Facebook Cannot Buy What Must Be Earned… Like Respect of Peers

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – I think that there is really, at the end of the day, probably more of a danger, especially to the printed word or what would pass as news than there is a benefit.  If you say, “Mike, why is that?” if everyone is a reporter, then no one is a reporter.  If everyone is an opinion columnist, then no one is an opinion columnist.  There’s no one that stands out.  There’s no distinction there. “I’ve got more Twitter followers than you do.”  Before, you might actually have to work for years and years and years to actually perfect and hone a craft and get good at it. Check out today’s audio and transcript for more…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I believe that a significant portion of this audience actually probably spends some amount of time on Facebook.  Are you spending your time on the Facebook application, are you spending your time there shopping?  You may be spending your time, if you’re unemployed, you may be spending time there trying to secure employment.  You could have done that with a new pair of shoes and a newspaper.  Do you see what I’m saying?

Sean Hannity had that Occupy Wall Street punk on, the one that he made famous about two weeks ago when he told him to take a shower, shave and go out and look for a job.  The guy goes, “I am looking for a job.  I spend all day online.”  Bingo.  You spend all day online.  How did people used to find employment before we had the magic of Monster.com, before they had their magic CareerBuilder.com and all these things?  Folks, most of these things that have manifested themselves in online entities actually existed in the physical world long before there were digital examples of them.  What the digital version does is it allows the cost of delivery to be accessible to almost anyone.  Almost anyone can start one of these things.

I think that there is really, at the end of the day, probably more of a danger, especially to the printed word or what would pass as news than there is a benefit.  If you say, “Mike, why is that?” if everyone is a reporter, then no one is a reporter.  If everyone is an opinion columnist, then no one is an opinion columnist.  There’s no one that stands out.  There’s no distinction there.  [mocking] “I’ve got more Twitter followers than you do.”  Before, you might actually have to work for years and years and years to actually perfect and hone a craft and get good at it.  Then you were followed and then you would win awards or respect of your peers.  That’s another thing.  No one has been able to divine a way for the internet to generate peer respect.  It can’t do it.  That can only come from people.  People can write about it on the internet, but it can only come from people.

AG, it used to be if you would ask very successful people, other than their accomplishments with their family and their children, which many of them were proud of, what their greatest accomplishments in life were, they would probably rarely if ever give you a dollar figure, unless they were Donald Trump.  I don’t know that I would put him into this mold here.  They would probably tell you the fact they had earned the respect of their peers was their greatest accomplishment in life.  How many of you people out there are working to earn the respect of your peers?  You do that by exactly that word, you earn it, work ethic, skill, talent, ingenuity, creativity.

There’s an old guy I used to work with in radio when I first got into the business.  He was about 40 years my elder.  He had been in the business for about 30 years, or maybe even 40.  Do you know what he told me after I had worked at this little radio station in New Orleans for a couple weeks and he had heard me?  You know what he told me?  It’s probably the best advice I ever got.  I’ll share it with you people.  He told me basically, “Kid, you got a lot of talent there, but talent don’t mean shit.  You don’t have the tenacity to survive all of the shit you’re going to encounter and you’re going to have to deal with.  You’re just going to be some other has-been, never-known talent.”  His point was, people that are successful, or used to be anyway, in any business are the ones that stuck to it the longest and actually did have some skills and plowed all manner of energy, effort, concentration into their craft.

We still do like to partake of things that are made by craftsmen.  For example, I’m wearing a watch today that was made mostly in Minnesota.  It could have been made in China.  I could have had some Chinese people picking and pecking away at little miniature cogs or designing the machine that would make the cog, but instead I was looking for one that was mostly made in the United States, even though the company began in Europe.  I wear Stauer watches.  Do you have any Stauer watches?

AG:  I do not have any watches they made.

Mike:  Have you ever seen a Stauer watch?

AG:  I don’t believe so.

Mike:  Beautiful.  Stauer, beautiful, handcrafted.  Back in the day, if you wanted a really nice watch, you’d get one that had 21 jewels or had Swiss inner workings and what have you.  That’s what a Stauer watch has.  I appreciate the craftsmanship.  I can tell the difference when I pick this thing up to put it on.  I have one that looks almost exactly like it that was made in China that weighs about three ounces less than a Stauer watch weighs.  A Stauer watch is a piece of art.  I’m willing to pay for it.

As we talk about the rolling out of Facebook, my original question to you was going to be, they were arguing over whether or not it was worth $80 billion or $108 billion.  I’m listening to Ali Velshi and Christine Romans of CNN this morning going, I don’t even think they’re worth $8 million.  Where do you get $80 billion from?  For what?  All they’ve amassed is a database of people that you can sell things to.  I got it.  Then you walk it back to what you said earlier about how do you monetize that?  How does that actually improve someone else’s bottom line?  I believe the answer to that question is that it probably doesn’t.  It is all the rage nowadays, isn’t it?  You don’t even have a Facebook account.  I can’t believe you had survived nine years or a decade of the Facebook world, having gone to college and all that, and still don’t have a Facebook account.

AG:  I had one for the first three months of college.  Then I was like this is not a good idea.  I’m getting rid of this.

Mike:  Did you have to go to Facebook Anonymous?  Did you have to go to FA classes?  The first stage in working with your problem is admitting that you have one.

AG:  There was so much stuff to do down in south Texas that it was never a huge thing in my life.

Mike:  Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  What do you mean stuff to do?  You mean outside of hanging out on Facebook?

AG:  Yeah.  We’d go to Cuña del Rio.  San Antonio is awesome.

Mike:  That’s physical stuff.  Nobody wants to do physical things.  Come on.

End Mike Church Show Transcript