“What should we watch?”

The rallying cry should ring familiar. Netflix, Hulu and their ilk use sophisticated algorithms to provide tailor-made recommendations based on your viewing habits, and those of your friends.

And Chill takes this to the next, logical inflection: a chat bot you interact with in natural language. The bot analyzes words and phrases to deliver personalized movie recommendations, complemented by a YouTube trailer for the flick it’s suggested. Coolness factor aside – because chatting with an A.I. as if it were a human is nothing if not cool – And Chill is just one more bot heralding the renaissance of chat.

Let’s get something out of the way: there is no static measure or definition of engagement. The word is amorphous, and inherently resistant to a hardline definition. Anyone that tells you that Engagement = X+Y with a  dash of Z mixed in is either deluded or deceitful. The definition cannot be static, by virtue of the varying metrics of success placed on a social media campaign by the brand running it.

In the past hour, while doing my daily blog crawl for news & notes, I’ve come across FIVE articles that address “Facebook Engagement” or “Driving Twitter Engagements” or “Pinning for Success”. All of them lost me within the first two lines of text. I’m done with articles that start out telling me “Social Media is here to stay!” or that “People are 10 Trillion times more likely to engage with PHOTOS on Facebook”. Really? This is still news?

There are fundamental drivers of every human action. Many people are aware of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but there are other theories about our innate motivations as well, such as William Glasser’s ‘Choice Theory’. I’d venture a bet that 95% of readers have encountered one of these lists at least once in their lives. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, in almost all lists of the basic human needs there is a need called “Love/Belonging”, the need that is fulfilled by acceptance of family, friends, and society at large.

This need to be accepted and respected by others is powerful and universal. We all feel it, and now social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare have thrown us all quite a curve ball in terms of what must occur for us to feel fulfilled in this area. As a result, what was once a genuine effort to fulfill our need for love/belonging has mutated into the most widespread and deep-seated epidemic of narcissism the world has ever seen.

Mediocrity should be a hard pill for your brand to swallow. You should not be OK with doing a job that can be considered “good enough”. This isn’t a rally-time bar hookup, and just doing a thing isn’t the same as mastering its craft. Are we all guilty of falling prey to this sort of cantankerous folly? Hells yeah. Do we know better? For sure. Does realizing either of those things make us in any way, shape or form immune? Nope. But when it comes to a well-designed, and well-executed social media strategy for your brand, simply put: mediocre won’t cut it.

There’s a growing trend in online communications, and I – for one – am not too thrilled. With increased aggression and startling frequency, quotients of the brands on Facebook are lowering their standards of communication. You know the type. They use words like ginormous and irregardless, both of which have become so pervasive in the American lexicon that they’ve been entered into the ranks of reverence on Dictionary.com (somewhere, another Wordsmith of some repute is rolling over in his grave, but doing it with a wink and a smile). These are the same folks that start every sentence with  “Actually”, or “I feel like…” and in the spoken word utter every statement with a sickly sweet sense of mild, bland surprise, and a frequently falling intonation (“Oh, really? No kidding.) They have seemingly no regard for the fact that an exclamation point is meant to do just that – exclaim. If you can’t express the sentiment with language, then using !!!!! as a crutch is not an acceptable workaround.

These grammatical slights are not creative. They are examples of lazy, uncreative people expressing themselves in lazy, uncreative ways. Like telling an old joke over and over again to the same person, what once was impactful for its uniqueness has become ineffectual by way of ubiquity.