Brass Tack Thinking - 5 Age Old Issues We Blame On Social MediaHow quickly we forget.

We seem to think that some of the struggles we’re having in the dawn of a new media era are, well, new. And they simply aren’t. We’re reacting to issues that have ebbed and flowed for decades, but they’re clad in the bright shiny coating of technology and novelty.

Here’s a bit about what I mean.

1. Snake Oil Salesman & Self-Proclaimed Gurus

There have been charlatans, scam artists, and carpetbaggers in business since the dawn of time. (There seem to be a lot of them on informercials, too). The internet makes them really easy to see and hear, so we notice them a lot more. It also makes it really easy to turn them off. But their existence? Not new. At all.

As for the businesses that are at the “mercy” of those that are shilling nothing of substance? We need encourage due diligence, and continue illustrating what great work looks like so they can spot it when it happens, and avoid it when it doesn’t. Same as we would to help a friend spot a decent realtor from a crappy one, or a good financial planner from a thinly veiled MLM dork.

The war we’re waging on the charlatans themselves isn’t going to help much. Why? Because few people would call themselves a snake oil salesman, even if they are. So what we need to focus on instead is the character and appearance of good work, and help businesses understand what that looks like so they can research for themselves. And if they aren’t willing to spend the time and effort to do the research? Caviat emptor.

2. Inflated Titles

We rage against calling people “experts”. I’ve been labeled all sorts of things, not all of them kind, some of them downright silly. But personally, I don’t give a rip what people call themselves if they can get the job done. Accolades and labels of stature are really only valuable when someone else bestows them, anyway, based on their experience.

Gurus and experts are simply perception mechanisms. They’ll be judged not based on the title on their LinkedIn bio, but for the work they deliver to earn it. We’re not tired of the words, we’re tired of the unoriginality, the saturation, the droves of people who we don’t think “deserve” those titles. But I’ve got my eyes on my own paper over here.

3. Fixation on tools

Twitter is revolutionary. Facebook is everything. Google is transformational. We probably said the same things about email, the fax, websites, the phone, hell, electricity. We obsess over the mechanism because of what it enables. It’s an icon, an artifact, of the potential we see in its use. We just don’t always communicate that very well. So we make the tool synonymous with the outcome, and stick our attention on the surface instead of in the substance.

But its our job as those that claim such righteousness in this space to (as my smart friend Ben Kunz would say) redirect the focus from the tubes, and onto the ideas that flow through them. That’s OUR job.

4. Lack of Measurement Standards

My coauthor Jay Baer did this research for our upcoming book:

Number of web pages Google finds for the following phrases:

“direct mail ROI” – 131,000
“email ROI” 55,900
“radio ROI” – 33,200
“TV ROI” – 12,600 (television roi is just 291)
“magazine ROI” – 3,150
“newspaper ROI” – 210
“billboard ROI” – 85

“social media ROI” – 796,000

We suddenly care an awful lot about measuring this new stuff when we haven’t demonstrated nearly the same urgency around measuring the rest of our work (or at least we haven’t been nearly as vocal about it). I’d be willing to wager those panicking the most over ROI are really shouting “please, help me make a business case for this in advance because I don’t understand how it’s useful and I need to convince someone with more rank and less risk tolerance than I have.” That’s a different discussion. What’s really at issue is that measuring anything in business and doing it consistently is a long-standing problem. We’re attaching this problem to social media because it’s the emergent issue of the day, not because measurement problems start and end here.

For those that DO have a measurement discipline in their organization, they’re working this out, one bit at a time, as the data becomes available and as they start connecting the dots. But they also accept that the investment and the testing based on educated hypothesis comes first, and the definitive measurement and data comes with time.

5. Paid Reviews & Endorsements

We buy sunglasses because Raquel Welch says she loves her Foster Grants. But do we vilify her for taking money to plug some shades? We read through advertorials in magazines written by obviously compensated or biased contributors. We’ve long accepted that editorial in a major publication often rides sidecar with buying advertising in that same publication. We accept free samples of stuff so we can try it out for ourselves and tell our friends. We’re a society wired to buy stuff because someone we know, trust, or otherwise view as an authority tells us to. We want help making our decisions about things and ideas, and we’ve long made peace with that.

Yet we scream bloody murder when someone takes $500 to write a blog review of a product, gets a book for free and has the gall to review it while they ooze bias, or puts their ebook up for the appalling price of $35 because “the internet should be free”. The humanity! The corruption!

What I think we’re really railing against is disclosure. It’s easy to hide on the internet. Pretend to be someone or something you’re not. What we struggle with is the potential subterfuge, not the idea that money is evil. We just want to know when it’s changing hands, so we can decide for ourselves what we think about it. I think that’s perfectly fair, but let’s aim the bullets at the right target.

Round and Round We Go…

It’s interesting to me the psychology behind some of these massive shifts in sociology, in culture, in business that we’re experiencing right now. It’s taking a lot of our preconceived notions and turning them on their head. It’s taking base assumptions we make about the world around us and challenging them at every turn. And it’s giving us yet another swing at the pinatas we haven’t been able to hit, so I think that renews our gusto for taking up the bat.

The ideas behind social media aren’t new, but the wardrobe is. And when we see a familiar face clad in all new clothes, it’s easy to mistake them for someone we never knew at all.

What I’d love is for us to slow down long enough to think a little harder about why we’re taking a swing at these things. Not in context of social media, but in context of business overall. Why do they recur? What are some of the base issues at play that we’re really trying to debate or solve? That, to me, would make for far more interesting and fruitful discussion.

Have you noticed this phenomenon? What else would you add?

image credit: Duncan~