Disciple Syndrome: Why We Worship Brands And How To Stop It

We need to abandon the idea of role models altogether and find new routes to personal development. The notion that here in the 2020s, you could put a savvy entrepreneur in front of a large group of naive hopefuls, and NOT end up with one billionaire and a queue outside a food-bank, is, frankly, ridiculous.

If social media has accomplished any useful Darwinian purpose, it's been to educate us in our own stupidity. One of the most sobering things social media has taught us, is that we no longer need people to be the offspring of a deity or to perform miracles in order to garner our worship. All we need them to do is:

a) Have a soapbox.
b) Agree with us.

Once they've met these two conditions, we will blindly applaud and submit to every self-serving action they take, however much we suffer in the process. A brief, demonstrational interlude...

Maximum Community Management: Celebritising The Brand

“Any brand can be celebritised. But how do you celebritise a brand?...”

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash (image modified).

If you thought community management was little more than diverting a brand's negative social media feedback into the dark depths of the private messaging system, we really need to talk. In fairness, most mid to large sized businesses do have a broader vision of community management than that, but even at the upper end, not always by much.

They might, for example, equate community management with hopping onto forums and review sites with an “I'm sorry you feel you didn't get good service”, and a polite but subliminally sulky defence of the company's reputation. And maybe they also equate community management with trying to sliver-tongue or basically bribe bloggers whose less-than-glowing assessments of their offerings are rapidly creeping towards Google's front page… They're covering the defensive bases. But if you know your old sayings, you'll be aware that defence, is not the best form of defence…