I think Kevin has boundary issues.  Lately he’s been writing to me a couple times per week.  From the tone of his emails, you’d think we knew each other.  His notes suggest that, at some point, we connected, and that we need to get a time on the books when we can talk about a solar project..…and I need to stop cancelling on him.  Gmail has decided we know each other, too.  His messages land in my primary messages folder. 

Kevin’s not wrong. I am planning on doing a new solar project.  We need to get the existing panels off the roof at the cafe so that we can repair it, and we’re looking into adding another array.

But I never reached out to Kevin or his company about my project.  And that’s teaching me a lot about how business is done these days; and it’s showing me why a business like ours needs to find new ways to market off social media.   

Two weeks ago, I explained why we’ve taken our business off social media and begun pursuing what I’ve been referring to as slow marketing, the idea that our marketing shouldn’t leave us frantic and glassy-eyed trying to keep up with the social media circus; that it should help us to fall a little bit more in love with our work and our lives each day, and that it should help continue the mission of our business — not just promote it. The short explanation as to why we’re exploring slow marketing is that we were badly hacked back in January, and were not able to successfully recover our social media accounts.  But in the wake of that, as we’ve become more centered, more organized, and the business actually appears to be doing better since the hack, I’ve been on a journey to make sense of the past twelve years of our various social media efforts, and why they didn’t succeed, despite our fierce efforts.  

Kevin has helped me to understand that.

Kevin’s emails land in my primary inbox because I keep mistaking them for personal correspondence and reading them.  I keep reading them because the language he uses matches the tone of all my other correspondence.  Kevin found out about me due to my Google searches, a tactic referred to these days as surveillance capitalism.  Like most folks, I was aware that there was some kind of surveillance of my internet search activity — why else would browsers, Instagram, Twitter, FaceBook and SnapChat accounts be free?  But I stumbled across an amazing book a few weeks ago, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — and How to Think Deeply Again,  by Johann Hari, that has really opened my eyes.  In it, Hari interviews Tristan Harris, a former Google engineer who is best known for his appearance in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma.  At Google, Harris explained, success is measured by the seemingly innocuous term “engagement,” or the amount of time a pair of human eyes is locked on a computer screen.  That’s because that time translates into advertising dollars.  

“Every time you send a message or status update on Facebook, or Snapchat, or Twitter, and every time you search for something on Google,” writes Hari, “everything you say is being scanned and sorted and stored.  These companies are building up a profile of you, to sell to advertisers who want to target you” (p.125).

Which is how I met Kevin.  Somewhere in cyberspace, there’s a Mini-Me, a little model of Shannon Hayes that advertisers can look at.  The more time I spend online, the more they know about me.  The more they know about me, the easier it is to market to me.

Ok.  I get it.  We’re living in a capitalist society.  I myself am a business woman.  I can’t begrudge Kevin’s marketing efforts.  He’s just trying to sell solar panels and get electricity use to be more sustainable.  There’s no harm in that. 

But in order for Google to successfully sell Kevin people like me as potential customers, engagement becomes the operative word.  Social media companies and Google need to keep my eyes on that screen as long as possible to build an accurate profile that enables Kevin to approach me as though he’s not a cold caller, but a long lost friend.  

Thus, the key for social media companies to survive lies in engagement.  They need their users to keep scrolling.  And to do that, they need the right algorithm.  Hari explains that “the algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent.  It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen” (p.130).  

Theoretically, as long as I’m ethically comfortable with this idea of surveillance capitalism, using my family farm and cafe to generate content for the social media platforms in exchange for raising awareness and marketing should be a legitimate exchange.

Except for a few things.  First, local food businesses like ours are critical infrastructure for building civil society.  We are the place-based venues where people meet face-to-face over something they love: the landscape, the fresh air, good food.  When that happens, they start connecting directly with each other.  Next time you’re at a farm stand or local cafe or farmers market, check out the number of conversations that are happening.  People are keeping tabs on each other’s families, they’re sharing resources, helping each other get their needs met.  Whenever I need to find any local resource, I wait for cafe day and just talk to customers.  That’s how I got the roofers that are coming next week.  That’s also how I found someone to help me with our solar array (Sorry, Kevin.  I didn’t want you to have to find out this way, but you just wouldn’t take no for an answer.).  The nature of what small businesses like ours do makes us bad for business for social media companies and Google.  We like engagement, too.  But for us, “successful engagement” is defined by eye contact and face-to-face dialog.  Can the algorithms detect this when we post about our businesses on social media? Can they play down our posts since they encourage people to put down their phones and talk?  Believe me, I’ve suspected this many times in the past.  But that’s not exactly true.  Then again, it’s not entirely wrong, either.

Hari’s book helped me  to understand this.  The algorithms want people’s eyes locked on the screen.  But what people’s eyes are drawn to makes it hard for businesses like mine to gain solid traction on those platforms.  That’s because of the negativity bias, a phenomenon that has long been understood in scientific literature.  “You will stare at a car crash longer than you will stare at a person handing out flowers by the side of the road,” writes Hari, “even though the flowers will give you a lot more pleasure than the mangled bodies in a crash”(131).  We even notice angry faces before happy faces.  If you want a video picked up by the algorithm on YouTube, Hari says you need to employ terms like “hates,” “obliterates,” “slams,” or “destroys.” He reports on a study from NYU that found a person can improve their retweet rate on Twitter by 20 percent by incorporating language to express moral outrage.

So where does that leave the small businesses — the ones that promote peace, compassion, understanding, love?

Well, personally, I found it left me competing with a whole lot of noise, without the decibels to get heard above it.  It simply isn’t natural for Sap Bush Hollow to tap into the negativity bias.  The only other way to get heard was to cultivate exhibitionism and shock value into our work.  Unless someone wants to film Bob and me having a spat in the cafe kitchen during the morning rush, there really isn’t much of that (and they might get their camera smashed in the process).

Which brings me back to the idea of slow marketing.  In our earliest days in our departure from social media, I tried to find resources to help make this separation.  There wasn’t much. Social media marketing is considered a necessary evil….Even as it becomes clearer and clearer to me that it could be a big waste of time and money for certain businesses.  

But the truth is, we’ve been marketing without social media for over 40 years.  Even with 12 of those years on the social media platforms, our most successful marketing has always been off of them.  So to wrap this up today, for those folks who would also like to get off these platforms, I’m going to list some of our most successful marketing efforts:

1. Patronage. We like to grow the business we want AND the world we want at the same time.  We patronize the causes we value.  Chances are, if we think a cause is important, our potential customers do, too.  
2. Digital newsletters.  Most of my readers find out about the weekly podcasts through this simple medium.  They also find out about farm events, cafe special and weekly sales.
3. Mailers.  When Mom and Dad started the farm, Mom read the phone book and reached out to everyone she knew.  I still read phone books (when I can get them), scanning for people I know who should get a mailer about the farm.  Print mailers are our single largest source of CSA sign ups, and pay for themselves over and over again.  We make an effort to collect addresses at every opportunity to expand and update our list. 
4. Customer referrals.  When we send out our mailers, we also send out customer referral offers, rewarding our customers for helping to find good matches for our business.
5. Conversations with strangers.  My kids are forever reminding me to carry business cards, because I seem to get in conversations wherever I go. The world needs more open, kind and curious discussions between strangers.  And I never know who might wind up becoming a customer.  I recently picked up a new customer while buying fish at our food coop.
6. Conversations with customers.  If I haven’t heard from a customer in a while, sometimes I just pick up the phone and call or send a personal email.  Part of this is because, since so many of my customers make regular appearances, I worry about folks if they don’t check in.  But the other part is that I’ve learned sometimes you have to ask for the sale you need.  And in making that connection, it’s not just about making money.  It’s about keeping our community together.    
7. Websites.  Yes, it’s obvious.  But it’s essential to have a real website, rather than just a Facebook business page.  As I explained in part one of Slow Marketing, a FaceBook business page can be wiped out.  You own a website. And you can use the blogs on sites to do all that positive feel-good posting that would have been ignored over on social media.  Our readers and customers seem to enjoy this format more, without the social media distractions.
8. PR stories.  These can be guest posts for online sites that refer traffic back to our website, or articles for local publications that highlight our expertise and mention our business.  We do this roughly once per year.  Since writing feeds my creative fire, I also have this podcast, which happens to be a great marketing tool.  
9. Collect customer info.  We have guest books, and we also let our point-of-sale system request customers give emails or cell numbers so we can keep in touch. 
10. Hang out a shingle and an open flag.  Yup.  Seems obvious.  But we’ve come to focus so much on the digital world, we sometimes forget that the real world can be so much more simple and direct. 

Or, you could be like Kevin, and keep paying Google to learn more about your customers.  Maybe that’s a successful marketing channel for him.  But with the way we’re doing things here on the farm, every time I reach out to a customer and make a connection, I feel like I’m building a stronger community.  That’s what slow marketing is about: it helps me love what I do and feel good about the work.  And while feeling good about our work doesn’t gain much traction in the digital world, it does a whole lot for healing the real world. 

 

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 Robin Becker & Rebecca Wigham.

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.