I'm a comin for the Mayor of Lil Bull.

Two posts ago I promised the numbers. The numbers are the results of my advertising campaign for Christmas 2018.

I'm paid to sell things. To sell a product (or multiple products). My salary rests on this fact. I make no profit in re -bleating what the lead sheep bleats.

Twitter and Pinterest have no paid content. Facebook has a paid advertising budget (we use it mainly as a forum/customer service gateway).

Twitter: 1 million impressions

Pinterest: 200, 000 impressions

Facebook: 199,000 impressions

Blog: 14,000 impressions

in 1 calendar month. 

I would like a better blog, but it is what it is. When I started this job I asked for WordPress with the publisher theme, but the team wasn't interested in the work of moving platforms.

The nature of reality is that you work with the tools to hand.

There are three obvious queries here...

The first one, the one most often asked: How can I prove these are not just "makey uppey" numbers?

Here I have to concede the territory. I can no more vouch for these numbers than BeBee can vouch for their 12 million users. There will be some inflation. In fact, Jim and Phil have done some good posts on exposing the differences between "impressions"on different platforms. My response is that we are comparing apples with apples, I can't say how inaccurate the description of "apple" is without giving out private company information.

I do know that I have access to google analytics tools that back these numbers up and other public sources.

The second question is...

Show me the money!?

This question begets a counter that you don't often hear. I didn't "pay"for this advertising. It is a free to use global publishing opportunity that never existed before. Yes, you pay in other ways (like data and time) but the rebuttal is based on the implied conceit - that you have to spend lots of money to make a little money. You've gotta be "too big to fail."

In the old days of winner take all mass market advertising, you could bully your way to the top. The context now is very different, "we are all marketers" (Seth Godin quote). The "money" is *access to a global audience.

*This why the global power blocs have been so quick "to protect your privacy," they're actually protecting their hegemony.

The third question relates to the first two.

So, how does this work for me? 

This question is actually the most complex of the three. To be a sheep, one has to be "content"to be a sheep. If you believe in the concept of sheep and wolves (hawks and doves), to begin with.

One of the things about posts like this one it that it is way too real for the majority of the audience. It contradicts an implied orthodoxy and runs counter to the herd. The herd naturally sees you as an enemy in their tribal binary formulation. By default, you become a wolf by rejecting the "creed."

"Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility."

― Sigmund Freud,Civilization and Its Discontents

Most are content to be lurkers, hidden, shapeless and indistinct. The huddled masses rarely want to advertise either themselves or their work, afraid of the scrutiny or censure. Like rats in the darkness, they will scurry from any bright light.

How doe it work for you? First you have to work.

This "fear" (of failure) is exactly that which gives the bold marketer his or her power. There is a reward to standing loud and proud in the town square squawking out a chicken-licken monologue to all comers. Social media (and media in general) is the domain of the loud, the opinionated (and often, the complete charcoal charlatan calligrapher, or troll).

Controlling intention and attention, being strident about about the unimportant, disregarding bold face truths, sowing the seed of orthodoxy. This makes you a visionary, a seer, a prophet (of doom). Being on the accepted side of a perceived argument. Using the "bleat" power of the group to advance position. These are the high impact tools of the online world. You need a cultivated element of duplicity. You have to enjoy the histrionics of being a drama queen, playing to the gallery or the mob. The mob, in turn, needs a reason for being, "a being against" rather than "a doing for."

Where is the value for a person who writes content and then dismisses the medium upon which it is written. A sculptor cussing his own hand picked stones.

Well that you might say is that is the perfect route to power. Selling dreams to the formless, gormless and gutless is always the place to sell demagoguery. Telling how bad is contemporary medicine can sell you a lot of snake oil.

A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It thinks in images, which call one another up by association (just as they arise with individuals in states of free imagination), and whose agreement with reality is never checked by any reasonable function. The feelings of a group are always very simple and very exaggerated, so that a group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.

SIGMUND FREUD, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego