ARI HERZOG

My Personal Blog

How Facebook Brings Us Together

By Leave a Comment

It doesn’t matter how long I stay off Facebook, for whenever I return I see different people posting the same stuff.

  • This is a list of 10 bands I saw in concerts and one band that I didn’t see. Guess which is a lie.
  • Here are 100 movies and which ones I saw.
  • Here are 100 TV shows and which ones I saw.
  • Add a picture from your camera that has the color orange.
  • How can I create a face mask?
  • Where can I get toilet paper?
  • Who wants to put a teddy bear in their window?
  • I came downstairs and my child was doing fill-in-the-blank.
  • Cat memes
  • Animal camera feeds
  • YouTube links
  • Zoom events
  • Dinner recipes
  • Free movies
  • Free music concerts
  • Free comic books
  • Free whatever

The list goes on.

I don’t blame people for sharing the same things on Facebook because it relieves everyone’s boredom from doing everything else the same way every day.

From morning exercise routines to afternoon walks to grocery shopping frustration to misinformation in the news to disinformation in the news to not caring about the news to not caring about anything, it’s natural to turn to Facebook and other social media to burn off the stress and share silliness.

Facebook’s mission “gives people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” In December 2019, there were 2.5 billion monthly active users with 1.6 billion logging on every day.

If Facebook was a country, it would have the largest population, followed by China (1.4 billion), India (1.3 billion), and the United States (329 million).

I want to believe that humanity can use Facebook to be closer together. Yet, out of my (current) friends on the site, I can think off the top of my head of two people living in England, one in Australia, one in Romania, several in Israel, and probably the rest in the U.S.

Maybe I should take this moment and reach out to 2nd degree connections in other countries so I can see what they are sharing and read their thoughts about the world coming together. And, maybe I’ll comment on their memes and lists too.

8 TV Ads About Caring and Hope

By Leave a Comment

Have you seen any television commercials in recent days?

Here are some of my favorites, courtesy of iSpot.tv. (You can click that link, by the way, to see every below ad and dozens more that have something to do with COVID-19, caring for each other, and hoping for a better future.)

I don’t remember the last time I ate at Burger King, but this ad portrays what every national restaurant chain should do.

We have to respect the men and women in the military.

We have to respect our children.

I lost track how many Amazon packages I received last month. This is to the workers. This is for them.

Honda gets it.

This ad could be about you.

Let’s hear it for restaurant delivery drivers. Please tip them.

Finally, I have to share this. It’s important.

Infographic on My Next Job

By

This is an infographic for my next job.

It is a new year and I refocused my job search to find a position in education. I have over 20 years of expertise in teaching and training, and I’d like to continue in this trend.

This infographic displays the most frequent words for my preferred job description. Culled from several job vacancies posted on LinkedIn, small words appear a few times and large words appear a lot.

I see myself working with a diverse student population, whether in a traditional public classroom setting or in a corporate training environment. I’m leaning toward applying for a license to teach social studies-oriented curriculum.

I elaborate my background on my LinkedIn profile. I prefer to either commute within Eastern Massachusetts or work remotely.

Please contact me with suggestions, tips, or for a copy of my resume.

P.S. Thanks to TagCrowd for its free word cloud tool.

6 Steps to Be a Guest Blogger

By

Guest bloggers are people who want to share a point of view.

Among prior bloggers, Lisa Johnson shared how to be an online expert, Brandon Yanofsky explained how Nike embraces social media, and Michael Dolen highlighted credit card companies that fail online.

You can write about any subject.

If interested, here are the steps to follow:

Step 1: Review prior guest posts and recognize everyone has a different voice.

Step 2: Understand the difference between guest blogging and article marketing.

Step 3: Scroll through the archive and see what I write about.

Step 4: Contact me with your idea. Be specific.

Step 5: Receive my response and begin writing. Use keywords. Link to other pages (on my blog or elsewhere) that support your point of view.

Step 6: Upon publication, help to promote the post to your networks and followers. As people comment, respond to them.

Discover My 3 Reasons for Tweeting

By

I created my @ariherzog account in January 2009. (Though, I technically started a few months earlier before deleting my account and starting fresh.) I’ve seen lots of changes. The core reasons why I tweet remain the same.

1. Share resources. About 60% of my tweets follow the Social Media Club mission, “If you get it, share it.” The majority of my tweeting is spent sharing others’ voices, ideas, and insights.

2. Collaborate. This involves replying, connecting, and co-creating with like-minded friends and colleagues. About 30% of my tweeting involves networking and forging professional and personal relationships with people including Sarah Granger, Marshall Kirkpatrick, and Phil Gerbyshak.

3. Chit-chat. Whether I am auto-sharing an Instagram photo or replying to something someone else shared, you might see me tweeting to someone about pop culture or sports or science. These simple chats about life represent about 10% of my tweets.

These are my reasons for tweeting. You probably (and should) have different reasons. Care to share?

Why Your Online Friends Are Not Friends

By

Every story about social media eventually mentions Dunbar’s number, a theory popularized by psychologist Robin Dunbar about the relationship between the size of your brain and the size of your average social group. He proposed that 150 friends is the average cognitive limit that our brains allow for stable relationships.

It is therefore irrelevant how many friends you claim to have on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social media sites. Whether it’s 20 or 2,000, most of them are destined to be acquaintances. Unless you meet them face-to-face, and maintain that level of relationship intimacy, they will never be friends.

Dunbar explains:

“Social media certainly help to slow down the natural rate of decay in relationship quality that would set in once we cannot readily meet friends face-to-face. But no amount of social media will prevent a friend eventually becoming ‘just another acquaintance’ if you don’t meet face-to-face from time to time.

There is something paramount about face-to-face interactions that is crucial for maintaining friendships. Seeing the white of their eyes from time to time seems to be crucial to the way we maintain friendships.”

Moreover, he says, of those average 150 friends of yours, maybe 3% can be relied upon when there’s a crisis or other life change that you want people to care about. Think about that. When was the last time someone interacted with you after a job loss, divorce, or other lifestyle change? I don’t know the best solution but adding more friends is not necessarily the answer.

I’m on Twitter here and Facebook over there.

Feel free to follow or friend me on either site. But unless we meet face-to-face (and that could include digital equivalents like video chatting on Skype and FaceTime, both of which I have installed and enjoy using), we’ll just be faceless names to each other. Where’s the beauty in that?