Back in the dark ages, during the dotcom boom of the late ’90s, business was booming at Stargate where I ran the sales team. It was so busy that our challenge was keeping up with the demand while handling our company’s exponential growth.
Like the employees at many startups, we adopted a “do whatever it takes” mantra. Sales would help with product development and customer service. Engineering would help with sales. Finance would help with contract negotiations. And everyone pitched in when there was an outage or a major opportunity.
We worked 12-16 hour days. Many of us also worked on weekends in an attempt to catch up.
It was a blast.
One time, when we were in the middle of yet another fire drill, I tossed a configuration question over the cubicle wall to my coworker Dan Beale – who at the time was doing network engineering, high-level support, troubleshooting and was my ad hoc pre-sales engineer. His response became an instant classic:
There are so many little bits of information in my head, it’s making me stupid.
I almost died laughing.
Over the next 20 years, it turned out to be one of the wisest things anyone’s ever said to me.
Which brings me to today’s topic – my experiment using social media to increase sales.
A few weeks ago I was listening to a small business podcast that said every business should be using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to grow sales.
Although I had accounts at all three, I only used LinkedIn regularly. So I decided to run a test:
- I updated my profiles and created business pages.
- I explored different feeds, joined groups and connected with new people each day.
- I used HootSuite to cross-post my blog articles to Facebook and Twitter.
After about a month, I found almost no benefits to my extensive use of social media for business.
- The B2B groups on LinkedIn were a major disappointment. Group feeds were almost 100% advertising. It was as bad as going to local Chamber of Commerce meetings and being hit up by every small business selling floral arrangements, business cards, real estate and financial services. This held true across Sales Groups, Executive Groups, and Entrepreneur Groups.
- I made zero good business connections, although I did reconnect with one old friend I hadn’t heard from since high school.
- My blog traffic didn’t increase. Almost all of my readers visit after I put a new article on LinkedIn or when I send out my newsletter.
What was more revealing was the effect that spending more time using social media had on me.
Twitter made me insane. My mind was filled with stupid memes, one liners, sarcastic posts and angry political commentary. It was addictive to go down random ratholes of content that filled my mind with small bits of meaningless info.
Facebook was worse. The things that showed up in my feed were of no interest to me. Memes, likes and bad jokes. Facebook’s friend suggestions were all strangers I didn’t know. The only friend requests I received were clearly bogus accounts (Russian supermodels?)
Even LinkedIn generated mostly noise for me. Although LinkedIn is useful for me to keep in touch with business colleagues and publish my blog posts, my feed had become filled with ads for products I don’t want, “popular” posts that are trite cheeseball inspirational/motivational fluff and updates from people I don’t know or interact with.
I seemed to be angrier. My temper flared up more quickly while my patience had dropped. I also kept checking my “feeds” for updates and news. My brain was on overload.
As Dan Beale so eloquently stated so many years before,
I had so many little bits of information in my head, it was making me stupid.
My solution – the low information diet
Once I realized how little my frenetic daily activity of posting, checking, and consuming data was contributing to my business and my sense of peace, I tried to slow down.
At first I said to myself, I’ll stop checking Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn multiple times a day.
But it didn’t work. I’d sneak a peek on my phone in the bathroom, in line at the grocery store or at a traffic light and then I’d be right back down the rathole.
So I reviewed my 3 Big Rocks and realized that this activity didn’t make the cut.
I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts*.
I cleaned up my contacts list in LinkedIn and aggressively unfollowed contacts whose updates I was no longer interested in**.
I stopped checking LinkedIn throughout the day.
I stopped reading the news online and listening to podcasts.
I even stopped listening to music when I exercised because I needed to quiet the noise in my head.
And it worked.
If you are finding your head is filled with meaningless trivia and you are not getting quality work done – you might want to give this a try too.
*Since nobody noticed, I’d say the business impact was minimal.
**You should unfollow me too if my posts aren’t valuable or interesting to you. You can always sign up for my newsletter or visit my blog if things change.