In both this book and my last book This is Social Media, I’ve been keen to stress that regardless of what the various hypesters and marketeers will tell you, social media interaction isn’t free. One of my favourite tricks at social media seminars is to kick off by asking how much it costs to put a YouTube video online. The answer, usually, is ‘nothing.’ My response is that this is perfectly correct as long as you value your time, or that of the person doing the upload, at zero as I’ve said elsewhere. Immediately you start paying them, or paying someone to demonstrate the upload for the first time so you’re paying two people, the costs start mounting up.

Of course the costs are tiny if you’re just doing the one upload but then nobody with any sense is going to leave it at a single upload. You’re going to be talking about paying people to interact, to sit and put entries onto Facebook pages, and to send answers to queries.