Dave Chappelle tells this story during a bit Live at the Fillmore several years ago, poking fun at MTV for getting Ja Rule on the phone to give his account on 9/11, saying, "Who cares what Ja Rule has to say about it?" Implying that society puts far too much emphasis on what celebrities have to say about an issue, and that was circa 2003, or in other words, the prehistoric era of the internet. Now, it's not only celebrities, it's everyone, and it appears to be encouraged.
It's a trending topic that the platforms want us to discuss, pushing it on us as if it's oxygen. Everyone jumps on board because the notion is that if it's trending, you'll get attention in the form of clicks, as meaningless as it was to get Ja Rule's opinion on September 11th.
I thought about that skit with Dave Chappelle when I saw the photo of Tiger Woods because it symbolizes what social media has become: an audience full of fans, with their phones in the air recording the shot, versus actually seeing it for themselves. A bunch of "content creators" desperately seeking the next thing they can weigh in on, not to add value, but to supplement their purpose with a hidden agenda or potentially go "viral." As if going viral is the golden ticket we're all searching for socially.
And that's the culture we live in today, where weighing in feels like an obligation. To put things into perspective, how many times have you heard this? "The best approach to building a brand is to be consistent on social media."
What follows that opinion is typically centered around establishing trust with your audience, about showing up, and how "If you want to see growth, you need to post every day."
I will NEVER give a client that advice. Ever, and here's why: Because what happens is a million people creating subpar content, for the sake of creating something, to appease an audience and the algorithms, because they falsely believe it's the recipe for establishing trust, but in reality, it's merely about relevance in someone's already saturated news feed.
"Whew."
I'm talking about posts that start with, "Here are my thoughts on Cracker Barrel, or Here are my two cents on the Coldplay CEO scandal, or The Phillies' Karen." It's as if we're all sitting there at the game with our phones out, looking for something to post, rather than experiencing life for ourselves.
This "post every day" culture created by the social media gurus, unfortunately, is the ethos of social media lately, and more than ever, on LinkedIn, filled with content critiquing the logo of a restaurant they likely haven't been to since they were a kid. All for the fear of missing out and not posting it, or worse, because it completely avoids what they could be talking about. As if our so-called audience is sitting by their news feed waiting to hear, "what you have to say on the matter."
It's double-spaced, line by line, with a big, clever hook, and a blatantly obvious call to action that contradicts the very meaning of establishing trust, because if you did want to earn someone's trust, you wouldn't be concerned about how your audience reacts to your daily content. You would let them decide, or at the very least, empower your audience to make up their own mind on how to respond.
In a world that's being laced with AI-written slop, posting daily because your "personal branding" LinkedIn coach told you how important it was to create content, isn't wrong if, in fact, you can actually post something of value every day. Which, I highly doubt you can keep up with, begs the point I'm getting at: It won't be the consistent content that gets noticed. It will be the content that gets drowned out.
The inconsistent content, the content that was created because you had something meaningful to say, will be the content that inspires people to react, and the irony of it all will be that it has nothing to do with what your "coach" told you that you "need to do to build a brand."
There is no rulebook for social media, and let me save you the suspense: if you're trying to go viral, stop, it's not something you can "just turn on," and when it's evident that's the intent, well, you're probably not going to like what people have to say about it.
In the meantime, I'll be out here living my life with my phone down as much as possible, because as passionate as I am about cheesy hashbrowns, nobody will give a shit about what I have to say about a logo.
I would rather be inconsistent and original than consistent and unoriginal.
Thanks for reading,
Derek
P.s. I wrote every word of this.
