I Feel Fine
But I won’t state that on social media. Here is why.
Have you ever heard of WeFeelFine.org? Well, I haven’t until recently. As a constant learner, I am attending Coursera classes at all times. Sometimes out of pure curiosity and other times to skill up.
At the moment I am learning to gain citizenship in the Metaverse (read about it here). After starting out with SEO, I am now with Social Media Marketing hosted by Randy Hlavac. As a digital immigrant, I have all those accounts. I am honestly just not using them, the way they are intended to be used.
I connected with a bunch of people, mostly people I do know in real life, but I hardly ever post something. I use it more like a filtered private tv-show, watching what other people are doing (when I was a kid, we would call those people voyeurs, but I guess that word is not applicable here?).
And here I am, tweeting hashtags, hooking-up people with the at-handle. Thinking with every comment — but who the hell will want to read that?
But surprisingly I get responses, and that is fun and encouraging.
There is a master plan behind those classes. I want Metaverse citizenship, I want to position myself as a content writer (with SEO knowledge) and strategic foresight expert. And to do that I need social and I need a strategy.
That is where I came across WeFeelFine.org. And the futurist in me was amazed.
Since I never got deeper into social media than being a boring little user dismissing all the ads (well, I admit, I bought my shampoo based on an Instagram ad, guilty here), the idea of social monitoring was completely new to me.
WeFeelFine.org was where it started. Already back in 2006 started as an MIT project, this site “visualizes emotional “data,” creating a record of people’s emotions as expressed on blogs and social media” (1).
But this was only the starting point. The media monitoring business has shown growth over the last years, currently valued at 3.96 billion USD with a growth perspective of over 11 billion USD at the end of the decade (this is about the market size of the sock (no Grammarly I indeed meant sock, not stock) market in the US at the moment as well as the condom market though this has even higher growth potential, also worth an analysis at some point).
Consequently, this means, monitoring software in place now, is nothing compared to what will come.
Connecting this information to the megatrend social authenticity and transparency, where will this go?
Will you have to acknowledge that your data is monitored before you post? Or will this work still be in the back, like it is now, when you agree to the T&C’s that’s that? Will the perfect marketer be a big data scientist? Will marketing then be AI controlled? But where is the human authenticity in that?
And when people know all this, will they not act accordingly? Well, maybe not, because they should already and most of us don’t (the author included).
We all know that we are tracked, but we don’t care, but maybe in the future, there will come a point we will.
So yes, I feel fine. For now. And so you do not have to check — it is sunny outside.
If you want to keep posted on my journey from this point on, follow and/or subscribe. Also, if you have any tips for me on what additional skills I will need, reach out. Until then, thank you for taking the time to read me.
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