That's it. My brain connected the dots. Two and two have been put together. Through the convergence of stars in the heavens and a couple of social media plotlines this week - one really out there publicly and the other just my own experience-shaped perspective - I see that what's really wrong with social media is... wait for it, wait for it...
Perspective. Perspective. Perspective.
In a nutshell: Ultimately we don't know what our shenanigans look like to other people. When stuff works well, it's a combination of listening and testing and being real and playing honest and working hard and having fun while keeping a groupthink mentality that tries to do the right thing for the right reasons.
But when it doesn't work, I'd wager that >80% of the time it's because we're going to do it the way we want to do it no matter what. If someone in that trainwreck of thought is a jerk to begin with, then it'll only get worse on social media channels. Example in play currently: Charlie Sheen. It might be funny. Ultimately, We the Public feed the machine that gives him these platforms. But the world's record for getting to a million Twitter followers faster than anyone ever doesn't mean he knows what he's doing. Tiger blood doesn't make you a social media expert, and Adonis DNA doesn't give you a right to expect anything from those followers in return.
People are following @CharlieSheen because of the surprise, the fear factor, the potential for gore as we collectively watch a celebrity implode. We want the messy. We want the NASCAR pileup on turn four. But that doesn't make it social media "best practices".
Along with the public outplaying of that particular lunacy (and you just know it'll be someone else next month, right?), there's a smaller undercurrent that's caught my attention. It's spamming folks for building Twitter followers. It's being nice, showing some interest, having some conversations in order to spam folks for building Twitter followers. It's a wooing of folks for a quick sale and building Twitter followers. It's using other people's social collateral instead of building credibility on your own - or at least, that's what it feels like to me.
It's the twitter accounts the respond to you with a link - but they don't follow you, don't have any followers, and have 500 tweets using the same link each time. It's the account with zero tweets, following you and 700 others, with 150 following back for no apparent reason. It's the folks actually interacting, but in ways that seem even more superficial than 140 characters might actually allow - lots of conversations with lots of different people but all ending with a pitch and a link.
Sorry - this is more rant than anything. Further proof that Charlie Sheen is more intrusive in the human psyche than first believed, I guess...