About a week and a half ago, I removed Foursquare from my iPhone. I then followed up by deleting my account entirely.

This wasn’t some hissy fit move because something in particular outraged me.

I just hit a point where I asked myself, “What’s the point?”

When I first got an iPhone last year and was starry-eyed about everything, I found it very cool to check in just about every place I went, spurred on by incentives like mayoralships and badges.

It was kind of neat to see where friends were checking in, occasionally finding that they were nearby.

Sure, I’d shrug off the good-natured ribbing by my wife and others, calling me a nerd for whipping out the phone upon arrival just about anywhere, to get that check-in entered right away.

I’d get obsessed with trying to attain mayor status for favorite haunts.

Somewhere along the way, it lost its luster.

I started getting requests from “friends” I barely knew, if at all. And I’d ask myself, “are these people that I really want knowing all my moves around town?”

After time and becoming the mayor of places like the bank and oil change places, a question gnawed at me – “Really, I’m checking in when I’m getting a friggin’ oil change?”

It took less than a year for me to find Foursquare both lame and pointless. I’m not about to get sanctimonious and judge others — if people enjoy it, that’s all that should matter to them. If they get value out of it, great.

I just don’t. As its popularity has grown, it gets harder and harder to become mayor of anywhere. Once the easier-to-attain badges are knocked off, the incentives and rewards are few and far between.

It also annoys the hell out of me when a business offers an incentive to becoming the mayor, but an obvious employee of the place holds the title. I’ve noticed that a few times. If you’re a waiter at a restaurant and they give deals to the mayor, it’s bad form to bar actual patrons from it. And good luck ever getting a mayoralship from a place like Starbucks, just to get a pittance off your coffee drink.

I think, in short, Foursquare became a hassle. A routine I put myself through for diminishing, if any, return.

I remember going through a similar mindset with some “world-building” iPhone apps on which I briefly got hooked. They were Tap Fish, We Rule and iFarm. I started the building, be it buying fish, planting crops, whatever. Next thing, every single morning I was feeding those damn virtual fish, cashing in crops, and collecting money. If you missed a day, you’d have dead fish or lost revenue. So it became an obligation to keep at it.

Until one day, I said, “Holy crap…this isn’t even close to fun anymore!” So I up and deleted all three apps and felt an immediate relief.

Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with Foursquare, Tap Fish, We Rule or iFarm. If it’s an app you enjoy, you use it. If it’s a hassle, you do what I did and move on.

But I don’t know…there’s just something about some aspects of social media that, at least to me, feels like a bursted bubble.

There are days I even struggle with Facebook and Twitter. Though I’m nowhere near ready to abandon either, my strategy has changed. I’ve gradually been conducting mass purges of people I follow/friend, in an attempt to push away the noise and get back to a point where I’m getting actual information of interest and value. But that’s for another blog post!

Tags: facebook, foursquare, ifarm, Social Media, tap fish, twitter, we rule

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend the PR+Social Media Summit at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I’ve been very interested and active in social media for years now, so it was exciting to attend such an event, right in my hometown.

There were a number of excellent presentations – a whole day’s worth in fact. Rather than recap each and every session I attended, I thought I’d share some quick-hit sentiments that stuck with me.

On transparency and openness:

• IBM has open Internet for all employees
• They encourage employees to do this to expose their individual expertise
• Trust employees – they are the brand
• Blogging personally helps you find your voice

(From Timothy Blair‘s presentation, “From Experimentation to Implementation: IBM’s Communications Evolution“)

On engagement and community:

• Community is about engagement – both conversing and listening
• Be visible and interact
• It’s not about the tools – it’s about the human element. The tools come and go. Yesterday it was MySpace, today it’s Facebook and Twitter, who knows what it’ll be tomorrow
• Every single individual in a company has a voice and is part of the overall community
• It’s being genuine on all platforms from LinkedIn to Facebook to Twitter

(From Amber Naslund‘s presentation, “Community isn’t a buzzword. It’s a business strategy.”

On building a personal brand and making yourself known:

• Just selling yourself through social media won’t cut it – follow conversations, listen to them, engage in them, monitor what’s going on
• Find ways to show off your expertise/what you do best
• Generate quality content…and lots of it
• Share everything from tips and tracks to “trade secrets”
• Read feeds and chime in regularly
• Become a source – getting cited as expert gains you tremendous credibility

(from Sarah Evans‘ presentation, “How to Stand Out in the Online World”)

I debated if posting about a social media conference even belonged on a blog about web accessibility. Quickly, I realized it does.

Why?

Well, for a few reasons:

My year and a half as a web accessibility blogger has been a great experience. Thanks in great part to social media, I’ve met a lot of fascinating, insightful and all around cool people. I do some of the above bullets better than others, but owe a great deal of the attention I get to social media.

PR+Social Media Summit was a great experience, one that I wholly recommend to anybody when the next session rolls around.

Tags: milwaukee, Social Media

Social media juggernaut Facebook, which boasted reaching 200 million users this week, has been working with the American Foundation for the Blind, and announced some strides towards improving the accessibility of the site, particularly for the visually impaired.

Carl Augusto, President and CEO of AFB, posted a lengthy entry on the Facebook Blog, sharing how he, as a blind person, initially had troubles utilizing Facebook when first visiting.

Two years ago, AFB began discussing with Facebook ways to make the social media site more accessible to blind users. Facebook is working on enhancements, and has published an informational page called Making Facebook Accessible for Everyone.

Among the features highlighted on that page are:

• Audio alternatives to CAPTCHA, which is the technology you see on some websites that requires you to enter letters from a distorted display that a human can decipher but a computer script or automation cannot.
  
• Straight HTML version of the site (specifically, the mobile version) that is friendlier to screen readers.
• Non-Javascript version of Facebook Gift Shop, which addresses a standing frustration with the inaccessibility of that locale
• Ability to use Facebook Chat via screen reader.
• Shortcut keys to key sections of the Facebook, listed out by browser

Tags: american foundation for the blind, assistive technology, carl augusto, facebook, screen readers, Social Media