Social Media Advertising

The world of social media has become to interwoven into regular media, that every news story seems to carry an implicit advert for a social media platform to "find out more".

In the case of the BBC, who are usually incredibly stuffy about not mentioning brands and if they do usually chide themselves with "other brands like this are available" to kid us that there is some impartiality going on.

But in the case of social the BBC forget all this and always trumpet what was said on Twitter, what was posted on Facebook.  So if you do not care for such things you cannot get away from it.  There is an implicit assumption here that this is part of normal life and not a product that although free is selling you're personal data like crazy behind the scenes.

Cisco

I sometimes look at what is happening at the beleagured Cisco systems on thelayoff.com

Here was a great comment that I think sums up the fake image the corporation endlessly tries to promote - but anyone who has worked there for a while would recognise as false: 

"The old Cisco is gone. Sorry to break the news to you.

Take a look at the images and stories on the CEC home page and on Glassdoor and have that paint a picture for you. The marketing tells the story, in every human-interest story and in every picture:

• A gaggle of smiling 20 something's in t-shirts doing a group limbo or a massive selfie at work
  
• All of them a mix of multi racial, good looking kids with an equal number of men and women
  
• Random story about how some salesguy saved up all his PTO so he could climb some peak in Nepal and put a Cisco flag on it
  
• A catchy story about how we are going to be the TESLA of IoT, Smart Cities, (insert shiny object here) and rule the world
  

It is all rather transparent, somewhat desperate and sad. Maybe I'm just bitter about where we are now and I'm seeing stuff that doesn't exist. Maybe not."