8 reasons I hate working in social media

Here are a few reasons why I hate what the industry has become:

1. Social media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but we keep acting like it does.

It’s frustrating when people act like social media is its own platform, with no influence from the outside world. This comes from both sides of the fence. We see claims of “Facebook leads to an X percent sales increase” with little quantification about how the company has ensured independence from other channels. We also see brands doing silly things after ignoring external factors.

The infamous #QantasLuxury debacle is a great example that when you have a massive brand issue in the real world, trying to run a happy social media campaign won’t go well.

2. Social media isn’t new, yet many people say it is and use that as an excuse.

In the grand scheme of things, Facebook, Twitter and the new Myspace are new. But social media is not.

Social media has been around since before the Internet as we know it, in the form of Usenet boards, dial-in servers and chat rooms. The idea of developing an online community and facilitating engagement and conversation for a particular purpose has been around since the early 1990s.