Social Media: Forever?
September 24, 2016
I love categorical affirmatives. These are statements which apply a concept to an infinite class of objects, entities, and actions. Forever is a long, long time, and it is one of my favorite words to read in high-technology analyses by wizards. Consider “5 Ways Social Media Has Changed Business Forever.” Let me be clear. I have difficulty with the concept forever. Infinity was enough of a challenge when Miss Martens, my freshman math teacher, introduced the concept of performing mathematical operations on collections of infinitudes.
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Grecian urn versus Snapchat. Which is forever? How about neither?
But for social media, forever it is.
The write up identifies five consequences of communication. For me, social media is communications. Granted the mechanisms are not face to face yapping over the fence. But I will suspend disbelief and highlight the five “forever” changes that social media hath wrought:
- Targeted advertising. I assume this means the ads I see when I visit a Web site using cookies which “know” me. Note that we use a variety of methods to make some of our online activity slightly less transparent. Details of some of the methods will appear in our forthcoming Dark Web Notebook, which if you want a copy can be reserved by writing benkent2020 at yahoo dot com.
- Organic marketing “like never before.” Another categorical. I recall that Genghis Khan did some organic marketing which worked quite well. True, he did not have an online connection, but the social folks diffused his message quickly.
- Fears of being trashed on social media by social media users. I understand fear. Ah, Columbia and other far off lands. Believe me. Social media criticism can appear on the fear scale, but the key difference is the ease and speed with which negative information diffuses. But whispering worked pretty well for some folks in Stalin’s social construct. Perhaps there is “fear” and “FEAR.”
- Real time customer service. Give me a break. What customer service? A chatbot may not be able to answer my questions about dead links in iTunes or where my lost suitcase is.
- Flexibility in content “dissemination.” I love flexibility. But when I worked in my first “real” job at Halliburton Nuclear, we had paper. We had fax machines. We had film-based transparency “presentations.” We had conference calls. We had face to face meetings. We had jet travel to whisk us really lucky types from New York to lovely Cleveland in a nonce. We had a PR firm to talk, spam, and fast dance. I am not sure how much more flexible I would be if I did not have the censoring services intermediating life for today’s marketers.
Forever. Think of this statement by John Keats:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Social media is just like a hand crafted, old fashioned Grecian urn. Well, maybe a tweet, a Facebook post, or a Snapchat may not last a few millennia. Close enough for millennials.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2016
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