Transcript
Hello everyone welcome to another DailyJim It is around 11 40 again and it is May 5th 2022. Or as some Star Wars people would say Revenge of the fifth upon on the Revenge of the fifth. Or as other people would say it's Cinco de Mayo which is much more of an american holiday than a mexican holiday which I learned I think in college. Um but yesterday when many americans will drink tequila and beer and eat tacos and then think that we're celebrating just as much as they are down in Mexico. Ah um Today I want to talk about how I I spent a lot of time today writing a post that I was going to post on facebook, and it turned out to be quite a long post and it was about me opening up about my financial situation and how it's really really not in a good place. Um and I was talking a lot I it really opened up quite vulnerably about Where I've been over the last 10 years with a lot of my work and, just and even you know and I asked people for help and to post it. It felt like a big step, it felt scary to put it out there and I put it out there around six p.m. or so. And again it's about a lot. It's almost midnight now and from what I can tell there have been about five likes and one other person who reached out, and sent a little money And so that's six people that I know of that have seen it, Out of approximately 1300 people that I'm friends with on Facebook.
And so I actually took a year, It's been 10 months since I've posted on Facebook and I thought one of the reasons was I'm posting and I'm not making any money with this work. I really need to focus on that or you know, all the stress and chaos of the pandemic and this and that. But you know, after posting today and looking back on some of the, latest posts that I did 10 months ago I think the last post before that was me posting an animated Jif, I pronounced Jif of the, the movie ferris Bueller's day off. There's one scene where the teacher is calling his name and he says Buehler. Bueller and he doesn't show up because he's not in class, he's ditching, and I posted that because I think I was getting this feeling that I would post out on facebook and it would go into this void, and I don't know if people are seeing it if they're reading it, if they're liking it, if they're hating it, if it's too long, if it doesn't have enough photos, if it doesn't have enough videos, if it doesn't have the right mood, if it doesn't have, I don't know. And so I imagine many of you have this experience posting on either facebook or Snapchat or twitter or Tiktok or, instagram or linkedin or sending an email or sending kind of a group text message or something like that. This idea of throwing something out into the internet void and not knowing what happened. Same thing with podcasting, putting it out there, not hearing anything back and not knowing if the person actually received it. And so, you know, I put on a youtube video tonight trying to figure out, okay, what is this facebook algorithm, How do I play the game so that I can see if people are getting the message or make sure that they get it. And the guy said something like the average reach for a Facebook post is like 5%. So if only 5% of the people that I post, you know, we'll see it of the that I posted to 5% of 1365. So only 65 people out of the 1300 might even see it. Oh my goodness, that's ridiculously low. And just how little control I have over that.
And you know, the other thing that came up for me was maybe I'll go a little longer today. But the other thing that came up for me was okay. Maybe the strategy is for me to make my post look more like an ad because this is an ad supported network. And I imagine maybe it's just like looking at the old newspapers. Remember looking at a newspaper and you would see an ad and it would look like a news story, but it wasn't a news story, but it kind of was, but it wasn't or even looking at a lot of news websites, and seeing an ad posted on the bottom and be like, this looks like a news story, but it's not, there seems to be maybe a desire or a drive to harmonize ads and stories so that they look kind of the same. And so I'm wondering.
Is the trick on these ad platforms to try to make my posts look more like ads, not too much like ads, but enough like ads so that it's hard for the user to tell the difference so that when I'm scrolling through as a user, I might click on it thinking that it's a normal story, which is what people would do in a newspaper. Oh, this must be a normal story. Oh, I already started reading it. Might as well finish it. So is that part of the trick? And the algorithm is to try to get me as a poster, as a writer, as a filmmaker, whatnot to create something with the same or similar aesthetic to an ad. And if so, how is that fundamentally changing the way that we communicate with each other? Maybe this is why the people who speak like advertising agents seem to do better in certain spaces. Maybe this is how we end up with presidents who talk as if they're selling us things nonstop because they are, maybe that's why they get the attention on some of these ads supported platforms because they look and sound like an ahead. And then it's hard to tell. I mean if the people who are speaking sound too different from ads, then it's obvious like, well this is an ad, skip, skip skip. But if it blends together, if they kind of merged together in this weird symbiotic relationship, then users may be more likely to click more likely to spend extra time watching that video thinking, oh maybe this isn't, Maybe this isn't an ad. Oh Okay, it is an ad, but I've already watched 30 seconds of it versus like if I could tell it was an ad, I would have skipped immediately. And so I don't know as I'm thinking about broadcasting more and putting my voice out there and trying to put it out more vulnerably and more open, I really pause and go, but, does that work on ad supported networks? And how do ad supported networks nudge me or encourage me to communicate in ways that sound much more like ads, Just so that I can get the attention so that if I put something out there with the intention of it, reaching 1300 people that have opted in in some way that it doesn't only reach maybe 65. Oh goodness, I wish email we're a lot more exciting to use because it seems um. A lot more likely that if I send an email to somebody it will at least reach whether they see it or not, that's up to them, They can choose their own filtering, they can choose their own algorithm, they're sorting, they can choose how they are going to receive it once it's there and how they're going to sort it and filter.
Well, assuming it gets past the spam filter, but that's, it's more or less solved in some ways.
Anyways. So today I was really reflecting on that, just how. It's not, you know, how the distribution system, the business model of these platforms can strongly impact what we say if we want people to hear it or see it. So, on that note, as I blast this out into the podcast either, which is nice because people can listen to it or see it regardless if they're signed up, they can, they can hear it. Um but the challenge is getting the word out to them so that they know it exists. And that often means going through some of these platforms that are ad supported. On that note, it's almost nine minutes for this and I'm going to cut it off so I can go back to watch the hockey game and stop thinking about ah, sending content, content, content writing and speaking on the internet and more so just watching good old fashioned television ads. All right, thanks.
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