If there’s anything you take away from this series on How To Be (Internet) Famous, let it be this: When it comes to marketing, few things you do online really matter.

Let me give you an example involving a major television network and something I just worked on.

Faster Than A Speeding Bullet

Let’s say you’re the CW. (Hint: Not the network I actually did anything with) and you have a huge hit with The Flash. The show is funny. Entertaining. Heartfelt at times. It doesn’t take itself seriously like Arrow does, especially when dealing with science fiction stuff that could be an audience killer if handled poorly. The cast is fairly diverse, which I really like, and is also kind of rare for a superhero property on television and in film.

The Flash has all these great elements going for it. But how can you repeat the success of The Flash with the other shows you’re launching this Fall?

A logical person would say, “Make sure the product doesn’t suck”, but in the real world, logic is rare.

Now, let’s nip one little thing in the bud: “It’s a superhero show” doesn’t really fly for explaining the success of The Flash or seeing the future and thinking that’ll be enough to launch a similar show successfully on the same network.

Think of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC for a moment. That show kind of sucks, and I think it’s sort of clear at this point that ABC / Disney keeps the show around only as an advertisement for the Marvel movies. So anything they lose on S.H.I.E.L.D. as a corporation, they make back elsewhere. (I really, really, want to like S.H.I.E.L.D. but so far it’s done nothing but promise awesome stuff and then not even come close to delivering on it.) So, “it’s a superhero show” doesn’t answer the question of how to launch a new show successfully.

Keep in mind: The number of people with access to CW dwarfs the readership of your average comic by an incredible margin. So although you’d think there’s this massive crossover and fan following that’ll go from comic to screen, you’d be wrong. An important thing to note in general is that fandom, however you want to define that, does not translate well between mediums. You may have a lot of YouTube channel followers, but that doesn’t guarantee you’re going to sell a lot of books. So all because a person / character is popular elsewhere doesn’t mean they’ll popular in other places. Just ask Grace Helbig.

Even if the character is The Flash, who has been around as long as Batman, and Batman’s been around for 75+ years now. So, that tactic is out (and also a damn good reason why studios and networks should ignore Comic-Con in San Diego. There is absolutely ZERO correlation between a big presence there, and the online hype it generates translating to, successfully launching a show or Hollywood blockbuster. Constantine, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (which was also excellent), and the lukewarm performance of Watchmen is all proof of that, and further proof of what I said about about few things online making a difference.

Scott Pilgrim and Watchmen, among other things debuting / showed off at Comic-Con, had a lot of online buzz that translated into nothing. For more on online hype not translating into box office results, I covered this in Social Media Is Bullshit.)

So what do you do if you’re the CW? Well, you get kind of stupid.

It’s ALL Bullshit

You see, I made a huge mistake when I was writing Social Media Is Bullshit. If I had done the research I’ve been doing now at the time I was researching that book, I would have found that not only is social media marketing (mostly) bullshit, but viral marketing, “growth hacking”, the lean startup approach, and SEO marketing are also bullshit. In fact, aside from paid advertising online, I’m hard pressed to recommend any sort of marketing tactic that you’d do exclusively online with no offline component to go with it.

It’d all be PR, which is something we’ll talk about in another edition of this column.

(The exception, yet again, being if you’re part of The Big Club.)

But if you’re a big television network, or if you’ve just bought into the hype the way stockbrokers, the media, the venture capitalists, and the tech companies themselves have, you think if you pull off some kind of cool stunt, that’ll be the thing that launches your next product successfully. This is the conversation I had with the people working with the network. And that idea is partly right.

A lot of people forget this, but if you go all the way back to 1995, Netscape had their IPO. A company that was less than a year-old, which didn’t make any money, went public. Why? Well, they were (rightfully) worried about Microsoft choking the life out of them (the exact terms allegedly used by a Microsoft executive is that they wanted to “cut off their air supply”), and their competitor had gone public, but the actual reason was that the IPO, to Netscape cofounder Jim Barksdale, was a publicity stunt. One that worked out beautifully, unless you count all the shareholders and people who came rushing to the stock market after that IPO and got hoodwinked by Mary Meeker (who inexplicably is still listened to by the tech industry) and her analyst friends and lost their money when the bubble burst.

So yes, “the big stunt” is a viable tactic, and it’s one that many of the multibillion dollar tech companies today have all utilized to get themselves traction, traffic, and investment dollars. Netscape wanted the traffic, time, and attention that would come with the media attention. (Ditto for Amazon, which benefitted greatly from media attention in the run up to their own IPO.)

It may be cool and hip to dismiss PR, but that dismissal comes from arrogance bred within the tech world by people spending other people’s money on business models that often don’t work or don’t even exist.

BUT! If you’re a big network like the CW, you’re not thinking publicity stunt. You’re thinking “something sexy and cool involving social media!” You then bring in your advertising agency, where good people work, but those good people all kind of know that it’s bullshit, so they’re going to tell you what they want to hear because they want to keep on living in their nice New York City / San Francisco / Los Angeles apartments.

So you go to the agency and say, “Let’s do something with tech!” And they’ll say “Ok! What do you want to do?” And then you’ll be like, “LOL. I don’t know!” And they’ll come back with some insane shit like iBeacons.

iBeacons, by the way, are awesome, but if you know anything about iBeacons right now at this very moment, you know that the technology does not work very well. But you’ll notice that I said “if you know anything about iBeacons”, which most agency people don’t. So the agency people come back and go, “Let’s use iBeacons!” and you’ll go, “OK! Here’s $500,000 for the activation”. (Which, if you’re wondering why agency people won’t shut up about beacons in Adweek and AdAge, now you know. They don’t know how it works, but they sure know how money does!)

You, the network, then go and do your stunt, and it bombs because of course it’ll bomb, and then your show comes on the air, and it bombs as well.

Whoops.

So what do you do?

Go back and look at that Netscape example. They did a smart thing, a big PR stunt. No tech was involved beyond the fact that they themselves were a tech company. (Or, if you want a more recent example, AirBnB’s Obama O’s. Tech company, offline PR stunt.)

If you want to launch something, and I know you do if you’re reading this series, the big stunt is a viable tactic, BUT! Look at where the focus is! It’s offline! Not online! I want you to stand up, if you’re not reading this in a public place, and say that again and again and again, like a sweaty Steve Ballmer, “offline. Offline. Offline. Offline.” If you want to succeed online, you need to get your offline shit straightened out first.

“Offline. Offline. Offline.” Why do you think so much of this series thus far has focused on the real world and not the Internet? Offline. Offline. Offline.

There are a lot of reasons why I’m saying this. Many of them are boring. If you’d like to be bored by them, you may feel free to ask me. But the tl;dr version is this: The platforms we constantly hear about in the news are nowhere near as big as they’re advertised to be, and once you factor in what exactly accounts for an active user and how and what and how long those active users actually use the service, it’s even smaller. People themselves do NOT have big social networks, so even your most active friend is only going to be able to spread something for you so far.

Put another way, when you see a blog or media outlet say something like “This thing is blowing up the Internet”, you can safely call bullshit on that because “blowing up the Internet” is code for, “I saw this on another blog / media outlet website and I wanted to repost it for pageviews.” It has nothing to do with ACTUAL popularity, which is what you’re striving for.

Why do you think we forget these “memes” (I hate that term, so does the guy who coined it as used in this new Internet context) so quickly? Because many of them are not at all popular. You’re just seeing them because it trickled up the food chain from one blog to another.

Oh yeah, and so much of the online statistics can easily be faked. I’m not just talking bots. I’m talking thousands of bots piloted by software to make them all look like real and legit followers in order to trigger the dumb algorithms Facebook and Twitter have which in turn, makes the thing look popular, which in turn (in the case of Twitter and Instagram) gets the idiot journalists who don’t realize they’re being duped all hot and bothered and in turn want to post about the “hot” and “popular” thing that isn’t actually popular.

This is the world we live in. You need to remember that. It’s ALL bullshit. And you know what the sad thing is? This isn’t new bullshit either. If you go digging deep into the history of the first Web bubble (because you better believe we’re well into the second one right now), it’s the same thing. There is very little difference. Don’t take my word for it. Pick up dot.con. Just as one example. Go read dot.con by John Cassidy and then just swap out names like Netscape with Snapchat or Twitter. (Or Yelp. Man if you own shares in any social media company, you better start dumping them all now.)

The key to all of this is to put the world back into the right context. The online stuff is hyped up by greedy idiots looking for money or traffic to their websites or both. It’s wealthy people getting other wealthy people excited about shit that doesn’t deliver. You may think it delivers because a wealthy idiot like Gary Vaynerchuck (multimillionaire prior to social media) told you that it delivers. It doesn’t!

If you want results, real results, you go offline. Because if you do the offline stuff right, then the online stuff will take care of itself. That’s right. Word of mouth, the sole engine of marketing that has ever been worth a damn, is fueled by what’s going on offline. Here’s a quick example: Yik Yak. Why’d that take off? Because OFFLINE kids in their schools were talking about it. Because the app found itself embedded within the OFFLINE social network of those kids, and they all started paying attention to it, which in turn fueled its ONLINE success.

We have it all backwards. We think the tail wags the dog. That online drives offline results, but it rarely works that way. If you’re the network, the thing you should do is use the online stuff for market research, and then target where those customers / viewers are OFFLINE and let them seed things and form groups for you online. But the network ain’t going to do that because it’s not cool or hip to do.

You can’t afford to piss away your time and money like that. You gotta get your head straight and focus. Because that network? They didn’t have their head straight. Most people don’t. They’re going to waste a bunch of money, get shit results, and the show may or may not suffer for it. In fact, that’s the last thing I’ll leave you with: That show, or the show of our hypothetical example with the CW, may succeed or fail for a multitude of factors. And you know where those factors are going to gel?

That’s right. Offline.

Image Credits: Steve Ballmer & The Flash CW logo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. “Quality Bullshit” by Doug Beckers on Flickr.