My friend, Kate Car­ruthers, has a great blog post up in which she draws the anal­ogy between those tout­ing social net­works as the next great place to make money and the Bible story of Jesus and the money-​​changers. She says:

I hate this approach to social net­works. To me they are com­mu­nity gath­er­ing places not cen­tres of com­merce.  Sure ask­ing peo­ple to take social or char­i­ta­ble action fits in.  But com­mer­cial exer­cises feel very unnatural.

Yes! Yes! A thou­sand times yes!

Until less than two years ago, I very much doubt I had pro­fes­sion­ally met some­one whose job was explic­itly mar­ket­ing or adver­tis­ing. Let alone met them in the con­text of a social net­work and our col­lec­tive engage­ment in it.

I am beyond over the cyn­i­cal exhor­ta­tions of those who believe using social net­works will make them pop­u­lar or rich or sell their amaz­ing new prod­uct. This despite some in the mar­ket­ing indus­try who believe that what peo­ple like me say sup­ports their posi­tion or has value to them.

Let’s stop think­ing about using social net­works to sell stuff! Rather, let’s use them to cre­ate, build and nur­ture pow­er­ful, con­nected, cre­ative and engaged com­mu­ni­ties that help each other, that bring human­ity to the con­nec­tions made there, and, if we’re using them for busi­ness, at least have a mod­icum of altru­ism about them and con­sider being of use to the cus­tomers of that busi­ness rather than suck­ing addi­tional dol­lars from them.

Of course, it’s not every­one doing this. Some are think­ing and doing what Kate and I con­sider the right thing. If that’s you, please keep doing it. And tell peo­ple what you think.

The sooner the money-​​changers are ban­ished from the tem­ple, the better.