As research continues to show, social media addiction is a growing concern, and one that’s causing serious problems when it comes to our mental and physical health.
But whose responsibility is it to find a solution to this growing issue – the networks and users of them, or do marketers have a responsibility on how they use tactics like gamification of products to instil further desire?
In this week’s episode of Marketing on Tap, we start the conversation around the long-term effects of social media addiction, and ask how we can turn the tide back before it’s too late. Look out for more discussions on this in future episodes.
Settle back and enjoy this week’s topic, brought to you in the usual unscripted manner that you’ve come to expect when Sam and Danny take the mic.
If you prefer to listen on the go, the audio version of this week’s episode can be listened to below.
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Transcription:
Intro: Join marketers, authors and craft beer enthusiasts, Sam Fiorella and Danny Brown for a hoppy discussion on all things digital over a cheeky pint or two. Topics on the menu include influence marketing, social media, brand advocacy and a taste testing of real world digital marketing campaigns. Some are smooth, others don’t sit so well. Don’t forget to stick around for last call, where the boys will serve you up one final marketing take away that you can go out and apply in the real world. It’s a great primer before the weekend.
Sam Fiorella: Alright, welcome back everybody to another episode of Marketing on Tap, my name is Sam Fiorella, this is Danny Brown and today we’re gonna switch things up a little bit. I’m gonna introduce a beer.
Danny Brown: Wow.
Sam Fiorella: I know right? You’ve trained me well. Jedi Master.
Danny Brown: Apparently there was an intro to the show. What the topics about while I pour the beer.
Sam Fiorella: Oh okay.
Danny Brown: [crosstalk 00:01:00]
Sam Fiorella: Okay, so maybe you haven’t trained me all that well. Anyway, today- yeah I think so. Today we’re gonna be talking about social media addiction. I’m gonna be- I’ve done a lot of research and I’m gonna be talking about at [inaudible 00:01:11] Social Media Camp, I’ll be releasing it for the first time, but I though this would be a good opportunity for maybe us to talk about a little bit about it.
Danny Brown: Yeah no, for sure.
Sam Fiorella: So, that’s something that I know you’re passionate about as well; but before we do that we wanna talk about this beer that you have poured.
Danny Brown: We do. Yeah, well we say “we” but say “Sam.”
Sam Fiorella: Sam.
Danny Brown: Because you’ve actually been to this brewery-
Sam Fiorella: I have.
Danny Brown: A couple weeks back.
Sam Fiorella: Yeah, so maybe we’ll take a break from our traditional process here, and I’ll introduce the beer. Goodlot Brewing, is a local brewery here in Caledon, that we were introduced to by one of our friends, Bill and he took me there, we went skiing one weekend and he took me by and it’s this local farm, they grow all their own ingredients. So everything that’s in here, actually is grown right there in, well it’s about 30 minutes from here, 35 minutes-
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: North of here in Caledon. Their hops, everything. Even the water that they use comes off of-
Sam Fiorella: well at least for the ones we’re gonna be drinking today. So the one- I bought six of them while I was there.
Announcer: [laughter].
Sam Fiorella: I sampled all of them. [crosstalk 00:02:18] The one that we’re gonna try today, is called Farmstead Ale, Lot one.
Announcer: Lot one, okay.
Sam Fiorella: Lot one. And –
Sam Fiorella: or Lab one, not Lot one, excuse me, Lab one. It’s six point 2 percent ABV. 38 IBUs, [crosstalk 00:02:35] I think you’re gonna like that one for that reason. Their using what they call nugget hops and cascade. So these are the things that you’re gonna a notice is really distinct aroma to this, that they introduced me to. Anyway, let’s just give it a shot.
Danny Brown: I’m ready.
Sam Fiorella: I really like these guys up there.
Danny Brown: Ah ha, here we go.
Danny Brown: [crosstalk 00:02:53] We also have a new cam. We have an Anna cam.
Sam Fiorella: Oh we have an Anna cam today, yeah Robert is not with us today so we have an Anna Cam, so maybe I’ll do that too. Alright guys, cheers.
Danny Brown: Cheers. Cheers.
Sam Fiorella: Mmm. Hang on. So Anna what do you think? [inaudible 00:03:25]
Danny Brown: Not Anna approved? Okay …
Sam Fiorella: Alright, well
Danny Brown: [laughter] Alrighty.
Sam Fiorella: We got rid of Robert cause he doesn’t like craft beer. Now we got Anna, we thought we this was gonna be an upgrade.
Danny Brown: This is good. I like it.
Sam Fiorella: I like it. I really like this brewery.
Danny Brown: But [inaudible 00:03:42] really soft.
Sam Fiorella: I do. Right now their building- they got a barn that they’re building and-
Sam Fiorella: Where there’s actually gonna be their tasting room, their tap room; but right now they’re working out of a shipping container. Their tap room is a shipping container right in the middle of their farm.
Danny Brown: Awesome.
Sam Fiorella: It’s a fantastic experience, and maybe you guys that are local go check them out. But Let’s get back to the topic. So, Danny what are your thoughts? How, how negative is social media on our mental health? Let’s start there. Just in general.
Danny Brown: I think, it’s obviously. There was a piece that Huffington Post published last year, that showed that social media addiction and what it does to mental health, leads to substance abuse, it’s like a primer that leads to substance abuse which obviously is not good. If you look on Instagram, under the hashtag media addiction, there’s over-
Danny Brown: There’s almost 4,300 posts purely on that hashtag. If you look on Twitter under the same hashtag, there’s a whole bunch of posts about social media addiction, how it’s harming people; their health is going down, their mental health is suffering. So it’s clearly an issue. And the more the networks make new features to drive us back on, constantly, the more we’re gonna suffer, I think.
Sam Fiorella: Yeah. Well, in this case, I’m gonna agree with you. I do believe that there is a-
Sam Fiorella: Not a believe, I can read from the science. Science is not a popular thing these days, but I do believe in the science and the results that I’m seeing from studies that universities are putting up. In terms of the negative effects, what happens, what bothers me about social media right now, is that it’s gamifying us to use it more.
Danny Brown: Yep.
Sam Fiorella: Alright, one of the things that I’ve learned in one of the studies I just read, is what the effects of negative cascades. Basically, what the test did was, we are going to have a group of students watch a movie and then we’re gonna put out a –
Sam Fiorella: Every one of them is gonna post something on social media with neutral language, like: “it was okay”, “it was fine”-
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: “I enjoyed it.” And then they were going to post something with very negative language, extreme negative language, like: “I hated this. It was the worst movie ever”, “The lead singer was horrid, should kill themselves”, “The actress is anorexic.”
Danny Brown: Wow.
Sam Fiorella: You know what I mean? Just as many negative things as they could say. Then they charted the effect of those posts. How many people liked the posts, one versus the other, how many shares were there, how many responses. It’s funny, cause the neutral ones just hung there, next to no reaction. The same people, with the same audience on their negative posts with really negative words, blew up.
Danny Brown: Wow.
Sam Fiorella: Right? And had like a hundred fold, I guess viral ness to them. In terms of the number of people that were commenting and joining in. What they noticed is, the more negative, or the more extreme the comments were, the more negative and more extreme the replies were.
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: So it like fed itself, and this is something-
Sam Fiorella: So they’re calling it the negative cascade effect. In that websites now, social media, LinkedIn, certainly Facebook. They are gamifying the experience to give us what we want.
Announcer: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Danny Brown: Not only what we want, what’s going to get us to stay on sites longer.
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: Like, how do these guys make money?
Danny Brown: Well, exactly.
Sam Fiorella: Eyeballs.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Right. The more [crosstalk 00:07:15]
Danny Brown: Advertisers, the brands that are on the platform to start with.
Sam Fiorella: Exactly. So the only way that they’re gonna be able to make more money is to keep us on longer. The way to keep us on longer is to give us more-
Sam Fiorella: Or to put in front of us what’s going to then get us to respond more.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: And so, it’s all of this gamification to keep us on. You know what I mean? If you start searching conspiracy theories, guess what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna start giving you more-
Danny Brown: [laughter]
Sam Fiorella: and more of that kind of stuff because everything-
Sam Fiorella: Whether you’re on the left or you’re on the right of the political spectrum or whether you’re talking about global warming, or whether you’re talking about religion. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t even have to anything political today. They are trying to encourage you to do more and more extreme, have more extreme conversations in order to get you on because they know that’s what’s gonna keep you there and that is now starting to play with our minds.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Right? So, one of the questions that came up to me, cause somebody called me out, right? I was doing one of these lectures and I was talking about these studies and one of the students-
Sam Fiorella: And this is what I wanna ask you-
Sam Fiorella: One of the students said to me, “well, Mr. Fiorella didn’t you introduce yourself as the owner of a marketing company?”
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: And I said “Yes.” And he goes, “Well, don’t you build social media applications?” I said “Yeah, we do.” Then he goes “Well, aren’t you at fault for my mental health, then?” Right. Leave it to kids, I mean –
Danny Brown: That’s a good question.
Sam Fiorella: It was a good question. Actually it was a kind of question I probably would’ve asked if I was him, just because of how snarky I am.
Danny Brown: [laughter]
Sam Fiorella: But for me, what I thought was yes and then no and then yes and then I didn’t know how to answer them. So what do you think? Do we bear responsibility as marketers in a social media platform for the negative mental health that we’re creating out there?
Danny Brown: I think yes and no. To a degree, because we build what we want, like marketing is all about desire. We want people to desire our products, our services, our client’s services, products, etc. So to desire mutually is driving towards addiction, cause the more you desire it, the more you’ll be addicted to try and do whatever you need to do to actually get what we’re after. So, the very fact that we need to sell on social media to drive to websites, to get client’s products out, etc. We are partly responsible for that. I do also believe though that there’s a part of responsibility on an individual, when it comes down to how often you use a social network. How often you check your smartphone, because the amount of time you spend on something is gonna correlate to the amount of time you see something and you’re encouraged to do something. So you mentioned that we’re being gamified-
Sam Fiorella: Yeah.
Danny Brown: To use networks more. I notice Facebook, I noticed this in the last month or so they’ve started giving you little badges next to your name when you’re in groups
Sam Fiorella: Yeah.
Danny Brown: And you’re posting and it depicts what kind of person you are, so you’re a visual storyteller, you’re a picture person, you’re a conversationalist, or whatever. So, if you’re a visual storyteller-
Sam Fiorella: And they don’t show you’re a troll, you’re an asshat.
Danny Brown: Right, exactly. Ya know. So they’re saying, “Okay, I’m a visual storyteller but I actually want to be a conversationalist”, so I’ve gotta do what I need to do to become that conversationalist.
Sam Fiorella: Right.
Danny Brown: I think, yes. I do think that marketer’s have some responsibility, but I don’t think we have all the responsibility, there has to be some point where self-
Sam Fiorella: Yeah, you know what, I’m gonna disagree in a way. Cause I don’t believe. I’ve been really thinking about this a lot because I’ve been trying to justify what we do for a living, knowing that I, myself have been affected negatively-
Danny Brown: Yep.
Sam Fiorella: My mental health has definitely been affected with social media in the last 15 years, but I don’t think it is. I mean, if we are a business, our clients have hired us, are our business. They’re going to use whatever channels that works for them, that people will engage in. I think that’s what business is and that’s fine. I don’t think it’s a businesses responsibility to change the way that it does business, necessarily or it can change the way that it markets, or we as marketers not recommending social media because we know that it’s feeding this negativity online.
Sam Fiorella: It is up to the individual. Now, that said. Can a business take steps to be the better man? I think there might be a way that they could leverage taking a leadership role-
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Sam Fiorella: to their advantage.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: If they do it with true altruism and then it’s not just a marketing gimmick.
Danny Brown: Right. Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Maybe they could do that and make it work for themselves, but I really do think though that there’s an education that’s required. I think that social media platforms should look at some kind of self regulation.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Right? If they were to do that and then provide education-
Sam Fiorella: Just like the anti-smoking. Actually, you were a part of a large group before that was involved in online gaming.
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Sam Fiorella: And I remember one of the things that your organization did back then was promote-
Danny Brown: Responsible [crosstalk 00:12:30]
Sam Fiorella: Alcoholics. Not alcoholics. Gambling anonymous or something like that
Danny Brown: Yeah. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:12:33]
Sam Fiorella: I don’t remember what it’s called.
Danny Brown: Yeah it’s like-
Danny Brown: I can’t remember now. It was the-
Danny Brown: We actually had it on our website
Sam Fiorella: Right.
Danny Brown: It was like a resource where you could go based on your profile, our platform would recommend you “okay you can only spend 10 minutes playing this-
Sam Fiorella: [crosstalk 00:12:49] see, I think that’s a great example. Same thing with the smoking industry, and of course with the smoking industry it was forced upon them.
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: It wasn’t voluntary at all. But I think social media is starting to get to that point where it has the same addictive factors.
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Sam Fiorella: That’s manufactured right into the work flow. So this is not just something that just happens-
Danny Brown: Right. Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: This is manufactured by social media platforms and by we marketers when we develop these gamification platforms for our marketing campaigns and contests. I think that they need to step up and identify the way that you pointed out they can tell that you’re a social storyteller, or that-
Danny Brown: Yeah. Right.
Sam Fiorella: You post a lot of photos, or you give a lot of comments, or you respond a lot. They know who you are, they know all about your personality, they know about your habits, why not identify you as potentially at risk?
Danny Brown: Right. Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: And say “Hey here’s some support.” Or like the gaming, the lottery and gaming so you can only spend so much time because we detected that you’re spending-
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: Way too much time, and you’re having a problem.
Danny Brown: You could [inaudible 00:13:49] then actually then limit your time. Based on log notes.
Sam Fiorella: And that’s [crosstalk 00:13:53] gonna create all kinds-
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Of arguments on there and I’m sure for Peter, we might even see it in the comments. So give us your thoughts in the comments. Should a social media platform actually limit somebody that they think is addicted?
Danny Brown: Well, it takes me back to the story last month where Facebook were found out, where they willingly took money from kids, college kids to spend their parent’s credit card money on games, the games on the platform. The [inaudible 00:14:19] knew it was happening, there was a couple people, whistle blowers, I guess, took it to the top and just got blown away, covered over with. So, yeah, the networks have responsibility. You look at something like that and you’re happy to get kids to spend $3-5,000-
Sam Fiorella: Yeah.
Danny Brown: On Candy Crush.
Sam Fiorella: I know. See, this is the thing, So, like- [crosstalk 00:14:41]
Danny Brown: Your addicted again. [crosstalk 00:14:43]
Sam Fiorella: The community guy in my says we need to, we wouldn’t be very Canadian if we didn’t say we need to look out for our fellow man, right? It’s important that we live in a society that is healthy for the benefit of all-
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Sam Fiorella: Just educated, but healthy. This is part of it, but at the same time, I really don’t like the idea of a business being told that it can’t market in a particular way, or that it can’t build its business in a particular way, cause we want to allow free enterprise to thrive. So there’s that middles ground that I think this is where we’re coming to a head, it’s really circling back to how I started this.
Sam Fiorella: This is really on my mind now because of this social media camp presentation that I’m doing and I might be putting out a call to action to all the marketers. This is the biggest social media event in Canada, it happens once a year, this is their 10th year and this year what I’m gonna do is all the marketers that are gonna be in the room and listening online, cause I think it’s gonna be live streamed again. I’m gonna be issuing a challenge, to marketers, to business people, to say we have a responsibility. If we can self-regulate, so that we are not regulated, cause eventually that’s what’s gonna happen, the way that the cigarette industry was-
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Regulated. The way the gaming, gambling industry was regulated. Social media will get regulated because the number of suicides, the number of broken marriages-
Danny Brown: [laughter]
Sam Fiorella: The amount of negativity that is being –
Sam Fiorella: The elections are being hacked through social media. There’s just so much distrust right now that is happening. There is so much harm to our physical and mental being, our political state, our social well-being, that it’s inevitable.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: It’s inevitable. We’re running to a break point. Which, is really the topic of that presentation I’m gonna do. We’re hitting this break point, where something is gonna have to happen, some big event and if it wasn’t the hacking of an election, it wasn’t all these suicides that are happening that are now directly related to our increased usage of social, I mean that’s-
Sam Fiorella: And for those of you who don’t think there’s a direct corelation between social media and suicides, one of the studies that I’ve been doing is I’ve charted the number of suicides in North America over the last 20 years, 25 years; and it was going down, surprisingly, up until around 2010-2014 in that range, and then all of a sudden around 2010 started to do this-
Danny Brown: So, that’s when the Facebook and the Twitters were at their peak and really [crosstalk 00:17:18]
Sam Fiorella: That’s when they launched, right in that 2010 to 2011-
Danny Brown: Well, 2014 is when Facebook came to the public.
Sam Fiorella: [crosstalk 00:17:25] well, that’s when they got big.
Danny Brown: Yeah, the peak time. [crosstalk 00:17:27]
Sam Fiorella: Right, and so what I detected is right when they sort of became really popular and mainstream, all of a sudden suicide rates start to go up and now that they’re getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, suicide rates have just this hockey stick effect happened-
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: You know what I mean? So this is why all these universities now are studying the effects of online usage and mental health and the correlations are there. Right? And you can just see it, people are saying it themselves.
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: Students are telling me directly. We don’t have the time in this podcast to go through all the details-
Danny Brown: Maybe a future podcast topic though?
Sam Fiorella: It could be-[crosstalk 00:17:59] or also on thefriendshipbench.org. I want to share some of these statistics that I’ve been finding, some lessons learned, and of course I’ll be talking about it at Social Media Camp, but in the meantime, for the purposes of this conversation, I want to focus it back to the business. Our time is running up here, we don’t have our bell-
Danny Brown: [laughter]
Sam Fiorella: Cause we started drinking early this morning. So, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That’s our last call here. Let’s end this with: how does this impact businesses? How does this impact the marketing industry, and the businesses that hire the marketing industry? What should they do, what are they obligated to do?
Danny Brown: I do like the idea of self-regulation that you brought up, because I think if, as you mentioned, if we don’t regulate ourselves and put processes into place that would be considered control how we send a message out to people-
Sam Fiorella: Yeah.
Danny Brown: Then someone will step in and take that control away from us-
Sam Fiorella: Right.
Danny Brown: [inaudible 00:18:58] has happened. I do like the idea of self regulation and if that comes to the point of say, okay, we go by cookie data on our website, where people go next-
Sam Fiorella: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Danny Brown: And if we’re saying these guys are always on social after visiting our marketing message from our website, should we be targeting these guys, or should we be giving them a break and not advertising on social in front of them, it can’t all break that way. I’m not sure, it’s a tough one because it’s like you say, “we’re marketers, we need to make money, or clients need to make money-
Sam Fiorella: Yep.
Danny Brown: -but we have kids, we have family members, we have responsibilities to these guys and the kids coming through at schools and-
Sam Fiorella: Yeah.
Danny Brown: -the universities you’ve been speaking to. So, for my take away I’m sorry, I don’t have one, that solid answer this week.
Sam Fiorella: I know, this is a tough one and I think it’s going to end up in the climate change type debate. The naysayers-
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: -and the supporters. People are gonna say “no, it’s not social media is not affecting us,” but I think it is. Not only-
Sam Fiorella: Cause from a business perspective, all you have to do is look at-
Sam Fiorella: -Forget the social side of it, forget whether you’re altruistic or not. Take a look at the fact that people are taking digital vacations. How many people do we know that are now off of Facebook completely, or off of Twitter completely.
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yep.
Sam Fiorella: So many people are leaving these platforms, right? And Facebook knows it and one other reason they’re trying to gamify us to keep us on more and more. So as a business-
Sam Fiorella: -we’re actually drawing up this community-
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: We’re drawing up the opportunities that we have to engage with people, so we either gotta find new platforms, or develop some different type of platform or we can take a step back, understand what this is doing to our society and say “okay, we need to fix this, now”-
Danny Brown: Right.
Sam Fiorella: -before we lose this brilliant opportunity to market and communicate with our audience.
Danny Brown: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Sam Fiorella: So whether you agree with it or not the stats are there. I think this is something we have to do, so that’s my take away. I believe we need to step up as a business, as marketers, as manufactures, retailers, wherever, whoever you are in this industry. I think we need to step up and take a leadership role before they come down and say we lose all this audience-
Danny Brown: Yeah.
Sam Fiorella: -because we have that breakpoint or there’s some regulation that completely limits our ability to market in this industry. So, anyway, there is no right or wrong answer to this, this is something we can talk about forever I think, but our time is up.
Sam Fiorella: Thanks everybody for paying attention, for joining us again, whether you’re listening to us on our audio, or on our podcast or video-
Danny Brown: Video. Yep. [laughter].
Sam Fiorella: And if you wanna keep following us-
Danny Brown: Yeah, if you’re on YouTube, make sure you hit the little bell notification at the top so you get new notifications. Please hit the subscribe and like buttons [inaudible 00:21:40] all the time. We’d love to hear your comments on this topic, we think it’s a real interesting one and we’d love to hear you guys, what you’re thinking of it and subscribe to your favorite podcast channel.
Sam Fiorella: Thanks everybody. Cheers guys.
Danny Brown: Cheers guys. Take care.
Sam Fiorella: Anna , I want that beer back.
Outro: You’ve been listening to Marketing on Tap with Sam Fiorella and Danny Brown. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next one, and please feel free to leave a show review. That’s always worth a cheers.
The post Marketing on Tap Episode 26: Social Media Addiction – Marketing’s Downfall? appeared first on Sensei Marketing.