I started the passover season with the first five plagues of social media, and despite a considerable transportation delay incurred by of all things a flood, I’m back with a few more plagues this Sunny Easter morning. To refresh your memory:
- Spam
- Corporate Blogs
- Self-Appointed Experts
- Accumulationism
- Constant Partial Attention
- The Echo Chamber. Dance all you want on the grave of print, but at least when you went to the newsstand to buy your favorite rag, you had at least passing exposure to the headlines on the covers of opposing rags. Creating personalized newsfeeds and groups of friends and followers lets us indulge our weaker impulse to attend only to those with whom we already agree.
- Social Media Exceptionalism. Exceptionalism as you may recall from the last couple hundred years of United States politics, is the belief that your thing is, well, exceptional, and therefore “does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles” [wikipedia] – this is more or less a continuation of PR Exceptionalism and Brand Exceptionalism, two great “we can’t/shouldn’t measure this program” belief systems. I’ll grant that social media is by nature more measurable and that many practitioners are making good efforts to measure it, but exceptionalism still kicks in when the measurements don’t live up to what we hoped and we decide we must have underinvested or decide to call the program experimental. No more excuses, no more faith-based marketing, I say.
- Social Media Purism. Or maybe I should call it Puritanism. The idea that Social Media is All You Need and the related idea that It Cannot Be Mixed or Diluted with Other Modes and Methods have the ugly tang of fanaticism about them. The flavor of the month is tasty, no doubt, but it’s not the only one.
Just two more plagues to go. Stay tuned and stay ducky.