I’m Sick of Driving a Conversation…

Simon Sinek is one of the people I most admire, both personally and professionally. Ever since I memorised his “Start with Why” TED talk a few years ago, I’ve followed most of the things he’s written and spoken about. So when I watched an informal chat that Summer Oakes uploaded to YouTube (WATCH HERE), I was struck pretty hard by something Simon said…

I’m sick of driving a conversation. Everyone is driving a conversation. I just wish people would F***ING DO THINGS”.

My first reaction was, how did I miss this the first time I watched it? I think the answer lies in the fact that I was probably doing email, thinking about coffee and checking my (two) phones with an eye on Tweetdeck at the same time. I’ve spent the last few days thinking about this and it’s given me a much needed kick up the ass. I'm not one to usually blog anything personal, so forgive me for thinking out loud....

If you want something you’ve never done before, you’ve got to do things you’ve never done before”.

The thing is I’ve written 3 books, but only published one of them. The reason for this is mostly down to me spending most of my time “driving a conversation”, with the assumption that this is a good thing. I have worked in social media for a while so it's OK right? I’m not sure it is.

I love the fact that social networks can drive a good conversation, but what exactly do we mean when we say that? Are we proud of ourselves because a provocative statement or quote that we tweeted had a handful of RT’s, Faves and @Replies? Or a post had a few shares? Did someone stop you in the street because of something you mentioned? And is it enough if you only reach one person, because you might have really impacted them? What difference do these interactions really make in the long term? I am grateful for the many people that Twitter has introduced me to, but in actually fact LinkedIn is probably the most social network for real connections anyway - and I only check that once a day. It seems like we (marketers) spend most of our time concentrating on creating some kind of new content, and hardly anytime at all looking at the outcomes or the results.

Publishing used to be an entire industry. Now it's just a button".

I used to have hundreds of comments on my blog posts when I was on Wordpress a few years ago, but now I’m happy if a post gets a few hundreds views (I hope this has more to do with "noise" than the quality of my writing!) Worse still, I check my phone multiple times a day (FoMO) and to reply with a thank you to anyone who was kind enough to mention me. I think I have mistakenly thought that this is what ‘leading by example’ . I do after all encourage brands to spend 90% of their time engaging with their audience and to respond in real-time to everyone wherever possible.

I think I have taken this too personally.

This is good for brands. But if you have a full-time job and your brand is not yourself, I don’t think these rules apply. There are many more important things that we could be doing. This is what Simon Sinek means when he talks about dopamine. The rush of doing something new (post, instagram, blog, tweet, downloading a new app) or the adrenaline (no matter how small) of checking your phone and seeing a new notification. It doesn't help that we can only really sustain 150 relationships even though we think we have many more "friends", but that's a different story for another time. It's not that social media is inherently bad. I've always been a fan of John Lennon's thinking;

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time". John Lennon

Dopamine isn't tied just to stuff we do ourselves. We get this rush from helping people. We are a generation that likes to do good and we love that we are connected to everyone. We give to charities for a similar reason. We sponsor our friends head shave. We text ￡2 to pay for a child’s school books. We adopt Guidedogs and children in far flung corners of the world. These are all noble things and we certainly don’t do enough of it, but we bounce from one cause to the next in exactly the same way that we bounce from one shiny social network to the next. What if you really got involved with a cause and spent some real time with them? Face-to-face. Less people than ever are volunteering. We're all too busy. (It's one of the things I love most about Salesforce's 1:1:1 model).

We consume things. We don't create things."

We feel like we are doing good things, but we don’t often focus on any one BIG thing in order to create things of substance. We are great at connecting to people. We are not so great at committing to things. Very few people really create stuff anymore. We consume things. You only have to look at the increase in tablets and the drop in desktop and laptop sales to see this. We are creative beings. But we don’t create enough.

This is why I owe anyone who follows me on any social network an apology...

I have promised books, posters and infographics ~ some of which materialised, some didn’t. I'm great at having big plans. But big plans take time, effort and a lot of work. Hardly a day goes by without someone asking me about the book I have been talking about for the last 18 months. So thanks to everyone who has followed my writing, and apologies for getting distracted so much that I haven't delivering it (yet), despite my (genuine) reasons...

• Sex Brands and Rock’n’Roll was a lot of fun to write and publish in 2010. It helped get me my first corporate job at Phones 4u and has shaped much of my thinking since.
• Follow Me, I’m Right Behind You got tied up in red-tape for legal reasons last year. (Interviews with the top 100 people in technology, but it WILL get published one day!)
• The 80 Rules of Social Media exists as a very successful blog post (several million views on various channels), but hasn’t been published as a book partly because it is now dated (written early 2013), and partly due to moving jobs. I wrote it at Adobe and the world looks very different now. Not just because I am doing more exciting things with Salesforce and ExactTarget, but because technology has changed a lot in the last 18 months and there are enough (good) books about social media now anyway.

So… What's Next?

I have a book written. It is very close to being finished and it talks about what a company should look like over the next 10 years. It has some killer graphics and it is intentionally written in the style of a 1920’s science text book ~ I want to emphasise the point that the principles great companies are founded upon are timeless, it is also a little self-indulgent given my love of old books. I have a new daily routine, a new diet, a new cycling plan and a couple of daily apps to help me get stuff done. Change is never a bad thing after all...

So I am stepping back from social media for a while, in order to try and create something of substance. I am tired of checking my phone 150 times a day when I could be doing much more useful things. Rather than seeking a few new favourites, likes or RT, or sharing a news article I read, I’d rather be writing and thinking about new ideas. Ideas which might actually make a real difference to someone...

You can have everything you want in life, if you just help enough other people get what they want". Zig Ziglar

I think each of us have the ability to create things of substance. The kind of things that might last a lot longer than the memory of a good post, a great tweet or a funny photo. But things like that require effort and concentration. They need commitment and discipline. So while I am coming off Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and most other social sites until I have finished my book (90 days or so) ~ when I do return, I’d like to think I’ll have something useful thing to say. Or not. We'll see. But if you want to achieve things you've never done before, you have to do things you've never done before, right?

Anyway, let me know what you think... Surely cutting back on social media isn't such a terrible thing? What could YOU create if you dedicated most of your spare time to something else for a while…..?