Photo Credit: Gary Bridgman, southsideartgallery.com
This isn’t yet another rant about spam blasts on Facebook. No, I understand why sometimes it’s necessary, and well, the promoter friends I have I half expect it. I deal.
I get all sorts of “like my page” requests, event requests, but here’s the thing. Some of them are obvious – like, I know so and so works somewhere, so sure, I’m gonna like the the page and no explanation is really necessary.
However, most times, there’s not one bit of personalization. Almost no one, especially no one who has anything to do with marketing for a job title, sends me even a shred of “hey, you should look at this, I know you’re into -insert passion here-.”
It’s not just my network, I know this. I talk with my non-marketing friends, and they seriously lament this, and in fact, have used quite a few choice words for people who don’t take the time to be considerate.
Most folks obviously can’t be bothered on Facebook, where supposedly we’re “friends” to take a minute to even include my name or even a perfunctory pleasantry. Why should I go? When I make recommendations to friends, “in real life,” I generally try to tell them why. If Facebook and these tools are an extension of that real life, why shouldn’t it be the same? And if I hear something about “scaling the interaction,” your answer obviously doesn’t get the point I’m going at.
We’re supposed to building communities where people “care” and we’re “in it together.” If you can’t even be bothered to dash off a seventy characters (the equivalent of half a tweet) why it’s important to particularly me at least once in awhile, you’re simply using social networks as yet another broadcast channel and I have to call into question your “community” intent. Or is it really, as Dan Blank says, “developing a market” for you? If it is, we’re going backward, not forward, with these tools to help build groups. And the idea that this is a “social” interaction is a bunch of BS if that’s the case.
Maybe I’m old school. But my grandma taught me over a manual typewriter (why I type so hard and loud to this day) that direct notes, personalization, and actually including something that shows you know the person go a long way because it’s not just about the party, event, or whatever. It’s about the community. We’ve got Facebook today instead of the social register, and we don’t have to type doubly hard to make an impression on the carbon copy paper, but that doesn’t mean we always have to “send to all” the same message. You might be surprised the results to take a moment and actually dash something off.
