Or you're stupid

I don’t know whether it’s specifically the Valley They Call Silicon, or just the new world of social media, but it does seem to me that the social phenomenon somehow breeds snake-oil salesmen like nothing else I can think of. Everyone’s got the sure-fire guaranteed one way to driving sales through Twitter/Instagram/blogging/Facebook/whatever.

Last week I went to a Meetup that was supposed to be a lunch-and-learn on blogging. The person running it was actually recommended to me by someone who’s in the career coaching business. He turned out to be a self-important geezer, and I realized that I’d “seen” him around on Meetup before and ignored him because he has about 48 different things going, all with the sure-fire guaranteed schtick.

And indeed he did spend 90 minutes informing a collection of about 25-30 people that if you go about blogging exactly the way he tells you, you’re guaranteed success. And if you don’t, you’re stupid.

Yes, he said, “You’re stupid.”

According to Mr. Legend-in-his-Own-Mind, blogging (his area of thought leadership) is the only way to make money. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, everything else—waste of time. And—you’re stupid.

That’s the thing about Meetup—for the price of a soft drink at a self-serve eatery, you can hold forth about any crack-brained topic you like. You don’t have to rent a facility or put together a PowerPoint deck. It’s kind of like the early days of the NSDAP.

And, also like the incipient Nazi Party, what I found fascinating was that 25 or 30 people sat there round-eyed and slightly slack-jawed for 90 minutes. After the harangue was over I asked the guy sitting next to me if he’d learned anything. He nodded almost reverently. “Yes. I was planning to go a different way, but now I’m on the path.”

Okay, I learned a couple of things. But I mistrust any True Believer (whether it be religious, ideological, dietary or social media) on general principles, so it was a bit of a struggle to pull those couple of bits out of all the blather.

One of the nuggets: if I go to another of his Meetups, I’m stupid.