Industrialized social media

Marketing consultant and author, Euan Semple writes that marketers and “professional communicators” have polluted our networks with industrialized social media.

He’s right.

Not only has social media drifted from real and authentic engagement as means of making strangers less strange, we have consultants teaching industrialized social media as the way of the land and companies selling industrialized social media as a service.

• Share your blog posts this way and that way.
• Use the right image.
• Use these magic words.
• Run analytics on what and when you share to garner data on the right people, the right mediums, the right words and the right times.
• Here’s prepackaged articles for sharing.
• Have us share your “words,” you’re too busy. You don’t even need to know how to log into your social media accounts – or that you even have a social media account, for that matter.
• Sharing the same items across multiple people’s social media accounts – for maximum effect, of course.
• Rather than you getting to know and learn from the thought leaders and influencers, we’ll get to “know them” and build relationships with them for you.
• We’ll write your blog posts and share them for you.
• Not to worry about engaging other people on social media, social media is for broadcasting your stuff to get “them” to come to your website.

This type of stuff would be funny if it weren’t true.

At times, I feel like Euan.

Sometimes I feel like giving up, conceding defeat to the marketers and “professional communicators” who have polluted our networks with industrialised social media.

Like Euan though, social media done “un-industrialized” style has its wonderful moments.

But then a post will trigger a cracking conversation, a podcast will open up a whole new perspective, a moment of online vulnerability will remind me our shared humanity.

And I’m with Euan, I’m not giving up and I’m not giving into industrialized social media.

Getting to personally know so many fine people who add value to my life in multiple ways in a genuine and authentic fashion is just too valuable to give up.