I do a lot of social media to build my online presence. I also tell a lot of second rate jokes that I come up with. Sometimes I get a laugh, but sometimes my jokes backfire (like my joke on mufflers.) Knowing what to post on social media or knowing what joke to tell has a lot to do with who your audience is. You either publish content to please your audience, or you publish content to mold who your audience is to become.
My best example is of an unfortunate incident I had at Whole Foods. I was talking to a guy I bump into in the salmon section. I told him my friend drove from New York to Boston on 9-11-2015 while on 9-11-2001 they flew from Boston to New York. I said, “It was like 911 in reverse!” Then the guy told me his brother was killed in 911. Oh boy. I chose the wrong audience for my lame joke.
Then, a lady doing a Notary job told the lady she was notarizing how scary all of the black people were. The Notary didn’t know the lady was married to a black person (hopefully not a scary looking one.) The Notary didn’t proof her audience before she made her commentary.
I think in the future, before I make a joke, I’m going to have a check list.
Question #1. Did you or any of your relatives die in 911?
Question #2. Are you from Syria, have friends or family from Syria, or are ultra-sensitive to jokes about Syria.
Question #3. I think you see my point.
That way you can figure out who wants to opt-out of your commentary, jokes, or other materials. Finding the right audience can be hard. It is hard to figure out all of the subtleties of what your audience on Twitter or Facebook wants. As a group, they might react differently to posts with different main keywords. My group likes Steve Jobs, but doesn’t care about Beyonce. They like success posts, but not nitty gritty posts about how to be successful by not doing certain nit-picky things. There are dozens of points about my group that I found out about by crunching numbers. I now have a good sense of what my group will like and what they will ignore. So, now that I have figured it out. I’ll throw two expressions at you.
Tiffany says, “Kill them with kindness”
Bashir says, “Kill them with chlorine”