5469 ways to improve whatever: screw lists, it’s time we grew up and helped

Is anyone else sick and tired of headlines like these?:

• “5 Ways to Improve your Social Media Strategy”
• “10 Hot Tips to be a better Marketer”
• “3 Surefire Ways to Build a Better Content Plan”

Haven’t we moved on from here? Haven’t we already saturated the publication space with enough hullabaloo and who sets these numbers anyway? I for one am tired of the unoriginality, or maybe I just never got into self-help books.

The problem with the social media and digital environment is that the people who are making things happen are too busy to write, or maybe they’ve just become unwilling to share. Apart from the fpur times a year conferences that we all attend, there is very little sharing that happens between social media agencies in South Africa. And if you’re claiming it’s happening, then you’re delusional.

Are we all waiting for each other to fail? Or are we all just monitoring the web-waves to see who makes the next social media faux pas? Locked and loaded with ridicule and rulebook slander? If that’s the unsaid current state of the social media and digital industry then I’m not sure I want to be a part of this system any more. The way I started this piece has made me feel like I should be providing you with a solution to the mundane diatribes of a few industry “experts”, but the truth is I don’t have one.

If anything, I’m maybe saying that instead of the four times a year conferences and the five ways to skin a cat blog posts, we should be forming communities — outside of the ones we’ve all managed at some stage or other — and get together, physically and talk things through, share insights, challenge conformities and measurement process.

Maybe I’m sounding a little melioristic, but I’ve always been somewhat idealistic in my view of the world. Damn. Maybe I’m being naïve and what I should be doing is keeping all this knowledge to myself and harbouring all these insights to be able to go off and continue to make a name for myself and write an industry related marketing book ‘How to be a douche and not share what we all struggle with on a daily basis 101’. Sounds more and more appropriate now, doesn’t it?

I guess where I’m going with this is that there are no 10 ways to improve, nor are there five concrete tactics to improve on anything unless you’re having a conversation with the people that are actually in the thick of it all.

If we keep doing what we’ve always done, we’re going to arrive at the same place we always do. Alone, isolated and frustrated, instead of being in an industry that should be thriving on a collective and open opinion.