Fair warning: I’m in a foul mood.

If you haven’t noticed yet, social media has gotten completely out of hand.

The focus is no longer on creation. It’s on conversation.

You know who’s really good at conversation? Socialites. Those who are famous for being famous.

Think Truman Capote’s “Swans.” Or Perez Hilton. Their ability to remain in the spotlight is their contribution to humanity.

Are we to thank them for that? Hardly.

(See also Has Social Media Changed the Way We Write Web Copy? Here’s Why I Think So)

The problem with ubiquity and fame-for-fame’s-sake is that the moment you fall from grace [or worse, you’re dead], you and your “body of work” are corrupted. You are gone. Forgotten.

Is that how you want to be remembered?

What Got Me in a Real Lather

The culmination of my thoughts on this came to a head in an article by Danny Ivy called “Is the Bank of Social Media Broken?”

I SO thought [prayed, wished, hoped] it was going to go in one direction but it went in another direction…

…one I found hard to pin down.

I thought Danny was going to comment on the wide but shallow landscape of social media…how someone could have 100,000 followers and not make a dent in a good conversation…

Conversation–as the Cluetrain Manifesto put it–was supposed to be the new currency. The only problem is…conversation isn’t quantifiable. And what’s quantifiable can’t be measured in any meaningful way.

Yeah, it’s hard to figure out the “ROI of my mother” [a statement social media love child Gary Vanyerchuk made]. So what? My social media contacts aren’t in the same category as my mother.

It’s an apples to oranges comparison.

We know how much it costs when the Feds are sitting on 1 billion coins. But do we know how much it costs when we’re churning out 100 million micro-conversations across Facebook, Twitter and blogs?

No. But the very thought puts some people into a state. Like Vaynerchuk.

Where Are You Going with This?

But what does 100 million micro-conversations mean? And does it even matter?

I don’t think so. At least not until we can put a number on it.

However, you can put a number to something like a book or a blog or an album. In those things you find depth. Substance.

Talking about states, Danny Iny’s article put me in a state. This is how I responded:

I think Michael pretty much shut down the argument. In a good way. He called the concept of a “social media bank” what it is: BS.

The rules have never changed. Reciprocity is in our fabric. And will always be. When you start calculating you become the relative who sells Amway–a person you avoid because they’re motives are bad.

And you really have to ask yourself a serious question: What am I really good at? Do I love to do it? And will it make me a living?

Then do it.

With a little advertising and viral power, people will find it. If it’s good, more will come.

Here’s the thing. People don’t love Steven Tyler because he gave them “little gifts.” They love him because he’s a great performer.

People don’t love Stephen King because he gave them little gifts. They love him because he scares them out of their gourds. [Some people call that entertainment.]

And people don’t love Obama because he gave them little gifts. They loved him because he was a sophisticated statesman.

The gravity of social media causes us to think more about social media than what we were actually designed to do. [You were not designed to be a social media expert, by the way].

Get back to creation. Our world needs more of that and less social media.

Here’s the bottom line: crawl into a hole and write.

And for goodness sakes, do not hand over your blog to Google+ or Facebook. Instead, use your blog to create.

We desperately need your work. In fact, we are waiting for it.

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