The Causey Consulting Podcast

Do You Know You Could Survive, Redux

January 21, 2021 Sara Causey Episode 61
The Causey Consulting Podcast
Do You Know You Could Survive, Redux
Show Notes Transcript

In July of last year, I predicted that censorship was the wave of the future. Now here we are. So if you didn't heed my warnings last year, cockadoodledoo. 🐓 Here's your wake up call.

Key topics:

✔️ I'll say it again: if most or all of your livelihood is based on a platform you do not own or control, you are playing a very dangerous game.
✔️ What would you do if your platform of choice disappeared suddenly? Or what if you were banned or shadow banned? (It's not relegated only to the world of politics and/or religion these days.)
✔️ The human touch still matters. Build relationships offline, too.
✔️ Back up and manage your own data! Do not leave all of your clients' contact info on an email management platform or in a CRM. Back up your data offline and keep hard copies if needed.
✔️ Websites are cheap and easy to maintain. If you don't have one, get one.

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Unknown:

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting Podcast. I'm your host, Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. So today is the Redux episode of Do you know you could survive? Last July, I recorded an episode called Do you know you could survive. And I'm not going to be shy in saying that my predictions in that episode have come true. Would that it were not so... I would really prefer that censorship was not here on our doorstep, and that social media wasn't becoming, like, clinched down tight on people. But that's the reality. I warned y'all this was coming. And now we're here. And frankly, based on the direction that things were trending in, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to look in a crystal ball or go scrying in a bowl of water to see that this was on the horizon anyway. So if you buried your head in the sand back in July, and now you're starting to wake up and look around and go, Holy smokes, my maybe I shouldn't have done that. You definitely want to stick with me through this episode. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that your social media presence is going to be reduced to ash and rubble tomorrow, you need to hit the panic button and run for the hills. There is a happy medium in between, let's say Chicken Little on steroids, screaming that the sky is falling, the Earth is coming to an end and the zombie apocalypse is upon us versus going over to the other side of the spectrum that I'll call Pollyanna Sugar Cube. Everything's fine. I don't have to change. I don't have to make hard decisions in my business. I'll just use power of positive thinking and everything will be alright. That's not how it works. I want to make a quick interjection here. Because oftentimes, when I talk to someone who says that they've tried the power of prayer, the power of positive thinking, or the law of attraction, and it didn't work for them, and now they've concluded that it's all just a load of bunk for gullible people. When we get into the nuts and bolts of Okay, well, tell me what you were working on. What were you trying to have happen in your life? What were you doing? What was your methodology? What was your reasoning behind it? It boils down to three basic mistakes. The first one is impatience, when they were believing for something to happen, or they were working to see something made manifest in their life, they got impatient, the universe was not moving fast enough to suit them. So they just had a little bit of a temper tantrum and said, screw it. This this whole stuff is just a load of bunk. It's not moving fast enough to suit me. Therefore, it must all be wrong. The second is wanting to know all the whys wherefores and house, the universe doesn't give you a roadmap, God doesn't come down off the mountain and go Alright, now I'm going to take you from A to B to C. These are the exact dates that is going to happen. This is exactly how it's going to play out in your life, you're not going to get any surprises, there's not gonna be any spontaneity. But that's not realistic. When When have you ever known that to happen? Most journeys in life aren't linear. And they don't easily go from point A to point B when we're talking about major life events unfolding. If you start getting tangled up in the how and when something is going to happen, you can really put yourself in a major bind. It can also happen, let's say use the example of a business audience or a demographic, you may start your business intending to serve this particular audience. Find it doesn't work out well and have to switch over to a different audience where it does connect Well, it does work well. And I'll use myself as an example. For both my executive coaching and my HR consulting work. I don't do well with small startups, like young, small infantile startups is just frankly not a good match. I wind up getting super frustrated and wanting to tear my hair out because it's a moving target all the time. They don't know what they want. They can't get a plan together and stick to it. They don't have the appropriate infrastructure and it just, you know, makes me feel like a crazy person. So I don't market to those people. And if they somehow find their way into my funnel, I politely usher them out and recommend that they seek help elsewhere because I'm not the person to give it to them. But if I got really hard-headed and said, No, I only want to work with these young startups, even though it makes me miserable, I wouldn't be doing myself any favors. The third thing that tends to go awry is just good old fashioned laziness. You I've heard it said that things like prayer, or the power of positive thinking, or even magic, if you're so inclined to call it that, those elements work best when they are paired with your own efforts. It's like putting rocket fuel on your own efforts in a particular direction. It's like, if you've ever heard that old joke about the guy that keeps praying to God to win the lottery and filing God gets frustrated and replies back saying, you know, it would help if you bought a ticket. The person who prays please God, let me find a good job where I'll be happy, and I'll perform really well. And then they get on indeed, or careerbuilder, they start networking with people and letting them know they're on the job hunt, are probably going to get a better outcome than somebody who goes, Please, God help me find a new job, or I'll be happy, and I'll perform well. And then they sit on a couch and watch a daytime talk shows and don't put forth any effort to go exploring what's out there, you know, like, they're just hoping that the universe is going to show up on their doorstep and go, Okay, here's a new job custom built just for you. Now, I'm not saying it's totally impossible for that to happen. I have seen some very insane, long shot, things come to pass in my life and in the lives of people close to me, I know it's possible. what I'm telling you is if you look at the odds of a brand new job showing up on your doorstep, custom built with you having to put forth no effort at all, it's more likely that the other person who's saying a prayer and searching indeed, is going to have a quicker result than the person that's sitting on their couch watching TV all day. I'm just saying. So my point is, if you've been the Pollyanna Sugar Cube, and you're thinking Well, yeah, okay, I've built my entire business around a platform I don't own and I don't control, but I'm just going to power of positive fake my way through this. And there's no possible way that anything could ever happen to jeopardize my business. That's not how power of positive thinking works. Essentially, what you're doing there is giving yourself confirmation bias, you're going to tune out anything that might contradict your own ideas, you're going to not look at data you're going to not think about, okay, well, what would happen in the event that Sara is right, and at some point, the rug gets pulled out from under me, how would I survive it? Do I know that I could No, I'm just gonna power positive thing my way through this and everything will be fine. I'm just saying it gives me a lot of heartburn. If it doesn't give you heartburn yet, I would say within a given another six months in it. And it probably will, I'm willing to go on record as saying that. As for the idea of Hey, look, my business doesn't do anything controversial. No politics, no religion, no R rated language, no dicey topics of any kind. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't. I have a friend who runs a page, I'm not going to name what platform or get into any specifics. I'm just going to tell you the general the general rundown of the story. She runs a beauty page, she posts stuff about like hairstyles, makeup tips, different filters, you can use different types of lighting to achieve different looks when you're posting selfies or doing photography. It truly has nothing to do with politics, religion, or anything hot button whatsoever. Not long ago, she posted a video saying I need to take a break from all this. I've been posting on a regular basis. And I just need a break from it. I'm getting overwhelmed by this platform. And I want to be with my family. I want to get out get some fresh air and sunshine. So I'm going to be posting less over the next few weeks. But I'm still around. I haven't given up on the page. I'm just taking a breather, and the platform shadowbanned her she believes for that she believes that because she said hey look, it's good to get out in nature. It's good. It's good to have real life. It's good to get away from social media and not give all of your attention to feeding the beast every day. She believes because of that she was shadowbanned I have another friend who runs a video channel. Again, not going to name of the platform or get into the specifics but he does tell jokes. He does a lot of comedy type stuff and he lampoons politicians on both sides, left and right, and he's very equal opportunity and telling jokes and being silly about stuff political satire. He was shadow banned. And he told me well I thought like as long as I was, like, equal opportunity in the in the jokes that I was telling. I was making fun of people on the left and on the right I was just, you know, being being silly, you know, not doing anything mean spirited, not doing anything hateful, I was just being silly and goofy and telling jokes, I thought I was fine. And in his case, it just simply wasn't true. He got shadow banned and lost a whole bunch of subscribers and almost no time. So one of the main things that I'm asking you to do today is just to contemplate a plan B, what are your transferable skills? What could you do? Hopefully ahead of time, before anything happens, that could endanger your livelihood, what are some ways that you could go about reaching out to your audience and building relationships that aren't predicated on social media. And by the way, if all of your contact information for your subscribers, past customers, etc, are loaded into some email service provider, for the love of god back all of that stuff up, you know, get it onto an Excel spreadsheet, and put it on a thumb drive somewhere, print it out and have a hard copy, do something so that you have the contact information for your customers, it's not just all on some cloud based CRM that could disappear tomorrow, or on some email service provider that could decide they don't want to service you anymore, have have copies of all that information, and be willing to pick up the phone. If you need to build rapport with people by you know, that good old fashioned device called the telephone do it. If you need to email people directly and just say, Hey, I was thinking about you and wanted to let you know that I really value your business. If you ever have people in your circle that could benefit from my service, send them my way, there's nothing wrong with going back to the good, old-fashioned ways of doing things don't get so dependent on automation and technology, that you forget the human touch, you forget how to do things, the way that we did back before all of this technology and automation, and building those relationships off of social media. It's not just a good insurance policy to make sure those people know who you are, and where and how to find you. If you ever were to get banned or shadow banned from a platform, it's just good to engender that human relationship and take away some of the transactional part of sales and bring bring back that relationship driven part of it to letting people know that you care about them as human beings. And they're not just a paycheck or potential sales commission to you, that's important. The second thing is, if you don't have a website for your business, if everything that you're doing is social media based, get a website, if you have a website, but you don't update it regularly. Or maybe it looks kind of doo-doo poo-poo. Go ahead and put some coin down, have it professionally revamped and start updating it, make sure that you have some platform to reach potential clients and customers, there's to stay in touch with your existing customers. Again, that's not predicated on social media. Now that that's not as necessary, in my opinion, as making sure that you have access to all of your own data. And you can get a hold of your customers and clients if you just had some giant internet blackout. But having a website, you know off one of those platforms, it's cheap. It's even having a professional web designer go through and make everything look pretty and professional. That's very cost effective anymore. It's a great way to build your brand that's not based on Well, what would happen if I got you my account was restricted for 24 hours, what would happen if I got pulled off this platform? What would happen if this platform disappeared, websites are not as likely to be going anywhere, anytime soon. The third thing I will say is if somebody has been out there whispering in your ear that you need to be dropping a lot of money on social media advertising, this may not be the best time to lay down a serious amount of coin on that kind of endeavor. Now, I'm not saying to just completely disable that part of your marketing strategy. There are some businesses where it makes all the sense in the world to advertise on social media. And they make a lot of revenue that way. I mean, there are companies out there that you know, for every dollar they spend on social media, they get two or three back. I'm not gonna argue with results and with a high profit margin, but we're all looking for a good return on our investments. What I'm saying is, if it's not a tool that you have in your arsenal yet it's going to be a big financial decision for you. Sleep on it, give it a little more thought Don't let some slick high polished salesperson arm twist you into doing something that you, maybe you're on the fence about it or maybe even have heartburn about it. Listen to your own gut instincts. You know, I had a company that tried to pitch me on spending like$20,000, on Facebook advertising. And I just, you know, there were some times when I really thought hard about it, they had a good sales team that made some pretty good arguments, but I just, I couldn't wrap my mind around spending that amount of money. I mean, you know, maybe you're sitting here and listening to this broadcast, and you're a billionaire and 20 grand is like nothing to you. But for a lot of us 20 grand is some serious bill paying money. It's not, it's not an amount of money to sneeze at. And looking back on it now, I am so glad that I listened to my gut instinct, which told me it's not some something's just not right here, this isn't, this isn't the right avenue for you to go down, I feel like that money would have gone into a bottomless pit. And who the hell knows if I ever would have seen a dime of that money back again. I'm just I'm glad in so many ways. And I want to encourage you, in the same way to listen to your own gut instincts and to not sink a crapload of money into something that who even knows like, what would you do? hypothetically, if you spent 1000s of dollars, and then the very next day you got banned off that platform? Or that platform went away? Like Well, I mean, seriously, like, would you? Would you be able to recoup that loss. I mean, it's a good rule of thumb anyway, not to gamble with money that you can afford to lose. But I'm just saying, you know, times are tight right now financially, for a lot of people, you don't want to throw money into a vortex, and then really live to regret it. There are people out there who are social media coaches, or they run social media, marketing businesses, and they're good people. They're legit, they know what they're doing. They've put in the time and the work, and they're serious about helping you achieve your goals. Then there are other people, in my opinion, that are just charlatans. They're in it to turn a quick buck. And they'll just kind of tell you well, I mean, results may vary. It's kind of like those diet or exercise videos, where they'll be like, oh, Bobby lost 50 pounds on our program, and then you see in like, little tiny 6 point font, at the bottom results may vary, Bobby's results will not be your results. Well, that's the same thing with some of these social media marketers, you know, they're gonna tell you, oh, well, maybe you didn't follow the program exactly correctly. Or maybe your business model just isn't set up for this platform. And you needed to throw all this money down the drain in order to get that data and know that information. So far, in my mind, some of these people that are just going to necessarily go away, because the platforms are going to change and the digital landscape is going to change over the next year two of our lives, I'm not going to be sad to see them go, frankly, some of them need to pivot in another direction and find something else to do with their lives. And listen, you know, I'll be extremely candid here. If you're if you are hearing this broadcast, and you're like man, I am a social media marketer and I'm, I'm barely getting by, you know, I've got enough out of my business to be able to pay my rent and put groceries on the table, but I have not getting ahead. Everything feels like a struggle. Maybe this is a good time for you to pivot and find something else to do where you can not just survive, but you can thrive. Some of the people are going to make it through this wave of censorship, censorship. I'm Susan Sun starshop. Some people are going to make it through this wave of censorship and some people are not. And I think you have to be prepared for a potential worst case scenario of if you are someone that gets banned or shadow banned, or your ability to effectively deliver social media marketing to your audience radically changes and you're just not making the kind of money that you want to make anymore. How are you going to handle it? So I'll ask you the question again. And if you ignored it in July, I want you to really think about it now. Do you know you could survive? If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it. If you haven't already, take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review for us on iTunes. Bye for now.