InTeRnEt - #LinkedInLates Edition

Welcome to the Monday Evening edition of S.P.A.M, it's like London Zoo Lates but with slightly less influencers and a lot less cr*p to clean up afterwards.

So, I'm going to try a thing this week, a bit like the #LinkedInLates posts which are just a by-product of trying new things that goes against the conventional norms of what we are advised to do when we post on LinkedIn to please the algorithm overlords.

WHAT IS THE THING ADAM?????????? I hear you scream at your chosen reading device!

One core subject only, no AI assistance, and breaking the subject down into I.S.P.A.M, focusing on Introduction > Social media > Product > AI > Marketing.

Let's GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

The subject! The INTERNET!

Introduction

This idea was born out of a conversation on a Slack channel I am a member of. It took far longer to write than I expected, partly life, partly thinking quite deeply at times about what I was writing.

Yes, it hurt!!!!

Perhaps, I should have picked something a bit less all encompassing for the first attempt???? But what you are reading is the moment I decided to stop. This is a newsletter, not a book after all.

Anyway, the internet is a huge subject that I'm not going to fully cover, but it has evolved at a rapid pace since it's inception all those years ago but not all bits necessarily at the same pace.

It really is quite amazing how much needs to change to stay the same, let alone innovate. A significant reason for that is bad actors try to hack, crack and sack their way to monetary gains rather than earn an honest living.

Whilst I do understand the impracticalities of a perfect world, I do wonder what it would be like if everyone used the power of the internet for good and in legitimate ways to make money. That said, a huge amount of companies and people keeping us safe and fighting the next big threat wouldn't have a purpose for existing. It's entirely likely that the internet would be designed very differently with the power of hindsight.

Looking at the Internet via the subjects of Social Media, Product, AI (and Algorithms) and Marketing while also not turning this into a book means that many things will be left on the table and over simplified but hopefully you enjoy reading it.

Social media:

Logic might determine that social media should not come first in this walk through the internet but when you peel it back to it's origins, it was all about connecting with other people and sharing things with anyone across the world. The internet has therefore always been social in nature, because humans are social by nature. Whether it was chat boards, IRC, MSN Messenger, Friends reunited, MySpace or a student making a website to rate other students (allegedly) and turning into one of the biggest companies in the world. Social has become big business from a money and attention perspective.

Social media in it's early days was proclaimed as the great leveller for businesses large and small. In fact, many businesses that would never have seen the light of day without social media have become big business. Monzo, Brew Dog, Gym Shark and Mash Gang are all examples of brands that can attribute a significant amount of their success to social media and there are many more.

However, as time has gone on, social media has increasingly become pay to play to reach your audience. Meta doesn't make a ridiculous amount of money by being nice.

LinkedIn has been charging for enhanced profiles and features for as long as I can remember. However, more recently, X, Facebook and Instagram have introduced paid plans. These vary in price and features.

Just paying for the lowest tier of being verified on an Instagram account has seen an increase in follower growth and engagement. How much of that is down to the blue tick and how much is down to other factors, IDK ??♂?

We've also seen the rise of three main user types. Standard users, companies and influencers. Whilst the TV, film and the music industries still have the ability to be king and queen makers, anyone in theory can now become famous. Jordan Schwarzenberger (Sidemen) recently spoke about the rise and rise of YouTube as a channel at AntiCon and it does not appear to be slowing down. At least three of the YouTubers I follow have more subscribers on YouTube than Apple.

So it is fair to say that social media has been ever present, just how it has been delivered and packaged has changed over time, as their UI has improved, as has how they attempt to keep you on their platform for longer. Just look at the recent changes to the LinkedIn mobile app. here you can see what LinkedIn are trying to push us to do, just look at the renewed push for Reel like video. But the truth is... we'll get to this later.

As social media continues to grow up and becomes increasing pay to play. Most paid plans still serve you advertising, which takes us nicely to the next section.

Product:

When it comes to the internet, it's important to remember that we are always the product Whatever the platform, there is something constantly being sold to us, whether that be subscriptions, products or opinions. That's not to say that you cannot have meaningful connections with other people on the internet Of course you can, but you should always be mindful of it.

Such is the push and pull of us as a product, whole industries have spawned as a result, more on that later but the resistance to us as a product and the internet being free at the point of need (To borrow an NHS quote) and the need to fund itself. A significant number of people try to block as much as they can. A game of cat and mouse ensues.

Now if we lived in an Internet utopia, people would happily except adverts etc. as part of the package but as the internet is still by design wild westy, and people being people (or businesses). People will constantly try to push the boundaries of what is acceptable. Some are super sneaky, and some like Amazon have openly said that no one has stopped watching Amazon Prime Video with ads, so we are going to introduce more ads. One of three things will happen, we'll accept it and carry on, stop watching Prime Video or pay the extra top-up to remove the ads.

If we accept it, can you blame Amazon for pushing the boundaries? That's part of why they have become so huge.

Becoming unusable

YouTube is now unusable with ads IMHO opinion. I now pay for YouTube Premium, which is a wonderful experience. I also get YouTube Music for free with it and while I understand why, because music has always been a big part of YouTube, by its nature it means that I am stuck with YouTube Music over another service simply because I refuse to pay for two subs for essentially the same thing.

The Daily Mirror, for example allows you to do something rather odd. Either accept their cookies or pay ￡1.99 per month for their privacy plus subscription. The problem with that? To have privacy, you have to give them your... erm details. Wait what? Is that better than accepting and them sharing your data with their 1447 (not a typo) partners? IDK, because I don't read it anyway.

AI (and Algorithms):

I'm sort of cheating here as this section is for AI, but algorithms aren't always AI, though the lines are blurring... because marketing and because they are increasing AI algorithms in some form or other. It's not just YouTube that's becoming unusable either. Google search is basically broken and a whole industry setup around ranking higher on Google has spawned a completely strange way of writing that isn't for the reader at all in a lot of cases.

It's to rank as high as possible and include affiliate links. The race to the mythical 1,000 words sweet spot for content length and to try and keep our attention for as long as possible to serve us ads, affiliate links and links to other stories to keep us from leaving. That said, the experience of many sites these days are pretty awful.

Do you need 1,000 words to tell you why a show has been cancelled by Netflix or that a celeb has been seen parking on double yellows and buying a bagel from an up market bakery in Surrey? Short answer, absolutely not but you get it anyway. You're welcome!

Once upon a time my blog about London used to get 5,000+ visitors a month without much effort, topping out at over 10,000 one month. Changes with Google search, Facebook and Twitter, plus add a new born son into a mix meant that number started to decline. Thankfully I didn't depend on it but there was a moment when I thought seriously about trying to monetise it and go full-time. Three consecutive Highly Commended finishes at the UK Blog Awards and beating Jamie Oliver's Blog will give you that confidence.

Facebook and Twitter have changed their algorithms over time, driven by making money, keeping you on their platform and engaged for as long as possible. We may complain that we want to see our friends and who we follow posts, but their stats don't lie about what works best.

Google on the other hand is giving the illusion that it is helpful, but trying to get you to click on promoted links over and above the organic placements.

"The couple who took on Google and cost the tech giant ￡2bn " because Google changed their algorithm to benefit themselves over 3rd party comparison sites.

Excerpt from the BBC article:

It was June 2006 and the couple’s trailblazing price comparison website Foundem - one they had sacrificed well-paid jobs for and built from scratch - had just gone fully live.

They didn’t know it at the time but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the end for their company.

Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like "price comparison" and "comparison shopping".

18 years later and the EU have come out in their favour. However, by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp. Yet, appeals have meant that it is only now that the case is finally closed... well until 2026 when they will start their civil damages claim against Google.

Social media is almost completely algorithm based now. Number of followers is still important, to a point but the algo will do what the algo wants. People have become famous on TikTok purely because the algo was in the right place at the right time, not because of anything special that they did themselves over and above anyone else.

This platform is guilty of it too and in a very big way. People write posts in such a ridiculous ways that if they were spoken out loud, we'd be worried for their health. These posts are being written for the algorithm and not the followers, and yet paradoxically people react and comment on them. Some real, some AI generated. There's a reason why there are Reddit communities and Twitter accounts that call out what they perceive to be bizarre.

This platform makes matters worse by offering AI help to write and comment on posts if you have a paid subscription. By doing so, it has eroded general trust in what is real on the platform. The recent knowledge badges, (whatever it was called) suffered massively because of the blatant use of AI and engagement pods that helped to amplify the chances of said badges. Some of the subjects I was nudged to contribute to were often super niche too.

We think you can add your knowledge to this article "How to do B2B marketing in the Artic Circle for Halloween" (Not a real thing FYI).

It's important to remember that we are feeding AI abnormally written articles and social media posts as training data. AI actually thinks we writing and think like this. So, it copies this behaviour, thinking it is good and expected. People who don't know any better and a lot of those who do, use the AI output and so on and so on.

Death of the Follower & Rise of the Real Fan by Jack Conte , the CEO of Patreon has clear skin in the game, but he's not wrong when he talks about the death of the follower as an important metric. I've worked for brands over the years that had huge followings before I joined and they were absolute grave yards and it was not difficult to improve any of them. Likewise, I've worked with brands with relatively small followings, but very engaged communities. So, follower size has always been outsized in its importance., there's more to it than that.

Perhaps most important of all, people are creating content for the algorithm and not their followers. So when you read an article or see a post that seems strange. That's because whilst it is meant for you, it wasn't written for you. It's basically lipstick on a SPAM sandwich.

Marketing:

A lot of marketing (not all) and by extension Growth Hacking has a lot to answer for when it comes to the internet. Dark patterns for example is used without fear (until very recently) to reduce churn. Is that marketing led, product led or business led? Regardless, it's likely that marketing had a hand in the copy of the umpteen steps (hoops) you have to go through to cancel.

Rory Sutherland has blown up on Social Media over the past 6 months or so, but I have been following him for years. If you're stuck for something to watch on a dreary Monday night, his appearance on Diary of a CEO (disclaimer, I'm generally not a fan of Barletts podcast these days) is worth a watch.

America has now mandated that companies have to let subscribers cancel as easy as they sign-up. Hopefully, other countries follow suit, but regardless, businesses should put their efforts into giving the best experience possible instead of finding increasingly difficult ways to leave. Free trials are also on their last legs as we know them, as businesses will no longer be able to rely on people who forgot that they have a subscription. They'll either need to improve their product or find better ways to keep subscribers engaged with their offering.

Perhaps Growth Hacking is the wrong phrase in 2024, but hacking feels like you are always robbing Peter to pay Paul. You'll get loads of customers but few stick around, you'll get loads of social media followers, but no engagement. You'll get loads of engagement, but they'll mainly be bots. I wonder how many now famous brands were built on fake followers and engagement bots on Instagram until they were banned. A quick look at LinkedIn jobs suggests that Growth Hacking/Hacker roles have all but disappeared.

Websites are littered with affiliate links and adverts, the group think 'marketing' rush to the next big thing to hit leads targets have made me say "This is why we can't have nice things" more times than I can remember. That said, it's also why most B2B businesses won't send emails to you on a Friday. Some of that is backed up by stats of course, but some have probably never tried because we are repeatedly told that we shouldn't do it.

I'm guilty as charged in this regard, but I always try to come from a place of honesty and try things that go against the herd when appropriate because we as marketers are supposed to be creative and data led, but if you only have data for a small pool of activity, say posting on LinkedIn between 8am and 10am, how will you ever know if 3pm or 5pm could also work for your audience. Pro tip: You won't.

Growth Marketing (I'm also guilty as charged) is the new(er) kid in town. Less hacky and less just marketing, though what is marketing with out growth? One to ponder perhaps. There is no getting away from the impact that marketing has had on the internet at large. From how it is written, to what we see in our feeds.

Better branding will trump better products all day long. But sometimes they can and do co-exist, just look at Apple. Apple does things their way and don't follow conventional norms. Few if any can get away with that. That's not to say they are angels of course.

It seems strange upon reflection that I sat in a room at a student newspaper meeting and people asked me why I wanted to write content as someone doing marketing for a student newspaper 20 years ago. It also seems strange upon reflection that we are not limited by space like we were in newspapers, if a story only deserved two paragraphs in a paper, that's all it got. It was incredibly hard to write less than more back then, even harder in my two years as editor to fit everything in a finite space.

In defence of marketing, and by extension journalists. They are just playing the hand that they have been dealt by big tech, we are forced to play by at best opaque, at worst invisible paybook. They are doing the things that work to get the results their pay masters demand. I love marketing and in particular good marketing. It should not be blamed for the ills of the internet, but nor can its influence and impact in shaping it be ignored.

We are all slaves to the algorithm.

Which is why you might not even read this, but thank you for getting this far if you do.

But we don't have to be. We can choose to be different and choose our own path. The bold and the brave can stand above the noise if you actually focus on the person at the end of the internet portal of choice.