I agree with my new friend Jabiz (more on that later) that social media experts are far too rampant on the internet today. There is benefit to understanding how Twitter, Facebook, etc. works, but gaming it for personal gain just seems wrong. Annoying, at very least. But at times, there are people who are still figuring out how best to use Twitter, their blog, and the professional internet at large. These people may be considered annoying, or even misleading. I may be one of those people.

It started like this. I received this email this morning:

http://www.jabizraisdana.com/blog/2011/05/are-you-real-michael/

Hope to hear back from you soon.

Jabiz

This was in response to an email I sent him, offering to write guest blog posts on his site, Intrepid Teacher. In his new post today about me and my site, he offers a few reasons why I could be a scam, as well as some reasons why I might be real. I’ll offer a couple short lists of my own:

My ideas as to why I may have seemed like a scam (all true):

• I failed to sign my name.
• I did use a prepared template – I’ve been trying to find guest blogging opportunities, so I have done a little copy and paste.
• I’ll admit to being new to his blog.
• I just assumed that the blog I found was the one whose email address I contacted, so I didn’t name the blog specifically — newbie mistake.
• Upon further review, the site mentioned a desire to have “guest contributions,” but only on an affiliated site, whoops!

Reasons I’m real but could be seen as questionable:

• My blog is legit though I don’t have graphic design skills — but I have a friend named Christina who helped me out with the graphics.
• I tried to make a descriptive About page, despite at the time not having a lot of content — still working on that in fact!
• Not sure what Googling “long pieces of text” means, but I’m intrigued to find out.
• My Twitter account is also legit, but indeed, I’m struggling with content.

Above is the post by Jabiz. My response:

Jabiz,

Please accept this as my tongue-in-cheek response to your blog post about me. Now that I look at things from your perspective, I can see how I might seem scammy or unauthentic. But I assure you, I’m a real person! And I really am interested in thinking and writing about issues related to education, from the perspective of a recent college graduate. I can see that your blog is very authentic, personal, and well thought-through, so if you allow me the opportunity to write for you I will do my very best to write content that your audience will appreciate, but also write from the heart and from experience. And if you choose to not include me, I can appreciate that as well, and will at very least take away from the experience the recommendations to make my site and my contacts a bit more obviously upstanding.

Admittedly, I just found your site through a Google search. But once on it, I appreciated your genuineness as well as your content, and I figured it would be a good opportunity to expand my writing experiences and to expand my audience. I would offer to write about various tools (both on the internet/computers and in the classroom) educators can use to streamline the teaching process, experiences I have had working with various ages of children, and anecdotes shared from my wife’s teaching experiences as well. If you have any other ideas, I’m happy to talk about those as well.

And I would love to have you guest post on my site as well, if you would be interested!

Thanks for your consideration,

Michael

What do you all think? Go give Jabiz some traffic, his site looks really cool. And I have learned a bit about my presence on the web, and I’ll be working on that. In the mean time, I would love to consider any other guest posting opportunities that there may be out there (so if you’re reading this feel free to get in touch with me and let’s talk!) as well as entertain the idea of having other people guest post on my site.

And Jabiz — please take this as a good-natured response to your post. And drop me a line, I’d love to continue our chat more privately!