“Not a bad book and a quick read, but long before the end I decided not to finish it.
Basically, anyone who knows anything about social media knows that it’s bullshit in terms of the ways it’s being used by large companies or corporate entities.
I did a personal Twitter experiment a couple weeks ago where I hit the Follow button next to every single person that came up. People who followed me and everyone THEY followed. In a week, just by doing that I more than doubled my followers. You can also mention certain key things on Twitter and likely get a new follower. Mention Jesus, weight loss, or teeth whitening and you’ll gain at least one new follower regardless of what you actually say about the topic.
The point is that it’s kind of difficult to measure the impact of social media. I could start a Twitter for you and guarantee that you’d have a thousand followers within a month. But how many of those are actual, dedicated users that would increase traffic to your company? A very small percent.
Also, social media is supposed to be personal. So when a company does it, and when it’s obvious, there’s no personality behind it and therefore the tools are being completely misused. If someone can give me one good reason to follow the activity of Frito-Lay on Twitter, I’d love to hear it.
The book does take on some big ideas, specifically the idea of the tipping point that Malcolm Gladwell put forth, which I appreciated. I’m not a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. His ideas are interesting, but they usually strike me as fairly flimsy in terms of proof. For example, his idea that most people can be successful if they spend 10,000 hours doing something is pretty much unprovable. You can cite examples where it’s true all day, but what I don’t see a lot of is the idea that there are tons of people out there who have put in the time and aren’t known. So I was pretty glad to see someone take on that idea.
All in all, I hope more companies will read this before they hire some kind of person to handle their social media presence. Because it’s a complete joke.”