Followers, Friends, and Likes. Oh My!! Engagement is a Social Lie.

via And Now, I Unfollow Thee – The New York Times

Take it all “with a grain of salt…”

More help for the Nverts. TechWite dashes another social myth!

The brilliant analysts of Wall Street, looking for better ways to blow more air into the bubble of Social media believe that “engagement” is everything. But what is it?

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“Engagement*” – Catch word for ‘user involvement’ –  the popularity of your web site, application, social feed, page, etc. “Engagement” supersedes “eyeballs”: the number of people who looked at a page. Engagement sounds more scientific, and is therefore more useful to analysts, stock brokers, and journalists in declaring the success or failure of an online campaign, and especially in applying a monetary value and potential for advertising revenue. But unfortunately, there is no standard “measure” of engagement. Is it: How many members have signed up? “Daily Views” of a page, or video? **  How many times they ‘click’ from one page to an advertisement? How many “likes” they post for your business on Facebook? How many “friends”, how many “followers”, how many? How many? And how many of those are even real???

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Wake up world. This is all vapor. Not even the kind of vapor you can inhale.

Today’s lesson is easy: Whatever anyone tells you about the popularity and massive use of a site, page, or “social network” is probably not (I’m being kind here…) exactly what is going on. Review your own experience with social. You are a VALID user. Your experience is probably not much different than anyone else’s. Think about it:

• Facebook—In spite of the many ads you can now find all over “your” Facebook, how many times have you ever actually used one of those ads to make a purchase? Have you? Tell me!
• YouTube, Web Pages, and elsewhere—The pop-up ad on the web page, do you want to see it? Or skip it?
• Twitter—Poor Twitter. I like Twitter. Do you choose to read Tweets that Twitter inserts in your feed? Do you have any idea where they come from? Can you really keep up with the tweets of the 50 Twitter feeds you follow? 150? 500? Do you think those people who claim to follow over a thousand other Twitter feeds ever even LOOK at the tweets?? How do you feel about being followed by all those robots and porn sites?
• Instagram – More robots and porn sites. More opportunities to buy followers.
• Followers – That’s right, you want to have a popular Twitter feed or Instagram?? Buy yourself 10,000 followers. Or more. It doesn’t cost that much.*** We are really talking about a hall of mirrors here.

You can read more about it using the links below. I won’t waste more words. I want to get off my computer now because I have a real book I am reading. One made with paper. Seriously. So, because it means nothing:

• Don’t follow me on Twitter!
• Don’t like my Facebook page!
• Don’t follow me on Instagram!

Peace Out,

—TW 

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(Links below open in a new window.)

*Engagement (Rate)
Trackmaven – Engagement Rate is a metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of created content is receiving from an audience. It shows how much people interact with the content. Factors that influence engagement rate include users’ comments, shares, and likes. <http://trackmaven.com/marketing-dictionary/engagement-rate/>

“4 Instagram Analytics Tools for Your Business”, HootSuite, <https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-analytics-tools-business/>

**Daily Views
“Snapchat Video Traffic Has Caught Up With Facebook”, Fortune <http://fortune.com/2016/03/01/snapchat-facebook-video-views-2/>

“Facebook Daily Views get New Metrics”, International Business Times <http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-inc-fb-daily-video-views-get-new-metrics-publishers-2342825>

***Buy Followers:
“Big Business: Buying Fake Instagram Followers”, Huffington Post,<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shayla-r-price/big-business-buying-fake_b_6322362.html>

Call me Ishmael. Call them Nverts.

They used to call it the “blog-o-sphere”—the world of bloggers. As blogs became less fashionable and Tweeting became all the rage, “Twitter-sphere” became “Twitter-verse”. (Because a Universe is BIGGER than a sphere, or planet, get it?)

Then it was “Facebook”, the number one tip-top destination, yea, the very Paris of the Internet. What do you call that?  “Facebook” obviously. To many people, Facebook is the Internet. (But, by the way, as India proved recently to Mark Zuckerberg, it’s not.) Are the unwashed Facebook masses the “Facebook-ians”? “Bookees?” “Fakers?” No matter. Today, I want to identify the un-brainwashed masses, the unfettered few, the unsavvy, who don’t know, and maybe don’t care about all that social stuff, and who, in this wacky, world wide web may get misled or tripped up by their blissful ignorance.

You know who “they” are, you might even be one of them. And heavens, “they” represent a whole spectrum of experience: Folks who founded the Internet, who pioneered it using America OnLine or CompuServe, yet they don’t know a Snapchat from a Tinder. Face it, at the speed of tech, even the savviest of ellipticals probably aren’t familiar with the most current and hippest of apps, whatever those may be this week! So there are plenty of people out there who don’t know one thing or another about “social”, and I want to help.

But first what are “they” called? How to refer to the innocents in this overwhelming and over-rated world of Social Media? The collective mass of humanity not hip to “social”. Is there a name for what Apple’s marketing used to call, “The Rest of Us?”

“Newb” suggests they are “new” to Social, but are joining the herd. Not what we are looking for.

“Social Media Luddite” has been used—way too judgmental.

Call them nverts! First we identify their “place” as “the Nverse”. This is short for “Non-Social Universe”—”Nsphere” sounds pretty good too, but face it, a UNIVERSE is bigger than a SPHERE, and we need a lot of room. (And in this crazy, mixed up world, nothing is original. If you Google, you’ll find #Nverse, meaning, who-knows-what? Some kind of reference to a Math equation? We don’t care.) Oviously the denizens of the Nverse are Nverts—like Non-Social Internet Introverts, they turn away  from the social Internet. It’s not perfect. How many people know what a phub is anyway? A lot of research and effort went into creating that word. Nvert. If you have a better name for Nhabitants of the Nverse, tell me!

But why am I doing this? What’s my point? Here. I read this on a web site recently:

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“Currently, we have about 70,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter.  That’s 70,000 people that we can learn from and service on a daily basis.”*

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Uh, no. Seriously. No, you can’t. Nverts, awaken! NO, THEY CAN’T LEARN FROM AND SERVICE Seventy Thousand of them ON A DAILY BASIS.

There is a certain naïveté, a hubris in that statement. The world has not changed that much. A small company, well-staffed by super-smart well-parented and motivated and energetic staff, may “learn from, and service” some of their customers who “follow them” on Facebook and Twitter. But 70,000? Uh uh.

I have a Twitter feed, I use Instagram, I write a blog. It’s “reality check” time for the Nverse.

—TechWite

P.S. Happy Tenth Birthday Twitter!!

*I’m not going to follow good journalistic practice and tell you where I got this quote because I don’t want to drive more traffic to their site. They may implode with information!

Dear #Millennials, The “Z’s” are coming. 😱

 

Dear Millennial, you are aging. 

No, I’m not talking about this GREY HAIR THING. Stop a minute, put down the phone, fingers off please, now listen to me. YOU ARE AGING. By most definitions you joined us on this planet as early as 1982. That means the oldest amongst you are approaching their mid-thirties. Many are easily within 10 years of the age of 40. Mark Zuckerberg, the icon of your generation, will be thirty-two in 2016. Sorry. I know you were busy texting and trying to get corporations to understand how to hire and retain you, and you didn’t see it coming, but it’s true. You are aging. In fact, you are not even “the new generation” anymore. Corporate Human Resources departments are already trying to figure out how to recruit and retain the next generation. Not you. I’m talking about “Generation Z”.

Got that? Take a deep breath. It will be okay. I’d like to offer some advice for what to expect, and how to move forward as the universe pulls away from you as its center.

First, although many of you hate the term “millennial”, by now you should be used to it.
I know,  “Gen Y”—being just an iteration in a series—was not as cool as it was for your predecessors. They got “Generation X“. You got “Generation Y”. They got to affiliate themselves with the “X Files” and “X Box“, and even, “OS X“. They gave you the “Y”, and then they changed it to the “M” word. “Millennial”. Jeez. For you gals and guys, someone might confuse your generational nom de plume with “Perrennial”, or “Centennial”, but not much else, and neither of those mean much. A flower that comes up every year? Okay. But  certainly “Millennial” isn’t as bad as being called a “Boomer” or even: “Baby Boomer“! What does that bring to mind? So PUH-LEASE, it could be worse; stop whining about what people call you and get over it.

Next, be prepared for the marginalization of the systems that you have created and used, whatever they are, and no matter how well they work. “Change for the sake of change” is the byword here; that’s what generations do. Can you remember these favorite Boomer tools that are now nearly non-existent?

• “paper”
• “book”
• “telephone”
• “pencil”
• “calculator”

A similar fate may fall upon the favorite tools of you and your cohorts. Be prepared!

Keep your ears open for the “big proclamations” about change that come from the media and corporate CEO offices. These will affect you. There are precedents. Look backwards. Forty years ago futurologists told the Boomers, “Paper is obsolete. We are going to the paperless office. Nobody will print anything!”. They said this every year for years. “This is the year we see the paperless office!” It was a joke. No Boomer believed it. But here’s why you should be wary: “The Paperless Office” wasn’t about getting rid of paper, it was about getting rid of Boomers! The Boomers became complaisant. And what happened? Filing cabinets disappeared. Giant shredders materialized in hallways. In the midst of this melee, jobs were outsourced. And the final blow, Boomers were bushwacked by “the Cloud”.

Today the futurologists say—as if telling Millennials what they want to hear—”Email is obsolete, email is going away. People don’t need email. The ‘M’s’ communicate with texting. (‘Snapchat’, ‘Facebook’, ‘Tinder’, ‘Slack’—fill in the name your favorite social media app that the Big Heads don’t use, and don’t understand)”. Who cares about email? You don’t use it. But getting rid of email clears the queue to put your technology on the guillotine. What do you suppose will go next, when the “Z’s” take over?

You “M’s” are big on “the Open Office”—no walls, lots of collaborative open space. Want privacy? Use headphones. And there’s the whole “remote work”, “working offsite” thing, which really means, “working from home”.  I wonder what will happen with that? I’m guessing next it will be the “office-less office”. Maybe it’s the texting apps? You tell me. Expect things to be dashed to pieces and cast aside as “old fashioned”—certainly “not as good” as whatever the “Z’s” come up with. Oh, and hang on, you won’t like this next one.

In the workplace, expect the senior people in the company to lavish great praise, and without actually comprehending it, to marvel at the creativity of the new changes that the next generation has brought forth, even if those changs have no practical business use. They’ll fall all over themselves trying to figure out how to get their old lumbering organization to look attractive to this new group of people. To anyone looking at this objectively, the obsequious nature of their actions appears pathetically desperate and says more about the incompetence of their leadership and the inability of their organization to innovate than it does about a new generation in the workplace. You might see really weird things happen, like the whole giant corporation change its branding to something that is just weird. Or the IT department may abruptly switch platforms, forcing the whole workforce to change how they work, because the CIO attended some conference where the “technology of the new generation” was discussed.

You may begin to feel marginalized in the workplace. At first, this might seem like your ideas are just not getting the respect they deserve. You have to work harder, or fight harder, to get your colleagues or managers to do what you know—because you are smart, and from your years of experience—to be the right thing. But when you begin to feel that you are being humored or ignored, take a breath. Pause. Evaluate. When it seems that your creativity and experience are no longer valued, perhaps even mocked, then it’s time to step back and appreciate your excellent Benefits package and consider your options. If the company begins to have “town meetings” about “change management”, and suggests that you all read, the latest faddish management book for companies in transition, then move quickly, because you will probably not be there long enough to retire.

Focus on what is important. In your home life, with your children, hopefully you realize by now that not everyone on the soccer team deserves a trophy. (Probably least of all, the coach.) There are those who are better than others at some things ,and there are those who rise to the situation, and there are those who just do the work and get it done and they’re all valuable. They all make worthwhile contributions, and if they are your children you appreciate and love them no matter what. With that in mind, step out of the way, and move on gracefully, and hopefully to something better. But, like it or not, now it’s someone else’s turn.

—TechWite