How to Make Social Media Work For You Part I

What's up everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal—my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. So today and next episode, I am talking about how to make social media work for us, rather than against us. This first of the two episodes will be about how social can work for us as people and professionals. And the second episode, next episode, will be about how social media can work for us as founders and managers. Let's hop into it.

So last week, many of you may already know, the Wall Street Journal published the findings of an extensive investigation into Facebook's failure to fix persistent societal issues that were created by its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, over the last several years. And the files include five separate articles that cover topics ranging from a VIP account program called XCheck that basically included celebrities and politicians and had their posts effectively avoid the algorithms of the platform for actual individuals to say, go or no-go on some of their posts, all the way to the negative effects of Instagram on teens to Facebook being used for drug- and human trafficking over the years. 

 I want to talk about one example that stood out to me from reading these files before hopping into how we should think about making social media work for us versus against us. So the second article of the Facebook Files was focused on Instagram and specifically how Instagram has become a toxic place for many people mentally, but specifically the article was focused on teenage girls. And there was research that was run, and two stats I want to throw out to you. The first is that 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

The second stat is that 40% of Instagram users who reported feeling unattractive said the feeling of being unattractive began on the app. And this made me think about not just Facebook, but this internet-enabled world that we live in and the social platforms that have basically become our digital town square that we connect with millions of people on my goal for these next two episodes is for us to be more thoughtful about how we navigate the internet in a way that works for us. Some of these reflections will be through the lens of how it can work for us as people, others will be through the lens of how it can work for us as professionals, and finally, there will be a few reflections on how the internet can work for us as managers and founders of companies. So let's start from the top.

Assemble a Toolkit

The first reflection from the Facebook Files is that we all, all of us need a toolkit for combating the shitty parts of social media. Social media is an amazing vice for getting us to procrastinate. I can speak to that firsthand. Social media can become a concentrated place for bullying, anger, and polarization, and social media can create our own echo chambers, where we hear the perspective of people who look like us, think like us, and come from similar backgrounds to us.

And so what we all need to ask ourselves the question of is, do we have the tools necessary that allow us to protect our time? That allow us to avoid bad energy and invite good energy? And finally, and most importantly, do we have the tools to invite diversity, diversity of people and diversity of perspective in our lives? So that's the first reflection. The second reflection of how to make social media work for us is the, very simply, there has never been a more important point in history for us all to have a deep sense of self. What does that mean? Well, I believe having a sense of self is knowing who you are, knowing what motivates you, and knowing the values that you have in your life, truly understanding who you are and operating based on your own internal operating system.

And the reason that I think sense of self has never been more important is because social media very simply has become performative, especially on Instagram, in a world where, like I just shared the stat of, girls are looking to models on Instagram and it's making them basically anchor their own happiness based on someone else's looks and the look of someone else's body to honestly, me on Twitter, anchoring my own happiness based on the people that I follow on the platform. So I want to be clear that I have felt social comparison on social media, a ton over the last five years.

And I personally am working really hard to develop my own sense of self because I feel this constant gravitational pull to accomplish more, not just because I'm someone who never feels satisfied, but also because when my feed is made up by entrepreneurs that have built multiple billion dollar companies, or my feed is filled up by venture capitalists who were the first check into some of the largest tech companies in the world, that has now become my reference point for success. And if that's my reference point for success, I don't feel very successful. So before moving onto the next reflection, I just want to share three things that I do to try and grow my sense of self.

Grow Your Sense of Self

The first is practicing gratitude, basically a way of taking stock of all of the good in my life, the accomplishments that we tend to gloss over. And this is a new phenomenon for me over the years of building Morning Brew, my co-founder and I were notoriously guilty of not congratulating ourselves, not celebrating small wins, and simply focusing on the destination. And then we got to the destination of selling our company and we realized how the best part of the whole thing were the small nuanced experiences throughout the journey rather than the destination itself. So I practice gratitude as much as I can.

The second is we all compare ourselves and we live on a spectrum of how much we drive comparison and how much we require validation to be happy. But I think there's actually an interesting way where we can use the comparison against itself. And so from time to time, I will feed my comparison in the right way. Basically what I do is I ask myself, Who are the people that are going to be with me for the long haul, the people that I care most about? My people who will support me through all of the wins in my career and in my life and all of the failures. And then I ask myself, what do these people care about what I'm doing?

And the answer of the question is all of my people, my family, my girlfriend, my closest friends, all they care about is that they just want me to be happy and they don't look at me as Alex, the entrepreneur. They look at me as Alex, the person, this multidimensional person. And the reason I bring that up is it makes me realize how ridiculous I am for making decisions and drawing comparison and determining my success based on people I see online, who are not my people. It doesn't mean they're bad people, but it's not my people, who are the people I should actually be caring about what they think if I'm going to care about what people think.So, the second thing I do is I feed my comparison in the right way. 

And the third thing I do is honestly, just spending time with myself. It is so hard for us to understand ourselves and get to know ourselves, if we don't take time to ourselves,, whether it's hiking, biking, meditating, taking a digital detox, because the more we spend our time on social media, in meetings, basically being kind of at the peril of the internet, all of our thoughts are going to be dictated by external factors versus us getting a chance to actually hear our own internal narrative and ask ourselves the hard questions, like what gives us energy, what makes us happy, etcetera.So make sure you're giving yourself enough time to just be with yourself.

I want to share two more reflections about how social can work for us in our personal and professional lives, but first, a quick break. 

Social Media Has a Perfect Memory

Let's hop back into it. So we've talked about how we all need a toolkit for combating the shitty parts of social media, like combating how it causes us to procrastinate, be part of ecosystems that lead to bullying, anger, and polarization, and also echo chambers with a lot of similar voices and perspectives to our own. And I also talk about how having a sense of self is more important than ever before because of social comparison on social platforms.

Now, I want to talk about social media and how it has a perfect memory. This is a great thing, but it also can be a really bad thing. And honestly, this is probably one of the scariest parts of social for me. This fact forces us to be thoughtful, but at times censored. It also creates a fear of expression and it's kind of paradoxical, right? Because we live in a world where social media platforms incentivize us to post more on their platforms in order for us to build our audiences, right? So we are incentivized to create more content and post more on these platforms. But the issue is, is the more that we post more on these platforms, the more opportunity there is for us to say something wrong or for something to backfire in the future.

And it's inevitable, you don't have to post something egregious or tone deaf or inflammatory or racist to feel the ramifications of social media, very simply society changes and something that is culturally appropriate today may not be culturally appropriate 10 years from now, but 10 years from now, our posts from today will be judged based on future standards, not today's standards and the executive producer of Founders Journal, Brian Henry, made a great point about how there are so many great TV shows, you know, from Friends to Seinfeld—TV shows that are hilarious, that especially during their time were very culturally appropriate, that as society has evolved, some of their jokes have not evolved in as appropriate of a way.

On one hand, I feel great about the fact that we as people hold society and ourselves to the standard of keeping out voices that are divisive or inappropriate. But also I think that the permanence of content online can lead to self-censorship where people won't be their most creative and expressive selves out of fear of being criticized in the future. This takes me to the other side of the coin, as it relates to social media and the internet, which is the massive positive. The internet is the greatest creator of leverage around connection and knowledge in the history of the world. I talk about this a lot, but I don't think it can be reiterated enough. It's really simple.

The Internet Changed Connection and Knowledge-sharing

In 1983, when the internet was founded, basically that was the start of us going from a fragmented society to a centralized society. It meant you went from being able to connect with a few hundred people in your town square to a few billion people in the internet town squares of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Instagram, etcetera. And this connection has made the cost of creating content almost zero, which has led to two profound changes in our society. First there's infinite content that has been created. So you can access that for free and learn and grow as a person faster than ever before. And I'm constantly seeing posts on social media, by people basically saying they don't understand why people are getting college degrees anymore when the internet has become our university.I don't know if I fully agree with that, but I understand the sentiment. 

And the second is that you have the ability to publish content and attract large audiences that gravitate towards the content you create. So a big reason we've seen businesses reach billion-dollar valuations faster than ever—and as of July, there are 291 unicorns this year, which is the most ever in a year—from that to folks like Mr. Beast on YouTube reaching nearly 70 million subscribers or authors like James Clear, reaching a million subscribers on their email newsletters. This all comes down to the power of the internet to connect us and make acquiring or creating knowledge free.

To Sum Up 

And so these are four really important things we should all keep in mind as builders to have social work for us as people and as professionals, we need toolkits to combat the shitty parts of social. We need to have a deeper sense of self than ever before. We need to understand the pros and cons of social having a perfect memory, and we should appreciate the incredible leverage that the internet and social has created around connection and knowledge. Now I'd love to hear from you. What specifically do you do in your personal and professional life to make the internet and social media work for you versus against you? Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any thoughts or questions you have about this topic.

And finally, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for Founders Journal on Apple Podcasts. It is the number one way to grow the show. So I'd love for you to help me and this community get to 750 reviews for the pod. And if you liked this episode, like I said, at the top, next episode is the second part on how we make social media work for us. But instead of as people and professionals, I'm going to focus on how it can work for us as managers and founders. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.