Qazzoo Complaints Regarding Social Media Part III

It is not always technology that leaves real estate professionals and small business owners scratching their heads and asking “What am I missing? Why don’t I get it? What am I doing wrong?” it is what the technology offers or in some cases doesn’t offer that makes us think that we are missing something or worse, leaves us blaming ourselves for missing the boat…again! We get the technology but we think that it will do things that it is not intended to do. We think that the platform was designed for our purposes but most times that is just not the case. A blender is great and does wonders for bartenders looking to make the perfect margarita but in the hands of a carpenter it is not nearly as useful.

Go back a decade and less than half of real estate agents had a website. Less than 25% of small businesses had a website. This was not because they had missed the boat. There are always new boats coming our way. The fact was that every website builder was a hammer and they thought every business was a nail. They were wrong and the truth was far different from that and many a real estate agent had stroked a handsome check to a group of website developers only to receive a cookie cutter site that created no business and only tied them to the development group for hosting and other essentials that were required to keep the non performing website up and running. Had no one heard my mother preach about good money after bad?

Along came the SEO companies that promised to have your website on the front page of search engines. Did anyone ever ask “How many people can you make this promise too?” or “There are about 500 companies all promising the same front page to thousands of websites…does this make any mathematical sense?”

Sure some SEO companies were great at doing their job. But we only have to do the numbers to realize that there were more companies making the same promise than could ever come through on it.

This is also true of social media companies of which Newt Gingrich fell prey to during his run for the White House. Love him or hate him. Newt is a pretty smart guy. He worked for Alvin Toffler. Toffler was a famous futurist and wrote about the age of information long before the internet was on our phones…or watches!

Yet Newt was caught paying for “Likes” on his Facebook page. Do we think he knew that? Not a chance. However it made me rethink my position regarding his elevated IQ.

You buy “Likes” from people who you don’t know and then you post stuff on their wall? As if that is not going to get you some unwanted press. Chances are that Newt never posted anything until that happened and then he quickly became a Facebook aficionado, albeit about 200,000 “likes” too late.

Now Facebook is better known and the foibles of those that have used it poorly are also better known. People paying for likes have to do it the old-fashioned way. Pay Facebook. Companies that want to broadcast their message to all of their “Followers” have to do it the new-fashioned way…Pay Facebook.

And this is what people are complaining about now. The fact that you have to pay to broadcast to all of your friends is only one of the many steps that Facebook will have to take in order to keep its stock price high enough to keep everyone employed at their jobs. That is the ugly part of evolution. You have to keep revenue growing or you are toast to the board of directors that keeps you where you want to be. And Facebook is about as commerce friendly as selling NRA memberships at Lollapaloozas. People don’t go to Facebook to do business. If they want to do business they still go to Google or if they are a Microsoft employee they go to Bing. But they do not go to Facebook.

To close out this review regarding the complaints that we heard about social media and Facebook in particular it is important to note that when we share a meaningful post regarding how to save money buying a home that took days to research one can expect two or three shares on Facebook. When we share a cartoon that took a half hour to locate and post we get 50 to 100 shares. So lets not go doubting ourselves? Why we can’t get a platform to work for us because it just might be the platform wasn’t designed with us in mind.