SOCIAL MEDIA IS BULLSHIT 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd i 7/14/12 6:37 AM 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd ii 7/14/12 6:37 AM 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd iii 7/14/12 6:37 AM social media is bullshit. Copyright © 2012 by Earth’s Temporary Solu- tion, LLC. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10011. www .stmartins .com Design by Steven Seighman ISBN 978- 1- 250- 00295- 2 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-250-01750-5 (e-book) First Edition: September 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd iv 7/14/12 6:37 AM To Amanda: I think you said it best, “If only we had known sooner, we would have done nothing diff erent.” 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd v 7/14/12 6:37 AM 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd vi 7/14/12 6:37 AM CONTENTS AN INTRODUCTION: BULLSHIT 101 One: Our Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Web site 3 Two: Astonishing Tales of Mediocrity 6 Three: “I Wrote This Book for Pepsi” 10 Four: Social Media Is Bullshit 15 PART I: SOCIAL MEDIA IS BULLSHIT Five: There Is Nothing New Under the Sun . or on the Web 21 Six: Shovels and Sharecroppers 28 Seven: Yeah, That’s the Ticket! 33 Eight: And Now You Know . the Rest of the Story 43 Nine: The Asshole- Based Economy 54 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd vii 7/14/12 6:37 AM Ten: There’s No Such Thing as an Infl uencer 63 Eleven: Analyze This 74 PART II: MEET THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE BULLSHIT Twelve: Maybe “Social Media” Doesn’t Work So Well for Corporations, Either? 83 Thirteen: Kia and Facebook Sitting in a Tree . 98 Fourteen: How Marketers, Cyber Hipsters, and Others Deal with Their Critics (Hint: Not Well) 109 PART III: HOW TO SELL BULLSHIT WITHOUT REALLY TRYING Fifteen: How to Create and Spread Bullshit in Seven Easy Steps 121 Sixteen: And the Answer Is . 128 PART IV: HOW TO REALLY MAKE IT ON THE WEB Seventeen: Everything You Will Ever Need to Know About Marketing 143 Eighteen: Recap 160 Nineteen: The Anti- Social Media Manifesto 168 Ac know ledg ments 181 Endnotes 187 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd viii 7/14/12 6:37 AM By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing . kill yourself. —Bill Hicks, comedian and social critic 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd ix 7/14/12 6:37 AM 053-50475_ch00_4P.indd x 7/14/12 6:37 AM AN INTRODUCTION: BULLSHIT 101 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 1 7/14/12 6:39 AM 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 2 7/14/12 6:39 AM CHAPTER ONE OUR TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEB SITE MY FIRST WEB SITE nearly got me killed. I was building it using a Bondi blue G3 iMac that my dad brought home from work. At the time, I didn’t know HTML, or that I could have just used GeoCities.1 Th e best I could do was use Microsoft Word and save things as an .html fi le. I got as far as creating a single page with a black background, bright red text, and an animated GIF of a spinning globe on it. Cutting- edge stuff for the fall of 1998, my sophomore year in high school. During a meeting of the Computer Club, I showed my friend, Whitey 2, the Web site I was working on. Whitey had bragged for weeks about the traffi c his tribute Web site for Th e Simpsons was getting. Knowing I wanted to share my alleged wit with the world, Whitey told me the Web could help me fi nd an audience, but then declared my cur- rent eff orts to be a failure. He volunteered to build me a “more respect- able Web site.” We called the new Web site “Th e Island” because of my obsession with the New York Islanders, a team that embodies medioc- rity. My goal with this new Web site was to document the stupid things that came out of my mouth, which I kept in a notebook (a practice 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 3 7/14/12 6:39 AM 4 | SOCIAL MEDIA IS BULLSHIT I continue to this day and recommend you follow. Not just for jokes, but anything. If you don’t write it down, it’ll be gone forever). Whitey didn’t fi nd any of that stuff funny, though, so he suggested we brainstorm something else we could publish. Th e next time I came to his house, we got to talking about how much we hated life at Monroe- Woodbury Se nior High School. We were both picked on relentlessly. Whitey was teased for being a com- puter nerd, back when that warranted a wedgie and not a hundred million dollars in venture capital. And me? When you run for class president and lose every year since the sixth grade, the whole school thinks you’re a loser, and you’ve got the votes to prove it. To help blow off some steam, Whitey suggested we create a Web site where we mock our school and everyone in it. He would do the coding, and I would do the content— most of which consisted of audio fi les, each featuring a rant about a student we didn’t like. We had a bunch of other things on there, too, but the highlight was “Th e Top 50 Assholes Who Go to Monroe-Woodbury Se nior High School.” Th e top fi fty was a list I built and maintained by going through old yearbooks and identifying people who had picked on Whitey and I. Th e idea was that we would then rank those people based on how big of a dick they were that par tic u lar week. At fi rst, Th e Island only received a few hits a day. Th en Whitey’s friend, Brian Egan, passed the link on to some of his friends through AOL Instant Messenger, saying, “look at what Whitey made!” Word got around, and suddenly we were hit with something ridiculous like twenty- bazillion hits an hour. Th e Island had “gone viral.”3 To avoid our parents discovering the Web site, we kept our names off it. Whitey also took the added step of having one his friends host it on a private server . a server that soon crashed under the weight of all that traf- fi c. Unfortunately, it didn’t crash fast enough to keep our classmates from printing “Th e Top 50 Assholes Who Go to Monroe- Woodbury 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 4 7/14/12 6:39 AM AN INTRODUCTION: BULLSHIT 101 | 5 Senior High School” and circulating it around school under the title of “Whitey’s Death List.” When Th e Island came back, we were shocked to fi nd that most people loved it, so much so that the audio fi les I did were recorded onto cassette tapes and passed around school like an early Metallica bootleg. A lot of people didn’t talk to me back then, hence the sus- tained electoral failure, so at fi rst no one knew of my involvement. Th ey thought it was all Whitey’s idea, and out of fear, I didn’t per- suade them otherwise. But when our classmates matched my voice with the rants, a weird thing happened. Th ey kept harassing Whitey for being a computer nerd, but aside from the football team— who now wanted to kill me— everyone else wanted to be my friend. Th e Island got me the attention I was looking for. 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 5 7/14/12 6:39 AM CHAPTER TWO ASTONISHING TALES OF MEDIOCRITY DESPITE HAVING AN underwhelming C average after four years of high school, I told my dad the only college I would go to was NYU, and that I wouldn’t apply elsewhere because “other colleges were bullshit.” Knowing I wouldn’t get into my school of choice, Dad fi lled out an ap- plication for me to attend Alfred State College. In the fall of 2001, I arrived at Alfred with a chip on my shoulder. Th anks to Th e Island’s success, I learned that if you do something interesting, the people who normally ignored you would start paying attention to what you’re do- ing. So, the behavior that got me rewarded my last three years of high school continued into my fi rst year of college. Th at is, until I received a lifetime ban from WETD1, Alfred State College’s radio station, and alienated everyone on campus. I didn’t know it at the time, but that ban was a blessing in disguise. After Th e Island was deleted, I put on hold my ambition to show the world how funny I thought I was. People in high school found me amusing, and that was good enough. And considering the number of near beatings 053-50475_ch01_4P.indd 6 7/14/12 6:39 AM AN INTRODUCTION: BULLSHIT 101 | 7 Whitey received from the football team, I didn’t want to push my luck. But Alfred State College can aff ectionately be described as a “Suitcase Campus.” Everyone went home on the weekend, and the school is lo- cated in a tiny town in the broke and undeveloped wilderness of New York’s Southern Tier. Lake Wobegon it ain’t. Without money, a car, or people who didn’t want to see me die in a circus disaster, the Web was my last refuge.