When I first started doing this whole “online thing” a year ago, there was one particular word that showed up in almost every conversation – human. You could be a human brand. You could now conduct marketing on a human-to-human basis. Your customers were now humans instead of numbers. It was important to be human online (whatever that really means).
Lately though, something weird is going on. The pull on social media participants doesn’t seem to be towards the human side of things anymore. In fact, it feels to me like we are getting less and less human.
Now what do I mean by that? Well, think about some of the actions that were considered “being human” online only a short time ago. What has happened to those proposed online activities? Let’s take a look.
Sharing Content
When I first started tweeting, I believed strongly that the best thing to do was to share content from others that you thought was really good and/or helpful. It was a good way to pass on useful information to your followers (at the time that was about 67 people for me, but hey!) and it also was a good way to connect with the people whose content you were sharing. You were saying, “Hey man…nice work.”
Now, sharing seems to be something we want to do with as little thought as possible. Triberr gives me a list of posts that I can just click “yes” on, and wham! Suddenly I’m sharing. I don’t have to read any of it because (one hopes) that everyone in your tribe is a great writer who agrees with your general online philosophy 100% of the time. Sharing content in a blog post is now most often viewed as link bait or comment bait because people have gotten cynical (and because a lot of people do share blog posts to get more links or comments).
The humanity has sort of seeped out of sharing content online.
Saying thank you
I’ve always been a big believer in saying thank you, most especially when someone shares a blog post of mine. It takes extra time that people don’t have to read a post and then share it, so I have always felt it important to let people know I appreciate it. Now there’s a problem though. Because of tools like Triberr, people aren’t going out of their way to share my posts. People have their account set to tweet things out at various times, and often times these days, a thank you from me garners a “for what” response. The person didn’t even realize they were sharing posts of mine.
Because of this change, I’ve stopped saying thank you as much. I can’t tell easily who is really intending to share my content and who is just letting a site do their sharing. This makes me feel less human. This takes out a big chunk of what I felt was important in my online world. That kind of bums me out.
Thinking for your own darned self
Perhaps the most disturbing thing I’m seeing in the online world is that a lot of people are no longer thinking for themselves. I’ve seen people do 180 degree turns on a person because the folks they were hanging out with didn’t like said person as much. I’ve seen people flash mob a blog post by a person they normally get along with. I’ve seen people purposefully try to bring other people down when the tide is going that way.
Perhaps even more disturbing, I’ve seen people start to just wait for the next coattail to grab. They wait for someone else to come up with the next big idea, and then they become one of the first to pounce on it.
Social Media offers us an opportunity to think about everything in new ways. Why wait to jump on someone else’s bandwagon? Start your own. Custom-paint it. Make it special because it’s yours, not because someone you think is popular said it would run well.
Sacrificing our souls
In an environment that is supposed to be all about “human-ness,” why are we giving away all that makes us human? Why are we automating all of the activities that most reveal our humanity in the online world? Will we eventually get to the point where all of our conversations are based on automated signals rushing back and forth from platform to platform? Will that really be better than where we were five years ago?
To me, that seems like a less meaningful world in which to operate.
What do you think?
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hubmedia/2141860216/ via Creative Commons
I think you are RIGHT ON Margie! Way too much automation and not enough free thinking and discourse! With Triberr I never did the automatic posting ’cause reading all my tribemates posts was so beneficial. Yeah, it was and is time-consuming but that is how I educate myself these days. Plus, I like to comment.
The other downside of Social Media is the ease with which we don’t have to interact IRL anymore! Ted Rubin is fond of YELLING about calling each other on the phone and gets totally exorcised when he sees a business card without a phone number. He’s right…that is the ROR – his term, Return on Relationships.
While I don’t really care for Barbra Streisand, “People really do need people” rather than just avatars and virtual relationships!
Happy New Year, (human) Margie!
@BruceSallan Yeah, that’s the funny part. People are social creatures and yet we insist on talking to each other in as much of a 2D, impersonal way as possible. Somewhere, the priorities shifted. And they are still shifting. And it’s really, really weird 🙂
Me thinks you are way too smart for me to be hanging around here, but if you don’t tell anybody I certainly won’t.
The only thing automated in my arsenal is Triberr; and even with that I will make the initial ‘share’ personal. The next day I will just release it with no comment, but first time out of the shoot I will personalize it. However, and I’m in 3 tribes, over half the people aren’t sharing anything at all so maybe they have already given up on it.
If I link someone in a post, I’m not fishing for comments. I hope whoever is reading takes the time to visit the post I listed. I am still very naive when it comes to SEO, link bait, etc; the only thing I can do is social so I tend to just stick with that. It seems when you get beyond that level, and some of the stuff you talk about in your post, it loses some of it’s allure. I want to stay glamorous……………:).
Me I can be pretty well most of the time; it won’t be for everybody and some might think I bring no value because they have some other agenda, but it’s no different in real life either.
That is my story for today and I will be sticking with it.
@bdorman264 you’re plenty smart. Whatchoo talkin bout, Willis?
I don’t have other agendas either, but sadly, people have become so cynical that sometimes they see agendas where there aren’t any. That’s because (also sadly) some people have had those agendas, and a lot of people have gotten burnt. All we can do is the best we can, right? 🙂
@margieclayman …..see, I told you I wasn’t smart…….that’s chute not shoot….but hey, they sound alike, right?
Margie the need for finding a reasonable amount of balance it critical.
The time it takes me to write a post is a lot longer than others and if I factor in reading “everyone’s post in triberr then it has become a full time job and no longer humanly possible.
Here is what I know…if I have read your blog for a bit I get a feel fro it I trust you. With my trust, goes my ability to hit yes to you in Triberr.
If you write multiple times a day, if you write materails that is sometimes questionable, then I have to read your post before I hit yes which means, when I am busy with clients delivering services-you go untweeted.
If you have been responsible for attacking me online or your best buddy has attacked me online (I am probably not gonna tweet your stuff even if we are in a tribe).
If I share your stuff and you do not share mine after a reasonable amount of time-again, I have boundaries and will not share your posts.
While I agree it should not be a tit for tat situation, it also should not be me sending you lots of eyeballs and you thumb your nose at me either.
AAAHHHHH humans, I have been a talker on Twitter from way back and like to talk my connections offline when my schedule permits. What I notice is social media crowds have an interesting expectation that the offline world finds odd. We expect people to care. (I hear Gary V in my head now)
My question for everyone in 2012 is ‘How will you show you care?”
@prosperitygal There’s a lot of meat there. I think you’re right. I think online, people do expect you to care, if only because when all of this started that was the big promise. Companies will care about their customers. Customers will care about each other. It was all very utopian 🙂
Good points about time, too. However, what I have never understood about that particular argument is this: if you tweet something out when you’re not around and people reply back to you, it becomes 100% obvious that you’re not around. Why open yourself up for that much potential attack (Oh, you never talk to me, blah blah blah)?
Margie,
Really like the thought you put behind this post. I agree with a lot of what you are saying but, ultimately, it is a choice in what we do and how we do it. If social media becomes automated, then it loses its value dramatically. If it’s just a numbers game, then automation is the way (I guess). If learning, interacting, and reading is the primary goal, then it is carving out an appropriate amount of time to do these things. When the time is up, it is well-spent, at least.
I don’t know, maybe I am an idealist, but I still choose to read what I tweet and try to learn from a great community that is out there.
Always enjoy your thoughtfulness.
Jon
@ThinDifference Hi Jon,
Very true, of course. These are just my opinions and I am always happy to hear other perspectives. I guess my only concern about the numbers game is that it really doesn’t get you much. People are starting to notice that I have a fair amount of followers on Twitter, but if you look, the wide majority of them are spam bots I don’t follow back. If I were to report to a boss that, “Hey, we have x number of followers,” I’d really be misleading him.
Thanks for the comment!
I’ve always been 50-50 on automation. Tools like Triberr are awesome because it REALLY automates things thus saving you a whole lot of time especially when you’ve a list of trusted bloggers whom you want to advocate for. But this may also backfire as I’ve personally once, shared a not-so-polite post automatically via Triberr and well, let’s just say it wasn’t very well received among some of my followers – the worse part is that I’ve never read the post.
Since then, Triberr has been on semi automatic for me and I eventually dropped it. Instead, I have a list setup on my reader to manually read through X amount of articles per day from my favorite bloggers and margieclayman.com is definitely one of them.
Now to add this article to my Buffer. 😉
@janwong Well thanks 🙂
I am using Triberr essentially as an RSS feed. I can see posts as they are published by people I like to read. That said, as I mentioned above, I still visit every post and I still tweet out the post the way I have always done. Does that defeat the purpose of using an automated tool? Maybe. But I’m all about finding innovative ways to use simple tools 🙂
I am with you, ironically, I found this tweet through one of the few people I follow that uses Triberr, for the most part, if people in my timeline use tools like Triberr, Bundlepost, and the such I will unfollow them. Not an automation nazi but I do find it completely annoying for the most part, I liken it to “mass media” (Newspaper, TV, Radio, or Billboard advertising) I think its just a desperate attempt at people trying to climb above the “noise” and be heard… not getting enough RT’s? Try auto-tweeting an article every hour, someone is bound to see it!
I LOVE your point, build your own niche, build an engaged audience of 30 instead of trying to appeal to the masses. I think you could do a lot more with a community of 30 then a “following” of thousands (that are probably just following because you follow them)
@jermzh You’ve reminded me I forgot to talk about automated following/unfollowing, which was such a huge topic over the summer months.
As I just said to you on Twitter, I think it’s really risky to say, “I don’t follow x-kind of person.” You never know the whole story with people. Assuming that someone is using Triberr to broadcast themselves and get more followers may be correct, but then again it may not be. Now, when I tweet out posts from Triberr, I go to the person’s site and still copy and pate the link the “old fashioned” way so I can differentiate my tweets from the Triberr tweets, but not everyone does that, and that’s cool.
Social Media is way too young for there to be a “right” or “wrong” way of doing things. Give folks a chance 🙂
@margieclayman I wouldn’t pretend to tell anyone they are doing it wrong, I just find most automation tools personally annoying. People can use social media however they want, I just am a lot less likely to follow someone (on my personal account) if they are auto-tweeting every 30 minutes. Don’t even have a problem with triberr, its a great tool, just have seen it used more annoying ways then helpful (to me). But again, thats just my personal opinion and have found myself using the tools different on other accounts besides my personal one.
I totally agree with you on focusing on the few to do more! Amassing an enormous number of followers has more to do with ego for some people than achieving something meaningful.
Sobering thoughts, Margie, and, yes, I automated this post through Triberr BEFORE reading it. I have experienced the same thing through my time on the web. At first, I was really engaged with a core group of people but, as my network grew, I became moderately engaged with a larger number of people. It’s a trade-off. We’ve only hot so much time and attention to go around. I love meeting new people and hate turning down relationships to “save time.” You can’t have your cake and eat it too, right? What I’ve come to do is only engaging with those who are responsive to me. I don’t seek after big names. I reach out to people that have an equal amount of time for conversation. That seems to alleviate the problem a little.
Automation can no doubt be useful but the decision, like all decisions, must begin with why. Why are you automating? Why do you choose to automate X content but not Y content? If the answer is simply to provide quality content to followers but has nothing to do with building a relationship with a content owner, then I’d say fine, automate it. But for me I’m just as interested in thanking or starting or furthering a relationship with a content owner as I am in providing quality content to followers/friends. This is one reason I don’t automate. It flies in the face of why I share content.
I completely agree with you Margie. The most distrubing thing I have found in all of the above, is watching people turn on “old friends.” I have been heartbroken watching people who seemed to be trust-worthy trash someone else, as soon as they have left chats. I know the reason they do it, as you have said, is because actually thinking for themselves and sticking up for the “underdog” will damage their popularity.
It is a poor excuse we make for ourselves that there is no time. We make time for what’s important or beneficial to us. People spend time, sometimes 2, 3 or 4 hours in chatrooms and hanging out on G+, but they can’t 10 minutes to actually read a post. We choose where we want to spend our time.
My biggest bug, which you haven’t mentioned is verification services. Yes I get auto-Dms, “thank you for following, come over to my FB page so we can get to know each other better.” These along with the verifications get trashed instantly. If you cannot figure out that I am a human from my tweets or interactions, and you are not sure I am “worthy” of your follow, well…
We have fallen into the trap that services like Klout and Kred and whoever else can give us a sufficient score that we feel we are worthwhile and powerful human beings.
If our self-worth, our credibility and our trustworthiness reside in artificial numbers, then we are more lost than we realize. IMHO
@martinamcgowan
Margie, I so love this post because it gets to the heart of so much of what is good and sad about social media. We have the tools to reach millions of people world-wide with important ideas and yet, we take short cuts and stoop to the lowest common denominator without thought or consideration. This is the human condition, I am afraid. People in social situations will flock to ‘fit in’ (just like middle school- we never grow out of it). So if being the 3000th person to share a Mashable article, or jumping on the ‘let’s piss on Joe’ parade is what makes us feel a part of the group, we will do it.
But the good in all this, is those of us who resist this automaton-like response stand out and bring good energy into the world. Our reputation, business and brand all benefit by being remarkable. Although it’s sad that being an independent thinker makes us look awesome, it is a truth online and off. So keep on being awesome, Margie. I respect and honor your spirit and energy!
I arrived on your blog, because you are in the same BrandFlair Tribe. I am reading all posts or at least scan them before I am sending them out. My audience is dear to me, and just sending out content that I might not agree, might hurt my reputation. I am pretty picky in what I send to my audience.
And that is how I see it. You can use every and all tools created to better or worsen the world we live in.
I thank most of the people retweeting my content. In the end its all about the person -I- want to be in this world, and if my thank you message is not understood. I remember the first time I received a thank you message on Twitter for sharing someones content, and I was flabbergasted. I thought it was the normal thing to do and not something special, so I was totally not expecting a Thank you, but I am very happy with it, if people acknowledge it. I think thats pretty cool.
What I do not like, is automated Thank you messages, or of course the well known auto-DM’s. Yack!
🙂
to put it simply, Margie (I am Orange), what is the point of being on a social media site if you are not going to be social? Thanks to @hensel for sending me here. Marieke forwards several interesting articles and I am grateful for her vetting to pick out only the very best. I see Prosperity Gals has been here also. The good ones travel in good company.
@cousineaug@hensel Oh that’s so very sweet @cousineaug ! Thank you so much! 🙂