Monday Musings: Marketing

Oh, boys and girls…let this be a lesson to you that marketing through Facebook and their “boost this post” carrot…well, let’s just say that it feels more like a stick at this point.

So, ironically, in an attempt to NOT spam all my friends with links to content I post here, cause I’m all considerate like that, I decided to pull together a faceboook page for the blog. I’d invite all my friends to follow it, and anyone who didn’t want to see the stuff could easily avoid it. Opt-in, not opt-out.

When I got to the end of the creation process, Facebook asked me what I thought was a fairly innocuous question: Would you like to sponsor this post for $10?

Now, I get that no would have been a fine answer. No, Facebook, you stealer of souls and hours of my life, I do not want to trade you little pieces of green paper for advertising. Please show yourself out.

All those things are things I should have said, in retrospect. What I did say was, ‘$10? Eh, what can it hurt?’

My pride, my innate hope that humanity is, at its core, good, any lingering warm-fuzzies I had for my fellow man.

You see, about a day after I took the red pill, I did, in fact see the harsh truth of reality. People suck, and the nicer you try to be, the meaner they get.

I ended up banning a bunch of folks from the page, and deleted all sorts of lovely images, of animals defecating, large piles of steaming dung, and dildos. It was a museum of ick, playing out there on my page, in real time.

Some guy even threatened to kill me. Now, he used a meme to make the threat, so how seriously should I take it? I guess not very. But if I turn up face down in a lake somewhere, please start with Gary Stennes.

But the thing is…how did we get here, where an ad in your newsfeed can motivate people to be such dicks? When did we lose the ability to just…scroll on?

However, as much as I whined, I will say that in the end, I got a ton of traffic to the page, and a bunch of likes from people that I don’t know. Not sure if it was worth it, necessarily, but it was effective.