From Tom Johnson’s When Social Media Becomes Hollow post, the emphasis is mine:
It’s not that I dislike Twitter or blogging or podcasting or Facebook or the infinite number of new social sites. For me, it’s the idea that social media’s only purpose is to grow your business and readership. I dislike the idea that it’s all essentially a business motive. You build trust so you can influence others and get them to follow you and subscribe to your newsletter. You engage in social media so you can increase your visibility, so people will link back to you, buy your products and services, and so you can take in more money and increase your product offerings. You engage in social media so you can expand your reach and little by little dominate the world.
When the discussion about social media revolves around this end game, I start to feel uneasy.
There are times where social media abuse reminds me of get rick quick schemes. Usually the only ones who get rich are the ones selling the schemes.
7 replies on “Social Media End Game”
Agreed, 100%.
Amen!
Whenever my friends and family come to me wanting to use social media to grow and improve their business I tell them 2 things.
1) It’s a chance to actually listen to their customers and build a relationship.
2) Don’t use it to just push content to people.
I recently heard a great quote in regards to how to find promising authors in a class of writers. It went something like:
I feel much the same about “social media” and intent. If you ask the person why they want to create social media and the response is “because I want to be famous/make sales/control the conversation” they might be successful but not remarkable. It’s the people that say they want to create social media because they “love how it works” that have the potential for creating amazing experiences worthy of referring others to.
Perhaps it should be likened to the telephone. It’s communications tool, but shouldn’t be used to annoy your customers at home ever 3.2 minutes.
I agree that intent plays a big part of this, but it’s also very hard to measure. I suppose this is a case of where actions speak louder than words.
Word.
It takes all kinds but I’m wary of these “social media maven” types. I still use Twitter, for example, to engage in real conversation with real people, without selling myself or my blog.
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Brie
I’ve found Twitter to be virtually useless to cary on conversations. If I find something in Twitter that I’d like to talk about I point people to some other medium that actually works for conversations (email, IRC, blog, etc.). One area that I think Twitter really shines is discovery. Being able to search tweets helps find out what people are saying.