Episode 132: The Sad State of Social Media - Stunning Digital Marketing

Show Notes

Episode 132 The Sad State of Social Media

Rob:

Hey, oh, Rob Cairns here. I thought we do something a little different. today. I’m here with my two good friends, Mr. Scott Mills and Mr. Jeff Brown, both Friends of the show. And I thought we dive into a subject I call the sad state of social media. We’ll start with Scott Scott. I want to welcome to the show my good friend and social media expert Scott Mills. How are you today? Scott,

Scott:

Good. Thanks, Rob. How are you?

Rob

doing? Well. And Jeff is a workplace education trainer, and spends a lot of his time training in social media. How are you today? Jeff?

Jeff:

We’re doing Scott and we’re excited about the talk today. This has been something that’s been on the burner for a while.

Rob:

It sure has Jeff. and I are gonna dive right into a subject that we talk about, and that’s mobs on social media. And I’m gonna dive right in to the GameStop situation, because we might as well start heavy and go like this. So do what do you take want to take? What do you think about the GameStop? situation in the whole mess on Reddit?

Jeff:

Let me take a first crack at it. It literally showed us that it’s not a free market anymore. Few get all the goodies and the rest of us. I mean, the match and limit you can only buy one share, is this a free marker What? And then they they as they’re the guys that got the money began to start losing their money in big time they put the brakes on so they can at least get out of there and a little better wall. A lot of the other guys kind of got cleaned. What do you think, Scott?

Scott

I think I think you just have to be really careful who you’re dealing with. It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on. There are what the situation is. It all comes down to relationships and trusted relationships with people and and don’t you know, you don’t want to put your money in something that looks too good. That’s the bottom line.

Jeff

Yeah, cuz it started off pretty cheap. And then people just decided, hey, we’re all gonna pile on and the thing went right through the roof.

Rob

There are situations where stocks do start off cheap and move for great reason. We take a stock called zoom in the last year. And what happened was zoom wise, it started cheap, and it grew. But that was because of the pandemic and other things. So, we can kind of say, every stock that grows, we got concerns with we got to work out why it’s growing, and do our due diligence, right,

Jeff

you know, but at the end of the day, though, you got to know how this thing started. The bunch of guys decide they’re going to get rid of GameStop as far as the market, and they decide they’re going to short it. And I mean, there’s a lot of geeks around they decided, hey, we’re we love GameStop I mean, for all intensive purposes, they picked this thing, they just started buying it it went bad It didn’t at the end of the day didn’t get a chance to correct it was definitely overinflated. But like everything, it never got a real chance to correct and if you’re a geek and you love video games, Video game companies are near and dear you and you the fact that someone’s going to try to pummel to destroy this and brag about it ahead of time. That’s not cool. That’s like want to fight

Rob

Yeah. I actually if anybody doesn’t know, I’m a classic video game collector. So I actually have no original Atari original Nintendo and originally metallic television. So yeah, I like video games, too. But I was getting involved in that mess. Scott, you know, the regulators are involved, both in Canada and the US Now, what’s your opinion on that? Or is it too late to it?

Scott

Well, everything, everything out there seems to get regulatory bodies in it after something big has happened. And there’s already a lot of victims. It’s kind of like responding to a call as a police officer after the fact. You know, you can’t save something when it’s already there. But hopefully, hopefully, the regulatory bodies can put some process in place to deal with the kind of the modern state of now and prevent victimization moving forward.

Jeff

it kind of speaks to the fact like social media when it first started off. I remember years ago, Scott, where it was more of a free for all then than it was today, so to speak. And the fact that people were still learning about it. They were trying to figure out what was going on. And everything was new. And there wasn’t much regulatory action, so to speak. And now, when you think about where things are at, it’s, it’s social media has matured more than it did say 12 years ago, 14 years ago. But it’s come a long way. And so same thing with I mean, the stock market’s been around a long time, but the internet, the fact that social media can drive attention. That’s something that I suppose probably suspect that it surprised everybody. When all these Reddit users just started jumping on the stock, they had no idea that what they’re getting with and boom, it took off like a rocket.

Scott

I think it really speaks to, to the heart of the issue and social media today is that, hey, it’s factual information, or misinformation, or disinformation. And you really have to verify what you see, it’s got to go back to my first point. It’s, it’s all about relationships, you know, if you want if you want to, if you want to invest money, then then get a good relationship with a financial advisor that that takes care of things like that for you, and advises you in a trusted way. And don’t jump onto the bandwagon of potential misinformation. on social media. It’s, you really have to be cognizant for what is a fact? And what is not a factor there?

Scott

I would agree with that in a classic example is, for those who don’t know, it’s worth mentioning, Jeff Scott, and I all met because of social media. So we, you know, we’re talking about relationships. And we’ve collaborated on many projects over the years, whether it’s workplace education, whether it’s a community project, whether it’s other things on the go. So, you know, I know, we’re talking about the sad state, but we also got to be very careful social media does have its uses and channels for the right reasons. And that’s something we got to remember before we continue to kind of dump on it.

Jeff

I instantly come to the Crime Stoppers, leave a tip tab. That was brilliant, and it did a lot of good. And at the end of the day, or what I helped him a part in creating actually may have, at the end of the day saved my two daughters from an incident in Halifax many years ago. And so there’s a lot of good that came out of that.

Rob

Yep, so true. Let’s move on to my second favorite heavy topic. And you know, before this, I had outage Iran. And at the time of this recording, the former President Trump is in the impeachment proceedings as we speak. And I’m not even going to touch on the political side of it, in terms of that, but a couple of weeks ago, when they went to ratify Joe Biden as the new president, we had a problem on the Capitol. And frankly, that was all caused by a mob, which grew because the social media in my opinion does when you have an opinion on that topic.

Jeff

Go ahead, Scott, because you’re probably privy to more insider details.

Scott

I don’t have a lot of insider details, but I definitely watched that whole situation. And I’ve been watching the fallout from it. I’m quite concerned with censorship on social media. also concerned about hate on social media, and bullying and harassment on social media. And I’m also very cognizant of kind of reputation and optics of social media companies and, and when, when Donald Trump’s social media account was, was taken off by Facebook and Twitter, I, I’m not a big Trump supporter or fan, but

it was very concerning to me that if the sorts of big social media giants can do that to the president United States, what are they going to do to law enforcement? Absolutely, as because we put out in the in the policing world, social media is the new kind of police scanner, because a lot of radio systems are encrypted. And, and a lot of media, they follow our social media updates, and, and the police services are putting a lot of very important relevant information in real time out, that is actually life saving. And sometimes the wording of that wording of those messages could be seen by you know, a spam filter, a bot that’s trying to stop something or censor something. And next thing, you know, your accounts suspended. And that is happening. I do know, of law enforcement accounts that have been suspended for putting things up like videos of a crime scene trying to identify suspects. And, you know, next thing, you know, there’s, there’s complaints being put in, that the content is inappropriate. And next thing, you know, accounts are being suspended. So we’re actually trying to keep the community safe and identify suspects in pretty serious incidents. And obviously, we’ve got a lens to inappropriate content, we’re not going to put something completely gross or, or that nobody should see out there. But when we’re trying to identify suspects and legitimate investigations and accounts are they’re being reported by by whoever’s reporting it. And next thing, you know, the companies are suspending our accounts. That’s very concerning to me as, as a law enforcement representative.

Jeff

Well, that would be equivalent to you’ve had a crime, you putting information in the newspaper, next thing, you know, the newspaper literally takes it out. I mean, you’re trying to solve crimes, you’re trying to be positive in the community, we’re trying to take the bad guy out of the community. And so we’ve got a picture of a bag or a video of a bad guy, for instance, doing something. We want the community to help, so to speak, in, apprehending or providing information. This has been nothing new. But what’s new is the fact that the information that’s going out there now is getting law enforcement in count suspended that kind of stuff, where what they’re trying to do is help get it up to community take bad guys off the street.

Scott

Yeah, well, people in the know, that work in law enforcement, you know, IT specialists and things like that

they’ve been, they’ve been raising this, this potential flag for a long time that law enforcement really needs to have their own kind of video service servers and things like that. And not rely on things like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, but the bottom line is, is you want to be able to communicate with the public, because it’s the public that law enforcement is sworn to protect. And you need to have that dialogue with each other. So yeah, as a law enforcement agency, you have to go on to the platforms that are active, that have a lot of community engagement on them and, and put your information there. So wherever wherever the community goes, the police need to go because the you know, the, the police are no good without the community. Absolutely. And so it’s kind of a slippery slope. When you see the censorship I’ve had, I’ve had people in my life now close to close to me that in the last, say, six months, they’ve closed all their social media accounts, because they’re quite upset about the censorship that’s going on, on all of the platforms. And it starts to make you It makes you wonder, right? Like, what’s, what’s the motivation, like, we obviously don’t want hate speech out there. We don’t want anything homophobic. We don’t want anti semitism out there. We don’t want. We don’t want a lot of things that are detrimental. You know, there’s lots of hate out there towards women. You know, I agree that all needs to be filtered out. But just because somebody has an opinion that’s different than ours. It’s a very fine line to walk about what’s going to get removed and what’s not like, for instance, I’ve, I’ve submitted things before about significant videos of child abuse, that are caught. So many people are reporting to me as a law enforcement officer. And I tried to, I tried to report that to the social media companies to actually get it removed, and they come back to me and say, it doesn’t meet their terms of removal, it doesn’t really meet the criteria. And I’m like, this is an absolutely horrendous video that’s causing people extreme, you know, upset because, because the child is being beaten. And you’re telling me that it’s not able to be removed from the, from your site, because it doesn’t meet your Terms of Use? What are the terms of use, and then you start seeing some of the political ones going down, the easiest one to say, is Trump, right? He’s the president united states, you might not like what he’s got to say. But taking away his, his social media accounts is a scary, scary thing.

Jeff

Well, who’s next? And for what reason? I mean, maybe I say something that’s not according to the party line, so to speak. And we see a lot of that. In the with the CC, Chinese Communist Party, right over in China, their social media credit score, and your credit score is not good. There’s no bus and there’s no crane, there’s no transportation for you kind of thing. I mean, do we really like take a Trump dance? Is that the first step into a slippery slope, where, literally now we look at our social media before we go and see if we can get a mortgage or not? I mean, where does this thing end?

Rob

It’s already it’s already happening. I mean, my my wife is a property manager. And I’m going to tell you, any two tenants she’s ever had the foreign few, the first thing she does is do a social media search to see what their apartment looks like, are they clean? Are they not clean and stuff like that? Like it happens all the time. And the first thing employers do, and you know, both, you know, I’ve just switched into a job. And they they want increased social media to see if my profiles were clean. I mean, they they’re lucky. So, you know, I, I would be hard pressed to believe that if you’re going for mortgage, the mortgage brokers aren’t checking you out on social media. That’s the first thing. The second thing we got to be really careful of is the censorship. Because the problem is that human mentality, what’s happening on social media, I used to say, as a marketer, people would read the first paragraph. Now it’s all by the headlines. And if you want to believe headlines don’t matter, I think you’re wrong. Because if you read the comments, take the Toronto Star, take the Globe and Mail take the Washington Post. People are commenting based on the headline, not I’m reading the article, and you can almost guarantee based on the comments I’m reading, they haven’t read the article. So what I’m going to tell marketers and businesses out there, headlines matter more than ever now because that will get your reaction not what’s in the text.

Scott

that is concerning. Because a lot of people don’t realize that the author, the journalist who’s doing the story, they’re not the ones that are actually making the headline. That’s the copy editor that’s making the headline, and many times many times that headline doesn’t match what the journalist who did who put the work into the story had in mind, and it actually causes them a lot of problems with the stories about because the headline doesn’t, doesn’t fit with the tone and and the actual story. So that is a very big big challenge out there is, is these headlines because people do read headlines. And I tell you in my world, it really, the headlines can really, really cause a lot of problems. Yes,

Jeff

we are no longer a nation of readers, we’re a nation of scanners. And it’s so easy. I mean, I teach my workplace education participants how to write headlines to get noticed in the newsfeed. And my wife says it’s a good thing. You’re good and not evil, because it’s very easy to manipulate, so to speak, those headlines can literally make or break whether people stop and read your article or not. And some people I mean, those copy editors literally are, it’s what sells reads, basically, they write for, for sales.

Rob

And they’re good at what they do. That’s it. But I, you know, Scott, I agree with you. I mean, we are a generation of scanners. And the problem is, we’re also a generation of I want it now, nobody wants to do the research. Nobody wants to do the reading. Nobody wants to do the background work to find out if it’s this is valid or not. I mean, I’m at the point. And both here are quite aware of this, I got so fed up three weeks ago, I do not have any social media on my cell phone at all anymore. And that’s because of this data that I removed. So the place I get it is on my home tablet, which does not reach me all day, or on my PC, I do not get social media whatsoever. When we function, somebody said What’s wrong with you? And I said, at the end of the day, how is this benefiting me to watch all this garbage going on, like Fox on that one, guys.

Scott

It’s a I’ve had people telling me this too. And in my world, like I like I’m doing social media professionally, for professional organization. And a number of the members even of the organization are on it for that very reason. And for whatever reason, they choose not to be on it, I get that, I get that point, it also can be very distracting. You’re trying to focus on the task at hand. And next thing you know, you’re scrolling through your phone, it’s very addictive. But I get that. I also do think it’s very important in this day and age, to know how the main social media platforms work and know what is out there on social media platforms and what’s being said and how it’s working. Because if you don’t if you don’t know how it works, the world’s happening around you. And then you’re unaware of it. And it’s especially important for somebody like a police officer to be very aware about what’s being said on social media, because your situational awareness can, is just that much greater if you keep an eye on what’s going on social media, and actually

Jeff

critical for their lives. If they know what’s going on in the community, they can get a pulse, and self shimmy gets the pulse faster. I mean, years ago, walking the beat, getting to know the community, they would tell you stuffs going on, they would tell you hey, you better not go down that block because it’s, there’s a bunch of guys looking for you. And so social media kind of works that way. But we also know now, because of the algorithms, they’re heavily filtered.

Scott

Yeah. So so like something you know, you’d be in for Nova Scotia, Jeff, the whole thing about an alert that goes out and makes our phone rang when something terrible is happening, and we need to kind of shelter in place type thing for save our lives. You know, that happened out in Nova Scotia. And you know, the the police out there, they put some things out on social media. And it became a big deal about the alert not going out in a major situation that happened. And you know, the alert is similar to kind of an amber amber alert for a missing child. But it’s actually it’s this through the same system actually. But it’s for kind of an emerging incident like an active shooter situation. It’s unbelievable. Every time an amber alert goes out the amount of people that are pissed off. They complain because their phone went off in the morning and it’s just I don’t know what the answer is. But it comes back to this, okay, I’ve, I’m not going to listen to social media because of whatever reason, right? Is that the same sentiment as I’m going to turn off the alerts because I don’t want my day to be interrupted by an alert that potentially could save my life or save the life of somebody else? Well,

Jeff

let me put it into perspective here because this was what happened. Nova Scotia is very personal. my good buddy Dave and I were doing some tech work for live streaming. And we were to building up. But as it was happening, I was getting texts from my, my daughter, Catherine, who’s up in Quebec, and the tweets were going out. And the RCMP were updating people on Twitter. Unfortunately, there are people that got up that day that didn’t have a Twitter account. And one of them was my wife’s cousins, son’s wife, her another nurse got in a car and they drove and the the imposter pulled them over and shot him. And so I would have taken an amber alert any day.

it couldn’t say someone’s life, I would have allowed it to annoy somebody, if it could have saved the life. And when it comes to an amber alert, you’re going to save a kid but goodness, where are we as people we can’t put up with a date of birth because a kid is going missing some mom some dad is literally out of their minds. A year completed about an amber alert. Oh, my goodness, she should be should be all hands on deck. Let’s find this kid. Let’s return this childhoods family set a complaint about an amber alert or the fact that there wasn’t an amber alert in Nova Scotia at that time, that was horrific experience. I mean, it was just it was the poser was literally in Turo for a short period of time. I mean, you want to talk about one of the most sacred things don’t masquerading as a police officer and killing people something that’s so respected. To do that, that is absolutely one of the cruelest things I could think of, and that is just unthinkable. And the fact that if some people had had that Amber Alert, they’d still be alive today, I would tell you, if you’re upset at amber alerts, you know what, hold on here.

Scott

So So Amber, just to be clear for the listeners, Amber Alert is a very, very specific thing that sends an alert out in relation to a missing child. And there’s very specific criteria in Ontario, Amber Alert System is run by the Ontario Provincial Police. So service of juristic, a police service of jurisdiction, if they want an amber alert out, they have to go meet the criteria and the LPP has to put it out, that’s different from an emergency alert. It’s through the same system. But it’s a lot of people interchange the terminology of it. So the emergency alert would be for something like this where we were there was a basically, a man with a gun in a police car that wasn’t a police officer that was pulling people over and shooting them on the side of the road out in Nova Scotia. So that would be an emergency alert. And I empathize with you there, Jeff. I’ve been teaching social media to police officers, as you know, for for years. Yeah. And the first thing I do when I get up in the morning, or the first thing I do, where I’ve been kind of tuned out for a while is I go and I check lists on Twitter. And I have all of the relevant social media, emergency management, people on a list, and I’ve got that right on my Twitter account. And I think that’s the most important thing that I that I teach is how to listen and be situationally aware on Twitter because Twitter is where all of the news breaks. And honestly, before I leave my house, I go on Twitter and I look at the social media Emergency Management list that’s that’s on the Toronto Police operations I TPS operations account. And I look at it because throughout the Greater Toronto Area, it’s got every single Emergency Management partner on there. So anything going on there from a weather issue to maybe there’s like an alert that’s going out for a missing child or maybe there’s like an active shooter or something there. I would see that and I just think that’s why it’s so amazing. And like Rob was saying he took the social media off his phone, I encouraged Rob to put it back on his phone, just for it just for Twitter. So you can listen to those lists, and get in the habit of using them because you can become so situationally aware, in order to protect your own personal safety, if you know where you’re listening. And some of the points we made earlier about social media for the good, yeah, we kind of started off this show kind of slagging it saying, for the bad, there’s a lot of good that goes on on social media. And that’s one of them. And, you know, just just that you saying that, Jeff, and my condolences to you, and everybody affected Nova Scotia. Um, I just, I just wish, you know, your relative, the person close to you, the nurse that was going to work, I wish she was had that training of, of, about listening, how to listen on social media, so that you’re aware of what’s going on around you. There’s so many what ifs, you know, but it’s something I’m very passionate about is, is teaching people how to use social media using it for good. I call it social media for success and safety, relationships and technology. And, and you know, the purpose if you if you use it with purpose and process, you’ll get payoff for yourself and the potential for for other other opportunities. Like I, I’ve been flown around the world to do a lot of good in relation to social media. But having said that, I know a lot of people that their lives have been turned upside down because of social media, because they’ve been targeting of a doxxing campaign, they’ve been bullied. There’s people that that have, you know, conditions like autism, and they get triggered. And from something they see on social media, and they and they sometimes they have a hard time just like everybody does, to understand what’s fact and what’s fiction. Absolutely. You know, like my life, my life has really been impacted by social media. And I keep in touch with a lot of people from a lot of different realms, including, you know, Rob and Jeff here. We’re always connecting on social media just because Rob isn’t up social media on his phone doesn’t mean he’s watching that people just you know, um, but I just

Rob

go on social media, I’ve just, you know, I’d have it on my phone. I I’m probably an abnormal on that one. I’m, it’s on my tablet. Um, so I often sit there at night with it in my hand, I just, it just helps me regulate time. But I agree you have to be on it to some degree to follow what’s going on with either, you know, things in the world journalism, even big brands to some degree, there is a lot of good that goes off. No, question.

Jeff

I’ve been checking out stats before I came on. Just take a look. And we see. Overall this is from sprawl social Facebook comments decreased by 5.6 per day. Facebook private messages, 2.1 per day, Twitter messages 16 decreased by 16 per day. Twitter retweets decreased by 20. The only places growing in comments and Instagram basically had there is something that’s coming there’s there’s apple and Facebook are in a Donnybrook theory, they fisticuffs as far as what’s coming as a shock,

Rob

just to Apple and Facebook. It’s Apple, and everybody. So the approach for those who don’t know that Apple has taken is the Safari browser, now blocks cookies. And the problem with that is many legitimate websites don’t work well. But it also makes jobs for guys like me harder, because marketing to do a Facebook tracking pixel. And for those who don’t know, that’s basically So Facebook can retarget ads that you for sites you’ve been on. It’s harder to do with the person’s running Safari, because of that. And a lot of people are going to browsers like brave as well, which also blocks tracking cookies. So the war between the manufacturers and the browsers are going on. But all this is going to cause frankly, is companies like Facebook to say Oh, you want this to have access, it’s 2995 a month. Because what people need to realize is something is locked, no cost. And notice how I don’t use the word free. The cost of using that service is you being the product and people need to realize that very simple Realize nothing is ever free in this life, including social media.

Jeff

Yeah, we see a lot of people, as a result of this started take a break from their social media. People literally are just not on there as much. I mean, some of the people I talked to, hey, when’s the last time you’ve been on social media? It’s been a while. And these were avid social media people. And from a marketing perspective I look at these are potential customers. If they’re not tuning in, then social media won’t be as effective as we want it to be. And it was going great guns. But, uh, Scott brought up the censorship of Trump, who was, let’s not forget that. Twitter was going down the toilet before Trump. And waiting like midnight is not a thing. But Twitter began to search. And now that they taken them off. I mean, they’re losing money, big time. People aren’t drinking the good.

Rob

And the other thing they did, Jeff was not only when Trump laughed, the problem I have is, Twitter turned around and deleted all the followers turn a POS account person in United States account. And how do you and how do you do that? I mean, that’s just ridiculous. And now that they’ve done it to Trump in the US government, what’s to say they don’t do it to the CEO like a guy like Elon Musk, what say they don’t do it to Jeff basil because he pees somebody off? What’s to say they don’t do it for Justin Trudeau. And then it goes on and goes on and goes on. And this is why I don’t like this whole slippery slope is gone down. Because now that we’ve opened up the door, once, I guarantee you, it will be easy, easier and easier and easier to open up again, Scott?

Scott

Absolutely. I do like what, what some of the social media companies did, including Twitter, Twitter was the most obvious one. In the US election where statements were being made that were disputed, in relation to official election results. I think that’s responsible, as long as you’ve got an official source. That’s, like, I’m not sure what that process was. But as long as there’s an official source coming through about official election results, and that’s used as the bar, I think that’s a good thing. To actually flag that say, you know, this, this claim is disputed. I thought that was a good idea. But I definitely didn’t think it was a good idea what all of a sudden, accounts were deleted and being taken away. That’s really concerning.

Jeff

Because it if social media is supposed to be the discussion when you’ve literally shut one side of the discussion down, that’s not social media media anymore. And that’s the, that’s the big issue is that, hey, we may not agree, we don’t have to go look and watch. We may not agree. But Donald Trump’s expression is equally as important as anybody’s expression online simply for the fact that you may not like what he says, but you get to say something to and I’ve looked at his thread, and my goodness, some of the stuff that they’ve said on that that Trump might just curdled in my dead mother’s ears. You know what I mean? It was just mean and you’re talking to Scott, you’re talking about bullying, you’re talking about just people being absolutely vile.

Scott

Yeah, I saw I saw a tweet this morning, it was actually brought to my attention by by another police officer, high ranking police officer, actually, that runs some social media accounts. And the account basically, or the tweet basically said, and I put it onto my, I took I basically, quote tweeted it saying amen. It basically said that. I wish people knew that, that there are real people with real feelings and real thoughts that are on the that are operating business accounts. Because they’re, there’s so much vitriol and hate. And I don’t think a lot of people would say what they’re saying on social media directly to your face. If they knew who the people were that were doing those accounts like that, like, like the people that are that are running big business accounts and big law enforcement accounts and any big organizations account. They’re very skilled. And, you know, the hashtag, I believe was something to do with mental health, mental health matters, right? When you get so much hate on your social media account, as a as kind of a that’s your job. You’re the Social Media Manager. It starts to get to you. Absolutely.

Rob

The burnout is really high in that field, I, you know, I’ve lived in that field this consultant for many, many years. And I’ll tell you, colleagues I’ve talked to and even people I’ve talked to in industry, the burnout rate is over 70%. And these guys don’t know how to unplug, as you know, you’ve been there. They don’t know how to turn it off, because you’re looking at feeds till midnight, they don’t know how to shut it down. And like, is that a way to live? Like, really? Yeah,

Scott

well, definitely, like, that brings up a really good point. If you’re going to have a social media presence, and you’re a large brand, you need more than one person doing it. And it needs to go on shift work, you know, you pretty much need 24, seven coverage, if you’re a big company, if you’re a big law enforcement agency, or you’re a big government organization, and you need you need to put into your your plan, that you’re going to need a lot of staff, because because the staff do need to turn off, they do need to switch off and they do need to get away from it. But when they come back into it, it needs to be up to date, because it happened so fast. And so many things happen, you know, even overnight, that it needs to be taken care of. and there needs to be a kind of a shift work hand off to the next person if you’re going to actually do it. Well.

Jeff

Yeah, not only that, but they need to have good leadership and almost times for the debriefing. How did your shift go? How, how is this stuff sticking to you, at the end of the day, people need to learn to be able to walk away and just let it drop. And now that’s hard in law enforcement, because people are going to last forcement, because a lot of times because they care. Yeah, it’s hard to turn the caring off.

Scott

It’s also heard in this this point came up in my world this week, as well, journalists, I deal with a lot of journalists, and I’m in law enforcement in the social media and media realm. And the vicarious trauma that comes to people that are actually in charge of communications is is incredibly high. And it’s not something that is is really recognized. And vicarious trauma basically means that, you know, something traumatic happens, you don’t actually witness it, but you’re hearing about it, and you’re it all the gory details are coming your way. And it’s actually triggering you. And, and so the mental health of people that are doing these jobs definitely needs to be taken into consideration. And that goes for journalists, that goes for anybody in law enforcement that’s doing media roll. Anybody that’s in, you know, Paramedic Services, or the fire department or you know, anything that’s got any regular amount of trauma, you need to build into your your strategy for human resources, that you have enough people to cover that those people are allowed to turn off, and that they’re allowed to take vacation, and that they have an outlet to debrief if they need to. And I can tell you for a fact that that is not happening across the board right now.

Jeff

Well, I watched and I am thankful that I hooked you and Rob Scott, because I watched through the years and I just wasn’t there. And that kind of bugged me a bit. But some of the stuff that you went through because of social media, all that stuff. I’m thankful that you and Rob were connected, because that was a support network, when really, law enforcement wasn’t aware that support networks needed to happen. It was suck it up at your job get over it.

Rob

Well I mean, it’s not just enforcement, I think a lot of, shall we say European people and older people have the attitude, suck it up and get over to so I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t just I wouldn’t just put it out there. And they don’t and they don’t understand. Like, you know, I’ve been doing social media since before it was called social media. So I started off doing compuserve cb chat. That was social media before we coined it social media. I started off doing internet Relay Chat. That was social media before we call it that way. And you know, the crap you’d see. And people would say, Oh, it’s not real, oh, I’m flirting with somebody, but I’m married, who cares? And I used to say, well, you got to remember people have really real feelings what Scott said earlier, and I have a good friend of mine who’s a teacher and she says the same thing to people. She says, Do you not realize who’s behind the screen? I do not get that and we got to keep that in mind. You wouldn’t ever walk in and say half the stuff people say to somebody in person? Right? So why would you do it? It’s an it’s just an extension of life. And, you know, people say social media is not real, I would be the first argue, I’ve got friends all over the world I talked to on a regular basis from here, the India. And that’s because of social media. I mean, there’s no question.

Jeff

Absolutely, it does impact. And we just got to start thinking everything’s in real life, and we need to start treating people. I mean, we’re always quick to jump to the bed, when Hey, maybe we take a pause, we do a little checking, before we start ripping and tearing the strip off people. I mean, we need to learn to be a little bit nicer.

Rob

So my rule of thumb on that, Jeff, is, if you’re going to put out a tweet or a post, and you think it’s gonna cause an issue, right, it, put it in a notepad file, sit on it for 24 hours and think about it. And then if and then if you can get past what I call the 24 hour checkpoint, then put it up. But if you can’t, if it’s that controversial, maybe you shouldn’t do it.

Jeff

Yeah, you’re, in my experience. Over the years, my gut has always been my best defense against putting something out putting a post together, it doesn’t feel right. I may not see it. But there’s a reason why it’s not right. And I’m all posted. And I’ve always been, I’ve always tried to be very charitable to peace, people always try to be positive, it comes back to what your mother said, If you can’t say anything nice to someone, then don’t say anything. But that’s generally not the case where and I love a good robust discussion. But a discussion is, hey, you’ve got your view, I’ve got maybe we talked about it, maybe we learn, but we walk away good. That’s not happening. And that’s it only seems to be getting worse. It social media seems to be drifting down. This is what turning people off. It’s drifting to personal attacks, it’s drifting to assassinating people’s characters, for instance, when that’s not really what social media is really intended to be. And then we’ve got technocrats editing and sensory stuff. That’s, they’re moving away from their mandate. And that’s where I believe 230 is going to come in at the end of the day, my gut tells me that there’s going to be a cost to all this stuff. And it’s, it’s going to be a wake up call for these tech people that the way they run their shifts right now it’s going to cost them and we’re just going to wait and see, but my gut says that it’s going to bite them on the arm. As my grandmother used to say she was a key breaker. She taught me the first few things he taught me in Gaelic, mahalo. Like me a marriage. And so I see some stuff coming because they have not been faithful stewards of the privilege of what they’ve been given big organizations, a lot of people have trusted them. And over the years, we’ve seen that trust has been abused in a lot of different ways. But, you know, comes back to, if you’re going to censor people, you can censor, when you get center all you just need to come up with the reason. And that’s not what social media should be about.

Scott

All right. I echo everything Jeff just said.

Like I truly think that the you have to think before you post, I completely agree with the with if you’re gonna post something that’s kind of inflammatory to have a cooling off period, kind of come back to it an hour later, or a day later. And if you still want to post it, then go. I also think it’s really good. Context is a big issue. Yeah. Everything he, you know, something like Twitter. I think he got 280 characters. Now, he used to have 140. But you can’t really say what you need to say. So you know, doing a thread on Twitter is a good thing to give it more context or put a link to a blog post on a website that you’ve got kind of the whole context of the story. And it’s kind of similar to a copy editor putting a kind of a catchy headline on something, right?.

Jeff

That was one of the things. We’ve done some training together, Scott. One of the things that came up in with the Nova Scotia fiasco was that everything wasn’t under threat. He was long tweet by loan tweet. If it had been put in a thread, for instance, it would have been able to really, he would have been able to follow up really quick. So there’s still lots of learning For almost everybody, regardless of your field, lots of learning to do to make things better. But yeah, well,

Scott

that’s a really good point like I, I’m a big, I was always a big advocate for, for making sure that whatever incident it is in the law enforcement world, that if you do a tweet, when you do the update, you reply to the tweet, make sure everything’s on the same thread. The same thing goes for Facebook, cuz I know where I was working. I was big about putting things out on Twitter and Facebook for two reasons. One, or the other could go down. They want to have an audience on both. And there’s a different audience on both. And that’s where the vast majority of the people were at the time. So you always have to reevaluate that. Do you want to go for more platforms? Or do you want to go, you should have more than just one in law enforcement. And when you do an update, it’s no good I call it alphabet soup. It’s, it’s not as effective. If you put something out on Facebook especially. And you just keep putting more posts, you need to go into the existing one, hit the edit button and add to the post, and put the date in the time of the update. And those are really, really, really important things, especially in an emergency.

Jeff

Yeah, it all kind of I’ve been kind of holding back and wanting to not go there. But with all this. You know, there’s there’s bad apples in every organization and this to fund the police. It just really grieves my heart. Because at the end of the day, if the police are going some breaking into your house, and you call 911. And there’s no one there to answer it. I mean, there’s a lot, I have met a lot of wonderful law enforcement officers. And just like any organization that can always be one app, bad apple in the bunch. But they’re a great bunch of people that are really wanting to help the community, they want the social media, because they can get up there faster and go farther and do a lot of good before they can even get there. And that’s where this censoring or removing of law enforcement off social media is not a great idea

Scott

was also for kind of the the safety of everybody involved in a major incident like that, like, like stay away from the area. But it’s also a lot of times people will see where a law enforcement officer is positioned in relation to a tactical operation that’s on your way for say, like an active shooter. And they they post on social media, the actual what was what was going on. Right. We saw that in moncton. Yeah, and then and so so it’s really important. Like, I know, I know, the people that were doing the social media there and Monckton, and ironically, two weeks before Monckton happened, the person that was doing a lot of that social media, he did an ad, just an absolutely bang up job in the in that New Brunswick incident on the social media, in two weeks prior, I was in Tampa, Florida with that, with that individual doing a training course. And he was he was like a sponge, learning all of these techniques and information. And two weeks later, he’s in the heart of it. And I actually nominated him for an award internationally for the work that that guy did. And he he’s still involved. He, I know he was directly involved in that second kind of scare that happened after the the Nova Scotia shooting. And some of these points that I was talking about him and I were actually on the phone together and saying, you know, make sure the Facebook’s all on one post. Okay, that’s got Yeah, we got it, Scott. We’re on it. ron ron. And yeah, remember that little things. And it’s very, it’s very, it’s very intricate. And you have to remain calm under pressure. And the Ultimate Evil for everything that law enforcement has planned to try and keep people safe on social media. And I know, in an emergency incident, is if someone were to shut down our accounts. Yeah. And that’s why getting back to this whole Trump thing scares me to death.

Rob

Yeah, I get I get that and it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t take much. So, you know, this is a discussion we could go on for hours and hours. The three of us, unfortunately, will not solve the problems to the social media world in an hour. I think we’ve brought out some really good insight to some people. So we’re going to kind of wrap up a little bit. I’m gonna ask each of you for a tip and where they can contact you. So let’s start with Jeff, what’s a good tip to make social media better place? And how can people get a hold of you

Jeff

One of the things that I always teach my participants is, regardless of where social media is going, build community around your business, treat people like people and not like numbers. Don’t say you got a Facebook page with 1000 fans. So you’ve got a Facebook page that has a Sally that’s got a Robert that’s going to Scott, you start thinking about people in that light, you’re going to raise up a great community because every time they interact with your social media, it’s going to be a moment of great joy that’s going to impact them. So build community as always, websites alpha social media, Inc, INC.com. And it’s Jay brown at alpha social media Inc, calm if you want to get a hold of me.

Rob

Scott, your tip.

Scott

My tip is completely agree with what Jeff just said, My tip is to be kind. Be aware, investigate and look into new social media sites, be open to it, and eat and learn how to listen on social media First, it might just save your life. And if anybody wants help with that, you can reach me at Scott mills@gmail.com there’s one t in the email, because if somebody really really hates me So Scott Mills with one t@gmail.com and that’s the best way to get ahold of me. I you know, if I were to lose my my gmail account, I would lose all my contacts. You know, also the censorship thing. We really have to be mindful of it. There’s got we got a long way to go on this there needs to be a lot of collaboration with the regulatory agencies, the government’s social media company. And bottom line is we need to be kind and we need to get along and we need to look really listened to people that are in the know. So my in a nutshell, my advice is be kind and learn how to use social media effectively, it might save your life.

Rob

That’s so true. And I kind of throw it out there. I think we what we need to do is my motto kind of always is treat people the way we you want to be treated and go the extra mile and then the world’s a better place. Thanks, Scott and Jeff for joining me today, as always Rob Cairns with the SDM show from the center of the universe called Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Have a great day, everybody. Thanks, guys. Be well be safe. And do us one favor, stay at home and be careful.