Playing Nice in the Social Media Sandbox

Is there anything new to learn about social media? Or is there just too much to learn, and as soon as you think you know something, things change? Yesterday I had a breakfast meeting on social media I paid $10 to attend, and an after-work meeting that also cost me $10. So what's my money's worth of information?

I've been putting out social media for work and personal use for nearly 18 months now. How am I doing?

I heard about Facebook landing pages in the morning. I didn't know they existed, and it was a brief mention in passing. The rest of the presentation was fairly basic and obvious information. I had to go back to the office and watch a YouTube video on how to create a landing page to realize what it was and what it was used for.

Then I also realized that companies are making money creating these landing pages, which are essentially, one web page.

I heard about QR codes, which I think won't be in common use for awhile yet, so I have time to figure that out.

I learned we should be thrilled about Ustream broadcasting, even though the quality is usually crappy. I decided not to be concerned with that either right now. I'm still thrilled about how easy the Flip Video camera is and it's not crappy.

The evening session was on evaluating social content. There were more PowerPoint slides. Whoever figures out something more dynamic than a PowerPoint slideshow will be the next software billionaire. And I have yet to attend any presentation where the projector and computer worked from the beginning. Or that the first people to arrive didn't sit in the aisle seats and make everyone else crawl over them.

There were mentions of various Internet tools to measure performance, most of which cost something to use. The presenter used the expression "play nice in the sandbox" three times, if not four. Once it was used to explain why he thought you should follow everyone on Twitter who follows you, even if obviously you are never going to have the time or interest to read all their posts.

Why? I asked. Why not just have the stream you want or is most useful to you? Because it's playing nice in the sandbox. For results people, it's all about numbers, and this is a number. Finally, the nice lady who twitters for Strange's Florist explained she follows everyone and apparently reads all their posts to learn about what kind of gardening everyone is doing.

Well, in that case, I can see it, but I felt like if you follow everyone, you are going to get pitched by other marketeers or at least asked to look at someone's naughty photos of themselves more than you want to be.

There is a guy on Twitter who was always bragging about his followers number. If he reached 1,000, he wanted 5,000. If he was at 5,695, he kept begging for more followers until he had an even 6,000. Why? He didn't read them. He probably only looked at the stream that mentioned him. What did the number mean? It certainly didn't mean all those followers were reading him because they were probably just collecting him like he was collecting them.

At a staff meeting, a person tweeting for another department bragged about having 700 followers. Wondering if I could entice any of them to follow our department, I went through her list and found marketeers from around the world, pornbots, and empty shell twitter accounts. If I counted only the real people who were likely to actually use her department's services, she really didn't have any more followers than I did. But saying "700" in a meeting sounds better than "346."

Lurking in all this is the thought that if you have a certain number, you will be paid to send out paid tweets. That's where all these measurement guys come in with their charts and graphs, looking at all the demographics of your pool. And this was the core of the evening lecture, to study and analyze and chart and graph your audience so you would know exactly what piece of bait to put on your hook.

Advertising and marketing is so eager to get into social media as a delivery tool, it kind of spoils social media as just something we were playing with before. It's like when cable tv starting having commercials just like broadcast television. Why am I watching commercials and paying for cable? What happened to my sandbox? I started using it for work, that's what, and now it's work.