Like Me On Facebook

We have become desensitized to the ridiculousness of our industry and to the pace at which yesterday's marketing miracle becomes today's bad joke.

I doubt there's anything that has gone from marketing phenomenon to laughable punchline faster than "Like us on Facebook."

The time it has taken "Like us on Facebook" to drop off the world, even for an industry as silly and fad-obsessed as ours, is breathtaking.

Just a few years ago you could not present an ad to a client without "Like us on Facebook" lurking somewhere near the logo. Today, if you dared to do that you'd be thought a complete imbecile.

Also in that brief period of time Facebook has gone from the exemplar of new age "brand conversations" to the most crass practitioner of full-on old-fashioned paid advertising.

The pivot has been stunning and for the most part the lemmings in the advertising and marketing businesses still haven't awakened from their dream world in which social media is about "brand conversations" and "sharing" and "communities" and all the other woolly nonsense of social media.

It is very instructive to go back 3 or 4 years and read the literature of our industry and the horseshit of the trendy phonies who were touting "likeanomics" and straight-facedly torturing data to evolve all kinds of absurd calculations for the value of a "like."

One genius (a self-proclaimed "Social Media Scientist") in a Harvard Business Review article actually calculated the value of a like as:

 

No, you can't make this shit up. 

And While We're Going Off On Social Media...

McDonald's recently hired 200 social media experts in an effort to attract more... you guessed it...millennials.

I've given them a one-month grace period to get their act together before excoriating them for their stupidity. But their month is up and here's what we've got. These are actual tweets from McDonald's last Monday.

Apparently some social media genius at McDonald's must have decided that millennials love fucking exclamation marks!

 

Is it really possible that there are sensible people who believe this moronic nonsense has marketing value?