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Facebook's users are the size of a Country. So as the logic goes, that is where the business is. Get on Facebook or lose. Well, that thinking isn't really thinking.
But let's not pick on only Facebook for this demonstration. The evolution of the Internet has been led by more hype than substance.
Snake Oil
Often times selling the hype has been more profitable than the mediums themselves.
"…most people want to believe rather than to know, to take for granted rather than to find out" James Thurber
We all want to believe that the vitamin will make our bulging belly miraculously melt away. We want to believe that this NEW pink pill will give us the virility and stamina of a 24 year old. And that cream will make the cellulite go poof! in an instant. And oh how belief works when vanity is involved.
What makes our decisions even more difficult is that these supplements and routines do have some truth to them. Today's world has produced some miraculous stuff for us.
So its Monday night. A big presentation is due the next day and you can't sleep.
You turn on the dumb box and holy smokes. Girls are Going Wild! Better turn that in case the wife wakes up. ;-) So you flip the channel and there is this slick dude in a suit talking about all these health secrets that THEY do not want anyone to know.
And oh my Lord would you look at the hotties he is explaining this to? This sales pitch has all the great elements. It Us Vs Them (creating and defending against a common enemy). The Implication of Sex. Those girls are from Playboy and not your librarian for a reason boys. Therefore we males just lost a bit of our cognitive resistance .
And thus we are playing with fuzzy deductions in logic that only work because we want to believe. And the logical conclusion is derived from illogical stretches of poor logic.
At the end we are left with Who are THEY? And what is it they don't want us to know. None of it is explicit. At best it is all inference tugging at emotional triggers.
Buying on Emotion and the 80/20 Rule*
But what about the argument that you need to work Facebook because it is growing at such rapid rates?
This isn't new by the way. This was the argument with Twitter, Blogging, SEO, and Even Websites.
The logic is the same that many of us have used to join MLM's, Religions, and even our careers. Without logic.
I have seen this in sales presentation after presentation. Set up a premise that you can never prove, by proving smaller conclusions that pretend to prove the original premise. Each step getting further and further away from any proof at all while somewhat proving the previous conclusion. Enough steps make "sense" without ever really proving anything. But the buyers head is going up and down over and over again.
Don't worry. That is how the world buys and sells. It is called being human.But in order to buy anything we have to want to believe.
It's why the newly single 40 year old Male buys a Porche and the 40 year old Divorcee hits the plastic surgeon within weeks of her final divorce papers. Emotion always drives us.
Of course we all have to make decisions without all the facts. Even in court a prosecutor never has all the facts. He or She merely builds a case and the jury makes an emotional decision backed up by the logic of the case.
In fact, even if you could get all the facts by that time the opportunity has passed ( a line used in getting buyers off the fence in high pressure selling by the way).
There is Gold In Them That Hills -for some
So I am not saying to abandon Twitter or Facebook. I am saying that you should learn to ask, "show me the money" more often. Don't blog because everyone is doing it. Don't Facebook because everyone is doing it. Do it because there is money to be made. And don't start until you have a pretty good idea how that money will come to you.
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*The 80/20 rule is Pareto's principle that states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
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