Today, the online world of Excel content creation is often a fantasy that doesn’t translate well to real-world business needs. On LinkedIn and other social media, posts are filled with content that’s often disconnected from practical business solutions, created instead for the sole purpose of gaining likes, shares, and comments. This phenomenon has deep roots, evolving from the early days of the internet to today’s content-driven platforms where popularity is more about entertainment than real substance.
A Brief History of Internet Content Creation
In the early days, people created content on web pages and blogs to share knowledge. It was a genuine effort to document discoveries and innovations. Sites like Yahoo, born as web directories, effectively ranked pages based on their usefulness, creating a knowledge ecosystem that valued authenticity. ‘Usefulness’ was measured by the fact that all activity on the World Wide Web was, in those days, driven by people who were eager to discover things and broadcast them.
Then came the “information superhighway” followed by social media in the 2000s. With it, broadband internet and expanding storage capacities exploded, making video content accessible and engaging on platforms like YouTube and accessible from the now-ubiquitous cell phone. As these platforms grew, so did the metrics of engagement: clicks, likes, follows, and subscribes became measures of a post’s success. This, of course, driven by the massive commercial advantage gained by ‘joining the dots’ that was the driving force behind major platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Google.
The Rise of the “Fantasy” Influence
With the dominance of engagement metrics, social media platforms began to promote the concept of “going viral.” This turned the content creation game into one focused on capturing attention rather than solving problems. In the Excel world, we see influencers whose expertise lies more in generating clicks than in creating real solutions that would work in business environments. These influencers may come across as knowledgeable due to their charisma, video editing skills, or camera-friendly personalities, but this doesn’t necessarily equate to effective business solutions.
Take successful influencers like Kat Norton and many others. Their success doesn’t come from their depth of knowledge in handling complex business scenarios but from their ability to create content that resonates emotionally. They bring likability, making Excel content more entertaining but, at times, lacking in practical application for enterprise-level challenges. Their techniques may impress in social media’s fantasy world, but when tested in a real-world business setting, do they work?
Where Fantasy Fails in the Real World
This divergence between the online fantasy and the real business world has a substantial impact. For example, Excel techniques like dependent cascading dropdowns, popular on YouTube, are often demonstrated with simplified, self-contained datasets within a workbook. But in real business scenarios, data often originates from multiple sources and requires live, up-to-date information across departments—a requirement that these one-dimensional tutorials cannot fulfill.
In my Mission Impossible challenge series, I showcase just how impractical many of these popular techniques are when applied to real business problems. For instance, when Excel influencers tackle challenges, they may succeed in their insulated environments, but the same techniques struggle to handle dynamic, interconnected requirements, and people that need to fluidly connect, found in actual businesses. Real-world needs, such as month-end account processing frameworks and handling data in real time, reveal the flaws in these fantasy-based solutions.
Bringing Authenticity Back
This growing gap between fantasy and reality on social media highlights the urgent need for authenticity in content creation. When content creators produce work solely for engagement, the value of genuinely useful information is lost. It’s not findable. In fields like accounting, finance, and enterprise management, this can mislead professionals and organizations, pushing them toward flashy but unscalable solutions.
In conclusion, while the fantasy world of social media garners attention and popularity, real-world business problems demand practical, authentic solutions. My Mission Impossible series challenges these “fantasy experts” by applying their popular techniques to real-world challenges, showing where they work—and where they fail. Through this, I hope to inspire a return to content that prioritizes real business value over social media engagement. The business world deserves solutions that will genuinely drive progress, not just posts that grab clicks.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this sparks a conversation about authenticity and genuine impact in the real world.
This is a podcast by Hiran de Silva. Narrated by Bill.
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