I was at a digital marketing conference this week and listened to a great keynote speech from Roy Sekoff who is the co-creator and President of HuffPost Live, the online news broadcast arm of the Huffington Post. He said a lot of great things but one funny point in made in particular is how we all have 2 personalities online: social and search.
Social is your ideal self, it is your super ego. Assuming you are one of the well-educated folks who visit this site – think about how your present your thoughts and opinions on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you have a social footprint.
If you are like me and have a professional life to uphold, you present yourself on social as the best you can be. Your best photos, your smartest one-liners, checking in at only the best restaurants. It isn’t a lie (well….unless it is, in which case you don’t count) – it’s just you at your best.
Your other personality is search. You may not ever admit to the world you are one of the 150,000 people a month who want to see “Lady Gaga Naked” but what you type into that Google search bar is also who you are, it’s just more of your everyday thoughts and not how you present your ideal social self. In a way you can describe search as what is going on in your head that you just don’t talk about because maybe those thoughts would get you in trouble.
So that brings us to Mark Cuban whose name is making waves today after alleged prejudice remarks in the wake of the whole Donald Sterling mess. You can find a clip of the interview conducted by Inc.com here. If you don’t want to watch the 3 minute clip and are just looking for the payoff quote without any context, here it is:
“If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face–white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere–I’m walking back to the other side of the street,”
Day in a day out we praise Mark Cuban for his honesty, even when controversial. In other words we appreciate that out of all of the high ranking sports executives in the spotlight, we appreciate that Mark isn’t just some always-social, press-release robot self. He is honest, candid, and gives us peaks into his thinking – his search self.
So I don’t understand, given Mark’s track record of intelligent thinking, how anyone is taking that above quote and firing off criticisms before understanding the context and the substance of his point. Here is a Twitter spat between Mark and ESPN’s Bomani Jones on specifically the ‘hoodie’ thing – one that at the end of the day is a pointless argument given the lack of context of the whole interview and ultimately changes the conversation to something easy to attack. That shouldn’t happen.
ESPN’s Dan LeBatard is consistent when it comes to these land mines of quotes that have the power to take over a news cycle and his point is that we (the people in the online mob of opinions) use these quotes and isolated incidents as symbols to attack an issue that is easy to attack. It quickly isn’t about Mark Cuban, or Donald Sterling, or Don Imus, or Richie Incognito or the context around them – but we just respond to the catalyst that allows us to feed our super ego social self with our popular opinions. We are anti-racism! We are anti-bullying! We are going to be loud so that everyone knows it! It creates and fuels the digital mob, just waiting in the wake for the next hot button to be pushed.
So when you see this Mark Cuban story, appreciate his honesty because he isn’t afraid to air his internal Google search bar. And we should continue to encourage it from our sports business elite. Don’t turn him into a symbol because of an honest point. The thoughts we have in our head, even when we know they are wrong and sometimes even prejudice in nature, do not make us bad people. The human mind is complex and does weird things. The key is how we act and treat others and if you take the 3 minutes to just watch the clip, you’ll know Mark Cuban is actually taking action to be part of the solution.
In the interview Cuban admits, “I know that I’m not perfect.”
No one is Mark. We all have our internal Google search bar.
