Dino Baskovic Can't Lose

That was my key takeaway from my self-imposed Facebook moratorium last month. Get a monkey. Fast. And make it update my Facebook account.

I'm far too busy with Twitter now, plain and simple. All that retweeting and hashtagging, it takes work, you know? My Klout is, like, 60 or something. I don't really know what that means, but if it dips to 59, I can't guarantee anybody's safety is all I'm saying. And Quora? I'm posing some really insightful questions on there and suddenly I have all these followers. That's too much responsibility to bear if you ask me. Or Quora.

Never mind how freakin' productive I've been offline. I finished entire chapters of books, refilled prescriptions and cleaned not one but two desks. You try doing that while keeping up with everybody's predictions for Bristol Palin post-Dancing With The Stars. One Saturday, I even thought of subverting a small government. But really, bringing down a dictatorship with Facebook? That'll be the day...

Too much multitasking, man. I love "friending" old friends and all, but I can get a monkey to do that for me while I'm shoveling snow or mulch or whatever it is I'm shoveling that day. Teach it to accept friend requests from only those that owe me favors and believe you me, I do not forget whose bar tab it is next. And when Zuck starts selling my deets to Madison Avenue, I can train my monkey to swing back with a DDOS attack while I eat a club sandwich.

(The monkey will of course make the sandwich, though without the whole wheat crap. Millbrook for me. And that will go on Facebook, too.)

So a helper monkey it is. For Facebook, for sandwiches, for the children. And nobody better touch my monkey.

Oh, I did learn actually learn a thing or two from my Facebook-free February. Nothing earth-shattering. No major epiphany. But plenty of small ones, which I will share in no particular order pretty soon. Or the monkey will share on my behalf. I have yet to decide.

No monkeys were harmed in the posting of this blog.

It was 1997, and I'd just relocated to Detroit to intern for a PR firm. I serviced several automotive accounts and fast learned that the North American International Auto Show was pretty much Mecca for the OEMs. Heck, I even learned what "OEM" meant.

Things were different then. There was no Twitter account for the show—for that matter, there was no Twitter. The old MSN CarPoint was the official website of the show, and if there were ever open discussion boards on that site, I'm guessing the top car execs weren't logged on congratulating each other with "Neat concept, can we steal? LOLz!" or "Aw, shucks, we didn't win car or truck of the year, but great for those other guys!"

So why are today's breed of execs doing just that? The slew of tweets these last few days between some well-known Motor City marketers is surreal. Granted, these individuals run in the same social circles as they do industry ones, so retweeting amongst themselves is not uncommon. So on top of sharing a common passion for cars or Detroit's rebirth or green tech, these gearheads blog about college football, juicy couture and their choice of best chili dog, garnished with a little ribbing all the while...

Which is nice when you think about it. Make no mistake, these peeps are pit against each other for market share. I wouldn't go so far as to call them buddy-buddy, but they are chummy with each other. As a consumer, that appeals to me. These are real people that drive the same cars and slog through the same morning commutes as the rest of us. And as a social media marketer or PR pro or whatever the heck I'm supposed to be these days, I find the camaraderie refreshing, perhaps even representative of some new form of Cola Wars where both sides aren't sworn enemies.

I myself chat with my industry counterparts on the more popular social networks. Mostly friendly talk, usually about what we hate and love about social media, or like today, why we can(not) wait to get the new Verizon iPhone. We're supposed to despise each other, but we don't. And why would we? We treat each other with mutual respect, and not because we may one day trade favors. We frequent the same trade shows and share the same stages in front our own peers. We learn from each others' failures and successes. Sometimes, we form friendships. Without question, we do it out in the open for all the web to see.

Is there something to all this hippie love between competing tweeps? Hard to say. It's likely to rattle some corporate cages, those run by the old business-is-war types with all their tired boardroom battle rhetoric. I never bought into that personally, and maybe this trend is more like-minded souls manifesting themselves one tweet at a time. Will it sell more cars? Hard to say, though maybe that's missing the point. Selling a car is one thing. Selling a brand is an entirely different matter altogether, especially when competing brands intertwine online.

Regardless, it makes for good "tweeple" watching.

Image courtesy of J.DoyonPhotography's photostream on Flickr

As I lamented on Facebook earlier this week about my pathetic foraging for rabbit food (fennel to be exact), an old high school chum chimed in with her shared disdain of my sissy snack habits.  We scoffed at people that drink organic beer, because really, organic beer?  C'mon.  Carefully stuck into our cursory exchange of witty banter was a simple question:

"And what is with the blog?"

My reply:

"The blog is my soap box: half personal, half professional. I get paid to play with social media for a living. And I smell good."

Smell good.  Soap box.  Get it?  Ahem...

Lately, my blog feels like a soap box.  Which is fine, 'cuz I have been paid to stand on one for the better part of my career.  Still, I can't help but feel like I need to shake things up a bit.  Admittedly, I'm losing interest in half of what I write.  If I write one more diatribe about social media I am going to gouge my own eyes out.  More than enough maharishis rant about why the web is this or that, and this is one swami sick of the same elixir.

I need new material.  Not that I will shelve the social stuff altogether.  After all, it pays the bills.  But this happened once before, long ago, in a magical land where there were no blogs or citizen journalists.  Just brazen geeks with a text editor in one hand and a Dortmunder in the other.  I had a pretty lil' web site with a respectable readership, I got bored with it and let it whither on the vine.  Why?  Many reasons, but namely I got bored with it.  Why?  Because after a while, I felt like I had nothing interesting to say.

Blogging means being compelling, engaging, intriguing.  You know, interesting.  Enough people tell me I am interesting.  I choose to believe them.  My writing at times reads like I am trying to sound interesting.  That's dangerous.  Then I am blogging just to blog.  That serves no purpose.  Like people that tweet every itch they scratch.  That sucks.  Less filler, more barley.  That doesn't suck.

Time to get off my soap box.  Time to make things interesting.  This will be fun.

Photo by Tim Samoff

My mind is swirling with ideas lately, moreso than normal.  I go to bed dreaming up all manner of hair-brained schema, theorems and mousetraps.  And, when my conscious least suspects, the ultimate escape-from-reality plan.  Should any of you find yourselves wanting to part with a prototype RAH-66 Comanche and a gorilla that can mix drinks, then Skype me.  No questions asked.

I am toying with writing my first book, submitting to The Rapidian -- a new hyperlocal in Grand Rapids, Michigan -- and testing a new online strategy for myself.  Yes, that whole personal branding thing that I'm trying to give its fair shake.  In short, sharpening the proverbial blade that will reach far beyond blogging.  Killing two birds with one stone, I want to get those lost manuscripts locked up in my noggin and put them onto paper.  Make that a Kindle.

Getting published has been a big deal for me ever since I was faculty at Lawrence Tech near Detroit.  Not like it was "publish or perish" for us lowly adjuncts but I nonetheless felt a wee bit of pressure.  I taught web design for eight years and felt it necessary on occasion to edit a textbook, do some interviews, score a byline or two.  Looks good on a CV and gets me on stage once in a blue moon. 

I figured a better fit would be to write for web design-related sites such as SitePoint and WebMonkey that I naturally plugged in my syllabus.  Proving grounds for technical articles, POV pieces on best practices and code examples.  I'll be damned if I ever got around to any of that.

So when this hit my inbox earlier today, I was thrilled that SitePoint remembered I still had an account:

So maybe SitePoint's no longer the best fit for me.  Nor is WebMonkey, though I still need that gorilla.  I bet I can find something to write about.  It might be business, but it may be bacon.  Or bologna.  Even baloney. 

Either way, drop me a line if you have some insights and Skype hasn't yet deactivated your unused credits.  I can't promise every piece I write will be riveting, but it's better than letting my works get rusty.