Social Media – Joseph A Federico

The Social Media Merry-Go-Round

May 24, 2021May 24, 2021
by josephafederico

–Joseph A. Federico, CEO of Anchors To Dusk Publishing & Media

Some say social media isn’t for them and others have a false and preconceived notion that by simply having a conversation about marketing, that said conversation would quickly degrade into one about advertising and dollar spend. Let me stop right there and say that is absolutely incorrect.

So, what is social media? Why are we fascinated — to the point of being obsessed — with accumulating likes, shares and pins? When and how did this start? And more importantly, where is it going?

We’re not going to dissect the story in its entirety…I’ll save that for a paid consultation or weekend retreat (Yes, I offer those, too…). But for now, I’ll gently dive right in and offer the abridged version.

You’ve heard of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. And by now, all these years later, who hasn’t? Facebook — one of the most popular social platforms to-date — started off as a “social” platform that was created to allow college students to communicate with one another, to share campus happenings and build virtual communities with the same cause.

It wasn’t until 2005 — around the time I dove head first into the publishing and marketing scene — that Zuckerberg and his crew had expanded the platform and began allowing the general population to reap its benefits. Wait, benefits? Yes. Facebook opened the floodgates and invited ordinary people to become more actively “social” and encouraged them to “peacock” …to show off and let their proverbial freak flags fly.

Sure, social media may have originally been created for/used to allow people to paint organic portraits of themselves or how perfect home life may have been, or even to allow loved ones to stay in touch…but that was just the beginning. The beast that we now know as social media today evolved at record speed. And most people still to this day, don’t know how to properly navigate through this landscape.

To be on social media is to have access to a special power, to be able to take control of your narrative, to tell the story that’s hidden deep inside of you on your own terms. It’s also up to you to tell the world about your business and how it’s owned and operated. It’s a gift.

Let’s go back even further than Facebook’s inception, and dissect an even more unforgiving platform called Friendster…and Hot Or Not before that. Those social arenas held the basic functionalities of the now-Facebook: Chat, Liking, Sharing…but on a much smaller scale.

Friendster allowed users to request and nurture virtual friendships with strangers across the country. I don’t believe it even had a blog or article section at the time or allowed for organic self-expression. It was a simple tool that allowed people to become “friends” with others, plain and simple.

Now Hot Or Not, that platform’s main objective was to get people to rate others’ looks and decide whether or not someone was attractive. Think of it as a platform where influencers gathered, but they weren’t selling products or signing-up to become brand ambassadors. Platform users were essentially selling themselves…for ratings. Think of Hot Or Not as the grandfather to modern dating applications, such as…well…the list is truly too long and boring to even mention.

Now that a number of years have gone by, we’re facing the dawning of a new age of social media. One of the first rules you have to follow is this: Organic content is now and forever will be king. Long gone are the days when a company would post a coupon, for instance, online and hope consumers would purchase their product or take advantage of said sale. The future is not in sales…it’s in how a brand makes a customer or client feel.

Which brings me to my next point… It’s time to integrate nostalgia marketing into every facet of your social media campaign. Think about how you felt when you purchased your own pack of gum with the allowance you saved up as a teenager. What kind of gum was it? What flavor? Where were you when you popped that first piece into your mouth? Who was around you?

See what I’m getting at? I’m attempting to evoke emotion and to set you up — the proverbial customer — to purchase a product. The landscape within the digital marketing world is changing due to the global pandemic. We want to be comforted and coddled and not to have to think about the detrimental news we see on our social platforms or hear about on television. We want to be happy and it’s up to large brands and corporations to deliver that to us. We deserve that much.

It will be interesting to see how social media will evolve in the next 5, 10, or 20 years and how society will adapt to an entirely new set of rules and regulations. I know that I, for one, am counting down the days.

(Article originally published in The Global Achievers, March 2021)

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Kaden Roach: Using Instagram to Impact

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020
by josephafederico

I can achieve anything I need through God’s grace and the understanding that I am enough through what God has. Growing up, I knew I had always wanted to make a difference in the world. The ability to leave an impact on someone’s life through my existence is so powerful. That’s why I started to really focus on growing my Instagram (@kadenrroach) to reach as many people as I can.

In high school, I was fascinated with performing and having people know my name. That’s all I wanted at first, to be noticed. I was involved in choir and show choir. I sang in talent shows, danced all over the town, and eventually became dance captain of our school group. These performing skills really shaped me into who I am today. Throughout my time in high school, I just wanted to be famous, but now that I look back, I realize that I just wanted to impact as many people as I could. Since I was performing at the time, that’s how I would make my impact.

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I would then further my impact through social media. I became so influenced by models and magazines. I decided that was my next move to make an impact. There was nothing I would have loved more than to model for an agency and be on the cover of a magazine; I wanted to show the world that a small South Dakotan boy could make it big. I would go around town and take pictures with my camera with my brother, and I still do. Then, I’d take these fun pictures and post them to my Instagram. After a while, some exciting things started to happen: I had brands like Starbucks, Target, and Alive! Multivitamins start following me. I even got to do my first sponsored post with LIFEWTR. Today, I still am trying to grow and continue to work with more brands. It is such a rewarding and fun feeling.

As much as I still love to do that, I got another rewarding feeling through motivational books and helping others. This made me discover my passion to become a life and health coach. I recently went through a hard time, and God and motivational books were there for me. They helped me so much, and I would love to return the favor and change people’s lives with my book one day.

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I am currently getting certified as a life and health coach through the Health Coach Institute in Idaho. My goal is to inspire people and help them along with some of their hardest journeys. Through God, I know that this is all possible. I then combined all my passions and have turned them into one.

Now, as my Instagram is growing, I write motivational messages along with the posts to help inspire people. As I am learning through my life and health coach journey, I am taking that knowledge and using it to help as many people as I can. I have done posts on taking a mental health day, sleep, drinking water, and even a nice one about what Thanksgiving truly means. As my passions continue to grow, I wish nothing but to make an impact through modeling, singing, writing, and using Instagram as that platform to do so.

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I have opened my mind up to loads of things this past year and it has helped me tremendously. One of the most important things I have learned is that I am enough. I learned that I have what it takes. I am strong enough, capable enough, and worthy enough. No one else can hold that same magic that I have inside of me. No one can see the world like I see it, and to be able to bring out my views and share them through these creative ways is powerful. No one else is going to fulfill your dreams until you start believing in yourself. That’s what I have done this year. I have learned to believe. I am ready to take my education and continue to make that impact on the world.

The world can be a dark and sad place, but if I can brighten it up a bit, then that is the most rewarding thing. You must show people that the mountain you were assigned can be moved.

That’s how I am using Instagram to make an impact.

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Potential Social Media Suicide

November 22, 2019November 22, 2019
by josephafederico

Potential Social Media Suicide: My reaction to Arielle Pardes’ “I Am Immeasurable: My Life Online – Without All the Metrics”

I’m sitting here, on my “off” day today – a day after a partner’s holiday party, a long yet productive work week, one where I hustled my ass off to close a contract with an amazing talent – and finally had time to peruse an issue of WIRED…from March 2019!

If you’d read my article from last week, you’d know that yes, I’m still a slow reader. I don’t have as much time as I’d like built into my schedule for creative synapses to get a workout with such activities as reading, or let’s say, for instance, working on (three!) novels. It’s reality, and I have no choice to be alright with that…for now.

I digress…

So, I’m extremely engrossed in the ever-changing world of social media, and am attempting to situate myself as the “Social Media Guy,” that as I began to type this up, I caught myself before I added a slew of pound symbols to words I’d normally identify as keywords on social media platforms. Need more sleep, much?

Jumping right in, I was mortified at first when I began reading an article by Ariel Pardes. Oh Jesus, girl, why would you want to go silent on social media? was my first thought. So, without further ado, I’m going to share a snippet of said piece, then add my two cents to close this thought out.

Pardes boldly starts out by saying, “Social Media is a death carousel, and by the start of the new year, I wanted off. National policy and news stories continued to be steered by the tweets and retweets of @realDonaldTrump. A photo of an egg had surpassed 30 million likes on Instagram. Children were eating laundry detergent and setting themselves on fire in exchange for followers. The phrase ‘late-stage capitalism’ was appearing everywhere.”

I rolled my eyes immediately, but then, similarly to the women in the meme where on one side, she offers a grotesque face, then on the other side, her eyes widen in contemplation, I was suckered in. Okay, missy, what have you got to offer?

First off, Pardes isn’t the first journalist, or even social media manager for that matter, to threaten to leave social for good. From March to this month, now November, social media content has gotten even worse. Starting with laundry detergent (Okay, that was gross…but if it was a marketing stunt, even I have to admit there was something clever there, and those little squares do look tasty… Oh please, as if you hadn’t thought about it before!) to detrimentally expensive political content that’s being questioned daily, social media content is easy to get caught up in and sometimes, is hard to hop off on a high note.

Pardes continues, “So I purged. Not the social media accounts, but the numerical machinery powering them. Likes. Retweets. Views. Followers. Subscribers. The metrics by which the words, photos, videos – what’s known, in toto, as content – are made valuable. I installed a series of browser extensions that promised to leave the content intact but expunge those boldface, sexy, ubiquitous numbers that cluttered and dominated my feeds.”

I’ve been taught, and self-taught, and educated on the fact that content requires to reap likes, retweets, views, followers, and yes, even subscribers. To this day, I tell clients, “It’s not about the numbers, but…it’s about the numbers. You feel me?” Then I proceed to offer explanation on how my team and I plan on attacking an evolved voice and grow a persona from the ground up.

However, there is something so say about the notion of simply sharing content – unfiltered, organic, personal content – for the sake of sharing content…not to get likes, retweets, views, followers, or even a paid partnership. That’s a refreshing idea to mull over, don’t you think? If we simply lived our lives on social the way we so desperately think we live them from day-to-day, we’d be much happier.

But, then how would capitalism work and run its course? The Kardashian-Jenner crews of the world would be nothing, because although I think they, and other celebrities, linked-up with smart managers and run tight business models, there’s no substance once the iron curtain gets peeled back.

And let’s be honest, do we really want to hear blasé opinions and see makeup-less appendages not holding cans of popular beverages? No. The world of social media would fall to ruins within days.

I digress again…

So, Pardes, right… She manages to explain how she dropped the numbers and says, “My guide to denumeration was Benjamin Grosser, an artist and assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Grosser builds little UX hacks for liberating Facebook, Twitter and Instagram from the hegemony of hearts, notifications, and follows. Install one of his extensions, log on, and you’ll find the room looks the same – but the curtains and crown molding have disappeared.”

So, is Grosser the “great and powerful” OZ in this situation?

Personally, I don’t buy it. We live for justification. And, admittedly, so do I. We’re too deep down the rabbit hole.

Please like and share this article. It will help me to sleep better tonight.

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Read Aloud

August 14, 2018
by josephafederico

So, on August 3, 2018, I was invited to participate in a book reading, hosted by Glen Binger and The Working Artist. The event was called, “Stories By The Sea,” and the reason said event was so fucking cool and dear to my heart, is because all who participated were – in one form or another – native to my home state, New Jersey.

I’d been invited last year by the wondrous Mr. Binger, but unfortunately had a prior engagement to attend. See, Glen has tenacity and sure puts on an entertaining show. When I was asked to attend this year’s event, I was honored and immediately added it to my e-calendar, then swiftly began preparing a chapter to read out of Voudou Juice.

As the big night approached, sure, my mind raced, and I asked myself, “But, what if they don’t like me?” I had also prepared like a motherfucker, thanks to my trusty assistant, Christopher. Not that what I prepared came out the way I had intended, BUT, that’s another story for another night… and par for the course, right?

And, truth be told, I was also a bit nervous, because, sure, I’d spoken with Glen over the years, but didn’t exactly know anybody else, except for those I’d connected with over Instagram. OK, I’m 35, but adults get nervous, too, alright?

There was this one fella, now that we’ve met in person, I’m proud to call him my friend. He’d been attracted to my online profile and writing ramblings… we’d connected almost immediately. Arthur J. Willhelm‘s the name, and writing poetry is his game. He was the first person I met formally after parking around the corner from The Working Artist. I felt like we’d known each other for ages.

So, OK, let’s now cut out the rest of the formalities, and skip to the good shit… After about 30 minutes of mingling, the event started, and each person read aloud for up to 15 minutes. The amount of talent in the room that night was immense… poetry slams, hot verbiage and tempered feelings poured out of each person’s mouth, one right after the other. And shit, the support we showed toward each other was a sight to behold.

Then, at about 8:40PM, after the last of us got up onstage, we went back to the meet and greet portion of the evening. Strangers even came up to me to say congratulations and told me what a great job I’d done. Then I, in return, passed positive vibes back to my fellow creatives. Truthfully, the ones I’d met that night, they’re going places. And, I can’t hardly wait to gather with them again next year.