Social media explained

Corey Smith on social media

The above image by Corey Smith is great. It has many variations: doughnuts, wee, or a piss-poor explanation of social media, which have been doing the rounds for years now.

This is because, when humans are presented with anything new or old, they have to categorise, classify it and wrestle it to the ground, in order to understand and manage the world around them. And, then they like to tell others how to do it properly. Sometimes these humans are wise and are leaders, they are the culture carriers of society. Other times they are not, like the two people who told me, this week, that I am doing Twitter wrong.

The main problem they have with my wrong approach is that I like to read every Tweet. What a weirdo! Consequently, I don’t follow many people because I find it hard to keep up. Also, I don’t like everything I read, so if it happens repeatedly, I unfollow the tweeters who are filling up my feed. And, normally they unfollow me. This seems to me to be a realistic approach. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Isn’t that like life?

Apparently not, according to my Twitter advisors, I am supposed to follow zillions of people and dip in and out. And there is lots of software to help me do this including the who unfollowed me app. I tried it out – apparently, @Oprah, @DalaiLama, and @DeathStarPR unfollowed me. What? They never followed me in the first place. There has never been any reciprocation of my fandom and I didn’t expect it either.

But, like all things in life, the more you do, the more you are worth. On Twitter, the more followers you have , the more you are worth, especially if you are influential, because you can turn that into money. And then the more money you have, the more you are worth until you have an epiphany and give back to society and then become truly worthy. It is all about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Writer Jennifer Werner is a social media influencer and writes brilliantly about having her influence monetised in the New York Times.

I too had an influential moment, when I reviewed the first Iphone on the eve of its launch and had loads of companies contacting me to buy up links on my page. This was 2007 when SEO was the main thing to get seen. Me being influential in that tiny window of the Iphone launch was heady stuff! Not really, the companies weren’t anyone I wanted to dilute my brand for (*guffaws*).

Last summer, I went to a day of Sharing is Caring – social media strategies at Campus London last year. It was a very interesting (and exhausting) day – full of how to advice such as:

• You have 15 minutes on twitter to build momentum.
• You have 1 hour on facebook.
• Speed is imperative.
• Try to latch onto a world event to get noticed.
• Peer to peer content is more valuable than anything else.

Everyone was furiously scribbling it down, and tweeting away on the hashtag #campuslondon. Just remembering that day, makes me want to tweet, facebook and generally rush about to get noticed. Even though I figured out a while ago that blogging is what I like to do.

One of the speakers was Malcolm Bell of Zaggora.com whose success is used by Harvard Business School as a case study in, I guess, social media success. He talked a lot about different strategies in particular using influencers like Jennifer Werner. But the thing he said which struck me the most was that:

No one has any idea how social media works.

Nobody. Not the CEOs of Facebook. Not the influencers of Twitter. No one.

And like most things which us poor humans don’t understand, we need an explanation, especially, when there are people who are making money from it. It is fascinating. Which is why there is big business in doing and being a social media strategist.

The twitter hashtags: #contentmarketing #socialmedia are full of:

• Seven ways to get more ….
• Use #contentmarketing to grow your…
• Social media explained, etc.,

But, for me this all leads back to the thing I always say in every blog about social media. Actually in every blog about anything, which is: Whether you are a big business selling a product to make money, or you are an individual wandering around the Internet cocktail party looking for good conversation, it is all the same. We all want to be heard, we all want to feel like someone is listening to our story and we all want to hear a good story.

And for those of us who want to be rich and famous, well that is just a variation of being seen and heard. Money=power, power=people listening to us. Right now, social media seems to be the latest thing to make that possible.

Sociologist Sherry Turkle, has said that there is no proper conversation on Twitter. But, I disagree. I think that there is, it’s just that I haven’t completely found the conversation of my dreams yet.

But when I do, I will let the world know, well 64 of them anyway.