Corpus Christi is a late-adopter market. There’s nothing wrong with this – we know we’re not Silicon Valley by any stretch of the imagination. It takes a while for technology to trickle down to our south Texas market. Maybe it’s our easy-going coastal lifestyle, maybe it is our geographic location (does technology rely on gravity to reach us?). Who knows?

What I have noticed as someone who has kept her eye on social media for the past two years is that not only has social media use caught up with the average American, but so has the misuse.

Offender #1: The turnkey “entrepreneur”
You’ve probably had it happen to you already. You add someone as a friend on Facebook and they send you an endearing message about how you are birds of feather, then one week later – blam! You’re hit with an only-somewhat related comment on something you posted and a link to their turnkey business that promises to save/earn you money.

Solution: Delete comment. Unfriend. The best way to show your disapproval is to not participate. Buh-bye.

Offender #2: The unethical “citizen journalist”
Oh man. If you’re in the Corpus Christi Facebook network you know exactly who I am referring to. This individual has actually created fake Facebook users and has conversations with them, or er, himself, on Facebook. This individual seems to think a.) we’re all morons who can’t tell that the four archetypical users you’ve created (supermom, single sexy female, handicapped older gentleman [seriously?!], and a young doubting guy to be an antagonist) are fake, given that they are new to Facebook and their only friend is this “citizen journalist,” b.) Facebook is an AOL chat room, posting numerous “I’m waiting” messages to one commenter as if all Facebook conversation happens immediately, and c.) that anyone would buy this muck-raking crap as truth.

It is a sad, sad thing taking place in my social media sphere. It makes me quake with anger that someone would misuse social media so brashly to further a cause this person calls citizen journalism. It makes me saddened and angry as a social media user, as a blogger, and as a champion of citizen journalism. You’re giving us all a bad name.

Solution: Unfriend this person. Report them to Facebook, especially the fake profiles. Do not participate in conversation with them. Urge your friends to do the same via private message on Facebook. Take a lesson from the blogosphere: Don’t feed the trolls.

Offender #3: The spammy “social media expert”
This person is clogging up your Twitter feed and your Facebook news feed with what seems like a billion messages about how to kick out the spammers (ironically), get followers, and do social media “right.” Every day. All day. They are probably using some kind of scheduling application to make sure they are posting these messages continuously around the clock to both networks.

Solution: Block on Twitter. Hide in Facebook news feed. It doesn’t mean you’re not “friends,” but it does mean you don’t have to see their  spam.

These are the three biggest offenders that come to my mind. Who are you top offender and how do you deal with them?

Photo credit: CarbonNYC via Flickr.

When I began blogging back in February 2008, as far as I could tell there weren’t any bloggers in my city. I had to reach out to Chicago, Madison, Orlando, and Phoenix for advice. As my following grew, I began to become interested in technology news. I subscribed to TechCrunch and Wired.com, and they kept talking about Facebook and Twitter. So I joined them. As my interest in social media grew, I learned that there was not only a social etiquette to this new world, but also physical meetings taking place.

As far as I could tell, nothing was going on in my community. As a matter of fact, the closest place was two hours away in San Antonio. I Googled “social media san antonio” one day, and found a couple of names of social media leaders in that community and began to follow them on Twitter. I connected with Luis Sandoval and Jennifer Navarrete. From almost day one, they encouraged me.

One sunny south Texas morning in early February, I made the early drive to San Antonio for FreelanceCamp. Luis grabbed me in between sessions and began introducing me. “This is Holly Hoffman,” he’d say. “She is social media in Corpus Christi.”

I learned a lot that day, about project management, connecting with other freelancers, social media in general, but what I really walked away with was the impression that these people had seen a need to organize a community and they did it. They just did it. They wanted a Social Media Club, so they started a Social Media Club. They wanted a conference in the BarCamp style, so they did it.

One person, or a group of people, simply took the initiative. And Luis and Jennifer encouraged me that day to start a Social Media Club in my city. As I watched Facebook balloon in local usage over the next month and new local Twitter users trickle in, I knew now was the time to organize my city.

So what if the community didn’t number in the thousands like other cities? I slowly began to realize that social media wasn’t going to be taken seriously in my city unless we organized into a group, pooled our budding knowledge, helped shape some best practices, and provided a strong foundation upon which to grow.

As I stood up in front of 60+ people last night, some of them still scratching their heads over Twitter, I was struck with the impact of what we were doing there. When I asked how many were on Facebook to raise their hands, then Twitter, I noticed that some did not raise their hands at all - some were not even using social networks. And yet, here they were. Hungry to know. I wondered how long they would have waited, how long it would’ve taken for them to find their way to the right knowledge. Even if they would’ve found someone to help them with their business efforts in social media, would they have been snake oil salesmen? What then would’ve been this entire community’s idea of social media?

It wasn’t hard to launch Social Media Club Corpus Christi once I’d made up my mind that it needed to happen. I went to the website, downloaded the instructions, hopped on a call with Chris Heuer and a couple of other Texas Social Media Club folks, and made a Facebook event. I grabbed a few people who had a curiosity and passion equal to mine locally, and they tackled a space and sponsorship. We sent out our Facebook event and watched with bated breath as it spread from 10 attendees to 40 and to nearly 70. I never expected them to all show up. But they did.

As I looked around the standing-room-only crowd last night, I wondered that I could ever think there was no community to organize. ‘Just look at all of them,’ I thought to myself. ‘They are the social media community.’ I turned to my boyfriend at dinner afterward, looked around the restaurant and said, “They have no idea was just happened tonight.” Our little city has been teased (by myself as well) that we run two years behind technologically. Heck, 10 percent of our population still uses dial-up. But if we want that to change, then it’s time we did something about it.

As last night’s social media high wore off, a new buzz rose up - this time on Twitter. All of a sudden, the small handful of local users I used to have “tweet ups” with at tiny Thai restaurants had grown to nearly a hundred, who were chattering away about last night. @CarlaGEE tweeted: “Enthusiastic response CC to @smccc! 3 words: possibility, energy, innovation! Bring it on!!” And @zowieguy tweeted: “enjoyed yesterdays #smccc meeting - glad to see corpus catching up with the rest of the world :)”

Tiny cafes are no longer going to hold us. Casual, impromptu tweet-ups have been replaced by a leadership team, group-selected topics, experts teleconferencing in from across the country and sponsored venues. And in taking the community offline, what we’ve done is grown it. People showed up in person, and then they showed up online.

Now comes the hard part - sustaining and growing this fledgling community. Who’s with me?

That’s not that interesting to me. Oh, trust me. I recognize what a feat of marketing skill that campaign was, and I salivated over the white papers just like every other social media marketing geek out there.

What’s interesting to me is something I recently observed in the medium-sized city I live in (Corpus Christi, TX) when our recent city council election campaign started heating up.

Politics impacted social media.

I’ve been an active and avid participant in social networks like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter for years, and have observed the trends in my smallish city. The interesting thing about smaller cities is that they are like little incubators. You can see a clear definition of when a trend begins; you can watch it sweep through the various demographic channels.

And I watched the Corpus Christi network swell from a smidgeon of college kids and Navy pilots (both of whom I imagine picked it up in other markets and use it to keep in touch with out-of-town friends and family) in December to the current 53,000+ (almost 20 percent of our city population) in the Corpus Christi network.

Politicians got Facebook pages, set up profiles, started groups. As they jumped on board, so did professionals, both young and old. They friended politicians almost immediately, as if seeing the familiar face made it more comfortable for them to be participating in this scary new landscape. Scoffers who had previously thought Facebook the time-waster of choice for college kids ruining early careers with photo albums of drinking binges began to see it for what it was – a tool for events, groups, movements, and keeping up with colleagues, friends and family members.

And though many a local college student was temporarily chagrined by their mother or uncle popping up in their friend requests, each began to see that they could coexist in the same space, making use of the tools for quite different reasons.

Political involvement at the local level helped legitimize Facebook in my community. The winning mayoral candidate, Joe Adame, utilized Facebook far more than either of his opponents. And it seems to have paid off. Mayor-Elect Adame took more than 65 percent of the city vote. There is no doubt that other factors played a major role, but the social media strategy run by that campaign took its notes from another victor’s handbook. I know because I forwarded the white paper to their social media strategist.

As I watched more and more people jump on Facebook, I noticed a lot of the new faces were in an unexpected age group: 45 and older. Around this time, I read that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women 55 and older. This coincided with an increase in the same demographic in our market, but it wasn’t restricted to women. So, I was miffed when I read a Caller.com article in which a political candidate stated of Facebook, “I don’t think it’ll reach anyone over the age of 25.” He didn’t win. And neither did mayoral candidate Douglas Schaffer who called social media tools “cold and unfeeling and unemotional.”

And when Joe Adame supporters checked live Twitter updates from @callerdotcom throughout the day to see updates posted 15-20 minutes before the local live television coverage could announce them, it was clear that social media had earned a new persona in Corpus Christi.

It’s a new world out there. Not just in local politics. Social media is changing. It’s not just for the young and techie anymore. So FB message your mom for me and say hi.

When I started WorkLoveLife in February 2008, I had no idea it would take me where I am today. What nobody tells you when you start a blog is that you will become a junkie. First, you’ll start devouring other people’s blogs in your genre. Then you start commenting on their blogs, and then you figure out that when you do that you get more readers. Oh that’s neat, you think. I wonder what else I can do to get more readers…

It spiraled out from there. As I grew WorkLoveLife, I began to run across concepts that I was already working with in my day job in marketing. And I was intrigued. Here I had been MySpacing, Facebooking (um, anyone else remember being on Friendster? I was there), Flickring, tagging and tweeting, and mixed up in all this craziness was marketing.

I wrote a few posts that really had nothing to do with Work, Love or Life, but had everything to do with brand image, marketing, and social media tools. And they were some of my favorite posts to write. And scrolling through my feeds every day, I would star dozens of articles daily that I wanted to blog about… but they just didn’t seem to fit what I was doing with WorkLoveLife.

One night, not long after my day job had a serious sputter, I sat on the phone with Penelope Trunk, trying to figure out my next move when she spits out the most preposterous idea. “You should be doing social media, Holly,” she says matter-of-factly, as if she’s been reading my tea leaves. “You do it all already. Just start a blog and round out your resume with some bullets by offering to do some social media campaigns for local businesses and friends.”

I considered this and found it hard to swallow that I could offer my thoughts to others on this subject. Then I started looking around my community and saw a major hole. Nobody, and I mean nobody, had any clue when it came to social media. I met with the community in San Antonio, and god love ‘em, they encouraged me. “Holly is social media in Corpus Christi,” Luis Sandoval told someone as he introduced me. And the truth of it hit me. If nobody filled the hole, the snake oil salesmen would show up soon, and I couldn’t have that happen – not to my community, not to social media.

That was about a month ago. Voila, blog. Hello, social media marketing portfolio. And you know, I even ended up falling for the guy who was running the political action group I offered to do a Facebook promotion for.

I love social media.