beBee…Could It Be The Light At The End of The Digital Marketing Bullshit Tunnel?

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.
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.
And why did they do all this? Well, for the money.
They created a perfect alternative universe that almost everybody who had 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 the 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?
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 the 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 a 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.

The beBee Alternative

After some deliberation, in early 2016, I decided to move my blogging to beBee.com.
And after having spent a year here, i can tell you that the quality of my user experience here, overall, is at least twice or maybe three times higher than my user experience just about anywhere in social media land.

beBee is the digital version of the city I have just moved to, which is St Catharines Ontario. People on beBee, like St Catharines are generally really nice and very helpful, willing to share with and support each other without any sort of ulterior motive in mind.
This is a rare quality, and it is reflected back to me on beBee every day. People on beBee are interesting and interested. They have great insights into business and lifestyle and are more than willing to share those that you have as well.
In short this is a real community, and the reason I know this is that I have spent the last 10 years experiencing things that are the opposite of a real community, and beBee is the antithesis of that.

Does beBee have some growing to do? Sure. But if this site can preserve the quality of its character as it grows, it will become the model that all future social media sites should follow.
Am I saying that because I just like it here? Sure I am. But I’m not the only one saying good things about beBee. There are thousands of us, all of whom have been looking for the light at the end of the social media tunnel, and who have decided that beBee very well could be that light.
But like any social media experience, you get out of it what you put in. So if you decide that you feel the same way about beBee that I do, you need to understand that principle, and do whatever you feel is necessary to make yourself known there.
This won’t be that hard to do because the majority of people here are all very welcoming, open, honest, intelligent and happy to be here.
I’m not sure that can be said for too many other social media sites. But then the longer I am active on beBee the less I care about that.

If your business has reached the point where talking to an experienced  communication professional would be the preferred option to banging your head against the wall or whatever, lets talk.

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

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