And the winner for most on the nose book title of the year goes to…
Sarah Wynn-Williams’ recounting of her time at Facebook (now Meta) is at times funny, horrific, and plain sad. From true Facebook believer, who pitched her dream role, international governmental policy, to at first disappointed employee trying to change things from inside, to full blown dissenter, and (spoiler) ultimately fired whistleblower.
There are few familiar names that come of well in Ms. Wynn-Williams’ telling. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg come off particularly badly with their clueless and tone-deaf behavior being only the start. It is also telling that there are currently no slander or defamation suits against the author for the memoir, only an order enforcing her NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) signed as part of her separation agreement.
Ignoring for a moment the wider societal issues with Facebook that are the main thrust of the book, what the author shows off is the often-dark side of the Silicon Valley myth. That while the pay and benefits may be great, the workload is deliberately punishing as an instrument of control. That anything outside of work is seen as an almost disloyal distraction. What is often portrayed as quirky, is often just mean behavior and nepotism with a significant dose of classism and well – carelessness. That it is far better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, regardless of the potential consequences.
Where this volume really scores is in exposing just how deliberately powerful and impactful Facebook can be when it comes to manipulation. That Meta just does not care about the consequences of this or the impact around the world. It cares about getting new users to generate more business and that’s it. Whether it be vulnerable teenagers, peoples struggling to wrestle democracy from authoritarian regimes, or actively embedding staff with political campaigns to spread false information at home, Facebook seems to play the worst role possible. It is illuminating how the lessons learned from real world events are the worst lessons possible and that these are the last people we should be letting have oversized roles in our society.
The public face and social engagement of the leaders of Meta is all front. Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” book and subsequent foundation are shown to be shams by people who not only do not practice what they preach, but also would be horrified by the mere temerity of the idea of being called out on this.
This is a book that exposes titans of Silicon Valley as not only shallow and immoral, but without any ethical framework or even basic decency. The very worst of the “let them eat cake mentality.”
While the book has a little of the “this was awful, but I did not say anything” that is often found in whistleblower accounts, this is kept to a bare minimum and while Ms. Wynn-Williams comes out of the account pretty well, she freely admits to her own naivety, and her wide eyed idealism.
This is a book that will make you think long and hard about your own Facebook usage but it really is about just how out of touch tech leaders can be, even with basic HR norms, and just how much the people who unleash technological forces just do not care about anything other than their own interests.
“The gradual degradation of an online platform or service’s functionality, as part of a cycle in which the platform or service first offers benefits to users to attract them, then pursues more and more profits at the expense of users.” – Dictionary.com definition of enshittification.
Originally coined by the author, Enshittification has entered the lexicon as it has struck a chord with everyone who feels, or is beginning to feel, that the maturing of the technological internet revolution is, well, shit.
Almost a companion work to Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism, which it references in several places, Enshittification is an easy to read take down of the business model of the internet giants that rule our lives. That those same internet giants deliberately make our lives worse due to their constant drive to extract profits and that this is at the expense of the user experience and the experience of the business customers who pay for it.
Doctorow’s basic premise is as follows:
1: Attract users by making a useful, responsive, and fun product usually at a loss.
2: Attract business customers by selling the user’s data, even if you’ve promised not to, creating a powerful tool for selling to users and driving other forms of sales channels out of business.
3: Squeeze every last dollar out of both users and business customers since you now have a monopoly in the space and the costs for switching are too high.
While Mr. Doctorow makes a great case for the macro-economic models for technology companies being fundamentally broken at best and downright predatory, immoral, and possibly illegal at worst, his hyperbole sometimes gets in the way of detail.
Veterinary medicine, my own former industry, gets a line in the book. Accusing corporate consolidators of paying veterinary staff minimum wages and then demanding that they pay thousands of dollars if they want to leave. While the consolidators and venture capitalists in veterinary medicine have a lot to answer for, I don’t recognize this particular piece of enshittification. Yes, some of them do pay staff minimum wage, but the repaying thousands of dollars sounds like repayment of school loan payments or signing bonuses which usually only applies to DVMs and perhaps LVTs/RVTs/CVTs. None of those are getting paid minimum wage. I guess it could be a reference to repaying money for vet services, but it is hard to imagine any company not wanting paid for services delivered.
I mention, and examine, this single veterinary medicine sentence because the conflating of two different facts to paint a picture which I should, but don’t, recognize gives me pause when considering the veracity of the book. Given I don’t know the business models of Amazon, Facebook, and Google nearly as well as veterinary medicine, should I take this as a poor bit of research or an example of flawed thinking?
And it’s a shame, because I buy Doctorow’s arguments otherwise. While the style and language is friendly and accessible, this book does deal with a number of complex anti-trust issues which the author masterfully navigates and explains. If not for the vet med line I would be bought in hook, line, and sinker. It is certainly possible that I’m bought in anyway.
One of the issues that books of this type can sometimes have is that they are either overwhelmingly positive or negative. While there is a lot to feel negative about in Enshittification, Doctorow does map out a pretty good manifesto as to how to reign in these tech giant monopolies. Unfortunately, advice on how to fight back at the user level is a little thin on the ground.
If you have the feeling that the internet is dying and the technology you used to love no longer seems to love you, then this is the book for you and it is a rallying cry for how we might fix it. Because if we don’t fix it nobody else will. The technology firms are just too powerful and there is too much money at stake for them to let anyone else clip their wings.
However, we made them, and we have the power to break them – but only if we try.
I love my smart phone a little too much, and I hate that.
A cell phone has been my constant companion for over 30 years. I never had one of the giant brick phones of 80s yuppies but my first phone was one of the first that made those phones look ancient even then.
However, the advent of the iPhone and social media changed all that.
I’ve spent a significant portion of my career working, at least tangentially, with social media. I still enjoy social media and find it to have value, but I am more and more aware of the downsides. I think the real turning point was TikTok. The pull of those short form video snippets was often just too much on days where not much was going on. Losing hours to the app, while not all valueless (poetry, politics, history, and religious scholarship can all be mixed in with the stupid cat videos and hilarious footage of people hurting themselves) was disconcerting. Like the borderline alcoholic that realizes that perhaps always having beer in the house is not such a good idea, when the app starts warning you that perhaps you’ve been on it too long, you know there is a problem.
I should make clear that I still like and enjoy social media. I’ve been making content for social media and the internet for well over two decades. Call me shallow, but I have much in my life to thank social media for. I also feel that its current place in society is so firmly cemented that to be without it would be detrimental to how I live.
But something had to change.
I’d turned off notifications years ago, no longer being the frontline person responsible for the hospitals’ I manage social media and reviews, has its advantages. For my own personal pages and sites, a brief check whenever I had a moment would do.
But the checking got way out of hand.
Sitting at my desk and getting sucked into checking the groups I was a part of, my social channels, and even personal email seemed to consume more and more time. Even more insidious, was the “always on” home display on my iPhone 14 Pro.
I’d managed to resist the draw of Apple Watch and other smart watches. Partly due to my affinity for real watches, but also because the constant checking seemed even more intrusive than I was already experiencing and harboring qualms about. It also helped to have coworkers who love their Apple Watches and them checking them while mid conversation was annoying enough to “not be one of those people.”
However, the extremely useful always on of my new, at the time, iPhone 14 Pro with its time and date display along with a cute picture of one of my dogs was gateway and constant reminder of the joys of browsing my phone.
But how to change.
When I travel, which I do a lot of for significant portions of the year, the scene in airports is one of obvious Smart Phone addiction. Rows and rows of people, not talking, not reading a book, but low level browsing of social media. I’m not judging, I still am happy to while away the time lost in this miracle of our modern age – the interconnection of smartphone, the internet, and social media. However, the sheer scale of how much these little devices of glass, metal, and plastic have come to be extensions of our modern selves can be shocking when one takes the place of an outside observer.
But what to do.
It seemed, I was not alone in wanting to make a change in the cycle of cellphone social media and attention-grabbing content intruding on life. Multiple celebrities were announcing their ditching of social media, and there were even a few who were getting rid of their smartphones altogether. But this removal of this seeming essential device of the 21st century seemed to reek of privilege. For every celebrity who is removing the stress of social media and the constant interruptions of a smart phone, you know there is an assistant and / or a marketing team who filter access and are ever more locked to their smartphones as they juggle their own needs and that of those who employ them.
So what for mere mortals?
I had become aware of the Light Phone when it first launched, and I laughed like most people at the idea of wanting a Dumify phone and there being value in that. Now on its third generation, the Light Phone contains a lot of the conveniences of modern smartphones but with a monochromatic interface, limited apps, and no social media.
The downside of course being that I want and need social media in my life. I want and need various apps on my smart phone, to control alarm systems, remote access to work computers, control of my smart home, control of my electric car, notifications of the location of my keys, wallet, and dogs, and any number of other things that make up a connected life and work. I was not ready to give up all that. I’ve read Ted Kaczynski and the Luddites, and I have sympathy with those arguments, I’m just not ready for the inconvenience, the disconnection, or in a place of that level of privilege, to make such a radical change.
An option would be to slave my iPhone to a Light phone as a hotspot. Meaning my iPhone could stay in my car or bag until I wanted it, but I could carry around a Light phone for day-to-day use. This seemed a needlessly complicated solution and I was also unconvinced that the temptation of the iPhone would not be too much and I would be back to square one but $500 poorer.
Then I found Dumify.
Dumify is an iPhone app, also available for Android users but you are on your own from here on out, that mimics the simpler interface of the Light phone, but does not impact the functionality of or even the regular interface of the iPhone.
By adjusting a few settings, and then just entering the apps you want daily / easy access to, the user can create a non-engaging, and thereby not tempting, interface for the things that matter most to you in a smart phone.
After a few weeks of use here is what I have found.
My smart phone screen time at work has plummeted making me far more productive when I am at my desk.
I still use and enjoy social media but it is as a choice rather than a need. I am therefore finding it limited to specific times of the day.
My simplified lock screen – see below – still can be a temptation but far less so.
In addition, when I open my phone, I get an immediate reminder that I really don’t need to be checking Instagram, Goodreads, LinkedIn, or whatever, right now due to the interface. That simple reminder, a reminder of virtuous smartphone usage if you like, is all I need to put my phone down.
Many people, when using a tool like Dumify, delete a lot of their other apps. I have not done this. I still like my iPhone. I just use it differently. A bit like being smart about alcohol consumption while driving. An unexpected bonus has been that I have been finding myself leaving my phone in my jacket pocket when I’m in the car. The temptation to check an app while at a set of traffic lights is now gone.
While the setup of Dumify is simple, and the app contains shortcuts to most popular apps, some research for company specific apps may be required. There are also multiple short videos embedded into the app to help the customization process. On the iPhone, the app uses URL Schemes and while it blithely suggests “just search on Google” for anything the app does not already have, I found this a little more complicated than I would have hoped. This might say more about the appalling state of Google search right now, than a lack of awareness by the app developers.
I found this article on URL Schemes extremely useful, however I did end up finding a few on my own either through searching or trial and error. It should be noted that the app uses a very basic implementation of URL schemes, and a lot of the documentation is about how developers can hack iPhone apps to do very specific things. When this is the case, I found just stripping the URL to its most basic form worked great.
These are the URL schemes I ended up having to make myself. I made most of them through trial and error as they are pretty simple.
Harmony Remote harmony://
Hertz hertz://
Lyft lyft://
Music music://
Open Table opentable://
Outlook ms-outlook://
RingCentral rcapp://
Southwest southwest://
Wallet wallet://
Itunes Remote remote://
Dumify will also make you download a second app for some links. But this is seamless once it is downloaded.
Dumify is a onetime $4.99 purchase – another reason to love it. There are couple of other apps out there that do similar things to Dumify, but they follow a subscription model, and I was less impressed when I looked at them.
Dumbing down your smart phone is not for everyone. Just like being always connected is not for everyone. But it is nice to have choices, and I feel genuinely more in control of my time and feel that access to this wonder of the modern age is now on my terms and not on its terms.
There are a lot of books about Twitter out there right now. That is perhaps not a surprise given (Spoiler Alert) that it has become a corporate / Silicon Valley dumpster fire.
Mr. Wagner’s account is balanced and well researched; however, one cannot feel while reading the work that it is missing the insider juicy details that make tech CEOs squirm. Perhaps because so much of Twitter’s (now X’s) dirty laundry has already been aired there is little new revelations in the work.
What” Battle of the Bird” does do is provide a clinical timeline from Twitter’s founding through to the events leading up to its purchase by Elon Musk and the unravelling of the technology institution under his stewardship. This in turn provides insights into the failure of Jack Dorcey (Twitter’s former CEO and co-founder) and Elon Musk’s failures with X.
As I talked about in my review of “Kingdom of Happiness” by Amiee Groth which referenced the failures at Zappos and the Downtown Project, both Dorsey and Musk in hindsight have had a failure of leadership due to a lack of management. It is all very well being able to persuade people to jump out of a plane, but you have to ensure that they have parachutes and know how to use them.
There is no doubt that Dorsey and Musk both do, or more appropriately have at one time, loved Twitter and what it has brought to the world. While Dorsey, according to Mr. Wagner’s book, seems to have lost interest in Twitter as a company once the reality of being a public company set in. Musk on the other hand, seems far too interested in his own press and ego once he understood the challenges Twitter faced and continues to face even after his pointless rebranding to X. It is hard to feel sorry for billionaires when the world does not work the way they want it to.
There is a theme throughout the book that perhaps Twitter can’t be a company. Dorsey in particular laments that what Twitter should be is a technology like email, that allows for the exchange of information, but that is not gatekept by any one platform. This is the kind of wishful thinking of people who have been made rich by the decisions to take their company public and have second thoughts. That they wish the world could be a different place. It can be, but only if different decisions are taken – the kind of decisions that don’t make entrepreneurs and venture capitalists rich.
Like I said, it is hard to feel sorry for billionaires when things don’t go their way.
Mr. Wagner does go into some reasonable depth as to the ethical dilemmas brought up by Donald Trump’s tweeting and his eventual banning from the platform. These are bigger issues than Twitter, but the impact on Twitter for both Dorsey and Musk were profound and still rancor the platform to this day. I’m not sure I want a committee of Twitter employees making decisions on whether what a world leader says is appropriate for public consumption, but at the same time I am positive I don’t want Elon Musk making those decisions.
As a grounding in the backstory and drama that is Twitter, now X, Battle for the Bird is a great document. Not a thrill ride or exposé, but a methodical grounding in the facts.
This is probably for the best given its subject matter and the turgid realities of Twitter’s recent past.
Perhaps this is the account we need rather than the one we might want.
Want to read a takedown of the leaders of the tech world, that calls them out for their hypocrisy and recklessness?
Of course you do.
Burn Book is, for the most part, that book. A book that at its most fundamental says “you promised us a brave new world – and what you delivered us was a more rapacious form of capitalism.”
The author, Kara Swisher, is a long-time journalist and analyst of the “tech sector” – particularly in Silicon Valley. She is also the co-founder of the Recode conference and the co-host of the Pivot podcast.
Burn Book, through the narrative of an autobiography, is her journey into the San Fransisco technology sector and her gonzo view of the events that, for better or worse, have shaped the world we currently live in – particularly its technology.
Where Burn Book really scores is in its view of characters such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, Steve Jobs, and Sergey Brin. From their early days, the beginnings of their success, through to their either refusal to accept the damage of their legacy, or the issues with how that legacy was formed, but also for some of them; their efforts to make amends. One is left with a sense of these figures riding waves that they barely understand or control. That often these figures are deeply flawed individuals who’s flaws have help lead to their success, but that long term they themselves are unrecognizable from the people they once were. Changed by wealth and power and all its trappings.
As Swisher mentions in the introduction; “move fast and break things” is in retrospect indicative of the tech scene entrepreneurs and their willingness to not think through the consequences of their actions. (Move fast and break things was an early internal Facebook slogan that was widely adopted by the tech sector).
Where the book becomes annoying is the author’s habit of “I told you so.” While this may well be true, and the whole purpose of the book is essentially to name drop, and let’s be honest that’s why we are reading it, it can become a little frustrating and seemingly self-aggrandizing. Swisher has earned the right to trumpet her vision and does have a record of putting billionaires on the spot, however, she does seem to fail to see the larger picture of the issues with this kind of innovation model.
Swisher is a self-proclaimed “believer in tech,” and this leads to the impression that she feels if only developers and tech titans were nicer then the world would be a much better place. This is quite possibly true, but one has to wonder about an industry who are happy to undermine industries and even societies, while failing to follow the basic rules that everyone else follows.
To Swisher’s credit she recognizes how close she has become to the tech sector and how that potentially impacts the objectivity of the analysis she gives. Of late she has made efforts to put distance between herself and her subjects. It would be easy to see this book as one of those efforts.
Burn Book is for the most part an enjoyable read with lots of moments to savor for those who want to see the self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” taken down a peg and be held to account. It does also do a pretty good job of exploring the duality of some of the complex individuals who run or formed some of the largest companies on the planet with little to no oversight. The author lauds Steve Jobs, for example, but does point out some of the flaws and cruelty that mars his legacy. It is not an in-depth analysis of all that is wrong with tools such as Facebook and the tech sector as a whole, but then it does not set out to be.
This is an autobiography and a story about being in love with an industry. The all too predictable break up, with the realization that who you were in love with is not quite the person you thought they were, is just another part of that love story.
Writing an accessible and thorough book about a complex and everchanging subject, such as social media, is a daunting prospect – particularly when your audience is a niche one such as veterinary medicine. Dr. Caitlin DeWilde; however, has done just that.
With the look and feel of a textbook, but the format a “Dummies” or “Idiots how to” book, Social Media and Marketing for Veterinary Professionals is a how to guide to all the major Social Media platforms and to all the tasks needing to be understood for someone who is not a marketing professional or even someone that interested in social media or reviews.
With chapters dedicated to each of the major platforms making up the first half of the book this can at times feel redundant; however, the thoroughness will be welcomed by those feeling out of their depth in a brand-new field and the dedication to not making assumptions is more than admirable. The second half of the book is a much more interesting read for the existing user, touching on issues such as retargeting (when online ads seem to follow you around the internet), review bombing, return on investment (ROI), and general advertising strategies both online and in print ads.
Filled with footnotes, the book is impeccably researched as would expect from someone with Dr. DeWilde’s reputation as “The Social DVM.” The index is a little thin, but it at least has one and it covers most of the things that one is likely to need to find in a hurry. What is a surprising addition is the over 80 QR Codes that link directly to an online resource for forms and other digital content. It is a little disappointing that the QR codes only take the user to a menu structure that the reader then must navigate through to get the required content. But this is a minor quibble and is a great use of a technology that is often used and abused. The fact that these online resources exist at all, and are included in the price of this volume, more than makes up for any navigation quibbles.
While I waded through all 200 odd and large format pages in three or four sittings, this is actually a book to tackle one chapter at a time, or to dip into as required. Growing your knowledge with your own experimentation and reading. While there is some building on what has come before, the chapters generally stand on their own and therefore can be used as a reference book if so desired.
Whether it be new managers suddenly saddled with a topic they know nothing about, staff members who have only ever used social media for their own personal networks, or those looking to build their own personal brands online there is now a guide for you with no translations from other industries required. To the vast majority of its readers, the subject of this book will always be a side interest to their main passion – whether it be veterinary management or veterinary medicine. We don’t often get resources geared towards niche areas within other niche areas. It is great to see this one.
Dr. DeWilde has literally written the book on using social media as a veterinary professional.
(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help fund my book buying habit.)
“We have always had some influence over the justice system but for the first time in 180 years, since the stocks and the pillory were outlawed we have the power to determine the severity of some punishments and so we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with.”
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson shines a, sometimes unwelcome, light on the unforgiving nature of Internet shaming. Ronson convincingly argues that almost 200 years ago we abandoned shaming as a form of punishment, not due a lack of effectiveness with rise of the larger towns and cities, but because it was seen as overly cruel.
Ronson has extraordinary access to those who lives have been ruined because of a bad out of context joke, calling out someone for perceived sexist comments, for making perceived sexist comments, and for being too irreverent in a selfie at a national memorial. The author also cleverly focuses on those less worthy of pity; the successful author who gets found out for making up quotes, and exposes our own attitudes to shaming. And then there are those who seem to have beaten the shame cycle; the UK publicist who went to war with the tabloid press, and the small town where almost a hundred of its citizenry where reveled to be visiting a local prostitute.
As well as telling the story of the various victims of the modern age of public shaming, Ronson also tells us of his own journey and grappling with his own role in the shaming of others and of being of control of his internet persona. This does not hang together quite as well as the rest of the book. I have a hard time, for instance, that such a talented researcher cannot look back through their own Twitter history to see who they have previously shamed. However, this is minor quibble and a brave personal exploration and opening up about personal shame.
The book does end on a relatively positive note due to the miracles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), however the real point of the book is for the reader to examine how they feel about this return of public shaming. Even for those whom it is hard to defend; the hunters seeking big game trophies, the Vet taking pleasure in shooting a cat with a bow and arrow, and the plagiarizing author, to name but a few – do they really deserve this level of life altering destruction?
For those who answer yes, this book is for you. “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” is, if nothing else, a testament to how much of a double edged sword internet shame can be, how cruel and destructive it is, and how uncomfortable we should all be with it. The Internet shows us at our best and worst as a culture – it is we who have to change.
Note: I have refrained from using the names of any of the subjects, or related people, in this post so as not to add to add to the problem.
For my American non-car fetish readers, Jeremy Clarkson is larger than life public figure and journalist from the UK who is known world-wide for the BBC motoring television show Top Gear.
When I say larger than life, a serious aspect of Jeremy Clarkson’s public persona is his often outrageous and politically incorrect statements in private and on Television. Some might say that everything has come to a head with the presenter multiple times in the past; however, for most the head was reached today when Clarkson was fired for punching a producer during an argument over food following a days filming.
The personal conflict comes from my love of Top Gear and Clarkson as a broadcaster. As a person, I am sure he is not someone I would like to spend much time with (I’m not a fan of his writing or politics.) However, the deeper conflict is how the media in the UK has essentially manufactured and over blown any number of remarks into career damaging scandals. The culture of bullying by majority over remarks or misunderstood events, by the major media and the social media hordes has to stop. We risk complete disengagement by future generations due to the risks of getting involved – it is just not worth it.
Finally, the human resource and management side of me applauds the BBC for having the courage to fire a key employee for completely unacceptable behavior in any workplace. Sorry Jeremy – but to needed to be fired for that.
The scandal is not the punch, the scandal is not incidents over number plates, or ill chosen remarks. The scandal is that television personalities and programing will be a little more bland and a little less interesting because we can’t just dismiss a personality as an idiot and not watch them if we disapprove.
(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help fund my book buying habit.)
“Scott, we have a problem with social media. People keep going on there and complaining about our products. We just don’t know what to do!”
“Well, for starters, how about you make a better product?”
Unselling is about sales and how the rules of selling have fundamentally changed.
After two fun books (that I reviewed here and here) on the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media and customer service, Scott Stratton and Alison Kramer have given us a great and insightful book on taking the pulse of our customers and where our businesses should be aiming. These concepts of pulse and aim (you’ll have to buy the book for the definitions) tie together a lot of what Scott has been talking about online and on the Unpodcast for the last couple of years.
What Unselling manages to achieve is to create a structure and understanding of why certain methods work and why others don’t. It is one of the frustrations, for example, to here about customer service failures and successes that can seem to contradict each other. Unselling provides keys to unlocking these mysteries. It also debunks a lot of nonsense that other marketers and marketing books talk about.
An extremely easy read, with short chapters, this is not Scott Stratten the borderline stand-up comic and keynote speaker, this is Scott Stratten the insightful and intelligent marketer who had risen to the top of his profession (the jokes almost get in the way). While the previous books concentrated on the how and the what, Unselling is very much about the why.
This is not a book for sales people, or a book for marketing people, it is a book for business people, and people in businesses, because we are all sales and marketing people now.
However, defining ROI in any small service business, particularly in marketing, can be incredibly difficult to be even remotely useful. Most businesses don’t bother except when it is easy. But for some reason, when it comes to social media, ROI is mission critical.
Why?
You can place an ad for discounted services, with a coupon, running for a month, and a unique web address, and a unique phone number, and track that (but honestly how many actually do this?) But how can you track the person who becomes aware of your business through that ad, spots your sign one day while driving by, and then six months later needs and uses your services unrelated to the ad?
What is the ROI of your fax machine?
What is the ROI of customer service?
What is the ROI of a strong brand?
How do you place a value on communicating with a significant proportion of your clients every day?
Most businesses consider word of mouth one of the most important forms of promotion. It is essentially free and it is highly effective. With social media, we have the opportunity to insert our businesses into the “word of mouth” of our customers, and thereby their friends, and their friends friends. Why would you not get involved and take advantage of that?
Facebook for my business probably takes up 15 minutes of my day on average. An email, or even a call by the time I’ve documented it, to an upset client can easily take an hour. Should I not deal with an upset client when I don’t have to because the ROI is lousy? Yes, you can place a value on a client and on retaining that client. You can even track that you do get some clients from Facebook, but you may also get clients because you have an email address or a telephone number. When was the last time that anyone figured out the ROI of their email system? Even when buying a new phone system most businesses to not justify it with ROI, but rather than as the cost of doing business.
Small businesses often look up to companies such as Nike and Apple and see their devoted, and almost rabid, fan bases as evidence of marketing in action. I would argue, however, that companies like Apple and Nike create devoted fan bases is by being approachable and interacting with their clients – Apple in particular. I’m not the greatest Steve Jobs fan, but there are lots of examples of Steve taking the time to reply to ordinary consumers and being very interested in what they had to say. HP, Dell, et al. for a number of years, sold dramatically more computers than Apple, but it was Apple who held Mac World every year. Nike became cool because they did not go after deals, they went after people who actually used their shoes – athletes. They engaged their most high profile target market.
Of course, there is a lot of other marketing involved, but remember Apple’s most famous ad only ran once in most markets. Apple, and Nike for that matter, opened their own stores that operate on a quite a different model from other retail outlets. There is some argument that this was to help control the customer experience, but I also feel it was to be able to respond, and engage, with customers. Like all companies, they do not always get it right, but I do think that it is the willingness to attempt true engagement, and a real concern for the customer experience, that breeds fierce loyalty.
Social media is not a strategy – engagement, however, is.
So how to do social media and get some results and some traction?
To me, a major issue for small businesses is when they are on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, YouTube, and are doing all of them badly. Focus on one, and only one, and do it well. Then you can move on to another one.
Create things,or provide a service, using social media that other people will value.
Share other people’s content sparingly.
Self promotion has to have value, or at least not look like self promotion.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your fan base or ask them to share.
Drive fans to your website, or blog, from places like Facebook or YouTube not the other way round.
Pick your social media sites carefully. In my opinion, YouTube, for example, is very useful and can expose you to an enormous audiences, but the attention span is fleeting and the sense of community is almost non-existent. Embed videos in your site or page. Facebook works for my business and my previous business. Twitter does not. However, Twitter will almost certainly work for my new business, and it works for me personally. This has a lot to do with the small towns versus large cities and the nature of my business – it may well be different for yours. Google+ has some personal value, and some SEO benefits, but has little real world value at this point in time in my opinion. But it does look very pretty!
Numbers of likes or followers are pretty irrelevant. It is the level of engagement that counts. I’d much rather have two hundred relevant, and engaged, fans or followers than 6,000 just making up the numbers. As someone much smarter than me once said: “If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.”
And finally, don’t cross post, post from one social network to another, unless you really know what you are doing.
And even then just don’t do it.
Please.
I beg of you.
I see people I respect and who should really know better, cross posting and it is counterproductive. Content for Facebook does not translate well to Twitter because of the character limit. Twitter’s special characters are not understood by most Facebook users.
There are social networks where cross posting seems to work pretty well, but again, it is a black art, and if you are questioning the ROI of any social network, cross posting from a different network is not any kind of an investment.
To sum up this long, and sprawling post, the ROI of social media is the ROI of engagement. If talking to existing and new customers is not for you then I wish you well.
That just means more customers for the rest of us.
(Clicking on the image above will take you to Amazon where a tiny percentage goes to help fund my book buying habit.)
Mike Falconer 