By Hiran de Silva
A recent post by Frank Custers is a textbook example of how easily miscommunication and miseducation spread across social media. It wasn’t unique—Colin Wall’s promotion of Anaplan in 2023 followed the same pattern. These messages are designed for a target audience: managers or finance teams who have already decided they want to avoid Excel and instead adopt a plug-and-play solution, something that feels simpler, less flexible, more off-the-shelf.
From that perspective, the marketing is doing its job. It resonates with those who are predisposed to hear it.
But here’s the problem: these same statements don’t stay confined to their target market. They fall into wider circulation on LinkedIn and beyond, where they land in front of Excel professionals who live in a different reality—people who solve precisely the kinds of problems that these marketers claim are unsolvable in Excel. To them, the posts don’t just look exaggerated; they look absurd.
So what happens next? Some shrug, roll their eyes, and move on—“that’s just marketing.” Others push back, challenging the statements from a holistic perspective. Both reactions are understandable.
Yet there’s a deeper question here: when misinformation is allowed to circulate unchallenged, what is the educational impact on those who genuinely don’t know?
Imagine a primary school classroom. The teacher is introducing arithmetic for the first time. A group of children come in from the playground loudly declaring that “one plus one equals three.” A majority of the class believes it. Now, what should the teacher do? Go along with it to keep the pupils on side? Or correct it, knowing that some children already know the right answer and others are still learning?
The same dynamic applies on social media. Some audiences may already know better; others may be misled. And the messages, once spread, shape perceptions.
Carol Kawada made a similar point in her TED talk after the UK’s Brexit vote. Targeted campaigns delivered questionable information to people who were politically disengaged and less practiced in critical thinking. Those outside the target audience barely noticed. But the cumulative effect was profound.
On LinkedIn, posts like Custers’ are not tightly targeted. They reach beyond their intended base. That means the misinformation doesn’t remain sealed inside a sales funnel—it enters the general professional discourse. And that matters.
So the question becomes: do marketers, salespeople, and even platform providers like Microsoft bear a responsibility for the accuracy of the messages they circulate? Or is it enough to say “that’s just marketing”?
This isn’t only about Custers or Anaplan. It extends to Microsoft’s promotion of “modern Excel” features, designed primarily to drive social engagement. It extends to the IT industry’s repeated invocation of “Excel Hell,” a term used without context to push alternatives.
If misinformation is left unchallenged, it becomes the accepted truth for those who don’t yet know better. And in business, that has real consequences—on skills, on investment, on careers.
So the real thought leadership challenge is this:
- Do we ignore and move on?
- Do we push back, case by case?
- Or do we build a more systematic effort to educate, contextualise, and correct?
Because if the arithmetic class teaches that one plus one equals three just to win applause, the damage is not just to the children in that room—it’s to the credibility of the education system itself.
The same applies in our professional world.
Misinformation is not a victimless sales tactic. It reshapes the way whole industries think. The question is: are we willing to let it?
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