Do you remember SEO? Some people went around “optimising” websites. Others sold courses on search engine optimisation. No, please, try to remember exactly what went on then. You were a bit vague how “those Google things” worked. So you outsourced. Something worked more or less, you didn’t get fired over low rankings. Probably because your boss didn’t understand SEO fully either.
There is a good reason why this happened. It is that nobody fully understands how Google works. It is secret, personalised, it changes often and Google spends a great amount of time and effort making sure it is difficult to reverse engineer what they do. Through it all, some of us had an attitude that is more pragmatic. I always said “if you can tweak it that easily, Google will take it into account automatically.” All those silly tags, the time wasted adding fields, alt texts and gobbledegook for what? Google does a better job at figuring out which content should be shown to who than you could even imagine. From phone usage, to browser habits, email content and million of other signals, Google’s algorithms are simply astounding. And useful. Yet still some people pay good money learning about SEO. Which brings me to the current fashion: social media training.
A whole industry has been built around teaching you “how to succeed on Instagram” or “how to promote your business on a Facebook page”. Friendly, trendy, graphic heavy sites, emailings, courses and videos with gurus full of a burning desire to help you “get ahead”. Training in technology was always a challenge methodologically. In times of rapid change such as these it is damn near impossible to stay current. Taking a “course in social media” is essentially admission of a handicap. You have no real projects to learn from, you lack the drive and bravery to put yourself out. Sure, you can’t improvise with the facebook account of a Fortune 500 company, but you sure as hell can experiment with any number of other ones. From the school committee Instagram feed to a blog about your kids’ basketball team. The cost is zero and the experimental opportunities infinite. Don’t read about it. Do it!
I started writing this article after seeing a scary directive in a pretty large corporation defining – among other things – the “correct time for Facebook posts” on their official page. This is an excellent illustration of just how stupid “social media gurus” have made people. Google it and you will find loads of scientific looking “papers” by “data scientists” claiming to have crunched millions of data points to “prove” when you get maximum traction. At first it seems clear or even “obvious”. You want to post when most people are online, more likely to see what you posted. But wait a minute. Those two statements aren’t even connected!
You want to post when most people that are interested in your message are likely to see it. Not even that. When some people which might actually react in a way that will have a beneficial impact to your brand will somehow see your social media post. The more you think about it, the more disclaimers you would need in order to even make sense of what exactly you are trying to achieve. What is your brand? Which parts of the audience do you think you will reach? What mood will they be in at one time versus another? How will Facebook’s algorithms react to your message at that time in relation to everything else going on when potential message recipients log in? There is only one way to learn and – you guessed it – that is not by going to a seminar or reading my articles. Even if you hire me to experiment and measure for your company, as I propose you do yourself, my fine conclusions will have a very limited shelf life. If anyone discovers a “silver bullet” for getting great traction in social media, by their very design, social media will have killed the opportunity in days or weeks at best.
Thinking, reading, talking to people and going to seminars are all useful idea generators. I often discover new tools from the fantastic people around me in the real and virtual world. We all need training and we all need mechanisms to make us rethink what we do. People like me should be paid vast amounts of money to help others in this noble cause. We can all improve in ways to test our hypotheses. But there is only one way to take responsibility and that is directly. Don’t hide behind management gurus for things you can quite easily test out and know yourselves. Until Facebook, Google and everyone else change the parameters that is. Which they have probably done 5-6 times in the time it took you to read this article.
My point precisely!