The Bee Who Is Me.

I have been able to, very quickly, build a following here and have a very manageable amount of solid engagement.
I have, along with some of my buds, (Kevin Pashuk, Don Kerr & Phil Friedman, all great writers), created a hive called The Beezers Hive, where we will cherry pick the best op/ed posts and feature them.
But the biggest and most important aspect of all this activity, which really amounts to starting over after more than 2 years of blogging in the Lumpy Kingdom, (aka LinkedIn), is the personal one.

I Have Become Myself Again In This Environment

I have been blogging since long before it was called that. Coming up on 20 years now, through email marketing, WordPress and most recently, LI Pulse.
For the better part of 2015, I spent a lot of time and emotional energy trying to figure out what had gone wrong with LinkedIn and making futile attempts to communicate with the Mighty Hamsters who ran the crazy algorithm that appears to have spun out of control in a number of key areas.
Hindsight being 20 20, I have come to the conclusion that the junior management of LinkedIn was trying their best to plug all the holes in the dyke, while the senior management was busy trying to package up all the data they control in order to sell it to some cash rich company, (like Microsoft) for an obscene amount of money.
I was at the point where I was starting to get depressed about what a cynic this whole process was making me when the amazing John White let me know about beBee.
I immediately signed up and when their publishing platform got going, started posting there. I joined a bunch of hives, read and commented on a lot of interesting posts, and started noticing that many of my friends from LI were doing the same thing.

If The Site Fits, Wear It

To me, it's not so much about the differences in appearance or concept of beBee vs LI, which are considerable, but about the character of beBee. About the intellectual freedom I have here to get back to the kind of blogging I used to do before I got pissed off with LinkedIn, after they started limiting my ability to grow a following.
I feel confident that, in one hive or any number of hives, there will be people who are genuinely interested in what I'm posting. And that's really a core positive quality of beBee and, to me, what sets it apart from pretty much every other social media site that matters.

The BeBee Virus

But there's also something contagious about the good feeling you get here, and that has a lot to do with the management of this site. Javier and Juan have a great team who are committed to making beBee a real success.
And since I have found a new home for my blogging, I have a vested interest in beBee's success and so am happy to promote it whenever I can.
BeBee makes LinkedIn look a bit dowdy and old school. In fact I was just there yesterday, and I have to tell you that the feeling I got was a very uncomfortable one.
Mainly because it reminded me of all the times that speaking your mind got you into some kind of trouble.
It reminded me of the pomposity of people who are trying way too hard to build their personal brand.
It reminded me of the posts I saw from women who were being either denigrated or sexually harassed by creeps.
It reminded me of my own experiences with trolls who just got it in their demented heads that they were going to make life miserable for whomever they wanted to.
And it reminded me of the politicos who were using the platform to further their own, often far right wing, political agendas.
All of these defects in LinkedIn, are a direct result of a real lack of management control, and blind faith in a very poorly designed algorithm that just kept making it harder for people to really optimize the site’s capability without having to become extremely devious.

Is BeBee The Antidote To All That?

Well, it all depends on what you want.
A lot of people, who migrated here, myself included, took away one important lesson from their LinkedIn experience…and that was that there is real risk in putting all your eggs in one social media basket.
So I didn’t leave LinkedIn for beBee. Because I still have reasons to go back there from time to time. I didn’t quit Facebook for beBee, because that’s where a lot of my 3-D friends are.
What I did was what I recommend that everybody should do, which is join beBee, participate on it, make it your blogging HQ if you like, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
And most importantly, give it the time it takes for your following to build. Following people here is a lot easier to do than it is on LI, and so far nobody seems to get pissed off about link requests because they are all building their followings too.

BeBee Is Really Focused On Doing Social Media Right

The people who run beBee are not at their first rodeo. They have brought with them a great deal of learning from other successful online experiences. They have applied this learning judiciously and created a site with a high caliber user experience.
But what really sets beBee apart from almost every other social media site out there is the accessibility of the management. They want their users to tell them what they think. How they can improve. What they can do to make the user experience ideal. They didn’t just create some algorithm and move over to the marketing department.
And you know what? By being accessible, they have managed to ignite and excite their users. They have managed to create a great feeling on this site. A very positive one. So much so, that I could very well be the most cynical bee in this whole hive.
And yet, here I am positive as all get out. Enthused about my social media experience again. Posting something every day no matter how busy I am with real work. And loving every minute of it.
Yeah. I’m a Bee more than I am Lumpy Hamster…even more than I am a FBer or a tweeter. But I am still, to some degree, all of those things. Because I am not stupid.
I’m working to help beBee grow because I happen to believe that it’s as close to the ideal social/business media experience as any I have ever had.
Will it be for you? Well, there’s only one way to find out, now isn’t there?

If you want to read more of my stuff, you can do that here:

https://www.bebee.com/publisher/@jim-murray

Download my free ebook, Small Business Communications For The Real World, here:

https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page

All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray.

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