Every once in a while I will run into someone who tells me Social Media sucks. Yes, I know, that is very unusual for someone to say that, but what I found out was what makes Social Media suck for many people.
Recently, I visited with a business women who had paid a very large amount of money to a large PR Firm and was provided instructions on how to market her business through what she felt very unusual and uncomfortable methods of marketing. She had been using their methods and paying to attend follow up seminars that was part of their continuing education program but after a year and half had not seen any increase in business. She asked if I could evaluate what she was doing that they told her she needed to do to market her business.
After a short examination I found what is causing problems for social media and why she felt social media sucks.
Anti-Social Media
She asked if I would be her guest to attending one of the continual education seminars she paid for as part of her PR package. I naturally agreed.
The event was organized by a group of PR, Ad Agency, Internet Marketing and (so called self proclaimed) Social Media Leaders. It was their own hug feast at a quaint country club. I’ll not mention the organization’s name or the exact location for obvious reasons. However, who and where this took place did not matter for my point deals with more of what I heard at this gathering is now being preached at these type of gatherings around the country explaining to me why there are so many lost souls online providing no value to multitudes of social networking platforms.
My host wanted me to hear what she is being told in previous gatherings. She felt what I was advising her to do for her social media strategies made more sense, but was puzzled at why this group was telling people what seemed to be a contradiction.
I understood completely what she was talking about when within the first two minutes of the lecture we were instructed to send as fast as we could at least ten Tweets, 5 LinkedIn/Facebook Status Reports and two statuses for Foursquare on our presence at this gathering. They even provided scripts up on the overhead projector for everyone to use along with a laundry list of url’s to post to sites offering their company’s specials.
As soon as that nonsense was over the lecturer started in on what my host explained to be the group’s theme. It seems this group feels in order for anyone to get value out of their time spend on any of the social networking platforms and to profit from it they need to think only of the themselves. They made the point very clear that…
“…responding to one individual’s question, remark, concern or humorous statement on on any of the social networks is a complete waste of time. All you want is for them to buy from you. You have plenty of friends here in the room. If you are wanting to socialize then socialize only with people who understand what your purpose online is..to make a bunch of money off the people online. …”
To substantiate their claims of their proposed methods of social media they paraded a panel of ,unknown to anyone outside the group, experts who spoke pontifically on what was more or less was a fine art version of Spamming. Their view of the internet and social media was very anti-social. We were provided with a workshop on how to use Facebook Fan Pages as a advertising tool only and was told over and over that responding to ‘Fans’ comments’ leads nowhere. A list was provided of instructions on how to use the Twitter apps that allow you to quickly post dozens of self promoting links to products or services.
To top off our three hours of insanity we were told in order to build our online community we needed to forget about interaction with people online since it is not profitable. We should just focus on luring people to listen by only posting “valuable information”.
Then we were provided a showcase of the people on Twitter who they felt executed their method of social media. This provided me with the only entertaining factor for this event since on they listed the few people I allow to follow me, or I am following, for who I know personally would not support any of the crap this group was shoveling out.
What Causes the Problem for Social Media
What clearly was the purpose of this gathering was for this group of old traditional PR and Ad firms to attempt to redirect people back to old methods of marketing. Coming from the environment these firms work in I know their true motivations for putting on a cavalcade of seminars/workshops promoting their method of social media. For them, the true method of marketing through social media is a huge threat. They are so heavily over invested in old technology and processes they cannot afford to change to more proven methods of marketing business today. To survive, they pump out information on what, more or less, is Anti-Social Media. Unfortunately, they have the funds to hire a lot of silver tongue devils to persuade people to write them big checks.
As I mentioned, this particular event is not the only one I have been told about. Seems there are many other factions of the PR and Ad agency world who are investing very heavily in showing small to medium size businesses how to look very bad to their consumers. Hopefully, more of the real methods of social media like connecting to only real people instead of just to hundreds of thousands of names on Twitter will prevail over some of the misguided information given out in these gatherings.
I am doing what I can to help get business people to understand that social media is about connecting to people who, if they like what you do, will connect to their people about you..and the networking then begins.
So, think about what makes sense to you.
- Does it make any business sense to use Twitter to just post links to information of no value or shot gunning dozens of lame quotes to hundreds of thousands of people who are not interested just to draw attention to your business needs?
- Does joining 50 groups on LinkedIn and then sending scripted emails to all of the members on those groups about your sale on fertilizer make any business sense?
The problem with Social Media is there are proven ways to effectively use it. This threatens the methods many large companies have spent a lot of money to support the opposite of social media.
Hopefully you can learn the difference before they get to you. Let me know how I can help.
