Social Media Done Right: QMN025

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Wednesday, 29 May

(Today’s report is a 5-minute read)

BLUF: When it comes to business, social media isn’t just “posting on Facebook” or tweeting. If that was the case, you could hire your Aunt Sally to do it. If you’ve already hired your Aunt Sally, read this and then spare no time in telling her to clean out her desk.

KSA here. I’ve long watched with morbid curiosity and partially restrained dismay at the way social media is understood, particularly by those who claim to build strategies around it. 

In my admittedly practical thinking, the function of social media as it relates to growing businesses serves a singular purpose: to build business; that is, to make money. Unlike ads, however, social media is active, not passive. There’s a human element to it that must be dynamic, cognizant, and alert. 

I assert that the purpose and function of social media is as follows:

To demonstrate thought leadership and industry expertise while engaging with an audience of one’s peers, those interested in one’s expertise, and potential investors/clients by syndicating and distributing content with the intention of building business relationships. 

Social media combines aspects of branding and marketing tactics, industry experience, and analytic strategy to create information-rich environments that will attract and retain clients. Everything else, I argue, is bullshit. That includes the “pivot to video,” virality, discussions lasting longer than it takes to look at Google analytics about mobile vs. desktop, scheduling, trolls, Russian bots, and underscores in usernames. 

Syndication is often conflated with having a large following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s true if that’s where your primary – or your potential primary – audience primarily resides, but if that’s not where they are and you’re not making 2013-era earnings on bombarding an audience with programmatic ads, then you’re wasting your time and, given the nature of those particular platforms, your money. 

Business social media, then, is putting the right content in front of the right audience. What does the right content look like?

• It's targeted, i.e., it’s relevant to the audience it reaches. That means it has an intended audience in mind when it is created and it is intentionally put in front of that audience. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your audience is anything like you: figure out who they are, where they are, what they value, and how you can best serve them. 

• It's kept fresh. Audiences, like clients, are built because people come back to you: because you have something to say about something they care about. This exchange of values – your thoughts and your products/services for their attention, time, and money – becomes a relationship. 

• It's provocative/informative/interesting. People want to share it, comment on it, bookmark it, quote it, email you about it. They're inspired/delighted/informed/annoyed: they feel something about it. They learn something from it.

There’s no mystery to audiences or social media except one: why startups and businesses treat it like an afterthought instead of developing it as a tool for growth. (KSA)

IMAGINING WAYS TO DESTROY YOUR TECH, THAT’S WHAT: This AI Uses Echolocation To Identify What You’re Doing (5 min) “Based at the Wuhan University of Technology, in China, Guo’s team has tested its microphone array on four different college students and found that they can identify whether the person is sitting, standing, walking, or falling, with complete accuracy, they report in a paper published today in Applied Physics Letters. While they still need to test that the technique works on more people, and that it can identify a broader range of behaviors, this demonstration hints at a new technology for surveilling human behavior.” I’m already imagining sonic devices generating frequencies that aren’t just meant to jam these microphone arrays, but to destroy them and incapacitate anyone – whether human or AI – listening. More on sonic stuff by the team that reverse-engineered the crippling effects of Havana Syndrome here. (KSA) 

CURATED MEDIA FROM NECESSITY: Inside El Paquete, Cuba’s Social Network (15 min) Nick Parish with a fascinating look at a bootleg media packet in Cuba. GWOT veterans with “haji copies” of DVDs still in their garages will find this concept somewhat familiar. Really amazing. “The paquete is more than a big dump of media. It’s a system, an economy, and maybe even a mental model for understanding how Cuba operates, in spite of, or as a result of, the otherwise antiquated media economy, with state-controlled broadcast and print networks. It serves to entertain, educate, and inform the Cuban people of what’s happening on and off the island in a way that’s unique to their cultural situation.” (BJM)

THE JUNIOR EXEC BY CPP: Big Decisions

Attend to your cognitive bias on major decisions. The most common for managers are:

1. Confirmation bias – information that confirms a leader’s preconceptions

2. Bandwagon effect – the probability off one person adopting a belief increases based on the number of people holding that belief. Also referred to as groupthink.

3. Survivorship bias – also known in business as Success Bias. “It worked for us before, so it’ll work again.”

4. Availability heuristic – tendency of managers to overestimate the importance of information available to them.

One cognitive failure that is common in business and often the core cause of managerial derailment is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

From HBR: “Psychologists David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger, now at New York University’s Stern School of Business, supplied scientific evidence that incompetence is bliss—bliss, that is, for the incompetent person. Their study, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” appeared in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

Incompetence, the study demonstrated, represents a dismaying troika of cluelessness: Incompetent people don’t perform up to speed, don’t recognize their lack of competence, and don’t recognize the competence of others. “The skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain,” the researchers conclude. In other words, if incompetents have people reporting to them, their poor judgment may damage careers besides their own.” (CPP)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA), Chris Papasadero (CPP) & Brady Moore (BJM)