Getting Social Media Wrong On An Industrial Scale - It Takes A Corporation

Matt Sokol's recent post is a great cautionary tale of how to approach the challenge of followers and popularity on Steemit. Matt went about things the wrong way on Soundcloud, spamming the platform with reciprocal follow-attempts, while letting his circle on Steemit grow organically.

Even if you've only been on Steemit a little while, I bet you can guess which approach was more successful. Matt deserves credit (and votes!) for his candor and his advice to the community.

Fortunately I had a great cautionary experience before getting started on Steemit. As a result I've focused on providing the most interesting content I can (or at least the sort of stuff I'd like to read) without worrying about my follower-count at all.

---

Photo by Verena Yunita Yapi provided by Unsplash

---

My previous employer is a major bookstore chain. (You may have heard of them. I'll neither confirm nor deny your guesses. They treated me fairly enough and I left on good terms.)

For years they were terrified of anything to do with technology or social media. We were not to share any special events or promotions to Facebook, for example. The executives had heard enough horror stories about social media initiatives backfiring in crazy ways, and were unwilling to hand control of social media accounts to local stores.

I guess with hundreds and hundreds of locations, the potential for something to be mis-interpreted and reflect on the company as a whole was just too scary.

But it was a drag when we had a great author in to sign books, or a special event for kids, and we weren't allowed to share the event with friends on Facebook. What a missed opportunity!

Then one day we got a new CEO. Overnight, social media became a major focus.

There was zero budget for this, and no strategy.

Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat - we were directed to get store accounts set up for all of them, and report back every day how many followers you've gotten. "Make one of the managers a social media guru and report to them daily with how many new followers you've gotten. They'll need to report their numbers back to your district manager each week." We were going to dive into social media, and we were going to approach it the way business approaches everything - with metrics and reports.

Ironically, Facebook isn't really thrilled with the same company suddenly opening half a thousand business accounts in a couple of weeks. That's why business pages have to be started by an individual. The solution? Our store managers were directed to use their personal contact information to establish their store's business page. "Who's comfortable opening a store page with your personal info?" That made for an interesting sales meeting.

Anyway, we focused on Instagram, because that seemed to be the easiest site to get results. At least, it was easiest place to get a follower number pushed up in a hurry. All we had to do was scroll through hash-tags that kind of had something to do with us, like and follow the posters, and hope they'd follow us back.

It was the classic "Follow me; I follow you!" spam, and hundreds of accounts were doing it all at once. We'd flick through the feed while we sat through conference calls, or during lunch breaks, or when we had a few precious minutes between one task and the next. Then once or twice a day we'd take a picture of our products, hastily staged and shot on the run, and hope for a few votes.

It was hard not to feel guilty about doing it. It was something we'd been forbidden from doing for years. But the numbers rose.

Of course, when you've got hundreds of locations all doing this at once, and all start following each other, the numbers rise quick. At least at the start.

What did it do for us?

Precisely nothing. Sales didn't increase, customers didn't start dropping in or calling to place an order because they'd seen a clever photo on our feed. Tweets about the new bestsellers didn't drive sales.

I just checked in on the feed and saw that posting slowed way down when I left a year ago, and the follower count is within 100 of where it was when I gave my notice.

Sure, there was no harm done. Not really. Not to us. It wasn't like we ever suffered the backlash the previous executives had been so worried about.

But. What a waste of labor! What a misdirected focus! If you've ever heard of the 80/20 rule - that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts - this social media push represented a 99/1 waste. And when it came time to promote a legitimately interesting event, the real news we wanted to share was lost in all the noise.

It certainly turned me off Instagram. As far as I can tell, that platform seems to be little more than a stream of homogeneous pictures all clamoring for attention; a million voices shouting into the void without a single pair of ears to listen. (Except that metaphor should have more to do with eyeballs.)

When you have a corporation doing this on an industrial scale, it compounds the signal-and-noise problem, making the platform completely useless to anyone who is trying to make a genuine connection to an audience. Then again, anyone trying to make a genuine connection probably isn't posting pictures of Pumpkin Spice Lattes or stacks of books next to bags of coffee, screaming "Like our picture! Buy our stuff!"

But how do you find sincere content creators in such a stream of garbage?

When I first looked into Steemit, I was worried it would be the same as Instagram, but for writers. I'm so very pleased that it's not. (I think the title for the "Instagram of the Written Word" has to go to Medium. So many writers writing about writing!)

I don't think a corporate presence on Steemit would ever get off the ground. What corporation could command the sort of dedicated, thoughtful writing that really gets significant votes here on Steemit? Anyone who is going to put in this kind of effort is most likely working for themselves, or just looking to connect with people in a genuine fashion. You're not going to have minimum-wage employees composing well-researched essays to drive sales at their branch of a big-box store.

It's something to beware of, though. I think we'd be quick to flag anything resembling this kind of corporate gamesmanship into oblivion before it ever got off the ground. But with big-box retailers really feeling the heat of decreased sales these days, it's a threat we may have to face at some point.

How about you? Have you ever had the job of using social media to promote a product? Were you working for yourself, a small company, or a corporation?