Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Confidence, Creativity, Effectiveness, Egovertising, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Perspective, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning
It’s not that long ago that advertising award submissions would talk about how many Facebook ‘likes’ a post got as proof of effectiveness.
As I wrote a few years ago [even though I can’t find the post, haha] that’s the equivalent of claiming someone is your fan simply because you asked them to pass the salt in a café and they did.
And while many were quick to try and blame Facebook for suggesting this as a metric, the reality – similar to those who blame Powerpoint for writing bad presentation – was it was the people who wrote the submission who were to blame.
For all the talk and conversation about effectiveness, it’s amazing how we continue to try and reframe what it is and how you achieve it.
Hell, even those who literally make a living out of it, do it with one eye on serving their own needs and wants – resulting in methodologies that, while not wrong, tend to be more about not failing than liberating.
But hey … they’re way smarter, objective and valuable than so much of the stuff we’re seeing being peddled left, right and centre.
Some things to note.
Having 100,000 followers on Instagram is not a demonstration of your strategic effectiveness.
Having 10,000 subscribers to your newsletter is not a demonstration of your strategic abilities.
Having clients write you a letters of thanks is not a demonstration of your strategic skills.
They’re all lovely.
They’re all things you should feel proud of.
But they are not a demonstration of your strategic chops.
Christ … I have 17,000 instagram followers and do you know how I got them?
Well, as much as I’d like to say it was down to the 18,000 excellent images I’ve posted over my 14 years on the platform, the reality is it was an accident.
Metallica linked my insta to one of their photos and overnight, I gained about 20,000 followers.
Literally overnight.
Now I know what you’re thinking …
“How come 20,000 people followed you but you only have 17,000 followers now?”
Well, it’s easy …
Once people realised I was not going to furnish them with insider knowledge of their hero’s and instead, would be bombarding them with photos of my cat, they left in droves.
Almost 10,000 people.
So those 17,000 people on my insta consists of about 10k who find me so insignificant they can’t even be arsed to stop following me and 7k of people I’ve overshared into submission.
To paraphrase Lee Hill who once told me, “turnover is sanity, profit is vanity” … we can say the same about followers/readers and happy clients.
Sure, having a lot of people like what you do is good … but it doesn’t mean you’re strategically effective.
It doesn’t even mean you’re even strategic … and yet so many seem to be mistaking their volume of insta/newsletter/client letters as proof that they are.
All that means is – at best – you’re good to the people who have chosen to follow/work with you and as good as that is, it’s worth remembering a lot of people think Donald Trump is the messiah which highlights many people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing or talking about.