Social Media Marketing and Pick Up Artists.

I realized this morning that about 50% of the brands I follow online are essentially characters from The Game.

To explain better, sketchy social marketing follows the same process that pick up artists do:

find a complex process that some people are naturally good at (in this case, both variations on the human function of socialization).
research successful variations of this process ‘in the wild’ in an attempt to find common patterns and steps that can be tested.
take your learnings, and build a few algorithmic approaches, to be tested in real life situations.
once you nail down the most statistically successful of these approaches, refine it, apply it constantly, iterate to improve, and continue to plug new variables into your equation with each new situation you meet.

My problem with this approach is that algorithms cannot adequately model realistic human behaviour. We’re still in the uncanny valley for making proper social behaviours, online or otherwise, a regimented process.

In other words, only people make good people.

The reason I compare this to the world of pick up artists is simple: just because it works doesn’t make it less sketchy. In the same way someone teaching romantically hopeless men a method for picking up women will argue they are ‘leveling the playing field’, agencies and social media practitioners will say that having a tightly designated, non-human-style method of formulating and sharing messages is about ‘finding efficiencies’ and/or ‘representing brands properly’.

My issue with this is that it never ‘levels the playing field’. Much like having a bunch of sketchy guys at a party desperately trying their new techniques to find someone to take home, their increased rate of success ruins the environment. Introducing sketchiness into an ecosystem damages the ability of that ecosystem to respond positively to authentic human behaviour.

Or, once bitten, twice shy.

The solution, of course, is to do the opposite of create an algorithm. Practice exclusionary definition, and develop an actual personality.

This is where I tell you this post is part one of two.

Edit: find part two here