A Decade In The Digital World aka Searching For Mr Goodbyte.

I’m declaring a 10 year anniversary.
It’s not exactly a celebration. More like a lamentation. It was pretty much 10 years ago this year that the Era of Digital Bullshit started, in my life at least. And I have been following it ever since.
It’s kind of an auspicious occasion, because you would think that anything with the word ‘bullshit’ attached to it would one day be found out and trampled to death by all the people on the receiving end.

Digital Resistance Is Futile

But no…instead, it grew and grew like the good old Borg species from Star Trek. It sucked up everything in its path and spit out little cyber flimflammer digital marketers whose mantra was, Digital Resistance Is Futile’.
They didn’t want your money at first. They wanted your time. The created lots of free places where you could spend your time – posting, writing, arguing with each other under the guise of making friends. Basically letting you provide (at no cost to them) the content and more importantly, the personal information they needed to build their mighty, planet conquering, mashed up cyber spacecrafts.
You might ask how I know all this.
Well I know it because I was assimilated. First by Google, then Facebook, then LinkedIn then Twitter for a while. I gave them hundreds of searches, millions of words, thousands of images and countless tweets.
I let them strip me naked and profile the hell out of me.
Why? Because that’s what they wanted and, by gosh, they earned it by giving me all this free stuff!
They gave me closet homophobes, religious fanatics, big game hunters, Jackasses, hawks, doves, old rock stars, friends from high school, idiot politicians, Nigerian princes, bimbos, vapid celebrities, lots of kitty cat pix, stupid math questions, selfies, racists, sexists and every other kind of ‘ist” you could imagine.
They kept me busy as a beaver chatting everybody up and fending off attacks from these ‘isters’, all the while listening to everything I had to say, deciding on my preferences, then slotting me into demographic, geographic and psychographic algorithms.

Consumer Digital Resistance Is Futile

And why did they do all this? Well, for the money.
They created a perfect alternative universe that almost everybody who has a computer could work and play in. It was a totally addictive thing of beauty and when they had enough info, they packaged it up and sold it to all the rubes who had been suitably primed and were waiting in line for it…The advertisers and their agencies. The multinationals. The government. Anybody who wanted to know stuff about us.
It was big business, this info on little old me. And little old you too.
The mantra was still basically the same, but now it read: ‘Consumer Digital Resistance Is Futile’.
The next thing they did could be classed as biting the hand that feeds them, (But they did it anyway because there’s always a bit of sociopath in the power hungry), and created digital marketing.
I mean, after all, there were all these sites that people were hooked on. Why not build an industry around that?

Digital Business Building Resistance Is Futile

And so it was. The cyber flimflammers started working on getting people to believe that all the content they were creating on business and blog sites could actually build their business. If only they would let them lead the way, for a modest monthly retainer and an open-ended contract.

And so the mantra changed again to ‘ Digital Business Building Resistance Is Futile’.
Of course they had no proof of its efficacy.
It’s new, they argued, and quite passionately. It’s big. It’s what old school marketing has evolved into.Your customers are waiting to hear from you. They don’t want to be sold. They don’t trust ads. They want to have a conversation. They want to see how all the gizmos you use to make your product really work.
They want you to strip naked and dance around for them. And they want to window shop and see every single window. So you’d better make yours real pretty. And away it went. And still it goes.

Sniff. Sniff. Something Is Starting To Smell

But today, maybe because all this bullshit is finally wearing thin, we’re starting to see some chinks in the great Digital Borg Cybership.
Dissent. Dissatisfaction. Disillusion. A notable absence of ROI. And, of course an almost total absence of any real evidence that all of this is not the manifestation of one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the business world.
It’s a theory. But it’s not without its foundation in my 10 year history of Digital Bullshit. And it’s not without its believers.
These are not the disgruntled masses or deranged individuals. These are straight ahead, hard working, intelligent, logical business people who are a starting to feel that they have been hoodwinked.
Are you one of them? There are many more than you might think. And over the past little while some of the noisier ones have started to pipe up.

Listen Closely And You Can Hear Them

They’re not ranting. They’re questioning. They’re not raving. They’re analyzing. They’re not fanatics,. They’re business people who simply want to take even partial delivery of all they were promised by the card carrying flimflammers of the Era Of Digital Bullshit.
Right now, to them, it’s been all take and no give and they are just starting to realize that that is all it’s ever been. And one by one companies are coming full circle, looking at a 1% ROI and muttering WTF.
This is not to say that there are some individuals and businesses that are pulling some decent results from their digital marketing efforts. Because digital is a good medium for certain types of (mostly retail) businesses.
But if you look a little closer you’ll see that many of the so call big success stories are from companies that are supporting that effort with, you know, media advertising, direct marketing, trade shows and all the other really useful tools that digital marketers a) know very little about and b) would much rather have you ignore.
I’m a writer. I nose around looking for stories to tell. And my nose tells me that we are at the very beginning of a new marketing era. With lots of new stories.And one thing is certain. This new era will be one that absolutely will not have the word ‘bullshit’ associated with it.

beBee…An Optimistic Beginning To My Second Digital Decade

This year, my eleventh in the digital realm, I discovered a new site. It’s called beBee. Most of you reading this will have also discovered it. Because it’s now my official blogging headquarters.
beBee very much appears to be a site that has had the benefit of studying sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and coming to the conclusion that the combination of who you are as a person and who you are as a professional could be the key to helping its users build strong and mutually beneficial ‘affinity’ based relationships.
As a marketer, with 10 years experience and the insights that come with it, the beBee model made perfect sense to me.
As a writer it opens up my material stream to pretty much anything I am interested in writing about, because I can always find one or more specific ‘hives’ in which to post these vertical articles, and be sure that, at the very least there will be a number of people who are interested in the same things.

"beBee is exactly the kind of site I would have created if I had started a social/business media site of my own."
Me

Using beBee in the way it was meant to be used has rekindled my faith in my own writing because the views and interactions I am achieving are amazing.
I know several other writers who feel exactly the same way. They, like me, were on the verge of just giving up on social media altogether and then discovered that beBee, as small as it is relative to the the behemoths, had a great many people who were genuinely seeking out knowledge and insight.
If this sounds like an infomercial for beBee, maybe it is. I have always been someone who likes to let people know when I have discovered something good.
beBee is a potent and energetic idea that currently has about 12 million users. As it grows expanding the ‘affinity’ based model it is built on, I can easy see it becoming a dominant player in the social media work.
And it is doing so simply because its users are way more than just a block of data to them. They are real people. People who are more than just what they do. Remember those?

If you want to read more of my posts, you can do that here: 

https://www.bebee.com/publisher/@jim-murray
Download my free ebook, Small Business Communication For The Real World, here:

https://onwordsandupwords.wordpress.com/2013/11/24/small-business-communications-for-the-real-world/

All my profile and contact information can be accessed here:

https://www.bebee.com/producer/@jim-murray/this-post-is-my-about-page


All content copyright 2016 Jim Murray

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