Social Media and You

A circus is the best metaphor for the state of social media marketing currently.

There are three rings, of course, for the Big Three platforms; endlessly entertaining feats of technical acrobatics, and the madly inventive clowns keeping us entranced. There are the marketing fillies and stallions; blogging monkeys; elephantine Amazons and Wikipedias; and spammy mice scuttling everywhere.

The circus scene boggles a kid’s mind. Interfacing with the web, we’re all kids at a circus. Many of us, much of the time, fall into P.T. Barnum’s famous ‘sucker’ classification, letting the lures and wiles of the circus substitute for true productivity.

Drilling down to what is authentically relevant and useful to your particular situation requires patience, skill, and experience.

Often people contact me wanting a blog or Facebook Business Page or website because other people have told them they should have one. But they have no idea how to use these tools; they don’t know what they don’t know about social media; and just like circus-goers, they’re reacting to the press of the crowd rather than looking out for their best interests.

Want to start up your online marketing? Get a professional to help you. Don’t run away with the circus.

Yesterday was spent in a mad scramble to fix a broken blog. When I initially installed it for my client, I had suspicions; and gosh durn it, they proved warranted when I discovered last Friday that the theme was kaput. Which meant that Saturday was devoted to blog renovation, instead of shopping and gardening. You can guess my mood as I approached the task.

Online, as in every other area of life, maintenance is foundational. A boss I had in a non-profit organization eons ago pointed out that what you need in an organization is first, a janitor; and second, a person to write the janitor’s pay check.

And today, Sunday, I spent some time refurbishing my own websites, checking links, straightening up, improving. It had been a couple of months since I’d visited them.

I’m also working on a Facebook Business Page idea, and keeping up with my personal page there, as well as Twitter, LinkedIn group discussions, and a couple forums where I like to participate.

Whew. The internet demands omniscient presence, and a humongous load of interaction, content production, responsiveness.  Not to mention simple maintenance.  It’s no cakewalk.

Yet through it all – what an  immense privilege!

I don’t profess to understand this, entirely, but I suspect it’s essential information and good guidance. Al Franken, Senator from Minnesota, urges us to protect our rights of free speech by enforcing net neutrality.

As Franken says, ” … telecommunications companies want to be able to set up a special high-speed lane just for the corporations that can pay for it. You won’t know why the internet retail behemoth loads faster than the mom-and-pop shop, but after a while you may get frustrated and do all of your shopping at the faster site.”

He concludes with, “Net neutrality may sound like a technical issue, but it’s the key to preserving the internet as we know it … ”

If this seems speculative and unlikely, consider another couple of news items from the past two days. The FBI is freaking out because their logo appears on Wikipedia.com. It’s illegal, they say, to duplicate their logo without their permission.

And then how about this story, in which the Saudis are blocking Blackberry service because it’s too permissive and could facilitate threats to reigning powers.

So, maybe it is necessary to defend our internet liberties. At least, let’s not take them for granted.

My son, who’s twenty-something and somewhat impulsive, recently ditched his Facebook account, saying he “wasn’t doing anything with it.”

In the short time I was connected to him there, I doted on his updates, of course. Pictures of my grandson,  recommended TED lectures, reports of outings and parties, comments to his posts from other family members.

He never updated much, but it was enough.

I miss him already.

Now, he’s my son, and our closeness has nothing to do with Facebook. I am using this situation as an example, however. He doesn’t know it, but seeing my son’s infrequent appearances on my News Page would make my day.

The moral of this story is that it’s advisable to think of your social media activities as objectively as possible. What you get out of online relationships is important, but always the primary reason for participating in social media is to increase trust – in you, or your business, or your ideas, or whatever. Trust is oxygen in cyberspace.

Other people come to depend on you being there. The quantity of your updates doesn’t matter at all, really, as long as we know you’re consistently there. If you go away, you disappear.

It’s been two weeks since ThoughtLead recorded The Influencer Project, but I finally had the chance to tune it in today.

Fun concept, informative even if you already know a lot about inbound marketing, and worth the 60 minutes if you are interested in brand building. Sixty thought leaders are each given 60 seconds to share their best tip on “Increasing Your Digital Influence.” Their tips for online success are varied and challenging.

While the worn-out theme of “being helpful” was dominant, there were other, more exciting and exacting viewpoints as well. The resulting collection amounts to a pile of gold.

Amongst admonishments to

• be consistent,
• develop multiple streams of influence,
• use video
• create great content,
• and focus on a niche,

there are other voices speaking of larger meanings.

One said that we used to debate, and digital influence allows us to dialog, instead. We used to compete; now we can value and admire. We used to seek to prevail; now we seek to engage.

But the coolest came from Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, who said, “self expression is the new entertainment.” Want to develop your influence digitally? Ask your peeps to express!

Hugh MacLeod gets my goat. I’ve been offended, outraged, disgusted by him more than once.

On the other hand, I subscribe to his daily email, and thrive on it with gratitude.

I guess that’s always the way with brilliance. It’s impossibly infuriating and totally enchanting at once.

MacLeod, an ‘early-adopter,’ a cartoonist, social media samurai, and marketing whiz has won the hearts and gizzards of large corporations as well as millions of minions like moi.  No sense trying to ignore him. Hugh MacLeod simply and powerfully just is, like a sudden storm or a rainbow.

I dropped his RSS feed and went away in a huff awhile ago, because all he seemed to be doing was selling me, and bragging. Egotistic bastard. But I’ll be whooped if he didn’t woo me back. Not intentionally, not just for me; but his presence was so large and artful, there was no resisting.

Hugh MacLeod gets social media, big time. You could say he embodies it. His brand is eccentric, unapologetic, driven. He passionately persists in relating, day after day. Subscribe to his daily cartoon, and you’ll understand. His artistry forces revised perceptions, with humor and compassion. He’s self-absorbed for all our benefit.

“Strive for perfection but don’t wait for it.”

(Perhaps this post  belongs on my other blog, but it’s here now, and so it goes.)

• Talking about Michael Gerber’s challenges in his E-Myth in my local networking group. Create the perfect system.
• Thinking about Valeria Maltoni’s weekly Tweetchat on Kaizen. Perfectibility as work/lifestyle.
• Loving the work I do, helping people express their brands online. And thinking how vast the field is.

I want to reject Gerber’s ideas, because they’re contrary to an artisan approach. But I know that the truth is, though he leans to the right, Gerber’s got a point. Whether you expect to incorporate your business or remain a tradesperson, your search for perfectibility is paramount. Your progress in perfectibility is the yardstick of success.

When you give things an Oriental slant, seeing work as practice in the slow patience of a belief system, the ugly edge of mechanism is softened. It’s not robotic, it’s devotional.

But really it’s the mere fact of the ‘net that forces us to work smarter, right? The vastness of it.

The reality that we have this tool for discovery of self and other that lets us envision a perfection heretofore unimaginable.

You may have encountered them: the rockstars, the early internet adopters who have attained worldwide fame. Guy Kawasaki, MenWithPens, @ pistachio, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Liz Strauss, Loic LeMeur … and maybe a couple dozen more. Not to mention luminaries like Mitch Joel, Clay Shirky, Seth Godin.

These people are exceptional, it’s sure. Their brilliance is remarkable. In every field, wherever we fixate our interest, we look for the finest, the best example, the cutting edge. To seek out, label, and celebrate the stars is human nature, and an admirable urge.

But this doesn’t diminish the reality that social media is the antithesis of star-crossed culture. Online, value is constantly shifting, and can’t be permanently placed anywhere. That which is revered today will be archival in a minute, so don’t take pride in any fleeting glory. Online, your personal glory is not the point, and if you persist in promoting it, you will fail. Online, you win trust, a commodity more precious than mere love.

A rockstar is to be adored, but not necessarily trusted. Inbound marketing and online social media are leveling, democratizing forces. They are the opposite of star-making culture.  Online, opportunity is equal; we are all rockstars.

Love, which is to say the attraction of opposites, makes the world go ’round.

I believe that is why we in the business world have at last admitted the heartful and human. Though commerce and marketing are science, the more pertinent realities of me and my business in context with my life and my world do not seem scientific at all. They seem messy in the extreme, full of surprises, never according to plan.

Technology itself, and the advent of the interactive web are also to be credited with the current multi-level trend towards humanist approaches. The early web adopters were the most brilliant among us, and they weren’t interested in promoting a purely commercial mission. They wanted to make a revolution. The social media vehicles that have resulted are the many facets and manifestations of individuals conversing, friends chatting, the Word being passed through the crowd, the nascent wisdom of the Cloud.

Social media is ‘me’n'my friends.’ But we’ve also devised this system called social media marketing, which works quite effectively despite seeming to be the opposite of social media’s strictly personal bias.

To me, this signifies evolution. It’s a developed ability to prosper through being your personal best.