When I started on Twitter it was about talking with my online friends from the US. It was about having deep debates. Someone would ask a question or share a link and many would reply. We used to have long talks between five or six people. It was good conversation.

Well, the conversation is dead.

Nobody is listening anymore, nobody is replying anymore, and everyone’s talking more than ever.

At some point earlier today, my stream showed 37 tweets with links in a row. Thirty-seven. Not one engagement.

I’m going to venture a guess on why this happened (and there’s no turning back):

Deaf Success

Success and deafness are positively correlated.

I’m not saying that my friends and I have all succeeded, but most of us have become more popular in the last year or so. More popularity means more people talking to you. The paradox here is that the more you connect, the more you ignore (that’s why I consciously keep my reciprocal relationships limited).

In other words, the more people you talk to, the less you talk to each of them. Unless you are broadcasting (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Are you broadcasting?

Take It Outside

Most real one-on-one conversations between my friends and I happens outside of Twitter. But I still miss the debates and multiple conversations that used to happen inside.

Utilitarian Networking

Each new generation of social media users is usually the most active when it comes to conversation. Every six months or so, you see new bloggers join the scene and start engaging others aggressively and building their own networks. The thing is that once the utility of that network plateaus, people stop spending time in it.

We are utilitarians, which is great for business but sucks for friendships.

Conclusion

If there’s an entrepreneur out there that’s looking for a good business opportunity, then this is it. I want a tool that focuses regularly on conversations with people that are not necessarily friends, with less noise and limitations. And if this tool already exists, please let me know which is it, because Twitter doesn’t work for that anymore.

1. Make friends.
2. Promote them so they will promote you.
3. Screw them over/ ignore them/ use them/drop them while becoming friends with their friends.
4. Repeat as needed.

In no time, you’ll be praised for your community building skills thanks to those drone followers that are too blind to see the obvious manipulation, too needy to question your quality, and too afraid to quit your empty cheerleading message.

Isn’t social media great?!

A recent study shows that we trust our friends recommendations less and less lately:

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her.

People in the comments are looking for the reason behind this, that the article doesn’t give.

Don’t worry, I’m here to help.

Remember, you heard it from the Owl first.

I’m a fan of criticizing our society and everything I think is wrong with it.

But I’m also a diehard realist, and always consider if what I’m suggesting is possible.

This either creates hope of change, or a harsh realization of inevitability.

That’s the crossroad I’m at regarding self-promotion.

I don’t like self-promotion. I can’t say I don’t do it at all, but I really despise everything about it. I trust traditional word of mouth, on two good friends sharing something great with each other in a regular conversation. I believe that providing and spreading value should be done by two different people. There’s no real difference between the noise of advertising and the noise of self-promotion, but somehow the latter has been increasingly accepted lately. The reason? It works.

Or so people say…

Self-Promotion Limits

Let’s assume it works for a second. Why does it work? My guess is because we have friendly relationships with a group of people that feels obligated to like us, to like what we do, to be our first audience and our first advertisers. Initial self-promotion will hide our content’s true value. It’s just friendly reciprocity. Our friends are equally bad indicators of success as they are at giving honest criticism.

The real reason “it works” is because it brings fast results, and that’s all we need in this fast paced and impatient world of ours. Self-promoters have followers that they wouldn’t have if they hadn’t self-promoted their work. That’s why I really can’t say anything to those that do it, because they DO have results to back up their decision to self-promote. But what kind of results?

It took Seth G. and Gary V. years to reach the point where they are at right now. Not only years of hard work translated into innovative ideas and business success, but also years of patience. Patience waiting to show up in the media and real life friendly chats. Maybe unconsciously, but they did it anyway. Let’s see which bloggers, PR people, social media advisors and other practitioners, reach that level of success 10 or 15 years from now. There’s a difference between 25,000 and 1,000,000 followers, and self-promotion can only take you so far.

The great ones talk. The average ones yell.

Self-promotion Placebo

The problem with self-promotion is perception.

We think that the more we self-promote, the better results we get. That if we haven’t gotten enough responses is because we haven’t promoted it enough. This may be true in the beginning of the journey (and even this is questionable), but once you reach average success, self-promotion is just noise (which your friends won’t call you on). Self-promotion ends up working as a gratification placebo. Since we don’t get the response we want from our community, we do it ourselves, therefore creating the false perception of good quality content.

Newsflash: it didn’t get promoted because it wasn’t good enough, or it was aimed at the wrong people.

The reason there’s usually only a handful of really successful promoted posts in each blog (if we define success by comments, retweets and such), is because it’s hard to create that kind of content consistently. It has nothing to do with promotion.

We are trying to make the boring sound new and interesting, and we are failing every time.

Average success through self-promotion only fuels our desire for more attention. And a high need for attention paired up with low quality of content will eventually hurt our reputation.

Self-promotion Decision

A smart guy on Twitter said to me once: “Stop having faith in humanity. It’s far easier to just not.” And maybe he’s right.

But if he is, I’d rather lose.

If self-promotion and an irresponsible generation of noise is what it takes to thrive, I’d rather remain hidden and true to my values. I may be looking for a noise-less utopia, but it is because I think noise is more harmful than what we give it credit for, and self-promotion is a big factor behind it.

Integrity is more important than marketing victories.

You can subscribe to Scribnia’s blog here,  and to David’s blog here. Follow Scribnia on Twitter here, and David here.

David is a guy I respect enormously because of his integrity and the quality of his ideas. Thank you David for asking me to do this, it was a pleasure.

Do read my guest post “The Epic Battle Between Short Posts And Long Posts” here.

• Most people agreed with it. The ones that didn’t were, interestingly enough, personal branders or people who make money with personal branding in some way. Makes sense: if  my product was a rip off and someone would called me on it, I would defend it as well. But that wouldn’t make it any less of a rip off.

• Personal branders: if you guys can’t decide on the same definition, how do you expect us to take you seriously? Not one definition was repeated, and they ranged from “how to be  authentic” to “how to show others what you are good at,” with many more in between.

Do you think we care about what personal branding really means? We hate the term, period. Whatever it is, we decided that we don’t like it. Are you expecting to change our mind just by saying it means something else? Good luck with that. And even so, there are 15 other “personal branding experts” telling me something different.

I think we are better off just ignoring all of you.

You can ignore us as well but we are the ones making you money, so I would think twice about it.

• Instead of showing up in a defensive stance and telling us how clueless and wrong we are because we don’t really “get it”, how about listening to us, your customers, and making the necessary adjustments? Learn and adapt. Every industry changes eventually, why would Personal Branding be any different?

I remember a post by Seth Godin where he said that Malcolm Gladwell was wrong in disagreeing with Chris Anderson’s idea of “Free.”

Seth’s reply? “Who cares? It’s happening.”

Who cares if you don’t like or don’t agree with what we think about Personal Branding?

It’s happening.

You can subscribe to Buzz Marketing Daily here, and follow Carrie on Twitter here.

Thank you Carrie for letting me write for your very popular blog, it was a thrill and a pleasure.

Do read my guest post “The Simplest Social Media Rule” here.

Hey, Personal Branding, I have something to tell you:

I don’t care.

I just don’t care anymore. You have prevented me from having fun for the last time.

I bought my URL domain and secured a couple of social media profiles. Your job is done, I’m moving on now.

Because really, all that you’ve ever really taught us is stuff we already knew. Did we really need someone telling us how to be authentic or respectful?

Don’t tell me about those drunk girls that upload their pics on Facebook for everyone to see, or about those employees that publicly say that they hate their job. In reality, the problem is those people are just being themselves. The problem isn’t, “You’re awesome but because of that photo of you peeing on a dog while getting high, the company decided to go another way.” You were a mess to begin with. Do you really go showing that picture to everyone you meet?

This is not Personal Branding; this is common sense.

The two most harmful consequences of Personal Branding:

1) It makes you afraid. Not only afraid to speak up, be confrontational and even curse, like everyone does offline, but it also makes you afraid of taking life into your own hands. Personal Branding bases most of its points on not upsetting potential contacts, your interviewer, your boss, or anyone else who will decide if you “live or die financially,” depending on what they find out about you online. To hell with that: authenticity means upsetting people. Only by disagreeing and even fighting others will you do something worth talking about.

This does not mean being scandalous, this means being human.

2) It has made us so calculated, that I wonder how many people are able to live up to their online personas. Meeting online contacts in the real world has been very disappointing in many cases. What’s interesting is that the people who haven’t played the personal branding game, have been amazingly fun, interesting and wise.

Sadly, with all this forced authenticity, people are actually becoming fake. That’s why we love those people who speak their mind without worrying about the scandal. We envy them because they don’t over-think the repercussions.

To be honest, I’ve never been as fake as when personal branding was my top concern.

My advice: Do whatever you want. Your intuition will take you through the best path for you.

The funny thing about intuition is that it’s magnetic. When you trust your gut, you attract people that like what you do, what you say and the way you think. You attract the people that you need, the people that will help you. Yes, you also upset those that don’t– deal with it. There’s no shining without conflict.

Once I started not worrying about the repercussion of every word I said online, I truly connected at an emotional level with others.

Once I embraced my personality, I strengthened the connections that mattered and cut ties with those that didn’t.

Once I stopped caring, I started to actually have fun with social media.

You can talk about the things you’re going to do, and then do them.

Or you can just do them.

Sadly, people seem to value more the former way of action.

The one that makes a big fuss about it.

The one that needs selfish justification.

The one that’s fake.

The problem is we encourage this type of behavior. We recognize the “talk-and-doers” more than the “just-doers.”

The moment we stop glorifying those that go “look at my good work!” and start recognizing just good work, the world will be a better place.

No wonder the best ones stay hidden. They choose anonymity over prostitution.

When you get involved in social media, you see a lot of articles that you “must read”, concepts you “must know”, and things you “must do.”

And they are pretty much true. If you want to compete, you need to know what everyone knows.

It takes effort to take off, that’s when planes spend most fuel.

But once they are soaring, they can turn the autopilot on.

This is why I no longer read almost anything about Gen Y, social media, blogging and many other burned topics.

Not because they are useless. They are not.

But their purpose is to help you take off, not to make you fly higher or faster.

Why do people keep debating these topics over and over then?

Because it feels safe. Everyone knows what they are talking about, they all feel smart.

But it won’t help. That flight will end at some point, the fuel is limited.

I can bet that most of this blog’s readers have also taken off. And this is why I think they should reevaluate their relationship with these topics by now.

It’s easy talk about what a successful take off you did once you are in the air. What’s hard is to take off again.

Read something else, be ignorant once again, let the autopilot do its thing.

Stop talking about what you already know.

After all, it’s more profitable to have many planes in the air than one spaceship on the moon.