It wasted our time

I’m not saying social media delivers no benefit. Fun can be had, opinions shared, friendships formed, contacts made, business won. But most social media is like the first pint out of the barrel: 95% froth. For every useful or gratifying transaction, we have to wade through acres of footling irrelevance – other people’s, and our own.

There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about this in business circles. No one talks about how many hours they’ve sunk into social media, as if those thousands of Tweets and replies somehow didn’t take hours to think up and type.

I can only presume that the employers of some of my Twitter friends deployed a similar doublethink when they drafted their social media policy. Or maybe they’ve decided that legislating against social is like Canute ordering back the waves. Either way, I guess they’ve decided to disregard the many hours that their people spend on marginally relevant Tweeting in work time.

The truth is that social media is a formidable time-sink, delivering questionable returns on the hours we put in. Just ask yourself: does your social media time seem well spent? Do you feel you’re investing your time, or frittering it away?

It spoilt us

Social media brings the rolling, never-ending format of modern current-affairs TV to written media, presenting us with a stream of links to fascinating posts and pages from which we can pick and choose.

Sadly, as Thomas Paine noted, ‘that which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly’. When it comes to it, none of those writings are actually quite interesting enough to read to the end, or perhaps even click on in the first place.

When you look at our passive, lazy consumption of digital media, the term ‘feed’ seems completely apt. The more delicacies are laid on our table, the less grateful we become.

It humiliated us

Social media pulled a major bait-and-switch on us. First it kidded us that we were worthwhile. Then it rubbed our faces in our own inadequacy.

The very format of social sites, based around personal ‘updates’, made us feel that every detail of our lives was worth sharing. Social media gave us a new layer of self-consciousness: the restless search for something we can share.

Before long, we were casting about for things to post or Tweet that would make us look interesting or cool. But when we posted, we quickly saw that there was always someone cooler and more interesting out there.

I used to think I was quite funny. Now I’m getting ground down by the way Twitter has the perfect smartass comeback for absolutely every life situation, news story and cultural event. In the same way, dauntingly intelligent comments on news sites are eroding my ability to form opinions on current events. Forced onto a global stage, the ego withers like an old sprig of parsley.

It made us needy

Phil suddenly realised there was no wi-fi at the hotel. How would everyone find out what he thought about The Apprentice?

Humans are naturally social animals, and have always craved the affection, recognition and respect of peer groups. But social media straps a rocket to that instinct – and not in a good way. It allows us to build networks far larger than anything we could maintain in the real world, and cram far more interactions into our daily lives than would otherwise be physically possible.

This has two results. One is dilution of experience, as the ‘currency’ of interaction is debased. As Umair Haque argues in this brilliant article, social media is characterised by ‘thin relationships’ conducted via ‘low-quality connections – linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships’.

The other result is addiction. As our interactions are watered down, we need more of them to get the same hit. Social media use becomes a psychological crutch, just like using nicotine, alcohol or caffeine. Checking our @ replies, counting followers or retweets, checking Facebook updates – all easily become compulsions. And all the more so because they’re so easy and convenient to carry out – with a smartphone, the means of addiction is always to hand.

The acquisition and comparison of numbers and totals (followers, friends, RTs) adds an extra edge of digital materialism. Who’s got the most?

Most users would admit to some level of addiction to social media. Recently, Ofcom found that 60% of teenagers admit to being ‘highly addicted’ to their smartphones, primarily due to Facebook use. And we’re still talking about services that offer only the most basic means of interaction – posting messages, replying, sharing and tagging photos. Tomorrow’s social media will be to Twitter and Facebook as heroin is to cannabis.

It wound us up

Social media gets us all steamed up by exposing us to two kinds of opinions: those we like, and those we don’t.

Confirmation bias means we tend to build networks of people we agree with – single-issue Facebook pages being a prime example. Frequenting such networks validates and entrenches our opinions, as we see the same views expressed over and over again.

In some contexts, extreme views are inflamed as people incite each other to go one step further and say the unsayable. We saw this most recently with the response to the UK riots, as Twitter users whipped up each others’ desire to see brute force used against citizens, more to gain revenge rather than to restore order. At heart, the mass hysteria of the commenters wasn’t so different from that of the rioters – it just wasn’t expressed physically.

If we do find an opinion we disagree with, chances are we will have the opportunity to respond to it online, which draws many of us into that blind, righteous anger that characterises so many online comments and reactions. The more we read, the more extreme our views get – the phenomenon known as attitude polarisation, which forms the basis for Godwin’s law.

Discussion and disagreement are part of life. But the nature of social media – anonymous, hard to stand out – turns the volume up to 11 on everything. Instead of chatting with a few friends round a pub table, we’re deluged with an infinite digital cascade of industrial-strength opinion. Unable to digest it, we’re left with an unhealthy residue of acid emotions – coupled with a weird alienating distance from our digital interlocutors.

It shattered our attention

Zen teaches that concentrated mindfulness of the here and now is the way to enlightenment. Truth is not somewhere else, but can be found in the sights, sounds and people that are present, right now.

Social media delivers the exact opposite, diffusing and fragmenting our attention over a multitude of ‘somewhere elses’.

The next time you walk out on a beautiful sunny morning, check out how many people are scurrying along hunched over their phones. Or observe the couples having lunch, each with a phone on hand for that side order of interaction to complete their meal. What did we do before we had these crutches? Did we just walk when we were walking, and talk when we were talking, and think when we were thinking?

It hardly matters, because there’s no going back. We’re never alone – and even when we’re with someone, we’re always with someone else too.

The idea of getting a second helping of social is apt, because digital media has become rather like food for us. It’s not hard for us to get as much as we need, or find whatever we want. It’s about choosing what, when and how much is healthy for us to consume.

It’s not too late. Social media is still young. But pretty soon, we’re going to need to stop obsessing over what all the great things we could do, and start thinking about the better things we should.

Having indexed everything ever written, Google has taken the logical next step and introduced Google Life, its technology for scanning our thoughts, memories and dreams.

‘Google is great for finding out who played bass in Showaddywaddy, how many pounds there are in a monkey or Inspector Morse’s first name,’ notes Mark Snips of Google. ‘But, until recently, it was no help with finding your car key, remembering the name of your niece or putting a name to that restaurant in Madrid you really liked.’

Now, people who find Bing by Googling ‘bing’ can bring the same staggering laziness to their own thought processes.

‘Many Google users are frustrated that they can’t Google the contents of their homes, lives or brains,’ says Mark. ‘They don’t see why they should have to memorise personal facts when they haven’t had to remember anything about the real world for over ten years. And that’s the next frontier of development for us.’

Telepath poles

Some observers feared that the mind-scraping indexation process might be intrusive, or even painful. In fact, no surgery or physical intervention is required.

Instead, Google will be installing 100m-high antennae at intervals of 10–20m in all residential areas. The poles emit a muted hum, a cheery green glow and a low level of non-fatal radiation. Each one bears a humorous variation on the Google logo. The company hopes that the so-called ‘mind-masts’ will occupy the same place in the UK national psyche as old village signs, or red telephone boxes.

‘Brain-spidering’ occurs once an hour and is detectable only by a slight tingling sensation around the base of the skull. Users may also experience some hallucinatory phenomena, anecdotally compared to the sense of life flashing before one’s eyes. ‘It’s really no worse than an acid flashback, or a mild psychotic episode,’ says Mark Snips.

Share your thoughts

Having been scanned, the raw mental data is transmitted to Google’s processing centre. ‘Obviously, we need a way to separate the wheat from the chaff,’ says Mark. ‘For example, although Twitter users might disagree, you probably don’t need an online record of every shave, cup of tea or visit to the loo you’ve ever had. But at the same time, some of those everyday experiences might have sentimental value. So we’ve developed a proprietary algorithm to rank memories based on how many times they’ve been recalled, and with what emotional intensity.’

A Google 'mind-mast' in a residential area

Once prioritised and encoded, your favourite holidays, proudest work achievements and most exciting romantic encounters can all be viewed online. Users can comment on and rate your memories and dreams, or share them through social-media networks.

Mind contents are made public by default, although users can opt to restrict access through a simple system of 57 privacy options. ‘In 2010, Facebook showed that people don’t really care how their most intimate secrets are being shared with billions of strangers,’ observes Mark. ‘And that means we can leverage these mental assets commercially, through a range of channels.’

Taste the future

To kickstart the development of so-called ‘head-apps’, Google plans to make brainscan data available via an API. ‘Once your brain’s IP address is paired with that of your browsing device, the potential is incredible,’ enthuses Mark Snips. ‘For example, a takeaway ordering site like Just-Eat would be able to offer you a menu tailored to your past eating patterns, current mood and available gastric capacity – even if you’d never visited the site before. It’s a real game-changer, bringing the functionality of the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser within the reach of every website.’

However, interpreting the raw data is likely to prove challenging. ‘It can be a problem filtering out all those thoughts that aren’t relevant to the task at hand,’ admits Mark. ‘But even that opens up immense potential for interruptive marketing attuned to what people are really thinking about. The owners of adult and shoe-retailing sites are very excited.’

Fantasies and hopes about the future are also indexed, so women going on dates can Google their suitor and discover exactly how he’s hoping the night will end. ‘You can also liven up boring meetings by checking what your colleagues are thinking about you on your iPhone,’ Mark explains. ‘It brings a whole new edge to performance appraisals.’

Infernal desire machines

However, past thoughts can only offer so much insight. The next stage of Google Life development is Data-driven Desire Prediction, or DDP. ‘Using thiotimoline batteries hooked up to our servers, we can now deliver search results before the user has even decided what they need at a conscious level,’ reveals Mark. ‘Holiday tickets, DVDs and new clothes will simply arrive, unbidden, at the exact second you first realise you want them. And with the installation of a special code snippet in your brain, you can even learn the exact time and circumstances of your own death – then post it on Facebook.

‘It’s a truly inspiring vision of the future,’ reflects Mark. ‘Nothing, anywhere, will be just your own – ever again.’

What actually happened? First, Gap launched their new logo. It had some text and a blue box, rather like the old one.

Then, some people went on Twitter and Facebook to talk about it – negatively. Since those channels are rich in chippy design and marketing professionals, including many who weren’t asked to work on the Gap logo, their views were expressed in a vivid, trenchant and (some would say) melodramatic way. And many others were swayed by their eloquence and moved to agree with them.

Bandwagon mentality

Soon, the bandwagon gathered pace – just as the bandwagon cricitising @brumplum for saying Stephen Fry was boring did. It’s easy to retweet – easier than deciding for yourself whether a logo is any good. Twitter has the power to generate torrents of ‘me too’ sentiment, for both good causes and bad. Honestly, did all those who turned their avatar green really care about Iran before their friends tweeted about it?

Did ‘everyone’ hate the Gap logo? No, they didn’t. A vocal minority did, and their views carried all before them. Reason and balance were forgotten; the mob was on the march. But I’m sure many people quite liked the logo, or were indifferent – they either didn’t bother to express an opinion, or their views were lost in the stampede because they weren’t as much fun as poking fun at Gap. Or, of course, they were unaware of the whole affair because their world didn’t revolve around social media.

Social media vs the real world

Social media is not the world. It’s not even a microcosm of the world. It represents the views of a particular section of society – mostly young, tech-savvy, opinionated. For some brands – possibly including Gap – social media may be a good window on real-world opinion. For others, it would provide a hopelessly skewed picture, because most people who matter simply aren’t active in the channel. But social media is very fast to react, and it shouts very loudly, and it gets reported, and marketing professionals talk about it a lot. So it’s hard for people, particularly marketers, to ignore it.

My point is that this wasn’t a New Coke moment for Gap. People weren’t deserting their shops, or throwing their clothes away. They were just slagging off their logo.

Gap responds

However, for better or worse, Gap decided they had to act on all this feedback. So, in a coup hailed by social-media experts as a triumph, they set up a Facebook page asking for new logo ideas.

Here’s the text that introduces the page:

Thanks for everyone’s input on the new logo! We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years, and this is just one of the things we’re changing. We know this logo created a lot of buzz and we’re thrilled to see passionate debates unfolding! So much so we’re asking you to share your designs. We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas. Stay tuned for details in the next few days on this crowd sourcing project.

Presumably, Gap were advised (by social media experts) that the answer to their social-media problem was more social media. Hence this initiative and the wretchedly upbeat, chirpy tone. It’s like buying a Fanta for someone who’s just punched you in the face.

Show some steel

The key sentence is the pitifully bet-hedging ‘We love our version, but we’d like to see other ideas’.

No, Gap. No. That way madness lies.

If you take a decision to update an iconic brand that’s been around for decades, and which nobody (as far as I know) thought was broken, you’re going to get some flak. You’re going to need the courage of your convictions, if you believe you’re right. And you’re going to have to show some steel in backing the ideas of the (presumably very expensive) agency you asked to update your brand.

Crowded out

The most perplexing clients I work with are those who pay me to write something, then rewrite it themselves before they use it. I can only presume that Gap’s agency are feeling similarly mystified. Having spent many hours producing their best solution for Gap, they’ve seen it chucked out in favour of whatever anyone else can come up with. Why buy a dog and bark yourself – and why pay for expert advice only to throw it away?

There are so many questions. Why pay for experts if amateurs can do better? Why not do crowdsourcing first, if it’s so great? Do Gap endorse working on spec? How will they decide that the new version is better, having already decided to launch their agency’s logo? How will Gap pay for it, if at all? How will they justify the wasted money on the old logo? Will the old logo be discarded and suppressed, even though Gap avowedly ‘love’ it? How will it be described, having been loved and then unloved? What if people flame the new logo as well, perpetuating the whole sorry tale? And will any agency ever want to work for Gap again?

The simple truth is that Gap shouldn’t be caving in to the social-media mob. As Henry Ford said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said “faster horses”’. For the most visionary entrepreneurs and marketers, there’s no ‘but’ after ‘We love our version’. They go with their gut, for better or worse. One person’s inspiration and commitment is better than the crowd’s throwaway, half-formed, nothing-to-lose ideas.

It would have taken a tough company to weather the storm. But that stance would surely get more respect from consumers than cravenly asking them what they might like, in response to feedback that’s probably not even representative.

Personally, I welcome it. At least we know they’re human. What’s the alternative? Everyone loves to flame the failures, but would we really be happier with a smoothly oiled PR machine, trotting out relentlessly positive, shallow responses to critical tweets, like a politician?

Although social media has a diverse user base, there’s a recognisable ‘SM personality’ that seems to predominate: young (or young at heart); generally positive; informal; chirpy (bordering on facetious); marketing and new media literate. When people berate companies for having the ‘wrong’ social media voice, they usually mean that the company in question has taken a tone that’s too far from this norm. But if your firm’s true ‘personality’ doesn’t conform, should you affect a different tone of voice to fit in?

Many firms have struggled to find their voice in social media. Some have rather stiffly adopted it as a purely ‘push’ channel, conducting a monologue rather than a dialogue. Some, like Habitat, have been hauled over the coals for underhand techniques. And some, like ASOS, are blessed with enough photogenic, web-savvy, Twitter-literate staff to give them all usernames and let them loose (see @ASOS_Amy, @ASOS_Nat and others).

A while ago, I blogged on the topic of honesty in marketing: the idea that by promoting a message that accurately reflects what the organisation is really like, we can be more congruent, more confident and (I believe) more effective in terms of reaching new customers. So why shouldn’t firms’ negative character traits come through in their social media? It may not fit the rigid stereotype of ‘engagement’, but perhaps it’s more honest in the deepest sense.

In my opinion, one of the key areas of concern within SEO circles is the enormous amount of SEO fodder that is being pumped into the internet to influence search rankings.

This doesn’t seem to be stopping either, with new services being launched to “rewrite” vast amounts of articles and distribute them online becoming almost mainstream.

At SES London recently the content was described as “not Pulitzer-prize winning”. I would go as far to say that a great deal of it is complete and utter crap that does nothing to build a client’s brand or reputation.

Now while I don’t believe that all of these articles currently hold the same value within Google’s algorithm, I do think their search quality team will attempt to address this problem as quickly as they can. The main question, though, is how.

My gut feeling is that they will use a social footprint to establish whether or not to count the link love to the destination website. They already have deals with Twitter and Facebook to crawl their posts in near-real time, and with these two platforms being two of the primary sources of content sharing at the moment it gives Google a fairly accurate picture.

Google will obviously have to address Twitter spam, which seems to be rife at the best of times. Given their early attempts at real-time search, they clearly don’t have a handle on how to measure social influence accurately, but these are early days after all.

Which brings me round to Buzz. Despite the obvious privacy issues, Google has placed a lot of resource into Buzz and this shows their hand a great deal in my opinion. I would not be at all surprised if Buzz was aimed at delivering a social footprint for the search quality algorithm. One obvious use for this data would be to separate the signal from the noise in online PR.

What should SEOs be doing to counter this?

Well, firstly, the rules of PR haven’t changed. Write great informative pieces of content that will attract links on their own. Make sure that these pieces of content are easily shareable and Tweetable and promote the content in the same way as you would promote your client’s site. Understand that everything you do is online PR and not just writing. The PR aspect of that is key.

If you manage to do this successfully, and Google do manage to clear out the noise, you will be sitting very pretty indeed.

But I still use it. A lot. Over time, I’ve realised that it’s a powerful tool when used wisely, and that, in a sense, its limitations are its strengths. So instead of dwelling on the negatives, I thought I’d use them as a starting point for considering what a fully-grown social media might look like…

• It will be real-time. For better or worse, this is what we now demand. In the future, we’ll see Twitter’s incredible ‘nowness’ combined with Google’s power to discriminate and filter information, giving us a window into shared thoughts that’s (hopefully) unpolluted by spam. But, at the same time…


What might this rudimentary bird evolve into?

• It will be persistent. Twitter trends come and go, but their residue is a bit chaotic. In the future, collaborative trains of thought will be captured, preserved and refined. We’ll be able to create and control our own social-media hubs, and enhance them by adding supporting resources. Google Wave will probably be the first manifestation of this, and Kosmix is a parallel in the world of web search. And as a consequence…
• It will be integrated. The ‘walls’ between Twitter, Facebook and future SM services will be softened or erased. A powerful, simple front end will bring everything together elegantly and hide the ‘workings’ from the user. Once we taste it, we’ll never want to go back to joining individual, isolated communities. And that will mean…
• It will be friendly. Through this new front end, some kind of semantic search will let casual users get involved without knowing what a hashtag is. Images, sound and movies will be seamlessly integrated. The whole social-media experience will be smoother and easier. My money’s on Apple to get this right first, just as they have done with music and phones. Which highlights the fact that…
• It will be more corporate. Just as they make it their business to own generic search terms through affiliates and brand-bidding, big brands will dominate social media. They have to, or they won’t be big any more. But know-how is always for sale, and they’ve got the brand assets, so they’re in pole position. They’ll make sure they guide the casual or novice user to their front door, regardless of channel. (They’ll also monitor our content so they know about every relevant conversation.) Dell is a trailblazer in this area. And after a while…
• It will be nothing special. In the end, every brand will have a softer, less formal tone of voice in social media. Big corporates will find and exploit the optimum balance between control and individual expression. And small firms and individuals will always be able to offer a different experience – just as they can in any other area. But at the same time…
• Credibility will out. The number of ‘expert’ SEOs, affiliate marketers, social media consultants and, yes, copywriters on Twitter is just ludicrous. It’s so easy to build a presence, and followers come cheap, making everyone look authoritative. But in the future, the cream will rise to the top, just as it did in web design and e-commerce following the internet boom. As in search, Google (or someone) will help us separate the wheat from the chaff. And after a while…
• Things will settle down again. Just as everyone sells online, everyone will do social media. It will be just another channel. The buzz over Twitter as a customer-service medium boils down to a simple truth: customers want prompt, individual attention. And that’s not news. There are new ways to reach customers now, but they won’t always be new. They will be understood, analysed, documented, and best practice will be established.

So what should we do? I say ‘do it, but don’t sweat it’. There’s much to be said for being a fast follower instead of a leader – not least, you can learn from others’ mistakes. So relax, get Tweeting and just enjoy the ride.