Sex and Attitudes Towards Social Media

The truth is that I have spent the last few days mulling this over, trying to identify behavioural patterns based on the different attitudes companies (or individuals) adopt towards Social Media/the Social Web, and particularly towards how to achieve marketing benefits, and each behavioural pattern strikes me as similar to the different attitudes human beings have towards sex.

For now, I have identified the following positions, and readers may well have identified a few more:

• The Compulsive Masturbators: Those who love self-promotion, major generators of spam, who enjoy talking about themselves, uploading videos of themselves to YouTube and writing on their blogs, naturally, about themselves. They do not build a community or generate conversation, nor do they expect it, as they lack any grounds for it; instead, they satisfy their ego by spreading their presence everywhere, believing that the greater their presence, the more relevant they are.
• The Unfaithful Married Man: He operates in secrecy, occasionally venturing outside his environment and interacting discreetly, usually under a false name for fear of revealing his identity and facing a reprimand when he returns home. His conversation is devoid of value because of the anonymity of his interactions.
• The Faithful Married Man: He has a very limited social circle and interacts only in familiar environments. He neither wants to leave that environment nor feels any urge to explore new experiences and possibilities. In fact, he is happy in his marriage, which offers him complete satisfaction and lasting results. Social Media is entirely alien to him by conviction, or at least that is what he believes.
• The Indiscriminate Promiscuous Type: He shoots at everything, joins in with anything and tries absolutely everything. He never misses an opportunity to take part, subscribes to everything, although afterwards he gives none of it the attention it deserves. He establishes no ties anywhere and leaves every conversation unfinished.
• The George Clooney: The great winner. He drives them wild and makes them fall in love. All it takes is a snap of his fingers to achieve whatever he sets out to do, with whomever he chooses. He is charming, attentive, handsome and likeable, and he also sparks that kind of interest no one can ignore. He is a good conversationalist, respectful, and never speaks well of himself; he does not need to, as others do it for him. Without doubt, what we would all like to be.
• The Chronic Punter: He is not attractive, but he thinks he is. He does not succeed on his own merits, and to satisfy his perversions he must resort to the services of professionals, who do the job for him in exchange for money. He appears to be successful and boasts about his conquests, but does not say that they all come down to using his credit card. He appears to have a good reputation, thinks he is George Clooney and acts the part, but those who know him understand that it is false and unsustainable; after all, he is a punter.

Any more?