Today I am sharing my honest thoughts and feeling about the social media drama of the last week. I think you will find parts of this interesting, and encouraging, and there is a slim chance you will find them inspiring.
Five days ago I lost my Facebook profile. There was a security breach and a tech loop, so I can’t log back in which means to the outside world, I have disappeared. And it’s pretty disorienting to have a social media persona, a place in which this is where I am for so many hours a day, and then just to disappear. And so a lot of people have just reached out, been so supportive, so compassionate, and I wanted to let you know how we’re doing, what I’m thinking, and what I’m feeling with all of this, just because of all the messages that have been coming in. I hope that this is helpful and encouraging for everyone.
So the first thing, I’m not mad at Facebook, not even for a second. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get through the tech loop and they kept saying, “Go here to get your security code,” but I couldn’t log in here. And that was so frustrating. But when we realized that it was gone, I haven’t been mad. Many people have shown compassion and also kind of lamented about this is the problem with Facebook, or mentioned leaving Facebook. And I have a lot of thoughts about it…
I’m so grateful that over the past 7 years I have been able to use social media to connect with all of you. Instead of having to have a long commute to an office, I have been able to connect with people across the world without leaving my home. I’m so grateful to Facebook for that.
We’ve been really clear about Facebook’s role in our business. It exists to amplify a message that we work really hard on. It is not Facebook’s job to make sure I don’t have these kinds of issues. It’s not Facebook’s job to make sure they push my content in front of people. It’s Facebook’s job to do its best to create a positive user experience. And I get to use this tool to reach people in ways that would have been impossible without it. So we don’t have ill feelings towards Facebook other than, of course, just like the natural human frustration. Like, oh man, this stinks.
This really would have been no different than if I was well established in a networking group and the building burned down and the networking group ceased to exist. Or it’s not much different than when COVID happened and people who were used to going to farmers’ markets every week and all of a sudden there were no farmers’ markets. So I’m grateful we can just rebuild… we’re in good standing. We didn’t break any rules. We have all of our groups, we have all of our business pages.
I’m not going to disrespect the platform. It’s their playground. And we have been playing on it and we will continue to play on it. And also, we’re not leaving Facebook, just like I’m not leaving Southern California. That’s where my people are.
And Facebook, it’s where our people are. And no one else has left just because we had a security issue and I lost my personal profile. And so staying, for me, of a value is to stay with my people. Like there’s loyalty. If my community and clients are on Facebook, I’ll be on Facebook. It would take a lot more to fully move me from the platform other than a security issue and a tech loop. It’s not enough to move me away from where my people are. That’s one deep thought.
Second deep thought. Since I started Emerge Sales Training, we’ve worked very closely alongside some really brilliant coaches, those who understand the online space. Everything is backed up. We have an email list, we use GroupTrack CRM. I anticipated being able to find most of my business contacts very easily. We retained access to our previous membership portal. We can pull lists of previous clients. I have clients in my phone. We have multiple backups on our business pages’ profiles and ad accounts just in case one gets shut down because we know it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.
And so again, this kind of comes back to really understanding what is my role in my business and what is the social media provider’s role in our business? And making sure I’m just not expecting it to be my everything. like, “Oh my gosh, you have all this content. It must be so hard to lose all the content.” Well, first, Karen retained admin access to all of our groups. So she’s able to view all of the content by the person formally known as Tasha Strand Smith. And it’s going to take some time to re-upload everything and that’s ok.
I have published daily for years and I will continue to publish daily for years. I’m not going anywhere. People say, “Well, the content is gone.” But I am the content. And because I have developed the skill of a prolific content creator, if we have to rerecord something, it’s just going to be better, more effective, more current. It’ll match my current skill set, which continues to develop through the daily and weekly practice of content creation of things that are relevant to our audience.
I need to rebuild my network. So here’s what this means for our business. I need to go through lists from the other backup and I need to message people and say, “Hey, this is me. Also, how are you?” I have a unique opportunity to have meaningful conversations with people I might not otherwise have a reason to connect with. I’m not trying to do it overnight. I’m not trying to go from zero to 2,700 friends overnight. I’m just going to do a little at a time, enjoy the conversations, and know that that meaningful connection with a few people will always outweigh lack of connection with a lot of people.
Number of friends is a vanity game. Depth of these relationships and my ability to network through the relationships I have is something that I don’t even know if that needs to be a focus. Just kind of a way of being. I’m comfortable in startup mode. I know how to start up businesses. I know how to start them from the ground up. It’s maintaining them at this like 500 to a million dollar year level that is tricky. Starting from scratch, not a big deal. Whatever I’ve built once I can build again, faster, stronger, better.
I heard someone say a few years back, when we’re rebuilding areas of our business, we’re not building them from scratch. We’re building them from experience. And as a business owner, we just know parts of our business are going to fall apart. For you, you’ll have legs fall apart, leaders leave, we’ll have platforms go down. That’s part of being a business owner. And no, I do not like being accountable in that way, but I also don’t want a boss. So there’s give and take with all that.
I remember early in my career people were upset that companies weren’t stable, that you couldn’t count on a company because at any time they could let you down, they could lay you off. You could be investing 15, 20 years in this company and then they could do layoffs. And I remember experience that as a young professional, just like, well, I mean, the company is not the stable part, I’m the stable part. And so I worked really hard to develop my skill set, develop my consistency, develop my stability.
So it really didn’t matter what the company was doing because I could just take my skills and create revenue anywhere I wanted to go. So if I was selling knives, I could do that. If I was selling education, I could do that. I could lead people to do that thing. I could obviously sell sales training and leadership coaching. And if this goes down, I could sell something else. Because the skills that I have, even if clients move away from me, the skills that I have will never leave me.
The biggest asset in my business is not my personal Facebook audience. It’s not even our business Facebook audience or our email list. The biggest assets are me and Karen and our skill sets and our values. So it doesn’t really matter what the market takes away from us. We can’t lose the things that are actually the core of what makes us successful.
I have had a bit of an identity awakening and I’ve asked myself, “Now that I’m starting over with my online persona, how do I want to show up?” The truth is I don’t want to change a thing. I’ll just do three to five posts a week, get things back going again, and the business will run on all the other platforms that it’s designed to run on.
We’ve been wise with our money. In good sales times, we’ve saved. And if we get some blowback financially from this, well, we can absorb it. Our hard work, listening to our advisors, lack of materialism mean we can take financial hits and it won’t impact our ability to run our business. We can rebuild and we can still support our families.
Truthfully, the biggest loss is my personal network, not my business network. And it’s my actual friends that I’m really missing the most right now. And this is the part that I’m grieving, but I have faith that I’ll find them again. And the closest people in my circle can find me through Charlie or they could call me if anyone needs me. And so we’ll get all that back over time.
I’m not sure what about this is helpful for you. I don’t really have an agenda necessarily or specific action that I want you to take. Well, maybe. I think I just don’t want you to be scared of social media assets either way. I don’t want you to withdraw from social media out of fear that you might lose it. I don’t want you to go and be consistent but still be fearful that what if I do lose it? Social media assets, they’re such a blessing. I’m so grateful for them, even when things like this go hard.
We’ll just keep showing up every day. We’re going to keep asking you what’s hard for you in your business. We’re going to solve for it. We’re going to help you increase your skill and therefore your encouragement and motivation and impact and income.
And it doesn’t matter if my friend profile has 150 people on it or 3000 people on it. We’re going to show up every single day. And that is what makes our business successful.
I hope this was encouraging for you today. <3 Tasha. P.S. You can send me a friend request here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1201543593195092/user/100009344218376/ 🙂 I would love to connect.
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