These are all lies.

As a social media professional, you live on the internet, not the real world. This is a word where you are judged entirely on the look of your avatar.

This means for many of you, personal hygiene only needs to be minimum at best. As long as you look sharp in that avatar, you should be fine.

If you’re dealing with someone via Skype or some other video chat, then you need to clean yourself up a bit to look like your avatar. But, even then you’ll only need to clean yourself up as much as you’ll appear in the camera. This may need to involve washing your face with soap and water and combing your hair.

I know. It’s hard.

You’ll eventually have to meet someone in real life. They’ll probably want to “pick your brain.” This is as awful and horrifying as it sounds.

In this case, you will need to clean yourself up to look like your avatar. Get as much advance notice as possible so you can fully bath and dress appropriately. You may need to do laundry.

Thankfully, these instances are few and far between. As long as you’re able to look amazing in your avatar and give the illusion you aren’t a disgusting slob, then you’ll be fine.

So take a great photo, give it that photoshop sheen, and kick some ass.

Like I have any choice but to ignore your crappy banner ad.

Ugh, ok, fine. You have to make money. I get that.

So I click the Ad Choices logo, and it pulls up a window that says, “Hey, we’re stalking you so we can make more money off of you. Click here to read our overly long and obscure privacy policy.”

Well that’s not happening.

So, I’m presented with a list of eleven companies collecting my data. Eleven companies are collecting my data just from one crappy banner ad. And that’s not counting whatever other crap is stalking me that I don’t know about.

What’s even worse? Three of those eleven companies don’t allow me to opt out.

Fuckers.

Who decided that you could track my browsing habits just because your crappy banner ad was served on a blog I read? I can see how this went down:

Advertiser 1: We need more information about people who ignore our banner ads. What can we do?

Advertiser 2: What if we put a cookie in the banner ad to track every site a person goes to without their knowledge?

Advertiser 1: Isn’t that a bit creepy?

Advertiser 2: Nah. We’ll just call it “Ad Choices” to give people the illusion that they have a choice. But then we won’t allow them to opt out.

 Motherfuckers.

I get it that advertisers need to make money. I get it that they’re probably going to be stalking me anyways. But seriously, what idiot decided to call it Ad Choices? If I don’t have a choice to opt out, there is no choice.

Why don’t you just be honest and call them Targeted Ads or Stalking Ads or whatever that actually makes sense and doesn’t lie to people?

Apparently, PR people think a guy who writes about how much he despises social media with every fiber of his very being wants to try out new social networks for fun and then write about them.

Right.

So, I read through these press releases, and almost always, I’m curious about how bad these social networks are. And almost always, they’re appallingly bad.

We added the ability to dislike things!  You can only have 25 friends! You have a better illusion about the ability to control your data!

Yes, those are the features that people are just dying to share with all their friends. Because everyone loves it when a friend tells them they are disliked.

Social networks aren’t built on one feature alone. It takes a set of complex features tied together to a network of people who produce enough interesting content to make me stay on the site. And that’s really damn hard to build.

I’m certainly willing to try a new social network, but give me a more compelling reason than one dumb feature.

And don’t send me an entire press release. I don’t have time to read all of that BS.

The more my life involves social media, including this blog, the lazier I get. And the lazier I get, the fatter I get.

These days, my clothes are tighter in the wrong places. I don’t feel as good when I look in the mirror. And woman don’t look at me the same way.

Well, women never looked at me that way.

Social media promotes physical inactivity. It asks us to spend more of our time living our lives together on the screen instead of together the real world.

In a perfect world, everyone would exercise appropriately and eat foods that aren’t pumped full of artificial crap. But our world is imperfect. We spend out days sitting on our ass and we eat our weight in high fructose corn syrup.

Social media is just one more distraction that keeps people out of the gym or from cooking a dinner that is full of wholesome nutrients. It’s no more of a distraction than video games, television, or any other modern electronic amusement. But I really didn’t need one more.

So I started taking care of myself. Instead of spending my whole life trying to create the perfect digital persona, I went to the gym. I made healthier meals. I took time to get my emotions in check.

You’re not missing anything by stepping away from Twitter for an hour to take care of yourself. Facebook can wait while you go to the gym. And if you think you are missing something, then just look at what’s trending to see how little you’re actually missing.

When you come back, we’ll all be jealous of your tight abs, firm butt, and rippling pectorals.

Well, besides Facebook, but we all knew that.

Burnout.

I burned out hard on blogging. Everything else seemed more interesting. And I mean everything. That includes exercise and watching all nine season of Roseanne.

Who knew it would be impossible to sustain a comical rage for over two years?

So I took an unexpected break. A break that took way too long. Here’s a few things I did while on my break.

• Watch all the seasons of a lot of crappy television from the 90s.
• Worked at my job that pays the bills.
• Started exercising.
• Discovered that my kitty likes to sleep under the covers.
• Gave up caffeine.
• Started sleeping like a normal person.
• Complained that I had nothing to do.

And once I started complaining that I had nothing to do, I knew something was wrong.

Then I went to an event. An event where I was the snarky jerk in the corner with my friends, complaining about every last detail. When they laughed, I remembered what I needed to do.

If someone doesn’t call out how perverted our socially connect internet is, then we’ve already lost.

I’m still not there 100% yet. There are things I’d rather be doing, like eating pizza, playing video games, and cuddling my kitty. Hell, I’d even prefer to exercise.

I’d rather be living my life off the screen, rather than playing up my every moment as another reason thousands of loosely connected people need to know why I am more awesome than you. I dot want to create digital memories that will be lost in a sea of data for some marketer to sell me some crap that was made in a Chinese sweatshop.

But, I’ve still got a bone to pick. And a cat video to upload. And a wedding to plan on Pinterest.

Twitter made a big stink last year by creating their own photo service.

Here’s something you probably didn’t notice though (unless you’re a dirty pervert), Twitter allows people to post porn.

Finally, you can share all your nasty, 140 character fantasies with all of your followers. Want to show your crappy cell phone pic of wang all over town? Twitter’s got you covered. Want the world to see your ta-tas? Tweet them out.

This is different from other image services, which had policies in place so we didn’t have to see your nasty junk.  They would take down your photos because they knew no one wanted to see that. Twitter, on the other hand, only has policies about child pornography.

Everything else is a fair, naked game.

Twitter can’t monitor every body part that gets posted on there. Porn stars have been tweeting their private parts for years now. And now the unwashed masses can join them in the orgy of fleshy images.

No longer do we need to worry if we can share our junk next to our resume and a link to a cute cat. We can. But the burden is entirely on us to behave like rational human beings. Isn’t that terrifying?

Just because you can keep your porn on Twitter, you probably shouldn’t. People look at that stuff, and we don’t need to know how kinky you really are. Really, we don’t.

Don’t the trending topics provide enough horror?

Trending topics have all the benefits of giving yourself a lobotomy. However, they come without the high price or inherent danger of performing a clumsy self-surgery on your brain. They somehow manage to combine the absolute worst in ideas, writing, and respect for other human beings in less than 140 characters.

It takes serious effort to be that consistently bad.

Let’s take a trend from last week and use it as an example: #iusetothink

This trend would be fine if people used it correctly. We would see a bunch of people saying “A good workout #iusetothink” or “A walk with the dog #iusetothink.” But no, that would be too obvious and would assume that people understood basic tense agreement.

Instead, we have a bunch of people saying things that they USED to think. This trend has caught on so much that even brands, whose community managers should know better, used the hashtag in a desperate attempt to stay out of touch and in front of an audience. It makes brands look dumb.

Marketers – based on this example, we can assume that the audience for promoted trends doesn’t even understand the basics of grammar. Do you honestly believe that the people who share trending topics will grasp your weird promoted trend and be able to help you accomplish your business goals?

This is why Twitter’s trending topics fail so miserably. Putting some funky hashtagged term in the face of hundreds of millions of Twitter users does not mean an instant success. You can’t target if you’re getting the brightest people, or those who need to go back to grammar school. And both of those groups will find a way to twist your message around in ways you never expected.

So avoid giving yourself the stress and brain damage and just avoid trending topics. Your brain cells will thank me later.

I’ve been on Google+ since it launched in June, and only one person has hung out with me. And that was for work.

Hangouts are supposed to be fun and friendly. They’re supposed to bring your intimate circles together. They’re supposed to be impromptu and spontaneous.

Instead, they just make me jealous.

Why do other people get to hang out with The Muppets, President Obama, and William Shatner? Why am I stuck alone in my apartment with my cat? She doesn’t want to hang out on Google+. She just wants to sleep and eat cat food and hang out on my lap in real life.

And where’s the fun in that?

So let’s hang out. Join me for a Google+ Hangout on Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 9 pm EST on The Anti-Social Media. We can all be losers and talk about cats and coffee and how much we all hate Facebook and Google+. Afterwards, we can all blog about how much we hate hangouts.

But for a few minutes, we’ll be the coolest kids on the internet.

But people have begun to abuse my willingness to connect.

These people who I’ve been connected with for months and years have suddenly decided that it’s OK to use LinkedIn to send me weird pitches. Instead of using it to cultivate a relationship, they just decide to  send me a demo of weird tool I’ll never use. I also get messages that assume I know everything about my connection’s lives, because I’m stalking every single moment of their existence.

Seriously people. Stop abusing your power.

You already have all the information you need to contact me appropriately. LinkedIn is the best tool for stalking people because they tell you everything you need to know about contacting them professionally.

Just because we’re connected on LinkedIn doesn’t mean we’re bosom buddies. I know, I shared a link you posted, but that was really just coincidence, not affinity. Stop reading so deeply into the relationship you’ve imagined between us.

Use LinkedIn to build relationships, not stomp all over them like Godzilla. Slow, careful development of a relationship will yield better results.

Besides, no one was going to read your half-assed pitch regardless of where you sent it.

Yes, it’s time for another weird social media “holiday.”

Seriously, who knows or  cares about this so-called holiday besides community managers? Most people don’t even know that community managers exist in their online lives. They think that crap just automatically comes out on Facebook and Twitter from brands. Given the sheer number of comments and madness on some Facebook walls, you’d be hard pressed to think they was any actual moderation there.

But community managers deserve a holiday. Hell, they deserve a whole week to be celebrated. Community managers are a special brand of psychopath who make our online experiences much better. They kill the trolls. They remove the spam. They humanize the faceless avatars.

They do all the thankless work of making the internet remotely more usable. And they do so willingly and passionately, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.

This is why they’re such lovable psychopaths.

So, even though the “holiday” is contrived, say thanks to the poor person who has to read all 10,000 comments on a Facebook page. They deal with just as much craziness in their job as you do in yours.