time thinking about how you want to be viewed by your audience, how you wish to present yourself. If it is your desire to have a wide swath of influence, make sure that what you say is either what others need to hear or can relate to. And make sure that it is honest, coming from your heart.

Mickey Mouse has grown from a bit movie part to the dominating face of the Walt Disney Empire. He is so inseparable from the Walt Disney brand, that statues commemorating Mr. Disney in his theme parks include him standing and holding Mickey’s hand…

Whether in Twitter or Facebook, you started out with no followers and nobody to listen to. You diligently sought out interesting people to follow, speaking up and opportune times and saying hello to, and engaging them. Keep it up. Even those that have a million followers started with none as they furtively typed in their first comment to the virtual Universe. Get in there and get involved. People will love you, too!

Learn from your mistakes and grow

In the silent movie Plane Crazy, Mickey plays the captain of an airship, flying through the skies with his passenger Minnie. As he has always, Mickey has eyes for Minnie; however Minnie is not interested in his advances. Mickey continues his amorous plays for affection, going so far as to even force himself on his passenger. A far cry from the happy-go-lucky and friendly Mickey we know today…

You are the captain of your social media plane. Pay attention to what you are doing there, to your many followers, and engage them in a manner that they deem appropriate. Don’t force people to follow you back, or push yourself over and over into their conversations.

They do make a cute couple...

Minnie ultimately discovers a parachute and escapes the plane, and Mickey ultimately crash-lands. The movie was a flop, and is one of the chief reasons that the premiere of his second movie, Steamboat Willie, is the one we use to officially celebrate Mickey’s arrival on the big screen. It would appear that since their introductions, Mickey has learned from his mistakes, and treats Minnie with far more respect…

Mickey smoked in The Gallopin’ Gaucho, but eventually gave it up, and we are all happier for him, as he celebrates his 81st birthday in full health. Yes, even mice can be exemplars of improving behavior.

The Biggest Fool is the Guy who Refuses to Learn From His Mistakes. ~ Gary Arbaugh (@TheGaryArbaugh)

It’s easy to say something that might offend others in Social Media. Don’t fret – simply apologize for it, consider a better way to have said what you did, and move on. Realize that some people will bail on you because they don’t like your style, and you will have to simply accept you cannot please everybody. If you are respectful and kind to everyone you meet, you will soon find the seats in your social airliner filled with plenty of people returning the affection…

Always be friendly and respectful to others

Across the board, Mickey Mouse is the most friendly of all of Walt Disney’s creations. No matter what is going on in his life, he greets his friends and even strangers with kindness and consideration. He is always quick to welcome in someone at his door, always ready to lend a hand or lend something to those in need, and ready to cheer up his curmudgeonly friend Donald Duck. Who by the way seriously needs to work on that speech impediment.

If all of us greeted our friends and followers with the same loving acceptance of whoever was on the other side of the connection, I have a feeling we would spend even more time in social media enjoying the company. Get involved in causes after carefully researching them, and don’t be afraid to cheer up the grumps. Everybody has a bad day.

Don’t let others get you down

For some, the term Mickey Mouse has been used to mean shoddy or shady, from a character in the movie The Godfather II referring to a “Mickey Mouse Operation,” to Indiana Jones saying “Yeah, and I’m Mickey Mouse.” While visiting foreign lands and noting unusual (and questionable) currencies, Americans have often referred to the flimsy notes as “Mickey Mouse Money.” British Soccer fans call the second-tier League Cup competition’s award “the Mickey Mouse Cup.”

We all have our nemeses both in life and here in social media, who put us down privately (and even publicly,) or question our motives and abilities. Despite this behind-the-back derision using his name, Mickey has remained cheerful and forward-looking. He has refused to let anyone get him down, and as young children seeing his fortitude, many of us have grown to love and respect the Mouse. Keep moving forward with purpose, and those that deride you will eventually fade away in their own negativity. There is also the block feature…

Be consistent in all that you do

We’re talking about a little guy who wears the same outfit 99% of the time. Consistency is Mickey Mouse’s forte and one of the big reasons he has been so successful over the last 80 years. We know the many consistent attributes of Mickey Mouse, and no matter the twists and turns of plot in a Disney cartoon, we know exactly how he is going to react.

Change your social media avatar only when needed, because it is part of that essential “brand” you have among others. Changing your avatar temporarily makes it hard for people to find you in the stream of information, as you are now an unfamiliar sight. You don’t want to get lost by the very same people who love what you have to say because you shaved that mustache or went blonde.

Take the time to truly know yourself, what you stand for and therefore how you ought to behave around others in all situations. Be well-grounded and familiar in your own personal philosophy and make the difficult decisions that keep you on course with it, or change when needed. Consistency in behavior sets the needed deep habits that will carry you through the hazards that come into all of our lives. Those that know and appreciate you will love you all the more for the bedrock you provide in their lives while facing the larger societal issues impacting the news or their lives, and will they reward you on Follow Friday by asking others to follow you too….

Be willing to try new things

From his exciting but lustful beginnings as a plane pilot to his happy-go-lucky, whistling days on a steamboat, Mickey has moved on to serve as a soldier, a musical conductor, tried his hand at Wizardry, has been a detective, and enjoyed a host of other roles in life. Mickey has cheerfully gone wherever sent by his animators, and If he were real, would’ve learned quite a bit from each new character.

Don’t be afraid to try new things. We are always faced with little opportunities disguised as hard work, and should never shy away from them. Often, these new responsibilities lead to growth whether as a person or employee. Never be afraid to figure out those things that seem positively magical in their complication; we often discover they are not so difficult once in the middle of the fray.

Find and make a variety of friendships in social media. Don’t keep your sphere of influence limited to those that look and sound and work like you. A wealth of varied experiences and backgrounds keep the stream of information flowing on your computer screen interesting. Accept the friend and follow requests from oddballs once in awhile, because you will soon discover that those residing outside of the box say things that make you both laugh and think, to say the least.

Be always at the ready to take the lead when asked

In politics, of all write-in protest candidates, Mickey Mouse has led the charge when voters have been dissatisfied with their offerings. Because of his consistently cheerful countenance and pleasant ways, Mickey on countless occasions he has had his name written down on ballot after ballot, his name bandied about in practically every single Presidential election since his birth. He has been offered up as a leader at school board, mayoral, city council, senatorial and gubernatorial elections.

If you follow Mickey’s social examples, you will soon find yourself in demand in the lives of your friends and followers, asking for help and sage advice. Don’t shirk your new-found popularity; rather, once again jump in with both feet and expand your niche. Give your opinion humbly, and accept the thanks when given.

Stand up for your ideals and beliefs

If you ever want to see the power of protectiveness, just begin a business enterprise using the Mickey Mouse character, without first asking permission from the Walt Disney Company. You will soon find yourself swarming in legal battles and facing off against a league of attorneys four-deep. Walt Disney is extremely protective of its characters, Mickey Mouse in particular. It’s Mother Hen-like guard over its brand has allowed Disney to grow profitably into new ventures over time.

Don’t let others take credit for what you do, know or say. Stand up for yourself, and make sure others know from whence the good ideas flowed. Politely remind people to retweet or recomment giving proper credit when due. Be consistent in branding who you are and what you stand for, so that others can easily define you when they too go to bat for you.

Tackle issues head-on

Mickey has always been up-front about problems or issues he sees. If he sees someone being bullied, he is the first to gather up his gumption and speak out. Invariably, he gets the snot knocked out of him, but her perseveres and ultimately wins out, and we respect him for it.

I have had the honor of helping Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley) with Aquathon, a 24-hour social media marathon last July, wherein with the help of thousands, we raised $28,000 to drill 2 fresh water wells in Africa. I am looking forward to Aquathon II, slated for May 1st of 2010, a dance-a-thon to held World-wide. I also had the joy of working with Josh Charles (@joshcharles) with his very meaningful project to donate 100% of the profits of his beautiful song Healing Time, to rebuild the homes in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, where people are still smarting from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

There are a variety of issues you can address using social media. Take one that means a lot to you personally, and run with it. You can hold contests, tweet and ask for retweets, blog about your cause and send the links out. Create multimedia presentations by playing music and sending photos related to the cause. Be judicious in the amount of time you spend discussing your cause, so that your followers do not become jaded or block you due to the noise.

Of course, patterning your life or social media presence after a cartoon character might not seem desirable. But at least take the time to learn from the values that made Mickey Mouse popular all around the World. And if the big ol’ yellow shoes and round black ears fit, then wear ‘em!

I know I’m not alone in my sentiment. There are a number of people on Twitter who’ve voiced their disappointment with this untweaking of a valuable communication tool that already works when done properly. A few of them are pretty heavy hitters in the Social Media world, who have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers and have happily helped Twitter in its growth by providing interesting commentary and multimedia. They ought to be listened to…

Awhile back, I came across a comment on Twitter from someone I follow, stating that she was often confused by retweets, trying to figure out who had made the original comment, and what was added by the retweeter. I realized then that if many of us were banding together to push Twitter to unhinge and remove the new feature (or improve it quickly,) we needed to ensure others know how to properly retweet, Old School style.

“Old School” Retweet Methods

There are a number of methods people use to retweet information on Twitter, and not all of them are easy to parse. So I thought I would share a few techniques I have witnessed, and demonstrate what I believe is best.

The Special Character Separator – This form of RT simply resends the message, but places a /, ~,::: or other special character or set at the end followed by the commentary by the retweeter. Works well for most if you have it obvious, but sometimes the chosen separator doesn’t hit everyone over the head equally.

Use of special character to separate the information

Use of arrows to "point" your comment at the original tweet

The @Sender Put at the End – This form of RT places the @sender name at the end of the commentary, often in parentheses, and sometimes with the word “via”. Commentary is normally placed after the parentheses. This format is often constructed by mobile phone apps like Tweetie. The parenthetical separation is typically good enough for people to get who said what. The person below, however, seems to have sandwiched the RT by commentary before and after…

Putting the (via @sender in parentheses) technique

The Pre-Comment - This is my favorite, and I’ll explain why. In this type of retweet, it kind of feels at first NOT like a retweet, because it doesn’t start out with RT at all. The commentary by the retweeter comes first, drawing more readers in, because it doesn’t feel addressed to anyone in particular. Then the RT follows the comment, and we can sort of reverse-engineer the conversation. Here’s an example…

Comment back is placed in front of the RT'd message

You get the commentary first, which seems interesting in itself, and then see that it is a retweet to @Alyssa_Milano The RT letter set is enough of a visual cue to see the separation between the comments. Alyssa will see all of the retweets she gets on her messages because like any good user, she is checking her @Mentions often.

The Pre-Comment method is elegant, interesting and if followed by everyone consistently, would be a model for Twitter to use when reworking that new feature I am so diligently ignoring…

Retweet often

I mentioned previously how to be a Follow Friday Rockstar.  Retweets are a powerful way of letting your followers know, throughout the week, why they should follow someone you find to be interesting.  It’s also positive feedback to those scions of Twitter you love, letting them know you listen, you care, and to please continue their fine work of sharing.  So retweet and be retweeted!

I thought I’d start out with a propaganda film from the 1950′s regarding Homosexuality, just to put you in the mood…

The video was created in 1961 by filmmaker Sid Davis, and was funded by both the Inglewood Police Department and his Inglewood Unified School District. In those days, it was acceptable for government monies to help propagate the myth that Homosexuality was a “sickness of the mind,” or that gay men were pedophiles. Although as a rule we’ve stopped using government funds to share such idiocy, the myths still exist in the minds of people we come across daily, and the ideals resulting from such falsehoods still slip out of the mouths of many.

Three days ago, I blocked a person on Twitter, an action that I reserve for spam-bots, britney-bots, someone trying to sell me something, people who are rude or obnoxious, and your garden-variety bigots. This particular person fell under the last of those categories, and I had no qualms whatsoever as the block happened in a knee-jerk manner.

The last tweet I will ever see from the guy read something like this, “Here’s my daily sound-off on the Muslims. They have no business being in America. Round em up and ship em off.” (I changed it a bit so nobody would find the guy using Twitter Search and slam him too badly…)

I don’t miss the guy, and he was completely lost to memory until I saw what day it was today.  November 16th is International Day of Tolerance. So the question arose in me – Was I, too, being intolerant? Should I have continued to follow the guy, despite his demonstrated hatred of those he obviously knew little about?

The Importance of Tolerance

The next time you’re walking down a crowded street, take a moment to think about the incredible variety of backgrounds surrounding you. The man walking by you enjoying his latté may have come from grandparents who were chased from their homeland by people hating their faith. The woman juggling the cell phone while folding and tucking the newly purchased newspaper may have heard hushed stories from her father about dear friends or relatives being killed simply because of their race.

We are the culmination of the co-mingled hopes and dreams of our ancestors, the centuries of hard work and strife as each generation before ours was pushed forward, cajoled and upbraided, supported and loved. We are also the product of the intolerance our ancestors suffered, as well as the intolerance they may have shown to others. The wounds are still there, if you look closely enough, listen carefully enough. You can still easily find the stereotyping, the racial jokes, the homophobic commentary, and the fear and anger it incites in those that are ultimately its victims, the pain and hardship that stereotyped individuals have had to endure.

With each passing generation, the anger dims a bit, as tolerance spreads further, rippling outward from those that are exemplars of it. There also remain those that abhor tolerance, angry vacuums of bigotry, using all available means to suck in those that are unprepared to face the variety of existence around them. It is our role to face these black holes of hatred head-on, to become immune to their poisons, so that others do not lose their entire lives to it.

Raised to See the Difference?

We have grown up in a world that sees the differences, categorizing each other since early childhood. The playgrounds and hallways of our youth held the jocks, the populars, the socials, the nerds, the loners, the rockers, the goths, the emos, the eggheads, the geeks and endless other categories of those that were different. Some of us wended and weaved among these groups, picking and choosing friends as we found fellowship in the varied ranks of many. Many of us did not, choosing one group or another to temporarily identify with.

Tolerance must be learned, must be shared and supported as a life-skill. Without it, our children will not be able to wend and weave their way through life, will find it difficult to reach across those artificial boundaries, and will be stunted in their ability to connect to a wider World filled with different people being rapidly woven together through social media and technology. Without the ability to tolerate, people get paid by us to make movies to frighten our children with lies. And worse.

The Teaching of Tolerance

“The highest result of education is tolerance.” ~ Helen Keller

The teaching of tolerance begins at home, with how we behave and what we say around our family, especially our children. Even the smallest allowance for stereotyping or discrimination cracks the door ajar for more, like dirty little flies scurrying into our home.

Avoid stereotyping -It is assumed that if you are reading this post, you know that people of all races are equally as intelligent, as funny, as quiet, as athletic, as studious, as hardworking. Avoid the urge to lump in others who may share a physical trait, sexual orientation, or religious faith, no matter how many similarities you believe you have found in your experience. Young children reside in what must seem to be a very complicated world, and many will readily grasp at these oversimplifications. It’s a nasty little short-cut that bypasses true learning about the people around them, and should be avoided at all costs.

Avoid derogatory terms - If you have used derogatory terms in the past, stop. And not just around your children, either. Never denigrate others, no matter what they have done to offend or hurt you. If you must vent, avoid the use of degrading terms related to race, sexual preference or religious background. If you tell jokes or “funny” stories with those terms, you are simply hurting your children’s ability to tolerate differences they come across in others later in life. Examine the use of terms such as “That’s so gay,” and you will see how it poisons the atmosphere for others.

Be the example – Start at home and begin to learn how to tolerate the differences in opinion your spouse and children have with you. Listening is key in this. The former head of the United Nations Kofi Annan, one of the most powerful negotiators in modern times, is noted for his ability to listen at the bargaining table. Ask simple and meaningful questions to learn how other’s think, and they in turn will be more open to your thoughts. Speak respectfully, even in the heat of an argument. And try to keep your opinions to yourself when it comes to how your teens’ friends dress.

From Tolerance to Acceptance

The word tolerance has the connotation of “putting up with” someone, rather than accepting them. When we merely put up with working in the presence of an openly gay person, we are practicing the 2nd definition of tolerance, allowing for a so-called variation or deviation from what we believe to be the personal standard or societal norm. But if you discovered your coworkers merely put up with your presence in the office, how would it affect you? Where we define the area to draw our acceptable standards from is one way to move toward acceptance.

You can choose to restrict the definition of acceptable behavior to that found within your own home, where everybody comes from shared values, experiences, race and faith. Anyone outside this tight circle would be a variation, a deviation of some sort. But move your vision to the neighborhood, and what is acceptable expands with the borderline. Now we have to include in what is “normal” the Gays and Lesbians, Muslims and Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and Whites that reside within this wider circle. So many new capitalized words! So many interesting people!

When you move the sweep of the circle to encompass our entire nation, the variations are almost impossible to behold, and the border defining what is the standard blurs. If this is from where you draw your definition of standard or norm, then you must now see the Bisexuals, Transgenders, people of mixed-race, all variety of faiths and intra-faith sects, agnostics and atheists, and so forth. Gets pretty hard now, doesn’t it, to place someone as a variation or deviation from the standard, huh?

Of course, many of us expand of our circle of acceptance only to the boundaries of our chosen faith and/or morality, and I understand this concept. I cannot fault you for doing so, and do appreciate the extent to which some of us live closer to those boundaries, for it is at those moral walls that we hear the voices of the Outsiders. Perhaps from time to time we can peek around and say hello…

Teaching Ourselves Acceptance

So how do we draw such a big circle, and move ourselves from tolerance to acceptance?

Learn about other faiths – From Churches and Synagogues to Mosques and Temples, go out and learn about others’ faiths by participating in events there, and meeting their adherents. Scan your local newspaper’s faith section for cultural fairs, open houses and open worship nights. Say hello, try some interesting foods, ask a bunch of questions, mispronounce things, pick up some literature, and enjoy the similarities found in our common desire toward morally desirable behavior. Look for interfaith alliance groups and lend your voice, too.

Show support for people of all sexual orientations – There’s plenty of space in Gay Pride parades for straight people to help hold up those big, beautiful banners. Ask your local chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Gays and Lesbians) if they need any help with fundraising or activities. Attend candlelight vigils in support of equal marriage rights, and share a cup of coffee with those seeking legal acceptance of life-long love and commitment. Read and learn about the difficulties encountered in the lives of transgenders. Don’t worry, they’ll like you, too…

Become a community advocate against Racism – Donate time and/or money to help organizations that combat Racism in your community. Make a few phone calls and ask if you can help flip pancakes for fundraisers, or attend speeches by civil rights leaders who come to town. Take some time off from work to march with others whenever you can. Shake hands and meet people in attendance, and begin networking with them. Write to your local paper and exhort others to join in rallies against Racism and bigotry.

Creating a Global Standard

But what of an even grander sweep of vision, encompassing the incredible richness of human life on our whole planet? Can you draw your circle of friends this wide? In this view, we gaze upon all of humanity, and all ethnic, religious and sexual differences disappear. We are left viewing the breadth of “human” existence. From this standpoint, our backgrounds, orientations and preferences are no longer limited to what is valued in just our family, our neighborhood, our region or nation. We become a part of the human PhotoShop colorwheel, blending into the person next to us, interconnected and part of a loving rainbow.

In a global existence, it is much easier to move from tolerance of others to acceptance of all. From this place, how far is it to move into the warm embrace of those around us? We are all equals, with so much to learn from each other. We talk and share openly, visit each other’s places of worship in respect and admiration, breaking a variety of breads in fellowship at each other’s tables. A much greater compassion is learned from connecting with each other, and soon, those that discriminate and differentiate become the variation from the standard.

The Global Standard and Social Media

Social media is teaching us to look across borders, finding fellowship in the wonderful people of all races, all backgrounds, all preferences. We sign up, log on, and are soon swimming in what seems to be, at first, a sea of difference. As we talk and share, view pictures of loved ones and celebrations, listen to music on instruments we cannot pronounce, receive recipes for foods we previously did not know existed, the armor of our stereotypes begin to fail us. With the veil of distance removed, we go from seeing the differences to the similarities we all hold, and reveling in our new-found together-ness.

So was I being too harsh on the guy who was bashing all Muslims? Should I have left him in my stream as a sign of tolerance? I don’t think so, and here’s why. Tolerance has its limits. We should never tolerate words that harm or threaten to harm another. Race-baiting, religious intolerance, and hatred run counter to the desired goal of greater tolerance and acceptance. I choose not to provide a forum for poisonous behavior, to lend even a speck of legitimacy by having him listed in my followers. I don’t have time for haters, because I am spending all of my time in the company of wonderful people here seeking to know me, as I come to know them…