There's a rather ironic downside to how much social media have changed the way we live and work, and that is the increasingly common usage of such media for rather shameless self-promotion and marketing. Now, of course, as I have addressed before, the pervasiveness of social media is such that it has made it almost impossible to ignore, particularly if you do happen to be a marketer!
The thing that I find both humorous and extremely annoying is how various individuals and entities that are anything but marketers, somehow concluded that the existence of social media was sufficient reason alone to commence seemingly endless (didn't I say shameless?!) "marketing" of themselves. Self-promotion is the new deep, the next hip, and you have to be on the bandwagon if you are gonna get anywhere fast.
Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as easy as that, otherwise all the cool, young marketers who actually did grow up with social media, and know how to use them without reading the guidelines and help sections, would be mega-rich and in early retirement, already. It's not because social media exist that it is justifiable to commence chest-beating self-promotion and then force feed it down the virtual throats of your network on a daily basis. There is a massive difference between using social media, and using social media well. Or even between using it and using it correctly.
Sadly the masses have swallowed the Kool-Aid, and it is now considered totally normal to see basically anything imaginable on social media, and in business the neophyte marketers think it makes them look good to continually tell us how great they are - if they ram it down our throats long enough, even we will start to believe the gibberish in the end - is that the mantra? Again sadly, for them, it simply doesn't work like that. But unlike classical marketing of yesteryear, which had a price tag attached to it, social media are free, so then we should take advantage of its never-ending opportunities to shout our name out. Right? Wrong!
The nanosecond that you feel the need to tell others how successful you are, because they don't seem to know that yet, is already a nanosecond too late. You are already too far gone, I'm afraid. How many truly successful people in business are known as successful because they never tire of telling everyone, versus those we know as successes because essentially their success is their voice and it spreads fast? I am pretty certain that it is the latter group who stay top-of-mind for the right reasons, and the former are those we like to switch off at every opportunity.
You know, these are lessons we all learnt in high school, right? While there might have been a (usually shrinking) small audience for the athletic guy who was always talking about his football last Saturday, and how bigger he was than his classmates, well, the smart girls eventually tired of it and went after the nicer guy who built his own computer. Or, when some girl who was always dressed in the latest fashions, and often bragged about how wealthy her parents were, guess what, the boys raced away in droves and headed for that cute intellectual type with the square glasses and her unique dress sense.
Why? Well, the point is rather simple and it doesn't change when we grow up and it doesn't change in business - no one likes a big mouth and no likes a show-off! Success speaks for itself, and one doesn't need to overdo the marketing of it. Word of success tends to spread very fast, and it's often better to hear it from a third party who heard of it first, and then you actually feel like offering congratulations when you run into that other person or company representative.
What's even worse, and is immeasurably more annoying, are those entities that are continually spouting about extremely small or even insignificant (in a news sense) events or progress, imagining that social media will somehow turn them into champagne-popping moments in our minds. "Wow, another success at Company X? They are unbelievable, how come they are doing so much better than we are?!" The short answer is often that they are not - they just talk about themselves more and are in the business of creating an image; one that almost certainly looks quite different from the inside than looking in from the outside.
Now don't get me wrong, there is nothing inappropriate about disseminating big news in your company, but the key is the word "dissemination"; neither boasting nor shamelessly milking it as as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Everyone appreciates a degree of taste and restraint, and it's amazing how much more people are willing to listen when you do have something of import to say. What the chest beaters don't seem to realize is that people switch off, and walk away, in the face of overly aggressive self-promotion. If they ever took the time to check on those who unfollow them on Twitter or their blogs, they would know that.
For those who swallowed the social-media-for-business Kool-Aid, it is simply untrue that one must post something on Twitter or Facebook every day, and if you've got nothing creative or interesting to say, that you go to default and start talking about yourself and how cool you are. It is completely normal in any active business due to a combination of being busy and nothing of note actually happening in a given week, that you don't say something on Twitter. Audiences are more sophisticated than people think, and I am sure we all prefer to see something really cool once a week on Twitter, than a barrage of comments and replies to other tweets that essentially say nothing. It's all just blah-blah-blah. About me-me-me. Or even me-myself-and-I!
Let success speak for itself, and let the voice of success spread the word around your network. It's a very loud and penetrant voice, it carries far and it very nicely does the work for you while you get onto the next task. By all means announce the news on your various social media channels and press releases, but then zip it and get on with it. Let others talk about it, and write about it. That resonates way more in the end, and people will be all ears the next time something big happens.
Whereas, for the blowhards, that shrinking audience eventually leads to an inevitable end - at best, they are talking to a few sycophants who by definition hang off their every word and cling to them (usually because they want something), or at worst, they are actually talking (only) to themselves. People got so sick and tired of the non-stop self-promotion that it actually had the opposite effect, and it turned marketing into a mechanism for repulsion.
A chemoattractant converted into a chemorepellant? Boy, even I wasn't aware that social media had the power to do that! :)
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