I’m going to say something today that not many people will agree with or perhaps admit to even if they feel the same way: Working with social media professionally can be about as much fun as a pack of rabid dogs slowly eating you from your toes upward so that you can experience every little nuance of pain.
I’m not really exaggerating either.
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Try telling people the aspects of your job and some of that explanation includes, “And then I have to do some work via Twitter and Facebook.” Go ahead, just try it, for fun. If you did, you probably got one of three looks:
1. Cluelessness – Because you told your mom and she still doesn’t know what Twitter is.
2. Jealousy – Because they assume your work is a lot of fun and piss easy and they’d love to be doing it.
3. Disgust – Because they can’t believe someone gets paid for that nonsense. It’s not WORK in their world.
Okay so there’s other possible options too but those are the ones I often see…and the only one that has a right to be there is the cluelessness. Let’s dispel the myths of the other two right now. It’s not fun, it’s not always easy and it’s a lot of hard work. I can see why you’d think that though.
We’ve all been there. We started out blogging and sharing our inner most secrets in an anonymous way. Until we made friends and gained some regular readers and now, oh dear, we actually have to think about what we write but it was still FUN. There were memes to do every week and stories about your life to share with an audience when the audience at home had grown weary of them. There were people to care when you were having a rough time and people to congratulate you when things were going well. Then, along came Twitter and it was like IRC for the 21st century but a hell of a lot slower and bulkier but wtf-ever, we’ll just enjoy it. More connections were made and it grew to become this giant phenomenon that many cannot live without during the day. Some of you can’t live without it when you go to the toilet or are doing the dishes – you might need help with that.
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No names, no numbers, just honest opinions.
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It was the latest great big escape.
But then, you start getting paid for it.
Suddenly you have to start thinking about what you say. You have to censor yourself and make sure none of your own beliefs shine through…unless, of course, they’re in line with the company beliefs. You have to pretend to give a damn about pointless websites and special deals that your company is running whilst being absolutely mortified that you have become one of ‘THOSE’ people. You have to be a constant force of happiness and goodwill, no longer are bad days allowed to exist in your world or will you be able to tell that simpering idiot that they should just stop breathing. It’s all about control and politeness – even in the face of abuse.
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Ah, the abuse.
People seem to forget or don’t give a toss about who that person might be behind the corporate identity. They just see that identity and therefore do not give a damn about bad manners, using language that isn’t even suitable for the ears of sailors or, in fact, behaving like an evolved human being. Oh how I would love to react to them in the same way. The problem is, I have to grin and bear it. It’s like being forced to laugh about having a pineapple forcefully inserted into your anal cavity. It’s not just me either. On a daily basis I see some of the nicest people I know get torn about for something that happened in a branch they didn’t know existed by someone who is supposed to be a respectable and mature adult.
Then there’s Facebook. You’ve had to take over the Fan Page or Group or whatever the hell the company does on there and make sure they have another 1 million fans by 5 p.m. tomorrow. So what do you do? You invite all your friends and ask them to do the same and it becomes a never ending circle of rage and clicking the ignore button. Yes. The ignore button. I don’t join any groups or page suggestions people send me anymore. I fucking hate them. If I wanted to join something, I would do it on my own, I don’t need any assistance becoming a brand whore as if I was an imbecile incapable of any thought – I have at least one a day. Therefore, when I’m asked to do the same, I feel so embarrassed about doing that to my friends that I
almost end up having anxiety about whether I should do it or not.
And that’s just under the company’s name.
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Scarily enough...most people actually feel like that...
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If you’re lucky, you’ve been able to hide your personal social accounts from those you work with and your boss. If you’re not so lucky, you’re probably me and this isn’t an option for you. I can’t complain, I was found for the job through Twitter. I do appreciate that. However, I no longer have the escape that it once provided. I don’t have the luxury of going on Twitter at lunch time to bitch about the cow in accounts stealing my yogurt out of the fridge again because…the cow from accounts will pipe up across the room and we’ll end up in an argument. I can’t escape to my blog to dump all my irritation and bitterness that I happen to be feeling for my job on a particular day because I will get asked to have a private chat the next day to find out what’s going on with me and how it can be fixed. Or perhaps to be fired, whichever. In fact, I even have to write this nerdicle anonymously and I haven’t updated my blog in god knows how long.
What the hell is it with companies and using social media anyway? Why do we need the infringement on our personal little happy places of escaping the mundanity of the world? Half the companies you see out there on Twitter have no business actually being there. It doesn’t provide any kind of benefit to them but they’ve heard it’s the latest trend so they dragged some poor bastard from his comfy job and threw him to the rabid dogs. How about you all focus less on the trends and more on your customer service and product delivery. If you actually got those right, you wouldn’t need Twitter or Facebook or a daily blog post about some mundane rubbish to remind people that you exist.
At home, I love it all. I always have. Some of my favourite people I have met through blogs and Twitter. Getting paid for it is a different story though and if I really didn’t need the job, I’d move onto something vastly more interesting and safer for my emotional health, like being a lion tamer. I have the hat and everything.
(Article cross-over granted by Sheena Gates of NerdMag)
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