This morning I was awaken to some very loud thunder and heavy rain around 4:00 AM after going to bed at 1:00 AM.  To most people they can just cover their heads with a pillow and then go back to sleep.  I have been fascinated with thunderstorms since I was very young.  I have a hard time ignoring something that I have not seen in a while.  It makes it even harder to ignore since it is the weekend and I do not have to go to work in the morning.  It is great to see some thunderstorms this morning.  I hope we will have an active storm season this year because the last few have been pretty slow.

I took the opportunity to check a few social networking sites and it really troubles me to see what it has become.  As you can see in the photo below, there are people bragging about how many followers they have on Google Buzz.  It seems to be the same culprits that you see on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook.  The post below seems innocuous because this guy is making a joke about it like I am.  I have run into many posts like this ranking those that have the most followers.  They are usually followed by a deep discussion of 100 to 200 comments about how to increase your follower ship to be like these guys.  Honestly it is embarrassing to see so many people desperate to make their mark in the world that they will go out and follow total strangers just so they can brag about how many friends they have.

This same discussion can be seen on each new social networking site that comes online.  Listening to these people tell the world how it only took them this long to get __________ followers.  My question is “How many of them are your friends?”  I mean how many of them do you even know?  I have 900 followers on Twitter and I can tell you that 75% of them are marketing companies while another 20% are spammers.  About 5% of them are people that I actually know.  It is laughable that anyone would really get excited by having more followers when most of them are spammers and marketers.  I have seen a few posts about a person’s online influence rankings.  

These are a little more interesting because they take a similar argument those before have taken though in their case they argue that the more people that follow you whether they know you or not will give you more influence in the online world.  I am not sure why a person would want more online influence unless they are trying to run for President or starting a movement.  Their point is that if you have 10,000 followers, then when you say something, then all 10,000 will read it along with all of their followers.  While this may seem like a legitimate point, the reality is not so.  I can say first hand that when I read through these posts, I just scan through them and see about one out of a hundred or so.  It has to be a topic that interests me for me to remember it for even five minutes.  This would suggest that if you are interested in having a greater influence in the world, a bigger factor would be the content of your post than how many people saw it.

If the content of what you say is still the most important thing for those seeking online influence, then it would be true that a person with people skills and a large amount of knowledge would be more influential than one with a large crowd around them.  If this is true then people would naturally gravitate to them.  A charismatic person with great ideas would not have a need to seek followers because they would come on their own through word of mouth.  This truth is the same in real life whether online or in person.  Some people naturally have this skill while others learn it over time.  In either case, no one becomes influential simply by adding thousands of people online.  There is one individual that I see online that is a photographer in the San Francisco area that has many followers.  People are attracted by his photography skills and so they follow him.  His people skills are terrible like my own and people get tired and leave so his follower ship has a high turnover rate like my own .  Needless to say the online influence that a person has can be ruined if the person is not a charismatic, knowledgeable person.

I know that people could easily say that I am doing exactly the same thing.  Online influence is not my goal in this blog.  I use my blog as therapy to vent my stress and it gets very little readership.  Because I use it to vent, I read it later and find myself laughing at my rants.  It works as a good historical record of things that were going on at specific times.  Since I do lack those people skills, a blog is great for me to get things off my chest.  If I were trying to obtain online influence, I would be doing a terrible job since many of my posts are of frustration about the topic of the day.  Many people do not want to hear that sort of thing so online influence is not something that I am likely to see with this blog.

Just a note to clarify things.  I am actually posting this on my Posterous account that also posts on my blog at http://paulmccord.net.  For those of you that have stumbled on the Posterous site scratching your head with confusion, most of my posts are only on my blog.  There is not much of a historical record on Posterous because I have not had that account for very long. So the moral of the story is that if influence is what you are seeking then please do not follow my example.  Also I never understood the desire to have influence anyway.  I guess this is something that is important to some people.  I see it at work as well with some that are constantly trying to check boxes on their career for the purposes of going up the chain.  Someone has to do those jobs so I say more power to them.

Posted via web from Paul L. McCord Jr.