Welcome To Show Business

The social media and content development hustlers make it sound so simple.

You develop some "compelling" content or useful information and you apply it to your blog or your Facebook page or your website and interested consumers will soon discover it.

You will create a relationship, and these people will be thankful for your useful contribution to their lives, and they will become active ambassadors for your brand.

Well, that was easy.

Only one problem. The whole thing is an infantile fantasy. Let's look at the facts, according to this website...

There are currently an estimated 14.3 trillion live pages on the web. If my math is correct (a highly unlikely circumstance) and the average person does nothing else in her life but surf the web (no eating, sleeping, working, or picking up firemen at bars) it will take her, on average, about 378 million years to get around to your page of content. It's been my experience that some people are not that patient.

There are 759 million websites. If the average person in the US visits 10 websites a day, it will take over 200,000 years to get around to yours. By the way, do you know how long humans have been around? About 200,000 years.

There are about 48 billion web pages indexed by Google. If a person does nothing in her life but random Google searches (no eating, sleeping, working, or picking up bloggers at the unemployment office) it will take her 91,324 years to find your listing.

There are about 450 million English language blogs active in the world. That is 33% more than there are native English language speakers.

So the bottom line is this. If you are anywhere near average, your chance of breaking through on line is approximately zero. Actually, it is exactly zero.

Consequently, if you are expecting your social media presence or your "content" to be anything other than a dead lox stinking up a dusty corner of the web, you have to be in the entertainment business.

You have to either make people laugh, or cry, or bolt upright. You have to amuse them, shock them, or give them something fabulous for nothing.

If you don't, yours will be the typical online organism -- a lonely, unloved creature conversing with no one but itself.

Think I'm exaggerating? Do a little experiment. Post some unadvertised "content" about your fabulous product today. See what happens.