It’s Shark Week so I have our little (sometimes huge) friends in grey suits on the brain. “Jumping The Shark” for anyone who does not know is an expression born from a stunt to increase the viewership of a TV show called Happy Days back in 1977 (see it here). Prior to that, usually a cute little kid was brought in to increase dwindling ratings (see Cousin Oliver on the Brady Bunch) and was also implemented after (see Raven Symone’ on The Cosby Show). The “Jumping The Shark” stunt backfired enough that the phrase has become synonymous with “moving beyond what has defined and made you a success” in pop culture and marketing circles.
I am pretty much on social media all day long. I watch tweets scroll down my HootSuite screen at an incredible rate that can only be mentally visualized by thinking of the code they watched in The Matrix. But what is being shared, in MY opinion, seems to have diminished in quality in favor of quantity.
In general, I am not a judgmental person (try hard not to be?). But when it comes to serial tweeting and posting, I have to formulate some opinion on what is being shared, the frequency of it, the motivation for it, and ultimately do I want to engage with that person or company in any way. So far, the answer is no… even if every fourth or fifth item being shared in between quotes from Benjamin Franklin is of interest to me. Yes, I now know your name so that has been accomplished, but my association is negative, and Im sure not the goal to anyone’s social media strategy.
Over on Empire Avenue, your score/share price is hugely based upon your social media activity and some other factors. I cannot even begin to tell you the daily frequency of posts on blogs/Facebook and tweets from some of the accounts I have come across. I can hardly think of or find three things a day relevant to me and what I believe PMC’s audience would find interesting, let alone 89! But when you fine tune into that, 98% of it is blah blah.
So, as the debate rages on regarding quality vs quantity… Is it “better” to have 200 followers who are hanging on your every word, or a mixed bag of 20,000? Is one quality post a day/week/month “better” than a mixed bag of forty? I suppose as most things the answer lies in a combination of both. And leaving out the people who have exhibited BOTH quality and quantity, and they are out there, where do you fall into this? Has your social media “Jumped The Shark?”
Related articles
- With sales declining for two years in a row, has the iPod finally jumped the shark? (marshallstanton.com)
- Personal [INFOGRAPHICS] prove the medium has jumped the shark (jeffesposito.com)
2 Responses
The $64m Question! I would summarize my answer in one word – relevance
We are in world of increasing noise. I forget the statistic about how many brands cross my eyes in a day (it has probably already gone up since I read it…) so what I personally can’t afford to do is waste time in irrelevances.
Take my twitter strategy, for example. By the standards of many, I don’t tweet so often (perhaps 1-6 times a day), but when I do I hope it stirs a thought or adds some value to the lives of people who see and read it. I often choose not to follow people who follow me simply because when I take a look at their tweets, they add no value to me. In short, they are not relevant.
If the content of your work, on any platform, is good, the reach has more value. But to court numbers for its own sake, has less value in my opinion.
The only nagging suspicion I have is how the Google algorithms measure this?
Doh, still don’t know 🙂
The $64m Question! I would summarize my answer in one word – relevance
We are in world of increasing noise. I forget the statistic about how many brands cross my eyes in a day (it has probably already gone up since I read it…) so what I personally can’t afford to do is waste time in irrelevances.
Take my twitter strategy, for example. By the standards of many, I don’t tweet so often (perhaps 1-6 times a day), but when I do I hope it stirs a thought or adds some value to the lives of people who see and read it. I often choose not to follow people who follow me simply because when I take a look at their tweets, they add no value to me. In short, they are not relevant.
If the content of your work, on any platform, is good, the reach has more value. But to court numbers for its own sake, has less value in my opinion.
The only nagging suspicion I have is how the Google algorithms measure this?
Doh, still don’t know 🙂