Let me start with a story about fishing (I finally get to combine my love of fishing with my love of marketing)…

A fisherman finds a new fishing hole that produces fish on a daily basis. The fishing is fantastic…he has so much fun day after day that he feels it’s a shame to keep it a secret. So he decides to tell just one friend. The word gets out and soon, the fishing hole is flooded with fisherman and they fish and fish until there are no fish left.

Due to the fact that the fishing sucks, the original fisherman decides to seek out new waters.

Because he’s a great fisherman he finds another hole and has great success. And, because the fisherman isn’t that smart he tells the same friend. Soon this hole is destroyed too.

Does this story sound familiar? It should. As, it’s what we’ve done with every major mode of communication that humans have ever invented.

Communications channels are like fishing holes. They’re fragile. It’s easy to ruin them. Flood them with irrelevant information and soon your audience seeks other sources of information.

For a while it doesn’t matter…especially if If there are no new sources of information. Then the audience is stuck. The demand builds and builds; the users beg for ‘something different’. The channel owners laugh all the way to the bank.

This party continues until a new communications mode is offered. Something new. Something better.

Then users jump off the ship they’ve been desperately seeking to escape.They flock to the ‘new thing’ and for a while the system works ok. That is until we get greedy and start trying to realize greater returns from a pond that isn’t growing.

We’ve ruined TV. We’ve ruined radio. We’ve ruined telemarketing. We’ve ruined email. We’ve ruined our websites.

Let’s try not to ruin social media too.