[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

Francisco Dao of 50Kings, writing over at Pando Daily, is trying to make fetch “smanker” happen. That’s short for “social media wanker.” If you live in an area of dense tech startup activity or are a sentient human of employable age, you likely know That Person.

The column makes a valiant attempt to carve out some real estate for his coinage in between “smang it” and “smerd*” in the Gideons Portmanteau Dictionary. But ultimately his Foxworthy-style questionnaire falls short of the comprehensive test that we need for wider adoption. As the unacknowledged hero behind an unsuccessful, decade-long effort to bring back “Opposite Day,” I know well the Sisyphean task he has set for himself.

*Small nerd, e.g., “What up, smerds!”

Francisco, if you’re out there, consider this blog post my offer to help. If catastrophic but edifying failure is also a badge of honor in meme proliferation circles, I am your man. I can also contribute my small but enthusiastic reserve army, the Opposite Day Brigade (ODB). They’ll turn the t-shirts inside out, I promise.

On to his list:

1. If you put your Klout score on your resume, you might be a smanker.
2. If you think having a Tumblr page automatically qualifies you for a press pass, you might be a smanker.
3. If you really believe the economy runs on “thank you’s” and not money, you might be a smanker.
4. If you’re socially inept in real life, but popular on Twitter, you might be a smanker.
5. If you think Mubarak was overthrown by Facebook and not by the blood of Egyptian revolutionaries, you might be a smanker.
6. If your idea of an awesome vacation is going to 140 Conference, you might be a smanker.
7. If you think “Liking” the Facebook page of a charity makes you an activist, you might be a smanker.
8. If you’ve ever thought you could survive on Klout perks and social media schwag, you might be a smanker.
9. If you claim to be an entrepreneur but six months in your “company” is still just a landing page, you might be a smanker.
10.  If you’ve ever given the advice “be authentic and engage in the conversation,” you might be a smanker.

This is a fine list, as far as it goes. But I have some quibbles. Mainly that a few of the ten are strawmen and are also not quite at the level of hilarity required to warrant inclusion. As David Foster Wallace proved in his non-fiction, if your made-up observations are either LOL-inducing or plausibly true, your audience will forgive you.

Re: #2, I don’t know of anybody who feels that merely having a Tumblr entitles them to a press pass. And I am a much bigger loser than Francisco and so keep the company of people who, if this was a possible thing to feel, would be inclined to. Now, if your Tumblr is on the level of Bon Iverotica or Annals of Online Dating, I see no reason why our Founding Fathers wouldn’t have wanted to give you the freedoms and benefits that come with the designation of “press.” Hell, I’d likely rather hear questions from the person behind Kim Jong Il Looking At Things than most of the White House Press Corps.

#4 is rather harsh on the socially inept. Plenty of delightful, smart folks are better in writing than they are in person. That shouldn’t get them branded as a wanker, or even the final 5 letters of the word wanker.

#5 seems to imply that there are people out there who envision Facebook as a giant 800 million person-Transformer. I get up every morning hoping to meet this kind of big dreamer, but I haven’t. If anybody knows of a Colorado-based meetup for these high-octane imagineers, let me know.

And Francisco, let’s also workshop “smanker” a bit. I have some suggestions for punchier Portamanteaus that might really blow this whole thing open. What do you think of “smoser” (pron.: /’smuzər/ (IPA), SMOO-zer)? Or how about “smassclown”?

Finally, in the interest of being constructive, here are a few off-the-cuff additions I would make to the original list:

1.) If you earnestly use the hashtag “#startuplife,” you might be a smanker.

2.) If your total number of tweets is less than 2x the number of times you’ve retweeted the pithy startup wisdom from Aaron Levie and Shervin Pishevar, you might be a smanker.

3.) If you enthusiastically post and endorse every single infographic that you see, you might be a smanker.

4.) If you don’t currently have a job and don’t actually have any experience doing much of anything besides tweeting in your undies but maintain that you are looking for a job in social media, you might be the textbook definition of a smanker.

5.) If you love George Takei and it’s not because of Star Trek, you might be a smanker.

6.) If, on any social media profile, you self-apply any or all of the following labels (guru, maven, visionary, intellectual, rock star, thinker), you might be a smanker.