Understanding Directions and Trusting Yourself
Over the past few months my Instagram has gained 2 thousand followers. Seems like a good thing right?
Upon closer look, I noticed that 20 percent of my followers are fake accounts. How do I know they are fake? The profiles have skewed following to follower ratios. For example, 40 followers and 4,031 accounts being followed. The other sign is a username such as pazluzruutida00144. Random letters and numbers thrown together. Even further, there are usually only 8 to 10 posts on the profile and the pictures are random. This person will not engage with my content.
It brings me back to my previous post about the marketing agency. When I first started working with them, I specifically said - let’s find ways other than social media to get my name out there. I said this because I am skeptical of how social media translates to real life results for musicians. After a few months I started to see that it all came back to “building my following” on social profiles as if this is now the default way of reaching people.
This reminds me of second grade. The entire class was given an assignment and the teacher explained that everyone must read all of the directions before beginning the worksheet.
As I read through the directions, I came across a direction that said “ignore all other directions and only fill out number 7.” So that’s what I did, I went to number 7 which said “fill in your name” and I filled out my name.”
I put my pencil down and looked around the room. What I saw surprised me. I saw all of my classmates filling in the answers to the worksheet. There were various math problems and some “fill in the blanks” and everyone was completing these tasks. I did not understand why anyone was still working. I raised my hand and the teacher came over to me. I said, I finished the worksheet but why is everyone else still working? She said she could not answer me. I sat there for another few minutes with my pencil down on my desk and then started to feel that I might have missed something. Maybe I was supposed to fill out the other problems? Maybe I mis interpreted the direction about ignoring all other directions?
After a few more minutes I picked up my pencil again and started working. Shortly after, as the class was finishing up the worksheet, the teacher started speaking. She explained that this was an experiment, a test, and everyone failed it. She then pointed me out, saying I was the only one who almost passed, but gave in to the pressure of seeing everyone else working.
So how does this memory of second grade relate to the marketing agency? The students in my class defaulted to the behavior they knew best when receiving a worksheet…do all of the problems on the worksheet. This was their trained behavior, and regardless of the specific directions to “carefully read all instructions before doing the assignment” the default mode was activated. This is exactly what the marketing agency did. Even though I had clearly explained to them that I wanted to explore alternatives to “social media” (radio, blogs, conferences, etc…) they defaulted to what the trends were, and that trend is social media. Unfortunately I waited too long to pull the plug on them.
The takeaways:
peer pressure and the urge to conform are real
we make many assumptions and must catch ourselves when possible
trust yourself, even if it means going against what the majority says. You’ll learn more that way.