VandenBerg’s Views

There has been a lot of talk, lately, amongst the social media heavy hitters about how to quantify a quality, on-line social media presence.  The discussion has become heated at times, with insults being hurled freely. Here is but one of many examples of the vitriol being bandied about.

Some of you are convinced that the number of subscriptions determines the quality being presented to those subscribers.  Others of you scoff at this and purport that  it is the number of times a posting is repeated that is the measure of the quality of the posting.  A third group wants to make a combination based on ‘efficiencies…’

To all three sides of this argument I have two words for you: Britney Spears.  Ms. Spears has many subscribers on Twitter.  If Ms. Spears asked, I have no doubt that many of her followers would happily repeat one of her postings.  For those of you who want to use some combination of counting followers and repeated postings to determine quality this is the deadly combination that breaks your argument.  There is no possible way for you to convince me that any of it would be of high quality.

This is comical.  To me, at least.  It is comical to me, I suppose, because I am outside the echo chamber looking in at you running around like mice in a maze with no exit, listening to you shout at no one in particular that you and you alone have the answer.  It is comical to me because you are so deep in the forest you can barely see the trees.

I will break down the essence of the problem for you.  Nearly everyone involved in this conversation is a designer, a developer, used to be a designer or a developer, or employs designers and developers.  Your entire world revolves around numbers, mainly one and zero.  You think in terms of ones and zeros.  You make sense of the world around you using ones and zeros.  You solve most of your problems by writing codes that are ultimately ones and zeros.  And that is the flaw in trying to quantify quality.

There are no absolutes in quality, only relative associations.  There isn’t a one or a zero in quality.  You can not write a code of ones and zeros to determine quality.  Trying to to determine quality solely based on a countable metric is impossible; it is just as impossible as trying to count using colors.  How many more is red than blue?  There is no answer.

Quality is not a yes or no answer.  Quality is only a comparative measure based on a past experience of each of us, and no two of us are able to see it exactly the same way.  Quality means that this is better than that, without numbers.  To paraphrase, I can’t explain what quality is, but I know it when I see it.

It is not your fault you think a certain way.  Blame genetics, blame society, blame whomever you choose.  It does not change the fact that you do think this way, and it is the way your brain is wired that makes you want to count everything, rank everything and assign numbers to everything.

The bottom line is you aren’t idiots.  Not one of you.  You are all extremely bright people, most with amazing skills.  But this topic is not one of those skills and you are frustrated.  And it is okay to be frustrated with this.  There is nothing you can do to change how you think.  We all can not be great at everything.

As to what makes me a “Social Media Expert?”  I had cards printed…

Copyright 2009 Mark D. VandenBerg All Rights Reserved