“It’s a necessary evil,” I lean back in my rocking chair, soaking up the warmth from the fire while Dusky sprawls across my lap.  I’m trying to stay calm, centered.  I need to convince everyone of my view.  And they’re not convinced. 

Sunday family dinner is over, and we’re lingering a little longer before everyone goes out into the January snow.  Jenn is in a bit of a tail spin tonight.  I blame Ballerina Farm.

For years now I’ve been hounding all farm crew members to pull their phones out to capture candid shots and videos of farm and cafe life.  They can post themselves, or they can forward their images and flics to me, where I sit down once a week and schedule all our social media activity.

But Jenn’s been scrolling.

“DON’T SCROLL!”  I admonish her, the martini from two hours before seems to have blunted my skills in subtlety.  “Just post.  DON’T look!  You’ll never be able to tear your eyes away, and you’ll only wind up feeling like a piece of crap.”

“I can’t NOT scroll!’ Jenn laments.  This feels like a negotiation with Lot’s wife. 

 “And what happens when you scroll?” I demand.

She sighs, drops her shoulders and dutifully repeats her lesson.  “I feel like a piece of crap.”  Then she whips back at me, “But is this what our future is?  Is this what farming is about?  Ballerina farm has over 800 thousand followers.  The mother is like, a size TWO, she’s popped out six kids and she’s pregnant for her SEVENTH!  And she dances and twirls in front of the camera and they get all these gorgeous shots and they’re all perfect and beautiful.”

The martini has worn down my defenses.  I grab my phone, open the Instagram app and search for Ballerina Farm.

There’s no way I can get the Sap Bush crew to look that put together.  There’s no way I’ll ever learn enough about digital photography and videography to capture shots like that.  There’s no way my posts will ever gain that kind of traction.  There was no way my body ever could have snapped back in place after two kids…let alone seven.  There’s no way I’m gonna do a pirouette or a piqué and have it get any traction for my farm business other than as a comical pathetic meme mocking the gravitational pull of middle age.  Now I feel like crap.

I do my best to encourage everyone sitting around the fire.  I mutter platitudes, like “That’s the way it’s done these days,” or “we just have to do our best and keep trying.”  But my spirit feels defeated.  For twelve years I’ve done my best to pull Sap Bush Hollow into the digital now, working on social media posts.  And we haven’t done badly, but we haven’t done well, either.  In the height of the season, I estimate I log a solid eight to ten hours per week conceiving, crafting, drafting, filming, planning and posting for social media.  I try to do most of it on Thursdays.  As a result, I’m notoriously short-tempered on Thursdays.  And when it spills over to Friday because I just can’t get it all done…well, then I become an absolute bear.

But, as I said, it’s a necessary evil.  I hound everyone again as they go home to keep posting.  And I go to sleep, pushing thoughts of Ballerina Farm from my mind, but they haunt my rest: their homestead cheese making in front of an old fashioned cook stove, their jetés out in the pastures, their comical wholesome reels if giggling groomed children, the aesthetic of their entire feed.  

I wake in the pre-dawn hours and sit down to meditate.  I turn on my phone to set the timer.  A notice pops in that my Facebook account has been accessed from a remote location.  Within seconds all my emails disappear off my phone, and I am locked out of my accounts.  I’ve been hacked.  Really badly hacked.

I know this is supposed to be a modern day tragedy…A digital nightmare beyond my control.  

Yet all I can do is smile.  

And resume meditation. 

And when I’m done, Bob and I go for a walk in the woods.  There, we reflect on the problem. It is, indeed, a very big problem.  In the days and weeks to come I’ll have to fight to secure all our bank accounts and our credit cards.  I’ll even have to defend the farm from fraudulent unemployment claims.  We determine the order of the steps we need to make to recover and secure our digital life, but we also decide to plan our way forward as though we might never be able to get our social media accounts back ever again.  

It took about a couple months to work through all the travails of the nasty hack.  And during that time, we learned some important lessons about the cost of social media in our lives and our business:

1.Our social media followers are not our followers.  We had accumulated a few thousand followers on each of our platforms.  In theory, I should have been able to go through all the steps to recover my account and reclaim them.  However, even with hired professionals, the task proved impossible.  The judgements about my account were made by a non-human digital tribunal.  And, I learned, Meta is so overwhelmed by hackers, not even the computers can keep up.  Thus, the easiest thing for Meta to do was simply permanently ban me from the platform…Even though the hackers were posting from Hanoi, Vietnam, and my posts come from Upstate New York.  No human beings at Facebook were authorized to assist in the case.  The only human advice I received from tech support was that, if I ever tried to open a new account again, it would be removed once more.  That means that twelve years of brand and relationship building were lost with the stroke of a few keys…And Meta had absolutely no wherewithal nor inclination to help me salvage it.   Every business works to build a solid customer base.  But what I learned was that social media is a dangerous place to do it.  These corporations have neither incentive nor obligation to help a small business person maintain an account.  By contrast, my mailing list is mine.  My email list is mine.  My followers belong to Meta.

2.We’re happier without it.  Ok, if you’ve been following this podcast, you KNOW that, so far, 2022 has been a rough year for Sap Bush Hollow:  shootings, deaths, hacking, plus we need a new roof on the cafe and, of course, we’ve just learned we have major car trouble..…And yet

I’m happier. 

Yes!  I’m happier than I’ve ever been.  I’m relaxed.  I’m having longer conversations, reading more books, playing more music.  A large oppressive weight feels as though it has been removed from our lives.  

Because the truth is, even though we devoted 12 years of marketing sweat and tears to it, we were never good at it.  We were never colorful enough, polished enough.  And while it was occasionally fun to come up with a new post idea, overall, it was energetically draining to try to compete with the rest of the noise on the platforms.  

3.It was too disruptive to the flow of our days.  Yes, it’s great to capture a bouncing newborn lamb, or the first day the sheep get turned out to pasture.  And we do intend to periodically post those glorious moments on our blog.  However, the farm and cafe are places of high activity.  There is a lot to get done in the day.  Each time action must be stopped to pull out a phone and set the stage for a photo or video, the work drags and drags and drags.  Patience runs short. And, for some folks (such as yours truly), the constant presence of a camera just adds to personal exhaustion.  

4.It wasn’t effective.  Yes, we did have some folks buy books or come to the cafe or order a CSA meat share as a result of social media posts.  However, without devoting all our days to keeping up with the latest trends and algorithms, our results from posting were completely random and never as much as I’d like.  I could work extensively on a campaign and get a few results.  Or I could work extensively and get zero results.  Those few times when we have brought in customers as a result of our posts were tricking us.  We thought what we were doing was effective.  But at the cost of 8-10 hours of labor each week plus the cost of the paid ads we periodically ran, it was a poor return on investment. 

So we decided to quit.  (Admittedly, we didn’t have a choice, did we? But let me feel clever about this for at least a second.)  Instead, for marketing, we’ve re-invigorated our weekly blog, developed a campaign for a series of mailers, and focused more on making time for personal emails, face-to-face conversations and phone calls.  Here are some of the key findings from our first quarter with no social media:

1. No loss in income so far.  Sales are actually up a tiny bit.
2. Digital newsletter subscription rates have gone up at five to ten times the rate at which we were gaining followers on the various platforms.
3. Work days are flowing much better.  We are finishing our work on time with fewer digital distractions. 
4. Moods are better.  WAAAY better.  I still devote Thursday mornings to working on farm marketing.  But what used to take 8-10 hours is now down to 2.  And that makes everyone happy.
5. We feel better about ourselves.  We’re sloppy.  We’re imperfect.  But we’re the best we’ve got.  It’s really nice not having to daily scroll through and learn how we aren’t good enough.  That means we’re a whole lot happier.
6. It’s easier to stay on mission.  We’re in the business to nourish and restore family, community and planet.  It’s a lot simpler to do that in the real world than it is to do in the virtual world. 

I’m not going to sit here and proclaim that everyone should jump off social media.  Some folks really enjoy it.  But I do want to suggest that, if it makes you really unhappy,  maybe it’s okay to quit it.   What I’ve learned from all this is to question the conventional wisdom, those same awful platitudes that I was throwing at the farm crew back in January:

“It’s a necessary evil…That’s the way it’s done these days.”

There are many ways to market a business.  And the best ways are the ones that help you fall a little bit more in love with your life each day.  

And is there any truth to that saying that “It’s a necessary evil?”

Well, I can tell you this. 

It isn’t necessary.

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Sarah Karker and Sally Goldin.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes.