When your ideas are spreading, when your work is remarkable, when your organization has built a social ratchet that works, one of the side effects will be a significant social media presence. People will talk about you in ways that they like to talk… online.

On the other hand, if you spend all your time beginning at the end, grooming your social network, tweezing your Insta posts, hyping your tweets–nothing much is going to happen.

The simple proof of this is that brands with ten or twenty times the social media impact almost never have ten or twenty times as many people working as “social media specialists.”

And worth noting: The Mona Lisa has a huge social media presence. Her picture is everywhere. But she doesn’t tweet. She’s big on social media because she’s an icon, but she’s not an icon because she’s big on social media.

The narrative of social media grooming is a seductive one, but it’s as much of a dead end as spending an extra hour picking out which tie to wear before giving a speech.