A Stranger is Worth More Than a Friend
The campaign to delete Facebook is trending again. I say again, because this isn’t the first time. Facebook lost 6 million users in mid-2011 after one particularly uproar-inducing redesign. People predicted the death of Facebook then, too.
Ironic that they used a hashtag this time.
There’s a great Wikipedia article that plots Facebook’s many rough drafts on a timeline. It’s evidence of how much we overlook the rewriting process when we think about a “successful” concept and its evolution. It took a lot of time and anguish for Facebook to become Facebook in its current omnipresent form.
In 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Pages, which gave companies and public figures their own spaces on the platform. It was a big step for the corporate and marketing worlds. Even then, many established products and brands had come late to the Internet. Some didn’t even have a website.
Facebook Pages put companies in direct conversation with their best and worst customers for the first time. Nestle’s Facebook Page became infamous for trying to delete its dissatisfied customers instead of hearing them out.
Facebook Pages also represented a big step for personal branding when they were opened to the public. It wasn’t long before all of us got an email or three inviting us to like the Page of a coworker, a former classmate, or a best friend’s cousin.
“He’s a really good writer—the best in our family—you have to check him out.”
Such encouragement went on before and after Facebook Pages, of course. “Please visit my website.” “Please follow my Twitter.” These digital solicitations are no different than the flyers under your windshield wiper that say, “Please visit our new storefront,” except a storefront usually has more thought behind it.
Just the other day, I received a notification to sign up for a blog entitled “Everything in My Head.” Based on the title alone, I did not sign up.
We know how to spot a headline we don’t want to read. We know exactly what we “Like” when we see it. But we have no idea how to direct that critique at ourselves. As I wrote previously, everyone needs readers and editors because we can’t see our own mistakes and blind spots.
When I started teaching, an old friend contacted me to help him set up a blog and a Facebook Page. He sent me a writing sample. When I suggested the same edits I give my students, he politely said thanks and ignored the advice. Interest in his work never moved beyond his friends and family.
“Well maybe I just want to write for my friends and family,” he said.
No, you really don’t, I thought.
Small businesses suffer a high failure rate because people don’t develop their ideas. It’s much easier to join the current pyramid scheme or open yet another pizza joint than to startup the first Starbucks when no one drinks espresso or create Netflix when there’s a Blockbuster Video on every corner.
People should never fall in love with the first drafts of their work, but they do.
A lot of my students will end their online assignments with invitations like, “Tell me what you think in the comments section below.” Even big brands will try to appear interactive by asking customers to “Join the conversation.”
Interactivity is inspired, not solicited. Your friends have received enough requests from other friends. Yet if any friend reaches out to you tomorrow with a clear, concise, and interesting idea, you’ll click Like in an instant.
It was one of the hardest truths to learn long before social media: you don’t want people you know to follow you. You want strangers.
Good authors and entrepreneurs spend their time creating work that will interest people they don’t know. When strangers respond with something more than a thumbs up or snark—when they respond with their own thoughts and ideas—then you truly have something. You have a conversation.
You might even have a customer.