RANT: Marketing someone who lives in FEAR

This morning, I checked my email before I started doing my gratitude list, which was a violation of my healthy morning habits. Error #1 on my part. In my defense, I did it because it was 8:45am when I arrived to the office because Tuesdays is my gym day and I normally get in a little late. Well, it was 9:15pm before I got home last night from work, so it doesn’t really matter that I was a little late. What matters is the email that was sent at 8:45pm by one of my coworkers.

My job is to market engineers and consultants. This person has “a thing” about being on Facebook. Someone scared him back when he was doing covert military operations in foreign countries and told him that he is to never, ever be seen or have his name put on Facebook.

My opinion on this is that it must be so wretchedly unhappy and uncomfortable to live in that much fear EVERYDAY! I have this image in my head of some military duche bag yelling at this guy saying “You shall never, ever be on Facebook or your family will die! The enemy will track you down and murder each and every child of yours and find where you live and come after you.

Meanwhile, I got permission from him to post a LinkedIn post that even had his name in the second line. Then, in the first comment, I added a URL link to the blog of his where the content was derived. Again, sends people to our company webpage where his name, photo and resume (CV) sits for anyone to find. I personally think this is all ridiculous. Right now, I feel fed up. I feel like he hasn’t produced any content for our company in a really long time.

It makes me want to simply right back, “You are CRAZY. Now, what about that blog you promised everyone that was due back in December. This is January.” It makes me want to say “Hey, how is your workload? How are your billable hours? Have you met your goal? How many clients did you piss off last year?

He spent probably 4.5 hours last night and this morning…along with wasting my boss, our president and our marketing coordinator talking about a freaking Facebook post

Error #2 on my part, I went ahead and posted the “approved” LinkedIn post, then instead of explaining my plan to Carlin, it was easier and simpler to just post it myself to Facebook…which admittingly it was out of our normal procedure that we did in 2020. The last week of 2020 though, she was out on vacation and I did all of the postings myself. I had the photo ready to go and copied all of the words to create a new company Facebook post. What has been happening recently is that I have heard that it is stronger for the Facebook and LinkedIn algorithm if you post a link in the comments, instead of trying to send people off of the platform by having the link outside to your website embedded in the post. The algorithm likes your post…and will show your post more, if the link out side is not in the post.

Everything was cool with the LinkedIn post, I posted it, added the link to the comments section, then just went over to make the Facebook post. What happened in Facebook thought, was that I took an extra step and deleted this guys name from the post. I thought everything was cool. Well, what happened that got him disturbed was when I put the hyperlink in the comments section, it auto-populated a photo of this guy because it was sending people to his expert page on our website. That could be called error #3 on my part because I posted the link… however, in my defense, his name was not mentioned anywhere. It just had his little thumbnail photo from our website.

Another major resentment I have is how he decides to spend an hour typing an email, tagging my boss and our president, about this bullshit. All of this could have been handled better if he would have called or texted me. We could have talked through it, edited the Facebook post by deleting the link in the comments and simply deleting the one line in the post where it says “to see the comments below for a link to this blog.” I think I need to set a boundary and stop this abuse. I had good intentions and the post was quality content for our clients.

I propose that we post the Facebook post again but not put the reference to his blog because it will put his little black and white portrait on the deep, dark world of freaking Facebook. Grow up and move on dude…. Sorry, you aren’t that important.