Last week I picked up on a tweet from someone via a conference which said ‘Social HAS to loose the anarchist tag – will never go mainstream otherwise. Need to move from punk rock to classical. #e20s’
I thought this a somewhat narrow minded view so I retweeted and said so. Shortly after I received a reply saying ‘You’re welcome to your opinion #e20s’, and perhaps rather bluntly I replied ‘Ta – I don’t particularly welcome yours, punk and classical, we can have both’. In quick succession I then received ‘I’ve no problem with challenge or criticism Doug. I’ve dished out enough of both! #e20s’, followed by ‘I don’t particularly enjoy being hashtagged all the time though’ and finally, ‘I just find the hashtags a bit #naff and #petty Doug’.
I tried to respond with ‘If you can’t stand the tweet heat – stay out of the kitchen’, but the person had blocked me, so I couldn’t. Of course we’re free to follow, unfollow and block whoever we choose and I couldn’t help but feel the final response and subsequent and immediate blocking of me was perhaps, in the tweeters own words, a bit ‘#naff and #petty’.
Leaving aside our squabble, I think anarchy sometimes gets a bad rap. As well as being ‘A state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority’ it is also defined as ‘Absence of Government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal’, and I’m sure you’ll find other definitions out there too. There are times when people question how much help Government is (regardless of its political hue), and despite all the challenges the concept of absolute freedom of the individual does at times have an allure to it, doesn’t it?
Of course there is an element of rebellion about social media. I expect Starbucks would rather people hadn’t hijacked their #SpreadTheCheer Twitter wall at the Natural History Museum and tweeted ‘Pay your fucking taxes’ right across it, but the mood of the day turned against them, and they got a taste of a ‘State of disorder’. I think this is more a case of recognising that you don’t own and control hashtags and the responses to them once they’re out there, rather than outright anarchy.
I found a few other examples of the Dark Side of social media (you’ll doubtless have plenty more), which I shared recently at the Workplace Trends Social Media for Business Conference. This was an interesting opportunity for me as in the main; I have a very positive experience of social media. Nevertheless I went searching for the dark side, and I found myself in the sewer soon enough.
I found plenty of examples of disjointed organisations proudly displaying their silo mentality for all to see, including a fine one courtesy of Qantas. As Qantas launched their #QantasLuxury competition to win a pair of Qantas pyjamas, what their marketing department failed to consider was their current public image following the decision taken to ground the entire fleet during an industrial dispute. The online furore that followed was of Qantas’ own making, and you can’t help but feel that a bit of good old fashioned talking between departments beforehand could have saved a lot of embarrassment.
We delved into the tragic tale of Sandy Hook from the perspective of Ryan Lanza. Ryan Lanza, estranged brother of the gunman Adam Lanza was incorrectly named as the killer by CNN News. Fox and CBS quickly followed suit while Ryan continued to work at his desk in New York City, until his social media feeds lit up with false accusations and his world changed.
We then considered Mary Beard, the sometimes controversial Cambridge Don who was vilified on social media following an appearance on BBC Question Time. In this case – the attacks were more about her appearance rather than her intellect, and I wondered, if Mary had been male, would such a thing have happened? As she reflected in an interview with The Independent, Mary Beard said:
“I think we’re still in the process of learning how to deal with all that. I suppose I feel, perhaps naively, optimistic that we’re just not yet quite clear about the rules of how you communicate online publicly. If you do respond, and say quite calmly, ‘I don’t think I actually said that,’ quite often you get a real response.”
Is she right? Watch this space.
My journey took me to some dark places for sure, and in summary this is what I was reminded of:
- You don’t own hashtags so use them by all means – at your own risk
- Despite the open nature of social media we see loads of businesses still completely siloed inside. When is business going to understand that it’s all about the conversation – not just in silos, but across and beyond the organisational boundaries?
- Check your facts
People can be and are hugely irresponsible at times, and they certainly don’t need social media to achieve that.
Perhaps more importantly – there was a brief aside to the squabble I referenced earlier when another contributor said (re: punk v classical), ‘how about New Romantic?’ How about it indeed. In fact – why not a bit of each and every musical genre (except maybe Phil Collins)? If the culture of social can’t be an inclusive, broad church, then it’s not a culture, it’s a cult.
Thought provoking post, Doug. Sadly I think we’ve seen some really damaging examples of social media gone horribly wrong – in some cases extreme enough for people to lose their jobs (and I’m certainly not going to make any judgement about those cases).
This is probably stating the obvious, but as far as companies go, social media is just another communication channel and the use of it doesn’t fix any broken internal communication or cultural issues. As with most other things, greater complexity simply increases the ways in which things can go wrong. That said, when used well, by organisations that have a cohesive internal and external approach to business, it can be phenomenally powerful. And I think that can only increase with time.
On a personal level, I have an over-arching principle with any social media. It only goes out there if I am happy for anyone in the world to read it – for the rest of my life. I think people sometimes forget that what you put online stays out there for all to see, so only put out what you would be proud to own.
Absolutely Vandy. Social certainly does not fix a broken culture – in fact regardless of the size of business, I think it helps to expose it. And I love your closing line ‘Only put out what you would be proud to own.’ That’s great.
Great post Doug…keep pushing! The person you squabbled with is so far behind the times it’s sad.
You rock!
\m/ You too Jay \m/
I appreciate your continuing support – thanks
As long as we can have a bit of Slade
Mamma We’re all crazee now.
Quite so.
The hashtag #philcollins should be rightly banned 🙂
Well yes….. Keira has a set of drum sticks used on a Phil Collins tour, they’re actually really neat. They were also used on a Journey tour too. Don’t Stop Believing.
Here’s something my friend Arun posted on Facebook in response to this post.
‘I think it’s part cult, part culture. It’s an amazing way for instant communication (without talking , like I’m doing now). We all want to belong. Social media is already mainstream for the kids, “millennials” if you want mainstream speak. I think they will drive this to the future their own punk way — just do it. Wasn’t Tchaikovsky a classical punk?’
I love it!
Another interesting post, Doug.
Another way of looking at the current state of social media, and how its constituents behave, is to recognize that it is a plenitude: it is a crowd of individuals all with their own views, opinions, prejudices, biases, etc. etc., all pulling in different directions. And when you encounter such profound diversity, aggregated and channeled in platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it can appear chaotically disordered in its absence of any obvious controls or governance (road rules), the very definition of anarchy itself. But a marvelous characteristic of this plenitude is its richness and variety and value that is inherently a part of its very disorderliness. You cannot have one without the other.
What is lacking from discussion and debate about social media behavior, whether individual or corporate, is the role of authenticity. When you interact with an entity in a social media channel, does it feel authentic, or are you just interacting with a bias or a prejudice or a marketing slogan? This is where you get the disconnects between the social media construct and reality, as in your Qantas and Starbucks examples.
If you sat down, in person, with the actual human beings instead of the social media constructs that they represent themselves to be then your experience and evaluation of those people would be profoundly different because of the means by which you had arrived at your judgement of them: personal contact. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t still end in disagreement with them, but the means by which you would have arrived at your reaction would be much more richly embodied in authentic personal interaction rather than social media jousting.
One of the ways in which I try to conduct and present myself in social media channels is as a rounded human being with all the richness, variety, flaws and personal tics that we all have. So although I am a professional project manager, and a lot of my social media interaction is around project management topics, I mix it up with some other stuff (e.g. wild swimming) that lets you know that I am not just a marketing platform or a spamming bot (which is how some real (sic.) people behave in social media). I know some people use different social media personas for different purposes, usually professional, and keep their channels separate, and I have argued against doing that.
It is the unintegrated separating out of an individual (or an organisation) into public/private or professional/personal personas that very often signals a lack of true authenticity. And once that occurs, all kinds of social media train wrecks are sure to follow…
Ian,
Keep being real.
Thanks,
Anthony