Social Media is F%$&*n powerful! If you know how to use it!
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
I’ve been in IT for close to 20 years now and I still hate it when people call me up and ask me to fix their laptop. Quite frankly, it’s embarassing and insulting having to explain to friends and family that even though I ‘do computers’ for a living, I don’t do desktops, laptops or pc’s. You see, my expertise is with Middlware (web servers and application servers) which has everything to do with hosting applications in datacenters, but nothing to do with fixing your damn pc!
Anyway, I’m glad I got that off my chest.. Iv’e always considered myself behind the leading edge technology but way further ahead of anyone not in the computer industry when it comes to technology. Social Media is one area that I’ve always felt that I was years behind, not so much because of the technology but moreso because of the invasiveness of it on my personal life and my unwillingness to comply. Anywho, social media has slowly been growing on me to the point where I’ve realized that ‘I have to be able to use it to my advantage’ .. after all there have been several countries that have revolted and set history!
It has only come to me tonight the power that social media can put in my hands – more importantly in the hands of everyone. So here’s my quick story….
As I’ve been trying to jump into social media more and more I’ve been finding it a bit confusing.. until tonight – I’ve jumped in up to my neck and now that I’ve encountered a real life problem I figured I’d surely put social media to the test to see if I could use it to solve my problem! As of right now I’ve only submitted my complaint but here’s what happened!
I’m trying to expand my social presence, more so to learn about it than actually give a crap in telling my friends what I’m eating at the moment! In doing so I’ve found it impossible to manage more than 1 social network at at time.. I’m not going to post an update or picture showing that I’m in Joes Pizzeria eating Salami 5 times, once for facebook, google+, linkedin, my blog and instagram.. long story made short I came across an app called Eveypost.me (#everypost) which appeared to solve all my issues..
If I was naive enough to believe everypost solved all my issues then I would have been happy as a pig in shite but I can never accept anyone’s word or applications ratings even if it has a million likes and top ratings! It ends up as I’ve used the app for some time now that it doesn’t do exactly what I would expect it to do.. to put things in perspective, when I post to everypost it is supposed to post to all my networks.. fair enough, this app does just as it says.. until you look at the details.. in this particular case, when you post a single message to #everypost it works for some social networks but not for others.. (example, https://blah.com works great for Pinterest but doesn’t work for twitter, and vice versa). Okay you say, that’s why they offer the ability to customize the message per network .. Great! However, no matter what you do – there is no way to set the ‘source link’ for your Pinterest post..the source link is everything! it’s what brings visitors back to my website.
You might think that this is a non-issue – but the reality is that even if you’re a small to medium level user, if you have to login to a social network and to post a global update, the tool is broken if it doesn’t bring the intended results and you’re wasting you’re time..plain and simple..
So, her’s the point of my story – I tried to report this issue as a bug on everpost.me but there was no such link.. there were only a blog, product info, about us, faq and a few other links… nothing as far as bug tracker or feedback.. after thinking about it for a few minutes a light bulb went off – how can i use social media to get a quick response from everypost.me?
I immediately went to twitter, anxiously telling my wife about the problem I was about to try to solve .. a BIG TEST in my mind.. so I enter a message to @everypost less than 140 characters on twitter describing the issue and asking what they were going to do about it? all good I thought.. I instantaneously realized that the people from everypost would get the message .. but this would be in private.. I immediately deleted it and resent the exact same message to @everypost and then tagged it with #everypost .. therefore the ‘everypost universe’ (#everypost) would see my message and @everypost would reply (showing that they cared) or maybe not reply (showing that they didn’t care)..
My guess is that they will reply at some point because I know this team cares.. there is no way that someone could produce such a quality tool that has basic fundamental issues that make the tool unuseable and the support team unresponsible.. I have nothing but praise for #everypost and tool that they built.. but let’s see where this minor social media example takes us!
I will update the outcome so stay tuned!