UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 43What Really Matters in Social

The term social is a pretty basic one. It means the interaction between people. That's it. Remember when you fled to the basement during family gatherings and your mom would come downstairs and ask you to come up and “be social”?¹

That's all I've ever asked of people who use social media: Just be social.

Come up for a bit, show your face, and talk to the company that's come to visit.

I've been screaming out against automation and scheduling in social since 2008. I've been singing the same song for more than six years, which is how I assume Lynyrd Skynyrd feels like every time people yell out “Freebird!” from the crowd—only slightly less cool.

Success in social has always been simple. If you wanted to use social media, just show up and be social.

Somewhere along the way, we made it okay to have a presence online without actually being present. On Twitter, for example, we went from a site filled with people there because they wanted to connect with other like-minded users to people there because they “had to.” With more and more users, the possibility of profiting from connections changed the very nature of what made the site great. Now Twitter was too big to ignore. We had to get our message, our content and our products in front of all those eyes. It was time to scale it, grow it, blast it.

Along came scheduling software, and I screamed about how bad it was for Twitter. People screamed back, and it was a party!

Then the hybrid schedulers ...