SocialMediaBust

A day or two ago, the reputed oldest Twitter person in the world passed away at 104, and if anyone deserves recognition for an interesting life, it's someone who has reached that old age and participates in a technology that even people 60 years younger find perplexing. So it's appropriate to thank Marsha Collier for passing on the news. That's a good thing. It was an oddity most of us might have missed otherwise.

Then, Marsha, who is an author of a number of Dummies books related to EBay, and host of a tech. radio show,  posted the following (see image to left):

@nameremoved I wish I would have known her! She certainly didn't need my book [amazonlinkto her book].

I don't know about you, but I do not see that it is in good taste to try to promote a book of any kind on the day that a venerable woman passed away. Attaching the promotional link for the purpose of getting people to purchase the book seems in bad taste. The passing of anyone is not an opportunity to plug one's own trivial book. I don't know of anyone who writes who would be so self-centered and unfeeling to even consider this. Yet, there it is.

You'd not even expect this kind of behavior from scam artists, and certainly @marshacollier is NOT a scam artist in any sense of the word. She may be a self-promoter to the extreme, lacking in empathy and more concerned about selling her next Dummies book, but a scam artist she is not. And that's probably why this is most shocking.

Are There Implications? What Can We Learn?

The first question, one guesses, is what would possess a technically savvy person to do such a thing. So, hoping to find out I posted a tweet to Marsha expressing my opinion about the inappropriateness of such an action. Because Marsha clearly considers herself a champion of customer service, monitoring social media and transparency, etc, I expected at least an apology, and/or explanation. Maybe I missed something.

Ah, no cigar. No answer. In fact Marsha simply unfollowed me, and ignored the issue. I didn't find that terribly surprising, but I did find it saddening. It's very common. Social media advice givers, many of whom are little above the level of charlatans, do not like their opinons or actions to be criticized. The talk is cheap and the walk is awful crooked.

 

Of the 15k people who follow Marsha, ONE agreed with the sentiment I posted. No other comments were made about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of standing above a corpse to market a book.

Yet there's more. Jeff Kingman who co-hosts the #custserv chat every week, and is clearly a friend of Marsha's, felt obligated to come to the defense of the customer service and ebay maven. Here's a example of what he posted in response to my single 140 post expressing dismay at using a death to market a book. There were more but it's largely irrelevant. No doubt you can search for the rest.

So let's put aside Jeff's blowup and the use of an obscenity.  I happen to think Mr. Kingman is one of the few folks on that chat that has any grasp of what he talks about re: customer service, and clearly he kind of "lost it". He's human. It's not the first time someone will be angry at my comments, and it won't be the last.

So, given this situation, and what we know about social media, what can we conjecture or conclude?

• Well, first of all, Twitterites, and probably most social media posters do NOT want conflict and disageement, and will ignore it.
• Many Twitterers and other social media folks will NOT engage with those who would like to refute and debate their positions. I've seen this over and over again, and if all else fails, they simply ignore, or do the "I guess we'll have to differ". I've almost never seen a desire to walk the talk of engagement.
• This is consistent with some research which shows that people who tend to be more successful on Twitter, are also positive, and rarely if ever offer negative comments. People seem to want to use Twitter not for debate or in-depth conversation, but they have an affinity for bland, usually vacuous and inoffensive content. Jeffrey's comments are actually among the handful of passionate statements I've seen on Twitter in 18 months. Sadly they don't reflect an interest in discussing the issue -- the marketing coupled with a death, and trying to profit from it. So, it hardly counts as intelligent give and take about the issue.
• One can use a simple criteria to separate the charlatans from the real true intellects who want to understand social media, and are not driven solely by the desire to self-promote. It's pretty foolproof. If someone reacts defensively to strong, but factual disagreement with their positions, refuses to engage, or shows no desire to understand your position, that's the charlatan. Works for me. Those that pass the test are absolutely worth their weight in gold since they are the ones you can learn from because they learn from others, those that agree and disagree.

Those are interesting points, I think, and may suggest how to conduct oneself on Twitter/Social Media but what about the profound silence? Amidst over 15k followers, why did only one comment briefly about the tasteless faux pas? Why was the person who posted a single tweet criticizing the faux pas violently attacked? And, what are the implications?

I don't have the answers, exactly. The silence in the face of stupidity, and the attacking of the person pointing out the stupidity is a form of mob behavior if and when it occurs. I can't say that very many people commented or attacked me, except for Jeff (there were a few), but it has a vague mob feel to it.

But the silence? Here's the implication and I believe the author of "You Are Not a Gadget" suggested that behavior online inadvertently results in encouraging people to do very bad things. The phrase is that social media legitimizes behavior we would not accept elsewhere, particularly if the behavior is common and left uncommented.

That's a deep issue -- a social issue, but certainly the silence functions as tacit agreement. When 15k people sit silently when someone commits a rather tasteless act online, it sends the message that there are no consequences. And that legitimizes the behavior, not only for the perpetrator, but for any and all who are watching.

That may be one reason why we will face a general decay on social media, because the desire to avoid conflict and controversy, to refuse to engage with those who behave inappropriately, and the profound silence influence social media to lowest common denominator, which means spam, junk, and superifical thoughs and expressions of those thoughts.

 Notes:

1) One reason there were no spontaneous comments about the tasteless act from "all those followers" is that very few people saw and read the actual tweets in question. It's kind of amusing, really. Only a very tiny fraction of followers will see any single tweet. It's a topic I've explained elsewhere in terms of the limitations of social media for business. Still the fact that NOBODY commented before me, is remarkable.

2) No doubt this post will cause more abuse to be sent my way, and I'm good with that. One of the things about social media is that we're all so new at it that any experiences are fodder for learning. Be assured that I will attempt to make comments about this post into learning opportunities for all of us who really want to understand the dynamics of communication and relationships in the social media environment.

 

 

 

 

---

< Prev		Next >