Monday, May 21, 2018

It's past time to to get serious about Social Media

I have taken a pretty much little to no interest attitude concerning social media and its various outlets like this Blog, even though I am aware every day that they can be an extremely effective way to reach new and existing customers in today's business environment for our fly fishing businesses. The main reasons for my lack of participation to date are that I really dislike the way, any Tom, Dick or Harry, as they say, can come along and write just about anything they like on a page whether it is accurate or inaccurate to any degree possible or simply put, full of S---. The truth in most stories that people tell are usually someplace in the middle of what actually happened and what they think happened. Particularly when two people are at odds over what was said or agreed to between them at some time in the past. One person believes it is his or her way and the other party believes it is something the opposite of that. Again the real truth usually rests someplace in between. That said, there are also a lot of people that never miss a day or it seems even an hour or less to check their social sites to make sure that nothing ever takes place in their cyber worlds without them knowing about it right away. These are often people that auto-react to anything they find in their "cyberspace" that displeases them. They immediately without considering or even caring about what harm their remarks will cause someone,  just fire away at their keyboards with whatever pops into their minds at that exact moment. It is true that some of the social media sites have back channel mechanisms built into them where a thinking person can go to open up a private dialogue with the party they think has cheated, lied or has caused them some other form of disrespect through their activities. However that many individuals first react in public then see what type of feedback is posted, is far too common and classless in my opinion. The other lack of participation on my part is caused by the lack of editing features in some of these type of platforms. You either type it all correctly on the first shot or you live with the grammatical mistakes you make in the writing process.  Primary example I find of this is in texting. Too many people just accept misspelling as part of everyday communications. Last but not least, the more outlets you subscribe to, the more work you incur daily in just keeping up with them all. Time is money and even for a guy who only sleeps 4 or 5 hours a day the time required to tend to this "cyber garden" is considerable. I will make more of an effort at it as since I retired from the Trucking Business I do have some more time but I think what I really need is someone to correlate and manage all of this type of internet business for me. A good person that is a specialist in navigating all of this would probably more than pay for their salary cost by keeping our online business on track and growing it more effectively than I am doing with my infrequent use of these platforms of opportunities. Anyone know a good College student or another person with the requisite skills that is looking for this kind of situation in the North Fort Myers area? Of course after watching the 60 minutes piece last night on the monopoly power of GOOGLE as to what Internet businesses they can either help succeed or virtually destroy through their "algorithms" by placing any Companies rankings either on the first page or two of their search results or back past page 4 where most people will never go to look for what service or product they are interested in. Can we say GOOGLE ADS boys and girls? Some of our deep pocket but know next to nothing competitors have proved that to my observational satisfaction. It reminds this Jersey Boy of the power the Mafia used to have in this Country when it came to whether some guys candy store or pizza parlor would do well or disappear in certain neighborhoods. Certainly not by the same methodology, but gone is gone just the same. These new benefactors of the "people" can be far more dangerous to a small struggling business then Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel or John Gotti ever were. In any regard, we will press on with this for as long as we can to see where it ultimately takes us. If you have something good to share then please send it to me for a posting here. GOOGLE claims that fresh content is the real key deciding factor in its site rankings. mmmm...