Armchair Salesmen – Marketing the Self in the New World

I read an excellent essay yesterday in Time Magazine about Mark Zuckerberg.  It was written in honour of him being chosen as Time’s Person of the Year – an award given to the person who has influenced humanity the most during the year.  While we could whine on and on about Julian Assange, I’d rather talk about this.  The Zuckerberg article is more or less required reading before you get to this post.  Click on the man’s head and skim it.  I’ll wait.

The above article helped to solidify a few ideas I had been working on into something more or less coherent.  But when I started properly joining the dots, the realisation they led to disturbed a little.  We all know the world is changing, and this change is being led largely by changes in the Internet, technology, etc, as well as cultural and political forces.  But mostly the Internet right now.  Specifically in the way we use it, and the way it is becoming a place for us to live as social animals.

Ten years ago the Internet was a very different place.  You went to a web page to look at it, and to get information from it.  That was all.  Maybe you bought something. These days we go to websites to use them – there are things we can do on them, and in some places we can leave a lasting mark.  Some of them, like Facebook, are becoming a lot more than just a service or a playground.  They’re becoming places where we extend ourselves.

Here’s a map of all Facebook accounts and the connections between them:

Click to Embiggen

Our personalities, and social reaches, are expanding.  Never before have you been able to tell something to hundreds of people you know all in one go, for free.  To show your family pictures of your vacation you used to have to email them all to everyone – now you can just share them. With this comes online honesty – children used to be at risk in online chat rooms where anonymity ruled.  Now anonymity is a scarce, and widely mistrusted, online commodity.

As our online presence becomes more social and more connected it becomes easier for us to communicate to a wide audience, and to socialize much more widely.  In case you don’t know the numbers, it’s taken Facebook six years to grow from a small college network to 550 million users worldwide.  That’s a twelfth of the planet, connected by a single network, and run by a single company that knows more about each and every member than most parents know about their own kids.

I’m not going to preach about monopolies or Big Brother.  Far from it.  This is how the world is changing, and if you think it’s going fast now, just wait. As I explained in the article 5 Technologies That Will Lead to the Singularity, computing power is growing at an increasing rate.  Lagging only slightly behind that is what we can do with all that power.

The exponential growth of computing power available, comparing it to various animals.

I’d like to stress that what we’re seeing is only the beginning.  Zuckerberg seems to think so as well. There are limitations, but these will be overcome.  Facebook, and what it represents, is just an embryonic form of what it will become.  Before I get onto my actual point, this quote:

We are running our social lives over the Internet, an infrastructure that was not designed for that purpose, and we must be aware of the distortions it creates or we will be distorted by them.

I mentioned previously that Facebook knew a lot about us.  That means a lot of money, in the hands of good or evil. Facebook does it’s best to use it only in ways that are not harmful or invasive, and hopefully in ways that at worst will see us spend a few bucks or waste a few hours (a day, in the case of those who play Farmville). Sometimes they get it wrong, but we’ve turned out to be pretty forgiving. What it also means is that people have a new way to sell us things, and we are eating that shit up.

We’re not just buying the shit.  We’re picking it up with our hands and smearing it all over the place.  Most people don’t like ads, or pass them on, but some people do.  Some ads, like the Old Spice commercials, are hilarious and make you want to share them.  We tell our friends about them, quote them, turn them into memes.  That’s fine, but we will need to develop the same kind of immunity to it as we have against detergent ads soon, or we’ll end up like Idiocracy with fewer dick jokes.

Pictured: Dick Joke

Hell, I know I wanted to go out and buy some Old Spice after watching that guy.  But big advertising companies aren’t the only ones who are using this new media as a sales platform.  Individual professionals, entrepreneurs and the garden-variety soap-box loons you thought were normal people before you friended them are doing it too.

This is Samantha Laura Kaye, a girl I knew in University who went on to work in hair and makeup styling, and do a little bit of modeling and promoting from what I can tell.  She’s doing a damn fine job of it, as well.  In a short time her website’s undergone an impressive overhaul, and every few days I hear about a new hair serum or a mobile massage parlor on Facebook.

Now, her website isn’t everyone’s taste – especially if you’re not into makeup, fashion photo shoots, hairstyles, or scantily-clad models playing prison rules soccer while showing gratuitous underboob (sigh… here).  My point is she’s using the channels most of us use to make our friends’ profile pictures say I heart cock to promote her business, and sell herself as a personality on the side.

Now, this handsome devil is Craig Vine, another casual acquaintance of mine.  He also has a blog, The Bloody Cabaggatory. But Craig isn’t selling stuff.  He is making money from the ads on the side, but it’s mostly for his own and his audiences’ entertainment.  But what happens on his blog isn’t important.  What is important is that he uses things like Facebook, Twitter, and a whole host of social media services most of us don’t use, to distribute his writings.

He’s pushing an agenda.  As scattered and off-sides as it is, he’s selling a personality too.  But the people with blogs aren’t the only ones who are selling stuff through Facebook, because you’re doing it too.

Being socially successful, it seems to me, is the end result of coming out on top in the majority of a series of transactions. I’m not trying to sound like a sociopath here, but think about it. Some people just play well with others, and others want them around.  Some of it might be the genetic lottery, but I know a lot of unattractive people who have a lot of friends.

It’s the nub of my little theory here that social success means playing your cards right, making the most of what you’ve got in terms of looks, personality and phallic humour to win friends and influence people.  It’s not directly related to selling, but when you communicate more with a lot of people because you want to, and you have an engaging personality, you are going to thrive. Being able to sell your personality like a product, on any level, is a good skill to have.

But Facebook has its own rules. As the third largest country on Earth by population, it already has guidelines and famous faux-pas like you can find on sites like failbook.com: Don’t have an open divorce on Facebook.  Don’t put your sex life on Facebook, or anywhere near it if you have more than one sex life.  Learn how it works before you post lurid details about your latest conquest all over your best friend’s wall, and for God’s sake, stop clicking on these:

These are a lot like the things we call ‘manners’ or common sense, but are totally alien to someone who has never used Facebook. They were not a part of our culture in our parents’ generation, but they are in it now, and to our children it will be hard to imagine a world where that wasn’t the case.

Being able to communicate yourself well, make people laugh or command an audience, socially or for business, have always been valuable skills. With the growth both in size and complexity of our online lives, they will become more vital than ever.  When a good portion of your connection with humanity is shared data, you better make yours as good as it can be.

There is no escape, except at a high cost.  You can say that you don’t want to use Facebook for anything but sending the odd message.  You can ignore Farmville and all the links people post and invitations they send you.  But there’ll come a subtle point where non-involvement edges you out of the network you rely on.  If you’ve ever kept yourself out of the loop for a while, you tend to fade away from the group’s consciousness.  You don’t call them, they won’t call you.

The same goes for social media.  We have a choice: participate, and get used to the idea that large portions of your previously private life are now in the public domain, or skip out and risk alienation. Those aren’t the extremes yet, but I already see a world in which virtual interactions hold just as much weight as those in real life.  And I think it’ll be here before we have either the technology or the maturity to pull it off.

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