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I have been using all the media tools out there for many years – and it’s been a lot of fun. Each time something new comes out, it’s to me like being a kid with a new paint set – I love figuring out what you can do with it all and how it interacts both with my (work-)life and with each other. One conclusion I have drawn from all this experimenting recently is that despite the generic label that these media are now called “Social Media” – they are anything but social.

I mean, if you join a club – you want to know who actually started it, don’t you? Nowadays, you almost never do though. If the club is so great then why are the founders nowhere to be found? And if you ask them a simple question – it would be rather common courtesy to actually get an answer. But that seems to be very far from the truth – I posted a question to Twitter’s team over 6 weeks ago – and got an automated reply that they are rather busy and would get back to me. When after two weeks of waiting patiently, I sent them another mail saying that I would like an answer please, I got a rude reply that said that since I had already asked that question and obviously wasn’t patient enough to wait for them to get back to me in their own good time, my question had now gone to the back of the queue of all other poor souls’ questions.. I mean – what is that!? I have no idea how long this queue even is, but I am still waiting to simply get a courteous answer to my simple question. How hard can it be? Whilst Twitter is a social application rather then a social network – you would rather hope they have at least the messaging part, their core existence after all, honed to a finetuned process.

Then take Facebook – we decided that it would be a good idea to pay a little money per day to Facebook for a limited period of time to advertise. There must be tons of entrepreneurs on there that might want to look for a more dedicated alternative such as E.Factor, rather then weed through the hordes of other people. So we set up the daily payment, with the Facebook team urging us to get started as soon as possible to the point of annoyance. To our enormous surprise, we found after three months from our card statements that they had been drawing twice as much money on a daily basis as we had approved AND continued happily after the time period we had approved had expired! Thinking it might be a mistake, we tried to contact them. Whereas before we had them chasing us every single day to set up the advertising, we now found that they were not at home. And I don’t mean, they sent us a message refuting our claim – No, they simply refuse to answer our calls, messages, letters and so on. Guys – this is ILLEGAL. Facebook – the father of all social networks is showing a very ugly, anti-social, side.

The good news for us is that we are learning from all of these things. Not that we needed to really – we treat our members, paying or free, with the same courtesy as we would someone that bought something from a store that we might own. And that to me is what the likes of Twitter and Facebook seem to be forgetting – the simple fact that by asking us to use the service they provide, they have made us to be their customers. Only that in this “social” virtual world of theirs, they seem to see us as something that merely makes their company a success, not as a customer they cannot be without. And this arrogance could ultimately lead to their downfall and disappearance. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if anyone has any questions – please feel free to post me a question on E.Factor or email me at marion@efactor.com . You’ll hear back from me within a few hours.

Marion

 

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