For most people and most pictures, sharing it on Facebook or Twitter is enough. It may be a quick snapshot of you and your friends out on the town or a cool sunset from a mountaintop and sharing it with our friends and family is enough. Other times, we’re able to capture something amazing, stunning, hilarious, or otherwise important enough to want to expose it to the rest of the world.

With those, we want to go viral. Here’s a (relatively) quick way to maximize the exposure of your perfectly-timed, once-in-a-lifetime shot.

To do this, you’ll need to be on several different social networks. It may seem like a large list but once you’re signed up the actual posting of this and future pics is a breeze.

You’ll need accounts here:

• Chime
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Buzzfeed
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• Twitter

Wow! That’s a lot, right? Not really. If you’re into social media at all these are all sites that you should be frequenting monthly, weekly, or even daily. They’re the only social sites you’ll need if you’re into photography, laughs, tech, offbeat, or just about anything else.

There are some notable exclusions, here, for those who have been in social photo sharing for a while. Flickr comes to mind as the first place that many people think of when wanting to share images, but there are challenges. First, it breaks frames, an announcing on sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon where sharing is often done from with a toolbar. The results for those who click on a Flickr link is that it will not display the image but rather an obnoxious message telling you they don’t support frames.

Okay, once you have your accounts created, it’s time to start exposing it to the world.

My Unfortunate Choice of Pictures

As fate would have it, I’m not in a position to go take an amazing picture (it’s 2am right now) and this is the only thing on my camera with even a remote chance of going viral. It’s a picture I took while at the mall with my family and the sign struck me as being funny because of the wording of the message. In retrospect, it wasn’t that funny, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

No matter – I love a challenge. If I can make this particular image go viral, your masterful piece of photography should be able to use the same techniques to spread around the world.

Once you have it on your computer, it’s time to get to work…

Chime It

Our first destination is Chime.in. The social network that was formerly Mixx before being grabbed up (and dramatically improved) by Uber Media hit the scene last year and is making a big splash. It’s the place we start for several reasons:

• It resizes large pictures for you automatically. in the world of sharing pics, it’s great to have a 10mb 2500px-wide image from your iPhone, but it’s hard to share. Uploading to Chime reduces the size to make it manageable and sharable.
• You can easily upload multiple images into a single gallery. Be sure that the primary image you want visible is the one that is uploaded last.
• The domain does well on the social sharing sites (discussed below).
• Unlike many of the photo sites, it allows you to write long descriptions with line breaks and links.

Again, I’m working with a challenging image to make viral, so I chose a headline that I thought would draw attention. It’s borderline offensive (the concept of eating kids is, well, sick and takes a depraved mind to think of it) but hopefully won’t be so bad that people won’t get the joke.

Be sure to use descriptive tags; you can post up to 7.

Pin It

Once you have it on Chime, use your “Pin It” bookmarklet to pin the image to a Pinterest board.

Don’t upload the original image. Using the bookmarklet will allow you to grab the image directly from your Chime. This links it back to the original Chime while making a separate instance of the image available on Pinterest.

The site is growing just like Chime and is getting plenty of positive press, so getting started early on these two sites will give you geek cred – like a hipster, you were on Chime and Pinterest before they went mainstream.

Pinterest does not allow you to title images per se, but you’ll be able to put in a short description. Unlike Chime, Pinterest does not do long descriptions very well and does not allow line breaks or links, so you’ll want to keep it short.

Tumbl It

Tumblr is a hybrid of many social functions. It’s decent for blogging, good for microblogging, and great for sharing image and videos.

It’s a bit more complicated than Chime or Pinterest, but it’s much bigger as well and gives you a nice venue for more than just pictures if you choose to use it or such things.

If you aren’t already on Tumblr, you can skip this step if you don’t want to invest the time into personalizing your blog with a theme, URL, etc.

As with Chime, tags are extremely important on Tumblr. Without them or a lot of followers, you won’t get natural views of your image. Don’t forget to set your click-thru link to either your Pin or your Chime.

Buzz It

Buzzfeed is one of the best-operated social networks out there right now from a sheer business perspective. They are aggressive and have a very clear understanding of how to drive traffic to their own site, reward their users, and get advertising dollars in ways that Twitter and others have failed at thus far. If they were as large as Facebook, they’d be making as much money as Google.

Unfortunately for you, it can be challenging to get to the front page. If you aren’t on the front page, you’re not going to get views from Buzzfeed itself which is why quality of content and promotion of your image is extremely important.

The good news is that Buzzfeed does very well on the social sharing sites, so even if you don’t make the front page of Buzzfeed initially, you’ll still be able to get visitors to it through the other networks, particularly StumbleUpon.

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Every year (for a whopping 3 years running!) we highlight who we believe is the top social media site of the year. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s not based on (much) empirical data. There’s no voting. The team sits down and argues for an hour on Skype and I write up the piece.

This is a crappy little blog and the “award” means nothing, but I can say this much – we really do explore social media every day and do whatever we can to find what’s good and bad about it. We’re not gurus. Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk do not visit this site regularly (ever?). Long story short, our opinion means nothing.

That doesn’t stop us from giving it.

In 2009 it was Digg (hitting it’s high point) and Twitter (gaining relevance). In 2010 it was Facebook (for dominating social networking) and Tumblr (for coming into their own as a content site).

In 2011, there was a shorter discussion than previous years. There was no doubt whether or not Reddit would be the winner. The only question was whether it should share the award with notables such as Google+ (for starting off on the right foot), Facebook again (for extending their domination), or StumbleUpon (for making tremendous strides in traffic and technology). In the end, we decided that Reddit had achieved by far more than the others and needed to stand alone.

Forget the Traffic

Reddit exploded this year in traffic. That’s only relevant to people who care about such things. The Reddit community (and in ways, the staff itself) view this explosion with a hearty “meh”. It’s not what made Reddit the player that it is today (even though it’s nice to have).

The real winner here was the community. There are those who say the community component is deteriorating thanks to the bump in traffic. They say the content quality is lower and the site looks more like (gulp) Digg 2009 with memes flooding the front pages. It’s no wonder that subreddits like Pics, Funny, and others have broken the 1 million mark in subscribers.

Still, the community remains strong because of the anti-community sentiment.

Well-Defined Anti-Community

The only thing that stuck with me from 9th grade biology class was a lesson I learned about routines. The teacher and I argued that everyone has routines. As a cocky and headstrong 14-yr old, I challenged the notion and boldly stated that I did not allow things to become so mundane that they were routine. She said that everyone dries themselves after a shower the same way every time.

A week later, I proudly walked in and announced that I was no longer part of the shower-drying-routine club. I had made a choice to break from the psychological urge to repeat the same thing over and over again day after day. I was smug. I had won.

Then, she asked me something that I’ll never forget, “So every day when you’re done taking a shower, you consciously try to dry yourself in a different way than you did the day before?”

“Yep!” I said. She smiled. I started to get worried.

“So,” she said, “you do this same thing every day, every time you take a shower.”

Damn. Trying to avoid routine had become my routine.

What does this have to do with Reddit? Despite the fact that every day older members of the community point out how Reddit has changed, how the community aspect has gone down the tubes, that the intellectual level that once was Reddit has turned to memes and images only, they still contribute to making Reddit the most brain-driving social network around.

This community that bashes each other daily in the comments is constantly improving itself as a result. By not liking what Reddit has become compared to what it was 2 or 3 years ago, it’s fixing itself. 4Chan went through a similar change but the partitions remained. At Reddit, they seem to be conquering the dumbing down of the site by intellectualizing the dumbing down of the site.

That’s the part that makes the community so strong, but it’s not the end result.

The End Result

Reddit has become relatively powerful, perhaps more powerful as a tight community than any other. Facebook has more users. Twitter has more reach. Reddit, however, bands together in ways that Twitter and Facebook do not.

Just look at GoDaddy. You can trace back the mass exodus that they are experiencing (today, as a matter of fact) to the Reddit community’s reaction to their support of SOPA.

Just look at Neil deGrasse Tyson. His first AMA ended up with over 11000 comments. I guaranty he could not have had that much interaction on the bigger social networks if he promoted it on television first.

Just look at Lucas (pictured above). His story is inspiring for more than just the Reddit community. It may not be as much money as a sustainable Facebook campaign could bring in over months, but for a 12-hour burst, it’s huge. Other networks would fail miserably trying to engage and roll out that quickly.

Most recently, look at the Secret Santa initiative. ‘Nuf said.

Reddit has become THE community that has been able to maintain an elitist posture while still having mass appeal. The majority of the population wouldn’t give the site a second look – it’s Draconian design is a notch above the Drudge Report. Even if the majority of the population were to explore the site, they would be aghast by some of the content (particularly in the “back to our roots” WTF subreddit) and would blush at many of the comments.

It’s not a mainstream site like Facebook or Twitter and hopefully it never will be. The site is big enough to be relevant but cozy enough to be exclusive. One of my proudest moments came the other day when I introduced (against my wife’s urging) my 16-yr old son to the site. He’s mature enough to handle it and a budding troll in the making, so I took the leap and brought him into the mix. “No posting or commenting yet, son. Just observe and learn.”

What will 2012 bring? Hopefully, more of the same. More excellent content. More game-changing activism. More altruistic giving.

More awesome.

Love ALL the Reddits!

Early signs of the mass exodus from GoDaddy are already starting to show up and the unofficial Leave GoDaddy Day is still later this week. First, they supported SOPA, the evil bill that would weaken the internet as we know it today. Then, due to a mass uprising by prominent GoDaddy users and attacks coming from prominent social media sites like Reddit, they dropped their support of SOPA and did what they could on Twitter to get the word out.

Everything’s better now, right?

Nope.

In an interview on Techcrunch, GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman was wishy-washy about the stance that GoDaddy really had about SOPA, prompting many to point out that “GoDaddy’s SOPA flip-flop is a PR stunt to try to stop losing money“. The carnage continues today and will only get worse on December 29th.

It may be too late already. If there was one thing that GoDaddy could do to save them from further domain casualties, it would have to look something like this:

“GoDaddy unequivocally opposes SOPA, PIPA, and any attempts by the government to promote censorship of the internet. We have heard our customers and the voices of the majority on the internet and we now understand the errors of our ways. We will use our resources and our connections in Washington to do whatever it takes to stop the relentless attacks on the rights, privacy, and security of the internet community and the websites that support an open and safe web.”

If GoDaddy makes a statement that is powerful, clear, and that leaves no room for doubt of their stance, it will be a good start. From there, they will need to become a poster child of internet freedom by truly using their resources and political clout to stop the tyranny that the government is attempting to throw over the internet like a Drakonian blanket of Big Brotherhood.

Anything short of this and the company will be harmed tremendously over the coming days.

Why GoDaddy?

Some people are starting to ask why GoDaddy is getting the brunt of the attacks when there are hundreds of companies supporting the bills. When we want to lash out at a company, we know that the best way to do it is to hit them in the pocketbook. So many people (this blog included) have registered through GoDaddy over the years and when the prominent website owners like the Cheeseburger Network and Wikipedia started pulling their support, others followed in the same manner.

The coming days will show more companies getting attacked. GoDaddy was the “low hanging fruit” in the internet’s loosely unified attack on SOPA. We had to make an example of someone and GoDaddy won that honor.

Who’s next? We’ll be watching Twitter and Reddit to find out who the next major example will be.

It’s Not All Bad for GoDaddy

A complete turnaround through denouncement of SOPA can go a long ways towards helping them rebound. Their current attempts at damage control such as calling (former) clients to let them know that they stopped supporting the bill and the more nefarious techniques they are allegedly doing such as returning incomplete WHOIS information to Namecheap will not be enough.

IF they make a statement like the one above and IF they go on the offensive against SOPA, they have an opportunity to go from hated enemy to hero. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible.

On a brighter note, this controversy has given them a boost in Klout.

If they lose domains at the rate they are now, punctuated by the mass exodus on December 29th, Klout may be all they have left to hang their hat on (and we all know how useless influence scores really are).

Do the right thing, GoDaddy. It’s your only hope.

In the past, emergency outages at Reddit have been caused by an overload of comments. When astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hit Reddit yesterday with “I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — AMA“, the community responded. During the subsequent slow period on Reddit early this morning, the site went into emergency maintenance mode for over an hour. Coincidence?

On Reddit, the r/IAmA subreddit is designed for people to say who they are or what they do followed by the acronym AMA (ask me anything). It draws a wide range of people from movie stars (Zach Braff, Bruce Campbell) to Jeopardy! champions (Ken Jennings) and often makes for the most informative and engaging comment threads on the website.

When Tyson hit the subreddit and announced it with a Tweet, the flood of questions and answers began.

It is rare to see any Reddit, even an IAmA, get over 10,000 comments. If it was the reason behind the outage, Reddit had better get ready – Tyson recommended that he should do a monthly AMA. If they aren’t ready, we may get to see a monthly screen like this:

Here’s the top question and answer:

This should actually be a long, comprehensive piece detailing the recent meteoric rise, subsequent expansion of power, and reluctant emergence of the site into the same power category as Twitter and even (gulp!) Facebook. The numbers support it. The content is excellent (even though old-school users claim that it’s in decline). Mainstream media and average netizens are starting to take notice.

To do a long story would (apparently) doom the potential that it would be read or even seen by Redditors, so we’ll get to the point.

For those who are unfamiliar, here’s a single stat to put things into perspective: a single popular story I posted on Reddit once received 213K visitors in less than 30 hours from Reddit alone, was picked up as a result by major sites such as Gizmodo, and went on to tally over 350k unique visitors in a week. To compare, a different post on the same site received 2k Facebook shares and almost broke 10k visitors. Don’t even get me started on abysmal Twitter referrals.

When the good people at Sortable emailed our editor this infographic, it was a no-brainer to post. Many Redditors have already seen it, but those who don’t know the story of Reddit should check it out and pay attention. WARNING: If you spend enough time on Reddit, you’ll probably get hooked… or leave in disgust.

Click to enlarge.

Sortable’s The Reddit Invasion

Calling Reddit “the best kept secret in social media” is no longer valid. The site is no longer a secret. Reddit is getting huge.

Below, we have broken down the demographics of the top 4 countries that use Reddit based upon data that Reddit accumulated in a survey last month.

Who in the world is Reddit? Here’s a breakdown. Click to enlarge:

When Condé Nast acquired Reddit 5 years ago, they were getting 700k page views daily.

Today, Reddit gets 700k page views in a less than an hour… at 3am. In peak times, it can get that much traffic in 15 minutes.

Reddit announced today in a blog post aptly called Independence that they are forming reddit Inc, a corporation owned by Advance Publications (the company that owns Condé Nast). As a testament to the power of Reddit, the posting of the story was able to take down the server that hosted the blog post for a few minutes.

The board will be comprised of reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Bob Sauerberg and Joe Simon from Condé Nast, and Andrew Siegel from Advance. A CEO search is also beginning.

“We built reddit during the most tumultuous years of my life and never could’ve imagined how far it’d come,” Ohanian, who left the company in 2009 but returned earlier this year, said on Google+. “The investment of time and love changed my life the day Condé Nast acquired us, but I never could divest myself.”

The relationship has been up and down between Reddit and Conde Naste over the years. Allowing Reddit to be its own company and not just a division of the media giant will allow them to make decisions centered around the success of the corporation and the website. Despite massive traffic (which has exploded in the last 12 months) and a robust Reddit user base, the site has not made many strides towards profitability. That has never really been the focus.

The goals of becoming a true leader on the internet will require them “to positively impact journalism, civic engagement, fundraising, product development, and learning.” These are all things that are well within their grasp now.

Who will be the CEO? As Reddit user ggggbabybabybaby reminds us, “I heard some big-shot CEO at Apple just recently left, maybe you can hire him. Someone said his previous salary was only $1 so you could probably double that.”

For the last several days, I’ve been studying Reddit. I’ve been visiting the site daily for two years now but it was only recently that I actually started studying the site. What makes it tick? Why is it so successful in an arena that has eaten up so many for so long? Why does it continue to get stronger while others get weaker?

To understand Reddit, just as when trying to understand anything, one must find the underlying attribute that makes the rest work. The answer is, of course, “a combination of things” but just as Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance couldn’t accept the obvious answers about “quality” until the end of the book, I too could not accept the combination theory. It isn’t that I don’t believe that there are many factors. I just believe that there has to be one component that sets Reddit apart.

There has to be a secret ingredient.

Before we discuss “effort” I want to take a look at the other things that work towards Reddit’s success.

The Other Candidates

There are parts of Reddit that would definitely qualify as best attributes of the site to people. Everyone who uses Reddit has reasons. Some of those reason may include:

• The Comments – Those who check out the strings of comments on submissions and posts know that they can be epic. In many cases, they’re smarter and/or more entertaining than the content itself. No other community outside of 4chan can even remotely compete with the level of commenting that happens at Reddit.
• The Subreddits – As Anon mentioned in a previous post, “Since it is so easy to edit your subreddit subscriptions, and most people do it, there really is no “front page” to worry about gaming your way onto in order to be seen by every user of the site.”
• The Content – Many old-school Reddit users would say that the quality of the content has deteriorated over the last year. This may be true, but it’s still much higher quality than similar sites. Reddit tends to be an early “viral maker” for many of the memes. While the site is rarely the original source, it’s the jumping-off-point for some of the best content out there that otherwise would never have received mass exposure.

There are others, but those three are clear differentiators between Reddit and other social news sites. For me, it simply comes down to effort.

Community Effort

It doesn’t take great depths of research to find examples of the community putting in effort. Some do it for the karma. Some do it for the lulz. The motives aren’t as important as the contributions. Here are some examples.

Monopoly: Reddit Edition

Reddit user Majupra submitted this. It’s not simply a quick Photoshop job where someone replaced names of Monopoly properties with random Reddit keywords. This was well-thought-out with categories grouped together nicely and clever insertion of insider information such as Reddit Gold and France is Bacon that nobody outside of the community would understand.

It was rewarded with suggestions and praise to the tune of nearly 1000 comments.

Upstate, New York: Reddit, it’s my first hurricane, how’s my preparation?

As ohmonsieur demonstrates, “effort” doesn’t have to take hours. It can be as simple as thinking of something clever, tying it in with a current event, and shooting a picture of it.

Tv stopped working, 10 minutes with google and 80 cents later I win!

Lessons learned, whether important lessons about disease or struggles or simple lessons such as Googling before buying something populated the site every day. Here, matthewmichael shared a quick experience he’d had where he saved himself some money. The share was a quick reminder to not jump on Craigslist just because something breaks.

Was it a ton of effort? No. Is this level of sharing present in other social news communications? Not even close. Again, you don’t have to search long and hard for examples. Everything listed above is all from the last 24 hours.

* * *

Many will argue that the other aspects of Reddit are more important than the effort. I would ask them if they ever read any of the hundreds of Rage comics posted daily. The fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu category alone accounts for many hours of Redditor labor poured into sharing real or imagined life situations to make people laugh or simply to make a point.

Reddit is a community of effort. The amazing comments and quality content are simply byproducts. It’s a pride thing.

Whether they want to admit it or not, Reddit was once the ultimate “hipster” site. No, it wasn’t/isn’t populated by people who wearing horn-rim glasses and skinny jeans carrying around graphic novels in their hemp knapsacks. It was hipster because it was only cool to those lucky few who knew about it. The site normally broke EVERYTHING first to the point that when people saw something for the first time on Twitter or Facebook, Redditors could say, “Oh, I saw that on Reddit last week.”

Then, Digg V4 happened. Since then, the traffic has gone up tremendously.

Quantcast reports that Reddit has jumped from around 2 million unique monthly visitors per month to over 15 million. Their numbers are normally around half of reality, so the site is likely getting over 30 million unique visitors per month.

They aren’t just quick checkups, either. According to Alexa, the pageviews per visitor are also rising steadily, peaking right now at an incredible 10+ pageviews per visit. By comparison, social offbeat news aggregator Fark hovers around 4.

How did the site become one of the top traffic sites on the internet so quickly while apparently not trying?

Digg V4 Helped

If Digg users had not heard of Reddit before V4 was launched last August, they certainly heard of it shortly after the launch. During a 4-day period at the end of August, 2010, Reddit stories owned Digg. Nearly all of the top stories during this time were actually links to Reddit submissions.

Please forgive the long screenshot below, but it’s important to understand exactly how Reddit blasted the Digg front page at this time:

While Digg’s switch to V4 had an affect, it was nothing more than a catalyst. What happened next got the ball truly rolling for Reddit.

“Holy crap, the content is great”

There were eye-opening experiences happening all over Reddit during the last months of the year. New users were finding out what old users have known for a while – the content is really THAT good. Unlike other sites where quality is often not the only factor in something going viral, on Reddit, quality is everything. It’s not guaranteed that something of high quality will make it on Reddit, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that something of low quality will be destroyed there.

The community is the most passionate out there. The demographics (discussed below) are tight and the users are everything negative about the internet: cynical, skeptical, hateful, and trollish. These traits, while annoying to much of the internet, make the site work. If a user posts something not worthy, they are told so. The story has no chance of moving up and will likely draw the original poster negative comments and ridicule.

The result of this type of community is that the stuff that makes it to the top likely deserves to be there. A Mashable story may be able to get 1000 automated tweets, but if it’s not a good story, it can easily get negative points on Reddit. “Gaming the system” is nearly impossible for spammers. Those who are able to be successful at it are eventually caught and unmasked.

“I’m just here for the comments/self posts”

For many, it’s the comments that make the site. Every day, some posts are able to get hundreds, even thousands of comments. It’s not just about the submission. Sometimes, the discussion within the comments is livelier than the original content itself.

There is a certain level of pride that goes into the comments. Reddit tracks comment “karma” that is based upon positive and negative votes received by the commenter. The best comments move to the top and the threads can be epic.

Sometimes, the best discussions don’t even need supporting content. “Self posts” are statements made or stories shared by users. Sometimes, it’s people ranting. Other times, it’s people commenting about other Redditors. These are often the most entertaining to see and truly exemplify the community.

The Tipping Point: Exposure

Whether long-time users like it or not, Reddit has hit a tipping point. More people are on the site, which means that more people are coming. As they tell their friends and relatives about the site, it will continue to grow.

The site is getting more exposure from celebrities as well. Yes, even Danny Trejo.

Here are highlights from the current US demographics according to Quantcast:

• 55% Male
• 67% 18-49 Years-Old
• 79% Caucasian
• 67% Childless
• 32% Yearly Salaries Over $100k
• 56% College Grads

The Reddit cat has come out of the bag in the last 12 months. Will the community stay strong? Will the content stay cutting-edge and pure? Will the traffic explosion continue?

The most likely answers are, “Yes, yes, and yes.”

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Read more about social media marketing on this blog or explore Automotive SEO at our sister site.

Today is my 2nd Reddit birthday. I should be happy, but I’m not. There’s something that has been bugging me for a while and realizing that I’ve been here for 2 years is a reminder that it probably won’t be resolved anytime soon.

Why in the world don’t more people know about the site? Social media is my life – I help businesses and organizations with strategies on Facebook and Twitter with the goal of teaching them that social media is more about listening than broadcasting. Some get it. Most do not.

Reddit has been my daily escape for a long time. I use it to laugh. I use it to learn. I’ve always said that if social media sites could have their average users take IQ tests, Reddit would win by double-digits. The community is robust and most of the content could be tagged “as first seen on Reddit before the rest of the social media world got their hands on it.”

Call this a rant, but how in the world do mindless sites like Facebook and Twitter that encourage dimwittedness (just made that up, spell check be damned) have hundreds of millions of users while Reddit and all its glory is a name that so few would even recognize.

Don’t get me wrong – running under the radar is part of the reason that the community is so strong. It’s definitely large enough of a site to spark conversations. Still, I sometimes think that if more people were exposed, the site could be even better and have more of an impact on society.

Some say Reddit’s strength is in being the underdog. They say that it’s more like an exclusive club that would be ruined if it were adopted by the masses. That may have been true a year ago, but I’m a firm believer that the site has the internal strength to fight off the negatives (spam, stupidity, and lack of a sense of humor) that come with mass adoption.

Reddit is growing every day. As noted today, the site has achieved a level of stability that it hasn’t seen in a long time. Should we start spreading the word more aggressively about the site? If ever a community had the power to make people listen, it’s Reddit. We simply don’t use that power very often. Would it be a bad idea to bring in the masses (ie am I wrong about mass-adoption not hurting the site)?

Flame all you want. I can take it. It’s my epic Reddit birthday and I’m never/always forever alone here.