B.J. Mendelson - Social Media Is Bullshit

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To Amanda:

I think you said it best, If only we had known sooner, we would have done nothing different.

CONTENTS

By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing kill yourself.

Bill Hicks, comedian and social critic

AN INTRODUCTION: BULLSHIT 101

CHAPTER ONE

OUR TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEB SITE

M Y FIRST W EB SITE nearly got me killed. I was building it using a Bondi blue G3 iMac that my dad brought home from work. At the time, I didnt know HTML, or that I could have just used GeoCities. The best I could do was use Microsoft Word and save things as an .html file. I got as far as creating a single page with a black background, bright red text, and an animated GIF of a spinning globe on it. Cutting-edge stuff for the fall of 1998, my sophomore year in high school.

During a meeting of the Computer Club, I showed my friend, Whitey , the Web site I was working on. Whitey had bragged for weeks about the traffic his tribute Web site for The Simpsons was getting. Knowing I wanted to share my alleged wit with the world, Whitey told me the Web could help me find an audience, but then declared my current efforts to be a failure. He volunteered to build me a more respectable Web site. We called the new Web site The Island because of my obsession with the New York Islanders, a team that embodies mediocrity. My goal with this new Web site was to document the stupid things that came out of my mouth, which I kept in a notebook (a practice I continue to this day and recommend you follow. Not just for jokes, but anything. If you dont write it down, itll be gone forever). Whitey didnt find any of that stuff funny, though, so he suggested we brainstorm something else we could publish.

The next time I came to his house, we got to talking about how much we hated life at Monroe-Woodbury Senior High School. We were both picked on relentlessly. Whitey was teased for being a computer nerd, back when that warranted a wedgie and not a hundred million dollars in venture capital. And me? When you run for class president and lose every year since the sixth grade, the whole school thinks youre a loser, and youve got the votes to prove it. To help blow off some steam, Whitey suggested we create a Web site where we mock our school and everyone in it. He would do the coding, and I would do the contentmost of which consisted of audio files, each featuring a rant about a student we didnt like. We had a bunch of other things on there, too, but the highlight was The Top 50 Assholes Who Go to Monroe-Woodbury Senior High School. The top fifty was a list I built and maintained by going through old yearbooks and identifying people who had picked on Whitey and I. The idea was that we would then rank those people based on how big of a dick they were that particular week.

At first, The Island only received a few hits a day. Then Whiteys friend, Brian Egan, passed the link on to some of his friends through AOL Instant Messenger, saying, look at what Whitey made! Word got around, and suddenly we were hit with something ridiculous like twenty-bazillion hits an hour. The Island had gone viral. To avoid our parents discovering the Web site, we kept our names off it. Whitey also took the added step of having one his friends host it on a private server a server that soon crashed under the weight of all that traffic. Unfortunately, it didnt crash fast enough to keep our classmates from printing The Top 50 Assholes Who Go to Monroe-Woodbury Senior High School and circulating it around school under the title of Whiteys Death List.

When The Island came back, we were shocked to find that most people loved it, so much so that the audio files I did were recorded onto cassette tapes and passed around school like an early Metallica bootleg. A lot of people didnt talk to me back then, hence the sustained electoral failure, so at first no one knew of my involvement. They thought it was all Whiteys idea, and out of fear, I didnt persuade them otherwise. But when our classmates matched my voice with the rants, a weird thing happened. They kept harassing Whitey for being a computer nerd, but aside from the football teamwho now wanted to kill meeveryone else wanted to be my friend. The Island got me the attention I was looking for.

CHAPTER TWO

ASTONISHING TALES OF MEDIOCRITY

D ESPITE HAVING AN underwhelming C average after four years of high school, I told my dad the only college I would go to was NYU, and that I wouldnt apply elsewhere because other colleges were bullshit. Knowing I wouldnt get into my school of choice, Dad filled out an application for me to attend Alfred State College. In the fall of 2001, I arrived at Alfred with a chip on my shoulder. Thanks to The Islands success, I learned that if you do something interesting, the people who normally ignored you would start paying attention to what youre doing. So, the behavior that got me rewarded my last three years of high school continued into my first year of college.

That is, until I received a lifetime ban from WETD, Alfred State Colleges radio station, and alienated everyone on campus. I didnt know it at the time, but that ban was a blessing in disguise. After The Island was deleted, I put on hold my ambition to show the world how funny I thought I was. People in high school found me amusing, and that was good enough. And considering the number of near beatings Whitey received from the football team, I didnt want to push my luck. But Alfred State College can affectionately be described as a Suitcase Campus. Everyone went home on the weekend, and the school is located in a tiny town in the broke and undeveloped wilderness of New Yorks Southern Tier. Lake Wobegon it aint. Without money, a car, or people who didnt want to see me die in a circus disaster, the Web was my last refuge. In February 2002, one month after my lifetime ban from WETD went into effect, I went back to posting my poorly thought-out grammatical holocausts online.

After a year of mediocrity and spelling errors, I had a long string of humor columns go viral, starting with The Universal Break-Up Card in February 2003. After that, I built a name for myself with columns like I Hate Captain Planet and What Would the Hulk Do? to similar success and started writing for other people. Beginning with popular adult film star, Joanna Angel, in 2004, I worked my way up to a nationally published music magazine, and then got a college survival column syndicated to over eight hundred college newspapers through CBS College Sports. From there, I contributed to a number of outlets including The Huffington Post, Forbes, Mashable, MTVs O Music Awards, the Eisner-nominated ComicsAlliance, and CNN.

JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY (AND MARKETING)

With the experience I gained using the Web to promote my columns, people started e-mailing me for advice on how to market themselves and their products on the Web. I never wanted to be a marketer, and at first I was reluctant to help. But college is expensive, and I needed money to impress girls who had no intention of sleeping with me. So, I caved and picked up some clients and started to do marketing for them, charging only enough to pay for textbooks. I promoted the bands whose events I also booked. Then I moved on to working with small businesses, and authors like former University of Pennsylvania professor Dr. Andrew Shatt. In 2007, I worked for The Edge with Jake Sasseville , a syndicated television show that aired in forty million homes on ABC affiliates, and in 2010, I helped promote Colonel John Folsom and his not-for-profit Wounded Warriors Family Support, with a national outreach campaign called The High Five Tour. During that time I also did some work with Ford, Overstock.com, Sprint, Dunkin Donuts, Microsoft (via Crispin Porter + Bogusky), and Sears (via Ogilvy & Mather).