Social Media Manipulation

For years we heard that advertising would make your numbers online. That you could get rid of your real world product, put it on the Internet, and with all the eyeballs attracted, you could charge a fortune for ads and end up rich. Only this didn't turn out to be true. Just ask the "New York Times," which went to a porous paywall. Turns out the numbers don't add up. (Kind of like your royalty statement from the label, but that's a different issue!)

Was the Harlem Shake a fake?

"You didn't make the Harlem Shake go viral-corporations did": http://bit.ly/10hy6fL

Its rapid disappearance is not the only thing interesting about the "Harlem Shake" phenomenon. I mean for not even a month everybody's talking about it and then not a single word? We make fun of true one hit wonders, we embrace the "Macarena." Yet "Harlem Shake" was like a comet, it came close to Earth and then blasted right by us into the universe. It'd be like making a friend at summer camp and having all memory of them wiped from your brain as soon as you entered the minivan for the ride home. Huh?

In other words, this sounds more like a marketing campaign than a true social phenomenon. After all, we still reference Rebecca Black's "Friday."

But the "Harlem Shake" story, the underpinnings, was not investigated by the mainstream media, which is still clueless when it comes to the Internet, never mind social media. No, this story had to be broken online, and you had to be part of the e-mail loop, a friend on Facebook or a follower on Twitter to find out about it, because almost no one reads qz.com on a regular basis.

And then today, someone e-mails me a link to this article, on Pandodaily.com, which I've actually heard of, but don't read on a regular basis:

"Social media may finally be dying, but the BS around it hasn't": http://bit.ly/11z6bzc

Let's go to the end first, who is this Brandon Mendelson who authored this article?

Someone selling a book. Yup, old wave St. Martin's published his book back in September. It seems to have had a bit of traction, but it didn't break through, unlike a Malcolm Gladwell book.

Everyone wants to be Gladwell. The only difference is Malcolm can write and you can't. Everyone wants to get on the train, not only Brandon Mendelson by Ryan Holliday:

"Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator: http://amzn.to/16vyyzk

I'm actually reading Holliday's book. I'll probably never finish it, it is not a riveting read, but it does blow your mind. It's an explanation of not only page views, but how to promote your product online. That's what it is about for all websites, page views, because that's how they charge for the advertising they do get. That's why despite all the hosannas in the business press, the "Huffington Post" is a worthless piece of crap. Yup, you see an interesting headline and then click through to find a non-story. They've won, they can sell advertising on this new page. Furthermore, you can pitch a fake story to get a website to get page views, no matter how outrageous it might be. That's what they're selling, titillation and outrageousness. And there's almost no fact-checking. But the resultant trail of page views emblazons your identity in the mind of clickers.

This is all to say that Brendan Mendelson has an agenda.

But if you read his article, he doesn't question the viral validity of the "Harlem Shake, " but PSY's "Gangnam Style."

Was "Gangnam Style" a fake?

You'll think so after reading this article. If nothing else, you'll learn how to rig the game. That's what today's media manipulators do, make you think you're living in your own self-created world when the truth is you lived in a walled Disneyland, where your odds of building a ride are bupkes.

In other words, just like advertising wasn't a business model to replicate your real world product online, maybe you can't make the social media game pay, and we're all going to become immune to it.

In other words, social media is where you gain eyeballs, but it may not be a revenue generator unto itself.

Which means the value of Facebook is lower than we think and Twitter is a news service, not a marketing platform.

Hmm...

I'm a natural skeptic. Which is tough in a rah-rah society. Where we've got an old guard clinging desperately to what once was and a new guard populated by snake oil salesmen who don't want you to be successful, but just want you to buy their product so you think you will be. It's self-help for dummies. Or an advertisement in the back of "Parade," or a comic book.

He who gains the most eyeballs wins. Are they doing so via manipulation?

You tell me.


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