DANCY EDICT ELEVEN:
People who live in caves should build glass houses.
"Retweeting your employer’s message on every channel has given rise to a new type of drone, the corporate digital troglodyte (CDT)"
EXAMPLE:
Confirmation bias is a short trip, from the echo chamber and is located at the corner of filter bubble and psychosis. Employee and corporate communications have taken on all the hubris of capitalism and most employees have become megaphones for their organizations, or perverted digital images of themselves in the fun house mirror of Narcissus.
We have two major issues going on with corporate humanity in 2013:
- Employees who are echo chambers for their employers
- Organizations that don’t stop the music for any reason, ever.
On July 18, 2012, I shared with the world “If your career has turned you into a billboard for your employer, save yourself a lot of stress & wear a sandwich board on a street corner.”
If your career has turned you into a billboard for your employer save yourself a lot of stress & wear a sandwich board on a street corner.
— Chris Dancy (@ServiceSphere) July 18, 2012
It had become apparent to me, at that time, that most ‘people’ in organizations were so afraid of not being heard that we had pretty much hired or forced millions of while collar employees to start standing on digital street corners spinning signs.
Retweeting your employer’s message on every channel has given rise to a new type of drone, the corporate digital troglodyte
Everywhere. On LinkedIn they were posting press releases about new software updates, sales records…
On twitter, if the ‘machine’ tweeted something, the troglodyte instantly retweeted it.
Worse yet, the corporate digital troglodyte community followed so many people that ‘consumption’ was setting in, and the disease started spreading faster than type four pneumonia at a disco in the village.
Things only got worse for the corporate digital troglodyte; in 2012 we saw updates that were communications about the status of communications. ‘XYZ now has 10,000 people commenting and reading it’.
When your communications strategy, includes your metrics, you don’t understand either
In month two of 2013 the CDT population, commonly re-shares articles that have dead links, mentions that are not tied to real accounts and spends large amounts of time offline, only to return a few days or weeks later to pick up right where they left off.
You know, because the rest of the Internet waited while they were on vacation
Organizations in 2013 still suffer horribly from a sense of understanding and sounding ‘human’ As I tweeted on February 7, 2013, ‘If your marketing plan is to “put a human face” on something, you don’t have a product, you have a monster.’
The last thing corporate communications teams should do is try to ‘sound human’ – in practice, you and your organization end up sounding like a wounded yeti.
Remember, you are not dealing with humans online, these aren’t people anymore, they have become augmented, perverted egos receiving a constant dopamine hit for their ability to re-share data, painted in beige to look like knowledge.
DANCY WHY:
You, your organizations and most of your digital connections have devalued their communications currency so deeply that Greece has a better chance of getting their Facebook updates read than you.
Communication is the fiat currency of the decade, this currency is rapidly leading to a global collapse of the information economy.
The only way to avoid the breadlines of 2015 is to vote with your dollar and STOP feeding the communications beast.
This means simply stop following the noise, FUD and buzz and start following that which enriches your life.
This behavior of self-selecting content is also prone to the perversion of digital hubris. Organizations and individuals have started to use ‘BLOCK’ on Twitter, Facebook and other services to ‘vote’ with their attention dollar.
Let’s be very clear here, if you block someone on any social network, that person or thing, has power over you, NOT the other way around.
Social blocking works if your life is in danger, in every other case, you just showed how weakened your attention dollar is and how very close to bankrupt you are
People and organizations could learn a lot from Margaret Thatcher.
‘Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.’
PUBLIC WHY:
In the United States on Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2013, we had two major events that were spoken of around the globe.
Not many people talked about the game, they talked about the technology and communications OF THE game.
We might be evolving externally as a ‘human race’, but we are devolving psychologically as a ‘human finish’
December 14, 2012 at approximately 9:50am EST something remarkable started happening around the world, on social media. The tragedy of Sandy Hook elementary school was being blasted from every radio, TV and social media channel, as we watched terrified children and wailing parents, a slow trickle of advertisements continued to crawl through twitter, Facebook and other ‘social outlets’.
You see, on December 14, 2012 our digital world, our machine that rips through information and data, didn’t slow down or pause and acknowledge this horror in American history.
It is interesting that the NRA who continued promoting themselves on that day have stopped using their social channels.
Shocking? Well not really, what was happening with the NRA, Tech Media and other well-meaning organizations, is that the ‘engine’ that pumped out their mind-numbing messaging didn’t have someone at the wheel to turn it off, so humanity was forced to see these images on TV and then jump back to the unreal world of digital communications.
If you automate your PR message, you might want to consider having a Roomba take your smoke breaks
for an hour or so (thought most continued for up to three hours before they stopped), what shocked me was the people I follow(ed) that kept tweeting about cloud computing, their last blog stats or their press releases on latest numbers or offerings.
These were the employees of the machine, these ‘people’ should have known better.
We have to ask ourselves, where do these people work and how out of touch were they to continue to pump sludge into the wound of humanity via social media? What cave were you in that you didn’t notice what happened at Sandy Hook?
ARGUMENT:
The glass cave lined in devalue attention currency is full of arguments:
- I don’t have training in social media
- I don’t understand how to use social media
- My boss makes me use social media
- I wrote something really important and people need to know
- I’m in communications or marketing
- I’m important
- I’m contrarian, so therefore, I must be heard
- My job entitles me to this platform
- I feel like I’m missing out
- It makes me feel better when I can contribute.
REBUTTAL:
I’m Chris Dancy, and I’m here to help, so far every EDICT has come to pass, so let us be very cautious with this rebuttal.
Tell your boss/organizations, that you are no longer going to share their messaging.
Tell them that you feel it devalues your worth and, ultimately, while you may believe deeply in your organization and its mission, until you are paid once for your physical life and once for your digital life, you will not devalue your personal communication currency.
Like I said, I’m here to help, so if your manager gets upset, please have them reach out to me directly, here’s my number, +1-720-924-8805, you can also text questions to me directly.
Finally, if TechCrunch feels that I’m on to something with the idea of your influence, being tied to your future employment, then you need to stop this behavior immediately.
It’s one thing to look out of touch, it’s another thing to look out of touch, homeless and malnourished
Next up, “ Quantified Self is a service level agreement with reality”
“I will give this wretched world the Queen it deserves” – SnowWhite and the Huntsman
Chris Dancy
Chris Dancy been working in IT support for 20 years with experiences ranging from help desk level 1, service desk manager, ITSM process consultant, software product manage, executive corporate marketing.
Most people know Chris as @servicesphere on twitter and as the host of the US edition of ITSM weekly, the podcast, syndicated to 30,000 listeners monthly. His name and avatar are synonymous with social media for IT, edutainment and his futuristic visions for IT.
An agent provocateur who lives 15 minutes in the future, brace yourself, you’re about to be awoken.
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