Quiddity! - the SEO Blog

One of the most popular styles of blog posts within the social media/ internet marketing/ SEO niche seems to be that of the good, old fashioned analogy. This is where a particular technique or action is correlated with something more everday as a way of providing an easy to understand explanation.

Ruud over at Search Engine People posted a wonderful one just the other day “How SEO is like Shovelling the Snow”, and Jeff followed this up with the “Social Media Hangovers...”. Every week there are more of these analogies appearing. Shana Albert over at Social Desire has become a master (or should that be mistress) of the entertaining, informative analogy.

Well it might be the fact I'm breaking up for the Christmas holidays today (two weeks – Woohoo! - Get back jealous fiends!), that has put me in the mood for a bit of good-natured, festive japery, but at the risk of cracking this particular niche straight down the middle, and possibly breaking the internet altogether (Does typing Google into Google really do this?), I have chosen to take this particular trend by the hand and lead it to its natural conclusion. If you hadn't already gathered that by the title. This is why Social Media is one big analogy.

• An analogy is a similarity between the like features of two things. Social media is like this in that it is itself an analogy to the real world. Whereas business has traditionally always been carried out in boardrooms; at meetings; over the phone; in the darkest of corners at conventions or conferences; this is no longer the case. The mantra “It's not what you know, it's who you know,” has always rung true (those of us that have lived on the bottom rung of the ladder know this more than anything), and as I said, networking has always been a pretty much hands-on undertaking. But Social media has changed all that. Social networks have created a metaphysical community that run both parallel to and are intertwined with the real world, a walking contradiction so to speak. Marketing specifically for the internet, whether it be through SMO, SEO, SEM or some other such acronym, is carried out almost exclusively online (obviously its natural home), and can be done so without ever having to meet anybody face to face (a savvy career choice for all the introverts out there). Physical business, away from the realms of internet marketing also uses social networking, though obviously not to such a large extent, becoming part of the metaphysical community and in turn itself becoming a form of internet marketing, hence the intertwining. Confused yet? I know I am.
  

So what was I saying? Oh yes, that the social media realm is itself just a big analogy.

• I've established that social media is an analogy to the real world, and so this is where I elaborate on the original premise. If you take a look at the real world itself, as opposed to the metaphysical one online, you will see that it is built on analogies.
• Money makes the world go round, so they say. They also say money can't buy happiness –give me the chance, I'll prove them wrong. But what is money? Take a look at your bank account – and before anybody reports me I'm not phishing here. Your bank account is nothing more than a serious of digits on a computer screen. Some people have more of these digits, others (like myself - boohoo) have less. These digits are an analogy for real folding money, the paper and coins you place in your wallet or pocket giving you that little extra swagger in your stride.
• In turn, real folding money is itself an analogy for something else. Taking into account that money is a pretty much abstract concept holding no physical value and now controlled by and large by the government of a country through various shifty means I don't even want to think about (grouped together under the umbrella term fiat money), its worth was once linked to the gold deposits horded by the country of its origin (representative money). This itself stemmed from the use of actual gold as a means to trade and barter by.
• Yet another analogy, stemming back to the day a very long, long time ago when some Smart Alec decided to place a value on a few bits of useless, shiny metal.

So there it is: Gold = Notes and Coins = Digits in a bank account = The concept of money = The foundation on which the real world operates. Our entire existence is based on a series of analogies which point to social media... Or is it the other way around?

All right then. I hold my hands up. It's been a long week and I've failed spectacularly in explaining why Social Media is one big Analogy. It can't be done. Not this close to Christmas anyway. This was a foolish endeavour to attempt to undertake in the first place, but when I get the urge to write, I write. I'm long overdue a lie down anyway.

The crux of the matter is that analogies are easily the best way to explain something to the uninitiated in simple enough terms so that it won't be misunderstood (this one being the obvious exception), and there are plenty of great ones out there amidst the land of Web 2.0.

Anyway, if I've not recovered from my long lie down over the next few days, let me wish you all a very merry Christmas! Hopefully I'll be putting the odd posting up throughout the holiday (odd being the operative word) and normal service - dare I call it that - should be resumed in the new year.

Merry Christmas