Social Media is an amazing tool and new opportunity.
It is also a massive problem.
Too much social media marketing and social media content is jointly to blame. It is using business and personal social media for unintended purposes.
This post is about confronting the real reasons why social media is as much of the problem as it is the solution.
For simplicity, all of the uses of social media that are not personal, are collectively defined here as “social media marketing.”
Let’s look at the problem, then how to solve it.
The Social Media Problem
Anyone who has met me, read my blog, followed me online, or spent even five minutes talking to me, understands that I’m mostly a person of optimism.
Yet, for the last few years, forming the words necessary to explain how I feel about social media has been difficult.
I understand what social media can do.
I’ve seen the way it can shape the world.
I’ve felt and experienced the power it gives all of us. Whether through our personal relationships, our work, or even the way we engage with public figures and brands.
Yet despite my optimism and first-hand experience, something has been wrong together with social media.
In order to tackle this problem, we need to identify and confront the underlying problems.
1: Promotion
When used thoughtfully and carefully, social media is a wonderful business communications channel. It is one of the best ways to reach current and prospective customers.
However, when it is used in a way that is aimless, thoughtless and careless, it produces a lot of unpleasant side effects including:
- Brand and consumer fatigue
- Sensory overload
- Bandwidth congestion
This is what happens when we allow poor strategies to guide all of social media.
There is too much irrelevant, self-indulgent garbage, being aimed at the wrong people, in the wrong context, at the wrong time.
Just because you can post something, doesn’t mean you should.
What bothers me is that too many brands, and people, post to fill a content calendar. Hapless Community Managers post because that is what they get paid to do. Everyone is posting because that is what all of the digital marketing people told people to do.
The incentive to post, and to post as often as possible, so long as it helps surface your content in the news feed, for the benefit of the brand, further damages the experience users are having across every single platform.
There are posts being made to satisfy the need to post, but not your needs as an actual human being who doesn’t work for the company doing the posting.
You don’t see nearly enough thoughtfulness and empathy for how people really use social media. You don’t often see a focus on helping people navigate through their busy and complex digital networks.
And you do not often see a proper mix of posts that will adequately meet the needs of the real people you are posting to.
Instead, we get more of this…
“who wants to buy something today?”
…just in more subtle or clever language.
This leads to the second problem.
2: Hype
Though we are connected to hundreds, or perhaps thousands of people, and exposed to thousands of companies and brands, we are only exposed to some of their lives, or some of their stories.
We are constantly being fed an overwhelming supply of curated posts, with the most exciting and glamorous moments of people’s lives, and the most exciting and glamorous cases of customer or organizational success.
So, we plug into a limitless number of private curated newsletters disguised as public newsfeeds, to consume the most interesting things from our friends, celebrities, and brands. Needless to say, we are no longer living in reality.
The problem with this is that it distorts our perception of what is real.
Posts of this nature ignore the day-to-day struggles, and bypass the mundane. These posts are often designed to elicit a reaction, and are not accidental or unplanned.
Much of what we see in our newsfeeds is glamour and glitz, ultra glamorized, and wildly unrealistic.
In this distorted reflection of reality, we are drawn to the spectacle, our attention hijacked by extraordinary stories that re-write the narrative of normal human behavior.
And because those posts are prioritized by the machines trained to hold our attention, and to show the “most engaging” content first, we never see the other 99% of reality.
This draws us further down the rabbit hole.
The more we see these feeds, the less we see the mundane real world that surrounds us.
What remains once we turn off the tool, is the nagging feeling that everything we have, do, and are, is totally insufficient.
3: Noise
The excitement of the novelty, the potential of this new online world connected by platforms, and the relatively radical shifts in communication and connectivity, had us all blindly running into the frenzy of a new digital world.
Along we way, we managed to make some big mistakes in the way we’ve been working, using and thinking about these tools.
We have erred along the way.
We’ve made miscalculations about the way we promote.
We’ve gotten wrapped up in the excitement of hype.
And, we’ve turned a social world of potential knowledge and collaboration, into a world of noise.
We’ve thrown together a stream of content without a single care for whether or not people want it now, or ever.
The social media machine is still in its relative infancy, and it has a long way to go before the outputs will be as impressive as the potential suggests it can be.
Currently, the most taxing problem we have, with no adequate solution in sight, is the never-ending stream of noise.
I’ve been writing and talking about this problem for years.
We look for “hacks” but point to lack of time and increased competition as the source of this problem. We are looking in the wrong place.
The problem is that there are no parameters for quality. There is no minimum standard. No amount of noise is too much.
We lack an adequate process for filtering signal from noise.
Consequently, we don’t have the right view of social media when we evaluate how to to use it.
Social Media, Properly Understood
People in business too often view social media as “just another thing we need to do for marketing.”
Because of this oversimplification, it has been lumped into the promotion"}},{
