What
is the difference between useful and useless media? We could probably
fill textbooks, whoops, digital pages of useless examples of people and
organizations using social media uselessly. Useless means having
or being of no use and not able to give service or aid. Being able to
comprehend useless means you have to understand useful.
Useful means a capable of being put to use, serviceable for an end or
purpose, of a valuable or productive kind. Key word here is PRODUCTIVE!
What Makes Your Media Useful?
We hear and see people claiming to be “gurus” of “how to” do
everything, anything and with anyone and everyone using this thing
called “social media”. You see it in articles, updates everywhere and
direct messages on Twitter. Consider these non-stop proclamations:
- Get the best SEO Engine on the planet: Why?
- Get tons of Twitter followers: Why?
- Learn from this expert: Expert about What?
- Get the experts book here: Just what I need another book!
- Join this webinar NOW!: Excuse me, NOW belongs to me
- Learn social media marketing tricks: Sorry, I don’t do tricks!
- Make $10,000 dollars a week from this new MLM program: Sorry, I make money the hard way!
With proclamations like these one wonders 1) does anyone understand useful 2) is anyone learning anything useful?
Social Illusions of Worth
Often (more often than we like to admit), someone will ask us a
question about the value of social media. With exception of a few
innovative companies and individuals most of the “crowds” use is
propagating hyped up messages to make themselves seem important or to
try and trap people into a transaction. The bulk of the messages are
useless while the minority is useful.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that people’s illusion of usefulness
leads many people and organizations down the wrong path, because they
think they understand something that is useful when in fact it is
useless. You see people somehow think that because they use things
they must after all possess the intellectual capacity to understand
that which they use is in fact useless. Consider how most
organizations and people are using this thing called social media. They
are applying old knowledge in the use and misuse of something new and
innovative. They fail before they start because of an illusion of
understanding what is useful vs. useless! In other words they end up
doing useless things vs. finding ways to be useful.
Social media appears to be falling into the useless wasteland.
To be useful to the market you must align your intent with what the
market considers useful. Who needs more friends or messages that are
not useful? Time and productivity are wasted when spent on useless messages and people who do not have similar intents.
The innovative possibilities of using social technology are endless yet limited to a few who “think beyond the crowds“. While the “wisdom of crowds” is indeed a valuable pool to tap into you have to use wisdom to discern between what is useful vs. useless.
To do so you must stand outside the crowd and think what would really
be useful to the crowd. If you stand inside the crowd you will find
yourself lost in useless activities. Stand outside the crowd and figure
out what would be useful and the crowd will follow.
I hope you found this useful!