As social media managers, we’re always talking about the algorithm. With a capitol THE. How to harness it, how to rise above it, how to keep it from punishing us in our pursuit of good, strong social communications for our businesses.
We also know – and hate to even think about – how the deck is stacked against us. Chances are, we’re not among the top 100 brands on any particular social channel. Our resources are modest by comparison to the giants of the business world. We are just trying to connect with the audience that’s right for our organization, cause or citizenry.
We should be able to do it with the right combination of talent, planning and creativity. And often we do!
But now it feels different. It feels like the deck is stacked against us.
I spend a lot of time reading about the social networks, their management, their updates, their business practices. Like a lot of social media managers, I know that they don’t really care about my brand or my clients. The last 5-10 years in our practice, our team has seen and attempted to navigate all sorts of weird behavior. Sure you expect it from your audience sometimes, but from the networks themselves?
Here’s an everyday example.
The Facebook account of a friend and colleague gets hacked. It’s identified within two hours and even with dozens of my friend’s REAL friends reporting it to the network, the response we got was that the post did not go against community standards. Even when reported as fake/stolen identity. The hacker started selling cars allegedly because of a death in the family and took money from a bunch of people. BTW, there were no cars.
It took her two months and a third party service to try and get her account back. And before you get all judgy about it, she had 2FA on her account so it’s anyone’s guess how it happened.
***I’m not going to share an image of this case because my colleague is still unraveling the effects of this incident.
Here’s a second example. This happened to me over the New Years’ weekend.
A friend wants to digitize a family members’ old reel-to-reel tapes and was asking for ideas from her Facebook followers for companies to do that. I posted a suggestion for a company that I’ve personally used and respect, with a link to their website. Facebook immediately flags it and removes it because it could contain a nefarious spam link. I am given the opportunity for a “second review” so I click all the boxes but the post is not reinstated. So I send her the information on Facebook Messenger. And then I post in her comment thread that my post was removed and I’ve sent the information to her a different way.
These are two very specific examples among thousands of inactions or missteps by the very social networks we’ve come to depend upon for a significant portion of our daily communications. If we zoom back out to a bigger picture among the social networks, we see similar events occurring on a larger scale. Some have much more serious consequences.
I recently took a deep dive into the doom-and-gloom of social networks via The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher. It took me forever to read this book because after every 5-10 page case study, I had to put the book down. For all the connectivity we’ve experienced with online social networks, there are so many horrible examples of where everything went wrong.
If you work in any facet of social or digital media, I do endorse this book. First, because Fisher’s timeline is expansive. He looks at the roots of the rise of some of the technologies we currently use—in the 1990s and goes all the way to the January 2021 insurrection and how social media contributed to that event. Second, because his case studies include significant events outside the United States, which are rarely reported here. Myanmar and Germany are two of note.
I am not a doom and gloom type of person. I’m a glimmer person. So I’ve tried to look for the glimmer, or the nugget or the positive takeaway for our clients and our audience.
So where’s the glimmer here? Here are the six key points I took from the book.
What I learned from The Chaos Machine
- The networks do not care about the difference between truth and lies as a key part of their business practices.
- The networks are predisposed to advance negativity and outrage but suppress positivity and harmony because it gets the negative content seen more often.
- The networks know how to fix it, but are not interested in doing that.
- There are few, if any, human monitors to review, analyze and take actions on items which are reported.
- Most of the “monitors”’ are third party companies who are paid by speed and volume, not thoroughness and accuracy.
- The entities are so large and their systems so complicated, no one really knows how the pieces of the puzzle work together.
It’s Time to Be Informed in a New Way
Now that you know these six things about how the social networks operate, you can strengthen your brand’s social media practice to help shield the worst of these and enhance the best of what your brand wants to communicate with your audience. You still need that audience and while you’re strengthening your practice, you can begin to strategize on when, where and how you might want to move your audience somewhere else.