I’m old enough to remember working before Microsoft Windows, before the Internet became popular, and before social media. When I was a teenager and wanted to talk to my friends, I had to pick up the phone and call them. Likely one of their parents would answer and would either bring them to the phone or I’d have to leave a message. Sometimes I just went outside and hoped I’d find one of them. I walked to school every day, and if something went wrong, the school would call my mom. She had no other way to reach me. Those days we all knew we had to be home when the traffic lights came on, and our parents would only worry if we didn’t show up.
My family had pretty advanced technology at home. We had two televisions, only one of which was black & white, and unlike the old fashioned black rotary dial phone my grandparents had, we had a beige push-button phone. We all used the same one, and I remember how my mom used to disinfect it with Lysol whenever one of us had a cold and used it. And if I spent too much time tying up the phone line talking to friends, I got yelled at.
Schools didn’t quite know how to handle kids with learning disabilities back then, so most of them were mainstreamed and just kept failing grades until they graduated or dropped out. School bullies stole the lunches of kids they picked on, circled them at recess, and called them names. Sometimes they waited for them after school to beat them up. They stuck nasty notes on their lockers, whispered about them during class, and didn’t invite them to their birthday parties.
I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Canada that, by all accounts, was incredibly safe. I used to ride my bike around for miles, and my parents had no way of knowing where I was. We never thought this was a big deal. Yet in my school and circle of people I knew, a friend of mine was almost raped after work, two girls in my high school grade got pregnant and dropped out, some kids did drugs, someone ended their life by jumping off of the building behind where I lived, and lots of kids were mean to one another. Kids weren’t sheltered the way they are today, but our neighborhood was far from perfect.
Fast forward to my first full-time job in 1986. My first work computer ran on MS-DOS and took me an entire day to set up because I received about 30 boxes in my cubicle one day and had to do everything from install chips on the motherboard, partition the drive and install the operating system. But I was fortunate enough to have an amber text screen, which was far fancier than the old green screen, so I honestly thought that I was special. When I needed to find old client documents, I had to go to the microfiche room and look them up. And for the first couple of years, we actually had a typing pool we would use to create a document.
Back then, if you wanted to market your company, you spent money on a TV ad, billboards, bus shelter ads, and brochures. Telemarketers regularly interrupted family dinners, people knocked on your door to sell you stuff, and your mailbox was filled every day with junk mail.
Several years later, as I walked into a war room in California for a client’s technology project, I saw Yahoo on several of the computer screens. I remember laughing to myself at such a crazy name and wondering what it was. Soon after that, one of the company executives took us all into a big meeting room at a local hotel and projected his computer onto a large screen where he demonstrated the Internet and talked about how we could use it. Mind blown!
I’m sharing this personal history with you, not to emphasize how old I am, but to underscore just how far we’ve come in the past 30 years in technology advancement. Optical Character Recognition or OCR wasn’t generally available when I started my career. People who were visually impaired had to rely on information to be translated into Braille for them. Today, thanks to technology and the Internet, Americans with disabilities have access to information online at the same time as everyone else.
Some of you may have recently seen the Netflix movie “The Social Dilemma.” It paints a terrifying picture of how secret algorithms manipulate our lives, causing addiction, mental health issues, spreading misinformation, creating isolation, and impacting our feeling of self-worth. At the end of the film, which is quite well done, one recommendation is not to believe everything you read online, but to do your research and check your sources. This is excellent advice. While the movie raises several points of concern that demand our attention, it does so with the dramatization it warns us about. Today I’d like to do a little myth-busting on the power technology has over us and how, as parents and business owners, we can ethically use online technology.
Humans are wired to network. Working in communities has been key to our survival since early man. Several academic studies have established that the Internet does not isolate people but actually increases sociability. Multiple studies, including one from the University of Michigan, showed that Internet use empowers people by improving their feelings of influence and personal freedom, which leads to happiness. Were it not for the Internet, COVID-19 would have utterly crushed world economies. With it, many businesses were able to transition to a work-from-home model. People who were laid off by employers had the opportunity to start their own businesses online. Physicians continued to connect with their patients via telehealth. Attorneys continued to protect the legal rights of their clients. Many of the companies we see today would not even be possible without the Internet. Impoverished communities can make their artisanal goods available for sale to the world thanks to the Internet. Our kids could at least continue some form of education. Families were able to check in on one another, without putting their health at risk. The Internet has connected us in so many positive ways.
The film calls out propaganda, bullying, mental health, and misinformation and puts social media in the crosshairs of blame. It warns that artificial intelligence will be the downfall of democracy and humanity as we know it. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has been around since the 1950s when the Department of Defense began training computers to mimic human reasoning. It started with early work on neural networks to focus on applications such as credit card and Medicare fraud detection, optimizing logistics, medical diagnosis, and offering better financial predictions. During the 2010s, it evolved into machine learning, which is being used to design self-driving cars, enhance fraud detection, and make recommendations about which movie you might want to watch on Netflix, so you don’t need to scroll through all 3,800 titles. Deep Learning, which is the phase we’re in today, sets up basic parameters and trains a computer to perform speech recognition, identify images, or use past data to make predictions. Rather than predefined equations, it gives the computer basic parameters and trains it to look for patterns. This technology has been applied to improving language translations, helping Siri not to seem quite as stupid when you ask her a question, recognizing animal tracks to help with conservation, and analyzing the details of crime scenes to help with law enforcement.
Humans have always feared what they don’t understand. When trains were introduced in the 1800s, people feared that the human body couldn’t possibly travel at an incredible speed of 30 miles per hour. When commercial television was first introduced, people thought it would brainwash everyone. In 1999, we all feared that airplanes would fall out of the sky due to computers’ reliance on two-digit year fields, and people would get stuck in elevators when we reached the millennium.
I’m not sharing this to minimize the risks associated with social media, but more to put them into perspective. Social media has not created bullies, it has given them more access. Social media has not caused propaganda and misinformation, it has made audiences more accessible. Yes, we have become addicted to our devices. And yes, our kids spend way too much time on theirs. It is true that if you are not paying to use a platform, the company is making money by selling advertising. It would be pretty unrealistic to assume that a for-profit company should provide this service for free.
At this point in the evolution of technology, it would be unrealistic to outlaw artificial intelligence, since we would lose out on all of the wonderful advancements I mentioned, and the ones to come. We could force all of the current social media platforms to shut down, but the demand to connect online would persist, and another country would likely create a platform that would capture our data and be completely out of our control. We already see this with Tiktok. Social media is a form of free speech, so censorship is a challenging issue for our country to tackle. Although the film scoffed at the idea of using AI to identify inappropriate messages, this really would be an effective way to handle the problem. I can’t say that I disagree with the tax on data usage to force the platforms to be more selective with what they retain, although I’m not sure how you would police that with private companies, since you’re talking about a lot of data. However, social media is the only form of large scale public communication not subject to regulation. The FCC regulates TV and radio to protect the public from indecent or profane programming during certain hours. There are no similar regulations for social media, although this is being debated. The trick will be not to tip the scale of censorship to interfere with our First Amendment rights.
As parents, it’s up to us to set the example for our kids. It begins by not using our smartphone as a babysitter but instead providing toys that allow our children to use their imaginations. We are also able to control when our children can first use social media. Despite being in marketing, or perhaps because of it, my husband and I did not allow our daughter to have a social media account while she was in middle school. We also had a tough talk about pedophiles and cautioned her to stay out of friends’ photos, especially when at sleepovers or wearing a bathing suit. We were very clear with her about the good, the bad, and the ugly of what she would find online. She is almost 17, and only during the pandemic opened her first Snapchat account to communicate with friends to stay in touch. I’m pretty sure she hasn’t been emotionally scarred by starting social media later than most kids.
For ourselves, we need to be conscious of the amount of data we provide the platforms because they can only use what we give them. The flip side of the film’s dramatization of evil men in a room manipulating our every move is that we all hate seeing spam and irrelevant content. Artificial intelligence is being used to present more relevant content to us. If you don’t like what you’re seeing, then don’t click on it.
But real change begins with us as business owners. We are the economic fuel for the platforms, so how we run our paid campaigns can influence how social media is used. As a marketer, I can say that the type of data made available for targeting has definitely been reduced over the past year. Sometimes clients get frustrated because they want their ads to be more targeted. But that targeting requires access to more data. So if we’re concerned about how the platforms are using our data in our personal lives, we shouldn’t expect precisely targeted ads for our business. Less data means less targeted ads, which means larger monthly ad budgets to reach your audience. You can’t have it both ways. Social media is still an incredible platform to generate greater brand awareness. Still, it has always been a form of interruption marketing, a lot like those telemarketer calls that used to interrupt our family dinners. We must be conscious and respectful in our social media ads, offering value, not asking for too much too soon, and inviting people to explore a relationship with you, rather than go for the hard sell.
Businesses have always used creative tactics to sell their products and services. They have always felt that their message was important enough to interrupt what others are doing. Now, with social media, they have a platform where much of the world can be found at any given moment. Organic reach is dead on Facebook in particular, and the only way to assure your message will reach your audience is through promoting your content. As business owners, it is up to us to reflect on the tactics we feel comfortable using to get found. I have always believed in taking the high road, which typically isn’t the quickest one, but it does get you to a place where your growth is built on a more solid foundation.
Let me leave you with a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk.
“Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view. It means doing their utmost to shape word of mouth by treating each customer as though he or she were the most important customer in the world.”
Happy ethical online marketing.