WHY DO YOU DO SOCIAL MEDIA

There are many reasons people join social media. There are also a number of reasons people shy away from social media. Today I am going to clear up some confusion about social media and that might either strengthen your points of view or give you pause to rethink your involvement.

Some of the most common reasons I hear for using social media are:

• I use it to stay in contact with friends and family
• I like to follow brands
• I like to snoop on celebrities
• To subscribe to thought leaders

What you do not hear as much, but you will hear, is:

• I am trying to manage my brand
• I want to become an influencer

What you never hear is:

• I have a huge fear of missing out and if I have to give away my privacy to become a commodity that the social network sells to companies and advertisers, then so be it. I’d rather not think about it.

I am mostly going to talk about the reasons you seldom hear, because they are mostly mythological goals. I am also going to pose some basic questions that you might not slow down and ask yourself.

This will not be a post about conspiracy theories and how the government is reading your feed and maps your movement and social connections. You can find plenty on that elsewhere.

Myth #1: I am trying to manage my brand

Origin: Marketing
Expression: If you aren’t a part of the conversation, then you are letting others create and manage your brand for you.
Reality: You are not a brand. And Statistically, you never will be.

In the earlier days of social media one of the most compelling arguments for getting on Facebook or Twitter was expressed in the felt need to manage the conversation around your brand. The concept was that the conversation is happening. The threat was that it is out there spinning out of control without your engaged management.

In the rumor-mill of life, it doesn’t take social media to have your reputation whispered about by people other than you. In fact, you probably had a conversation with a parent about this when you were young, and the conclusion was that you didn’t need to control that noise or pander to it, or manage it. You had better things to do with your time. Focus on the healthy relationships. Don’t spend your emotional equity the rumor-mill.

Social media doesn’t change this. If people want to find dirt on you, trust me, they will find it. Managing it is most frequently a waste of time.

Myth #2: I want to become an influencer

Origin: Marketing
Expression: As an influencer I can (be rich/be famous/move others).
Reality: In the massive majority the same factors that might win your an acting role or turn you into a supermodel are the exact same factors in play to become an influencer.

We all know there are a finite number of acting roles and supermodels in the world. This doesn’t have to be the case, but it is. And there is an entire sleazy industry of people looking to gain benefits from people who try and have not weighed their real chances or the cost. By this I mean:

• You “need” a manager
• You “need” headshots
• Your friends tell you that you are the best most creative person they know
• Everything is a potential audition. Be ready!
• and the infamous “Come on in my office and have a seat on the casting couch there.”

Let me make the message clear. The role of influencer is sold by the influencers, “come be like me! Don’t you want to be like me?” but the statistical chances of becoming an influencer is really “made” by another set of factors at its core:

• Is some aspect of your influence marketable and financially beneficial to someone such that they will ask you to review things, or promote things?
• Are you willing to mostly give away a nearly unsustainable amount of effort turning yourself into a promotional brand? (Burn-out is incredibly high for content producers who are also willing to promote other entities)

At the end of the day, being an influencer means being noticed by other brands that want to use your personal brands clout to help sell their stuff. That is what the industry is all about. We can pretend clout means something else, but clout in social media would not exist (mark my words) if there was no money in it.

Consider that Facebook and Youtube literally block your market reach (who can see your content) unless you either amass a huge army of people willing to promote you, or unless you pay for it. Let me say that again. They artificially hold your content back unless you are able to overcome their negative algorithm that works against you, or you pay them directly to promote you. Either way - it is cash money for them. You pay them - or once you amass enough views they harness that snowball and attach all sorts of adverts to it to make them money. And there are a billion reasons they can demonetize your content as well. This means if you are willing to create a nearly unsustainable amount of content to garner enough attention, then you can start taking an incredibly tiny slice of the advertising revenue (less that $0.01 per view), BUT if you do something that breaks their rules just a tiny accidental bit - then they keep advertising on your videos, but NO SLICE FOR YOU!! There is a famous story of a YouTube Guitar player who’s created video that got well over 1 million views, and while YouTube cashed in on advertising on the video, she got no slice because she made a mistake in the otherwise stellar content.

The other way to turn clout into cash is by directly promoting a brand. This is where a vendor sees that you have clout and agrees to pay you to directly promote their product in your coming content and you have to explain to people that your content is sponsored by that brand. Typically - advert slicing comes before direct promotion. You build an audience. You get more ads and a slice of the revenue. As a good content producer, the social network promotes your content in order to run more ads in front of more people - AND THEN brands reach out to you. One hill is clearly in front of the other, for most people.

So then why care about those two things?

I wouldn’t. I say that now. Like many, I once dreamed of a lot of people reading my tweets or visiting my website because I shared it on social media. The fact is - the odds are stacked against you literally, in achieving organic growth in social networks today. You have to pay for it. And if all of your friends like a tweet and one of the friends of all of your friends like your tweet too, because every one of your friends retweeted your tweet, you are still not viral amongst the noise that is social media today.

So why not just focus on the first list: friends, family, snooping

I will tell you why to be super careful here. In the case where you pay nothing and you are simply trying to engage with your friends, you don’t realize how a concept like “big data” (not to be confused with Big Tech) is basically the nosy loud-mouthed invasive nerdy Sherlock Holmes of your life. And he is so lose lipped you wouldn’t believe it. He is the quintessential rumor-mill and you are feeding him moment by moment. Let me give you an example:

1. You wake up and look at a friend’s feed in facebook before you get out of bed. They posted a picture of a new shirt they bought, and you liked it. Facebook’s image analysis as well as the tagging and comments on the picture get associated with your social map. And that map is connected to a massive amount of probabiltiy data connected to others who liked something about that shirt. Inside your social map - the data points connect with a greater degree of confidence. But it doesn’t end there, Outside your social map, others have liked that shirt too. You get slightly less affiliated data point connections to those likes as well. Imagine that the facebook mapping is drawing a picture of you. The picture just got a bit clearer, and not all of it is directly related to you. (This is a fact about how facebook maps the data points.)
2. You are ready and you head out to your car. On the way to work you stop for some coffee and snap a selfie noting how you cannot start your day until you get that dark water in you. You get on to work and check-in to your office in Facebook. Little did you know, facebook mobile has been tracking your phones movement all along. (This is a known fact. They do it through cell tower triangulation). They add your routes to your social map. They correlate that with all of the businesses you pass along the way.
3. Over lunch you go buy a sandwich and sit outside and flip through facebook marketplace. You are scrolling through lawn furniture when a friend interrupts you and you chat for ten minutes, and which point you go back to scrolling and end up heading back to work because you couldn’t find that lawn flamingo you were hoping to cross. Facebook adds the fact that you paused on the sale of a used machete for 10 minutes. This gets added to your social map as well.
4. That evening you check out a few social causes groups you are a part of on facebook. The facebook mapping engine goes wild. You are there for the cause, but facebook doesn’t care. It is one massive harvest of likes and comments and associations and images, that you posted, or others posted and you liked. The map goes deeper and deeper. Your drawing is incredibly detailed.
5. As you get ready for bed you chat with a friend on facebook. And it gets pretty personal. Someone is having relationship problems. Someone else is having an affair. Someone has cancer. Someone else has been breaking the law. But you aren’t worried about this. You haven’t done anything wrong. And isn’t facebook chat encrypted? Well, as it ends up - you never turned facebook chat encryption on because it is buried deep in the mobile and site menus. And in addition - the encryption is not end-to-end. Facebook only encrypts the traffic from you phone to facebook, and then encrypts from facebook servers to your friend. You are the one that accepted the terms of service where Facebook is allowed to read your messages. But you never read those things. And the same is true of Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and just about everything else.
6. You are fast asleep, but facebook is not. It has this incredibly detailed drawing of you and it is out selling it to whomever wants it. In fact, more than a dozen local and federal government agencies can simply have it at the snap of a finger. But facebook isn’t the only one still hard at work. There is an entirely different network… of hackers. And they are deep inside the Facebook mapping program looking at all of your pictures with a sleazy look on their faces.

And then it hits you. Nothing is free. Social Networks were made by nerds to make money. Those nerds took the very pleasant term “social” and changed it to mean “lurking at the digital stream of content from other people.” Those same nerds used to go to jail from breaking into your house and sniffing through your laundry. Now, you publish it FOR THEM. And you are their product. You are a “node” on their computer nerd network. You are the whale and all of their little computer programs creating “social maps” are leached to you like a swarm of hungry sucker fish.

My advice is: if you must be on social media, do your own research and scrape off as many of those sucker fish as you can. And some day, if you are bold enough to admit your are mostly afraid of missing out, but finally willing to admit that you aren’t really missing much - then cut bate and get the heck out of there. Those networks are getting a lot more out of you than you will ever get out of them.