People of the Internet. Think before you share.

“I still love you, I’m just disappointed.”

But please. Stop. Think about what you are doing!

I don’t think you are stupid (most of the time), you just need to stop being so lazy!

You are sharing crap online and I wish you wouldn’t do it.

Let me be clear — I love a cat GIF as much as the next man, and I totally understand the value of social media (without twitter I wouldn’t have ended up with my current day job) BUT, and here comes the important bit, the vast majority of what we post, share, like and comment on is complete and utter garbage.

At a high level social content can be broken down into a few key groups:

• Original content created and shared by users (excellent pictures of my dog for example)
• Content that brands and their agencies have created that users share because they like it or, more likely, because there is something in it for them
• Spam, malicious and deliberately misleading content

This third category is fine when everyone knows what it is and what’s going on, it’s all consensual we know that stuff is out there on the internet but we just let people get on with it as long as it doesn’t affect us.

The problem we have is when users that are trained to be lazy just click the RT / Like or Share button without reading the details (or take the required 30 seconds to sniff test the facts being presented to them).

This mistake, unintentional as it may be, causes big problems for organisations such as legitimate charities trying to compete for space to get their message out.

You don’t need to look far to see the damage that this can do, there are plenty of rogue apps out there claiming to get you more followers, tell you who has been viewing your profile and make you rich — and guess what? They don’t work, you just end up with a profile full of advertising for some fake product or service that you have never heard of, then someone sells the fake profile and makes a few dollars while you just shrug your shoulders and carry on playing Candy Crush and looking at photos of celebrities in bikinis on the Daily Mail website.

So what if I share something rubbish, it’s my timeline I’ll do what I want … right?

Wrong — That’s exactly like saying it doesn’t matter if I throw this chewing gum on the floor, someone will come along and clear it up for me. Except they don’t and before you know it the floor is stickier than a nightclub toilet.

What is ‘slacktivism’?

“The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it take satisfaction from the feeling they have contributed. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist.”

My personal definition of the term goes something like this:

“Slacktivism is a term which was coined in the late noughties to describe how idiots think they are helping causes / charities / sick babies by doing nothing but sharing badly photoshopped images with crap typography on Facebook / Twitter.”

Because we are trained by brands (and the social platforms to some extent) to blindly like / share content that appears in our feeds we just continue to do it with no regard for the legitimacy or effectiveness of our sharing. This is particularly evident in the sick babies example, with sharing posts such as “How many likes can this little guy get” requiring only sub-10 second Google Image searches to reveal that said baby has now either sadly passed away or is currently attending High School unaware that he/ she is becoming sharing fodder for those with a lower iQ than a pair of beaten up 90’s Reebok Classic trainers found on the floor at the back of a charity shop.

What do we do about it?

Luckily there are some excellent resources available for rapidly checking the genesis of such posts and linking to them on the wall of those foolish enough to share without checking is a fairly effective tactic to calm raging debates.

So called “normal” users that don’t spend their lives on the internet can stop themselves from being victim to spam / scam and slacktivist content. Sites such as Snopes and Hoax Slayer are a great resource but if in doubt just use a quick Google search. It really isn’t hard and there’s just no excuse for it.

One well publicised example forced Heineken to create the following infographic to demonstrate their innocence:

This is the damage that sharing without checking can cause. The key comment in their graphic is “Despite all our efforts, people continue to share the image”. Imagine if this was a person instead of a brand, imagine if someone spread untrue statements about you or someone you love so vile that they got attacked in the street by someone who had seen the post and not looked into it. We need to take a collective deep breath and look into the stuff we post on our walls / streams and feeds and think about how that might affect other people.

It’s important- you might think you are just one person but the power of peer-to-peer marketing is huge. In my day job we encourage peer recommendation from users who have had a positive experience with brands by making sharing easy for them.

Research we recently undertook for one of our clients showed that readers value the comment of their peers highest above celebrities, bloggers, journalists and professional reviewers. User generated content is incredibly emotive and can influence buying decisions for brands on an enormous scale. Brands wouldn’t spend the time and money they do now, perfecting their social marketing messaging if this wasn’t the case.

In summary — Apple are not giving away 1,000 iMacs because they have been opened and you can have one if you just “like” their page and you certainly aren’t going to win a new car by liking the Nigerian Prince BMW Garage (or by sending him your sort code and bank account details!!). Think before you share, and if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

Be careful out there people. Don’t be a dick.