Your social media measuring stick doesn’t matter

• Are you giving love and praise unconditionally?
• Are you generously sharing the bounty of your talents so that others might learn and grow?
• Are you holding fast to the promises your brand makes to its customers?
• Are you committed to doing more, even when no one is looking, even when no one specifically asked?

Such things will be the measurement of our lives. They’ll determine the course of our businesses.

As Danny Brown demonstrated, the degree to which a company serves its customers isn’t limited by the constraints of contracts or terms of service. Those boundaries represent obligations, and as such define minimum expected behaviors. We give you this tool, you pay us x dollars. It’s what’s required. Leaves you feeling a bit cold, yes? Maybe even of transitional (read: subjective) importance, good while it lasts.

While transactions form the elemental basis of commerce, it doesn’t define the relationship. Not the trusted relationship between seller and buyer, nor the fragile one between teams and leaders developing the goods for sale.

Definitely not the relationships that social media – the mindset, the channel, and its tools – can enable among users hoping to add value, experience more, and receive knowledge.

Yes, the overused R word

Relationships are a balance between vested parties that can transcend market flux, a tactical bungle, or a CMO guard change. Relationships make things happen. A relationship sometimes means saying “I’m sorry,” or “That was a bad idea” and mustering forward with a healthy self-awareness and mutual respect. Relationships stick. They flex and adapt, and take on the shape of their environment. And I’m convinced they can’t be measured. There’s no time box or scale.

Relationships can’t be measured, not in the terms of social voting as a factor establishing some meaningless position of social rank.

Some measuring sticks deserve to be broken, to splinter apart like dry kindling. These sticks harm like emotional weapons when they were wielded during tender high school years.  Yet we can’t escape the measuring stick of popularity, the golden gloss daintily painted on the “in” crowd even as adults.  The stick is smuggled into the hiring process and baked into our Twitter “follow back” criteria, and serves only to distance people, to maintain a proper spacing between the elite and the (as yet) unrecognized.

Those measuring sticks are superficial, narrow-minded, and misleading at best. At worst they create a caste system that has nothing to do with talents and skills or work product. Let alone aptitude or commitment.

Hook a developer up with an eager entrepreneur-type anxious make a TechCrunch and you’ve got one more way to measure social influence. Or so some say.

Me? I say tools like this one – and use the term loosely – do us all a disservice. They plant the seed of separation and a hierarchy that has nothing to do with true worth.

Nothing to do with the measuring sticks that matter.

Vanity parlor tricks

Someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn triggered the invitation to join Mixtent. The language was ambiguous and I wanted to see just what it was I’d been voted on. Amazingly, this tool pits one person in your network against another (“Who would you prefer to work with, A or B?”). Your choices help determine rank and suck you in to try to advance your own position. It evokes a sense of competition through a leader board. It gamifies personal endorsements, circumventing a lot of critical areas. And it’s horse pucky.

No sour grapes, I’ll tell you straight up that my score was low. And I’m entirely OK with that, so far as Mixtent’s scoring system goes.

It has nothing to do with the measuring sticks that matter.