Why Social Media Marketing is bullshit.
How we willingly drink the snake oil
Social began like Search Engine Optimisation…
It goes like this: Someone makes a new kind of system. A few clever folks realised there were rules to the popularity game it birthed. Changing rules, shifting goalposts. Rules understood by the shadows they cast. Rules, all the same. Except with social it wasn’t about PageRank and SERPs, but ‘influence’ and ‘reach’.
It had that same iffy smell of the almost-real: new acronyms, huge companies jostling for platform supremacy, marketers catapulted to ‘guru’ status on the authority of no-one other than themselves.
The blogs and tools and mini-apps to help newbies do it better cropped up, a multitude of vocal opinions appeared online, proving the best way to earn money through the system was to either:
Except, just to annoy the critics, it worked
Disclaimer: I’ve been coding and working with the net since before Google was founded. For a time — when it was possible to dramatically alter the SERPs — I sold my skills to other people on a professional basis, scoring #1 rankings on key phrases which directly translated to weird amounts of business. It worked.
In retrospect, the above feels like a guilty confession.
And therein lies the problem. When a new system like search or social comes out, you can mess with the rules. It works. The stories of it working are retold loudly. The turn into “top 10 weird tricks to…” lists.
People get excited about the method and the metrics. We learn that with social, the most shareable content is liquid, linked, informative, funny and useful enough to share.
The annoying secret, revealed
So If SEO boils down to “create a popular site” and the crux of good SMM is “create content people like”, where do we end up? What tools can we actually use to further our business, art, hopes and dreams?
It’s the same issue artists struggle with. They wonder why their efforts to get gigs, find a manager or do the Facebooks aren’t working, whilst that annoyingly talented friend one room down is kicking goals.
Apologies, but the ‘secret’ is a big fat let down. It is …Drum roll…
How boring. You could probably change ‘be brilliant at what you do’ to ‘make something people want’ and it’d still work.
Be the person your dog thinks you are
Or: Finishing an angry rant on a positive note.
Recently, a team member at one of my companies started an accelerator, which birthed this really neat subscription company that delivers boxes of treats and toys for dogs every month.
The guy behind Spottybox loves dogs. He’s also a brilliant marketer. He’s great because he’s honest and loves what he does.
A little while ago, the Spottybox guy got up at 6am on a Saturday morning, drove all morning to pick up a pair of dogs, take them to a vet and then to a shelter. They named the two dogs Spotty and Box, in thanks.
It’s a story worth telling. It’s good social media marketing, not because he set out to do ‘good marketing’ or hack the system in some way, but because he put effort into doing something people truly appreciate. He talked about it online a bit.
Social and SEO are just bits of marketing. Marketing is good communication. ‘Leveraging’ it as a system you can hack or ‘strategise’ around is crap. It’s not a way to create beautiful things.
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