Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 242

The Distortion Of Sound

We have everything that we need at our fingertips. Is that a good thing?

Need an article on something? There's a site for that. Need a video tutorial on any topic in the world? These a YouTube channel for that. It's hard to imagine how we did anything before the Internet came along. People are consumed with culture in a way that we have never seen. Watching movies, watching television, listening to music, reading a book... whatever your heart's desire is a mere swipe of the finger away. The question (and it gets raised time and time again) is this: how much quality do we have access to in a world of quantity? Most of the music we discover now happens on YouTube, but just how good is the quality of this music. Whether it's a MP3 or a YouTube video, the music is heavily compressed to make is as accessible as possible. Does anybody care? Is it just musicians and purist who really notice the nuances between something that was created in a studio instead something compressed down to a MP3 file and pushed out through mediocre earbuds? Well, it turns out that musicians are really feeling the sting, and that consumers are suffering because they're not getting the full spectrum and audio experience that the music was created for. A wonderful mini-documentary titled, The Distortion of Sound, was recently published online, and it examines the massive decline of sound quality and how technology has dramatically changed the way we listen to music.

Do you simply want more music or a richer music experience? Please watch: The Distortion of Sound...

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The 7 Deadly Sins Of Digital Marketing In 2014

Have we solved the most basic of questions for our digital marketing efforts?

I would argue that the vast majority of brands engaged in digital marketing have left the fundamentals behind them. These brands and are, at mass scale, following/chasing the bright and shiny objects of the day. The problem is that if you don't have the fundamentals down, there will be little chance of experiencing any form of success if all you're pursuing is what's popular now. You can pick a brand (any brand) and benchmark them against these 7 deadly sins of digital marketing in 2014, and you will see where the real gaps truly lie.

Here are the 7 deadly sins of digital marketing in 2014.

Website is not responsive. If your website is not responsive to the myriad of screens and platforms that consumers are now commonly using, how can any brand be mad at marketing initiatives that don't convert? If the consumer needs to pinch, move, expand, or rotate your website, you are ensuring that they will have an brand experience filled with friction. Brands don't like to hear this, so they are ignoring the fact that the destination for all of their marketing and impressions is failing at the point of conversion, simply because the website experience is unusable for most consumers.

A lack of mobile. The statistics don't lie. We live in the one screen worlds. Screens are everywhere, they are connected and they are highly mobile. The consumer does not care that a mobile experience may be a costly investment. They also don't care that you have an eighteen month IT roadmap that doesn't allow you do to much. They're simply having a bad experience. When brands talk about the true omni-channel, they fail to realize just how poorly they're performing in a mobile world, where the vast majority of users are connecting through smartphones and tablets. A mobile site that simply is a lesser version of a website is not the right solution. We live in a world where consumers have a digital first posture, and it's primarily taking place on mobile devices.

Not being powerful in SEO and SEM. This isn't the sexy stuff, but it is the fundamentals. Think about it this way: in one hour, how many people go to Google (or any other search engine) to look for you, your competitor or they're searching for a brand to help them, and it's your business that does provide this solution? These searches are leads. These are primed leads. These are people who are raising their hands and saying, "I'm either looking for you or for somebody who does what you do." So many brands are still focused on impressions and branding in the digital world, but they are not thinking enough about how their properties are optimized for both organic search and paid search.

Not capturing emails. If you want to talk about regrets in digital marketing, this is - without a doubt - my biggest regret. For over a decade, I have blogged and created a weekly podcast. In all of those years (and even as I type this), I have never bothered to build a database, to collect emails and to better understand my community. So many companies collect email addresses and (basically) spam everyone the same way. If you're not capturing emails, you really should be (do as I say, not as I do) and, if you're not, start thinking about what it would take to make that happen. If you are emailing your customers, how personalized and customized is the experience?

Display advertising leads to nothing. The advertising spend on display advertising is still a monster. Still many brands don't drive the advertising to a specific landing page. Many brands don't leverage the power of multivariate testing. Many brands don't optimize, iterate and change course based on performance in real time. Ultimately, most brands see display advertising in the same construct as their TV advertising (plan it, set it, forget it... then hope it did something). Don't be that brand.

Not truly using and understanding analytics. There are people who are much smarter than me on the topic of web analytics (I'm looking at Avinash Kaushik right now). Most brands are not measuring or leveraging the right analytics. We look at vanity metrics like users, clicks and whatever else. We don't use analytics to drive better insights and performance. This doesn't mean that we should ditch our current metrics, but brands have a tremendous opportunity to think about a true digital sales funnel. The new opportunity is in understanding how to develop micro conversions, while using your analytics to better understand the landscape and conversion points. When you understand the true opportunity of analytics, the sun will start to shine on your brand.

Thinking that social media is the same as direct response. It's not. Social media is an amazing place to connect, inform, build community, deliver superior customer service, to speak to consumers in a human voice and much more. Sadly, the time I spend in most corporate boardrooms revolves around strategies to suddenly monetize the audience. There's nothing wrong with thinking about how to get fans, followers and likes to convert into sales, but it's should not be the primary/only directive. Social media is not about making something go viral (though, that's an awesome outcome). Social media is an opportunity for every brand to connect, share and create in the curation and publishing of both original content and third-party relevant content to build consumers into a state of influencers. To create moments of engagement with a consumer. Social media should be about getting consumers to actually care about a brand. That should be job one.

There are others.

It's true. There are many more "sins" that brands commit daily. The fact remains: if you don't have the fundamentals down... if you're chasing the latest shiny object, you may be doing more harm to the brand (and your own marketing department) than you realize. The fundamentals can easily be summed up as this: if someone thinks about your brand and connects to it, the brand is able to convert that impression into something more meaningful. Without nailing down these seven areas, a brand will always be left worrying about whether their advertising is effective, instead of knowing that they are doing everything they can to move that customer further along in a very strategic sales and marketing funnel.

Any other deadly sins of digital marketing that you can think of?

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Pushing Through The Pain

I have no idea what I did to my back... but it's bad. Really bad.

When I used to do a whole bunch of close quarters combative training and coaching with Tony Blauer, I would often think about the notion of pain and what it means. Have you ever stubbed your toe? Your initial reaction is to scream out in pain, but is it really all that painful? Here's an exercise I used to do: I would take moments like stubbing my toe, getting a paper cut and other instances of personal abuse and, before yelping out in pain, I would ask myself, "does this really hurt?" I mean really, really hurt? More often than not, I found that my attitude would change. I'd no longer scream out in pain, but rather acknowledge that I had done some kind of minor/stupid physical damage to myself, try to rate the pain and then realize that my flinch response would have been to scream or react, but the reality was that the pain wasn't all that bad. In the end, I wound up not screaming or being upset over every little ache, pain, bump or scratch.

That was not the case last Friday night. 

I had been experiencing some back pain and I thought that it was just me sleeping the wrong way. Then, while lifting something heavy out of my car on Friday night, I must have tweaked it even more. It was blinding pain. The kind of pain that gives you both the sweats and nausea at the time. I didn't know what to do with myself or where to put myself. I have no idea how I made it into the house, but I could not move for days. Literally... stuck in the same place and every little movement hurt. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, an amazing doctor and more, I'm on the road to recovery.

Did you notice my pain on social media?

I kept to my usual schedule of blogging (six days a week) and podcasting (every Sunday). I'm not looking for a cookie or a pat on the head for sticking to my editorial calendar. Those moments made me realize something: whether your pain is physical, mental or both, only you can choose what you will do during that time. Sometimes pushing through the pain is the worst thing that you can do (I probably would not have made it through a session at the gym in that condition), but sometimes pushing through the pain is the smartest thing that you can do. Seth Godin wrote an amazing book on figuring out when to stop (it's called The Dip, and everyone should read it). Like most things he publishes, Seth is spot on. You have to know when to keep going, mostly because the best of what we have to offer mostly comes in the moments when we are pushing through the pain.

How often does a brand push through the pain?

This analogy works magically well, when I think about brands and their digital marketing. The truth, as we have often discussed here on this blog, is that digital marketing looks and feels nothing like traditional advertising. To this day, I often hear brands complaining that Facebook advertising doesn't work or that Google's AdWords aren't converting as efficiently as they once did. More often than not, it's the brand that is failing on the platform, and not the other way around. I've seen brands test something new (like Pinterest) and drop it quickly because they didn't see any kind of bump right away. It's regretful, because the brand attitude is that whatever else they had been working on (and refined over time) is better than this new thing right out of the gate.

Doing something new is painful... but push through the pain.

There are too many instances when the power of digital marketing is marginalized because one test... one pinkie toe into the ocean... didn't satiate the entire body. Changes are painful. Brands need to not only embody this newly realized culture of change that we're living in, but how to push through it and get to a point where the decision to keep going (or to stop) is happening because the initial pain was pushed through. Look, I'm just like you. I don't like change... I don't like pain. It's a lot harder to stare at a blank screen with pain ripping through your back, than it is to stare at the same screen while sitting in a Starbucks sipping on a cafe latte. Still, we push on. I wonder what online marketing would look like, if every brand was accepting of the pain and enabling their teams to push through it, and then figure out what the true value and merit was of the exercise?

I'm going to push through this pain to keep on creating work. Brands shouldn't give up, just because they stubbed their toe on something new.

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The Only Consumer That Matters

Who is really a customer of yours?

I often get to hang out backstage at conferences and events. When you have that kind of access to other speakers, business leaders and authors, it would be silly not to take advantage of it. So, I do. I ask them questions. I prod them. I engage them. I do my best to not be a pest, while at the same time, I see these as moments that should never be wasted. If I'm lucky enough to be one of a handful of people to have direct contact with a former President or current New York Times bestselling author, it feels like a moment that should not be wasted. That being said, I don't consider myself a professional speaker. Not like these people do. A lot of these speakers have one form of income: speaking. It always made me chuckle to hear professional speakers tell me that some group, company or organization that brought them in to speak is a "client." I've been speaking for close to a decade, and I never considered any of the organizers my client. It's a term that never sat well with me. Just because I spoke at an event (even after being paid for it), it didn't feel right proclaiming that the company was my client. It would be like me calling you a client simply because you bought one of my books.

So, who is really  customer of yours?

When I was spending time in Silicon Valley two weeks ago, Avinash Kaushik (Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and bestselling author of Web Analytics - An Hour A Day and Web Analytics 2.0) told me that a major brand once remarked to him that they don't consider anyone a customer of theirs unless they have bought from them twice. Two is a big number in this day and age. Most retailers struggle to retain customers because of digital technology. It's easy for a potential customer to walk through a physical retail environment, and then use their smartphone to either find a better price, become more informed about their purchase or ask their social network their thoughts on the pending purchase. It's called, showrooming, and it's something that I've written about countless time over the years. Initial thinking on showrooming was that it would cause mass disruption to the retail space. In fact, it's become so pervasive that retailers have created other terms around it to put it into perspective. Reverse showrooming, is one such term. This happens when consumers go online to research a product and then head to a physical store to buy it. Silly, right? Did we call it reverse showrooming when we would ask friends about a product and then go to a store to buy it? Retailers now waking up to the fact that consumers do research online first (really, this is something new that retailers are just waking up to?) are now initiating in-store tactics like offering in-store pick-up of products bought online, free wi-fi and training a more knowledgeable sales staff to build a more congruous experience.     

Reacting to reality.

There have been many reports that dismiss the power of social media in relation to driving sales. What these reports often don't take into account is how powerful of a referral source for both bricks and mortar chains and e-commerce sites social media is. What this really means is that consumers have a tremendous amount of firepower prior to making a purchase. They have power through the information available to them online via their smartphones, and they can also leverage the wisdom of their own crowds if generic searches and consumer reviews don't pass the sniff test. So, while some retailers might argue that consumers are much smarter than they ever were, I would argue that they're simply more informed and have more options than ever before.

How does this change retail?

In short, this ends the traditional retail cycle of "too bad." It's the end of: we don't have what you're looking for... too bad. It's the end of: we're sorry you didn't have a great customer service experience... too bad. It's the end of: we're sorry you had to drive all the way over here and we don't have your size... too bad. It's the end of: yes, it's more expensive than somewhere else, but you're already here... too bad. When consumers have information and options, it pushes traditional retailers back on their heels, and it forces them to provide a higher level of service (which, ultimately, is a mix of the physical and digital world). Ultimately, I'm hopeful that it also pushes brands to figure out who a customer is. A real customer. Like the one who buys from you twice. At least.

Call it showrooming, call it reverse showrooming... consumers just call it a pleasant shopping experience.

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Social Media, Politics And A Myopic World View

Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It's not a long segment - about 5 to 10 minutes every week - about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you're interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I'm really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.

This week we discussed:

Rob Kemp sits in for Terry DiMonte.

Facebook, politics and the new world view.

The news has become more opinion-based, instead of facts.

We need to be more media savvy.

Technology can analyze sentiment as well.

ComicCom San Diego and the revenge of the nerds.

The rise of Geek Culture.

Those who were beaten up on the playground are the new heroes.

Google dominates search... and there may not be other competitors.

Quartz: Google has run away with the web search market and almost no one is chasing.

The power of targeted advertising.

Facebook is getting increasingly powerful because of their newsfeed and mobile.

Will anybody catch Google?

App of the week: IFTTT.

Heather gets all freaked out about Evernote.

Listen here...

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How Does The World See You?

Episode #420 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Have you ever taken one of those personality tests? Some employers force people to take them (employees or recruits), while some of us come across them as we continue our journeys in life. Many of us take tests like this just to see if we're doing the work that we're supposed to be doing. Regardless, it's hard to argue that these test don't often pull out a thing or two about us that we may not have realized or paid enough attention to. Sally Hogshead is working on something similar... but different. In her latest business book, How The World Sees You, Sally proclaims that it's not about what you want to become, but how the people you interact with perceive you. Here's the thing: I'm typically skeptical about these sorts of efforts. I was blown away by the simplicity and accuracy that Sally has brought to this notion. In fact, since reading the book and doing the exercises, I've noticed a marked difference in my communication with people because I'm now filtering it by the outputs of How The World Sees You. Sally continues to be one of the most fascinating women in marketing today. He last book, Fascinate, dominated the scene for months, but Sally is much more than a best-selling business book author and speaker. In her second year of advertising, Sally won more awards than any other copywriter in the U.S., and was described as "the most successful junior copywriter of all time." After working at Wieden + Kennedy and Fallon McElligott, by age 27 she'd opened her first ad agency, with clients such as Target and Remy Martin. Three years later, she opened the West Coast office of Crispin Porter + Bogusky as Creative Director/Managing Director. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #420.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #214

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, Solve For Interesting, the author of Complete Web Monitoring, Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks and Lean Analytics), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

What We Can Learn From Past Anxiety Over Automation - The Wilson Quarterly . "I'm a big believer that, as a society, we aren't ready to deal with abundance; worse, that capital concentration will ensure that the boon of automation and software will be increasingly poorly shared among humanity. I get into a lot of arguments with people, particularly stubborn everyone-for-themselves Libertarians, about such things. But I've also had great discussions, and several memorable ones have come from my friend Kamal Jain. He posted this riposte to one of my recent Luddite polemics. Since those who can't remember the past are doomed to repeat it, it's worth a read." (Alistair for Hugh).

How I made $40k within Shopify's trial period - That Shirt Was Cash . "Saying, 'the rate of change is increasing' is a business platitude. It's always increasing. But one of the things that digital channels has allowed is massive, rapid experimentation. This fairly tongue-in-cheek post details how Shirtwascash (a shoestring version of Spreadshirt) made $40K --before the trial period on its shopping cart software had even ended. Retailers of the world, take note: this is how your empires crumble." (Alistair for Mitch).

The Sci-Fi Writers' War - Slate . "Life imitating art? The power of writing? Russian-financed propaganda? In a strange revelation about the conflict in the Ukraine, it turns out that for the past few years writers in the East of the country have been producing a small stream of dystopian sci-fi novels about armed conflicts between Russian-speaking Ukranians in the East and the Western-grazing government in Kiev." (Hugh for Alistair).

The Secret of Minecraft - Medium . "Robin Sloan takes on the amazing world of the videogame, Minecraft, and muses about its implication for everyone creating art of any kind." (Hugh for Mitch).

Jon Stewart - The Sound Of Virginity - Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee . "Without a doubt, Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee is one of the most interesting video series on the Internet today. The concept is simple: Seinfeld calls up one of his comedian buddies, they go for a drive, have some coffee and talk about life, the life of being a comedian and the awkward ways that comedians live. It's awesome. Each and every episode. HIs latest is with The Daily Show's Jon Stewart . It does not disappoint." (Mitch for Alistair).

I'm Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, and This Is How I Work - Lifehacker . "Is there anything better than listening to what Ira Glass and his team pull together for This American Life ? I think not. As someone who creates content, we often talk about the power of great storytelling for brands. We can teach it. We can encourage it. But, the truth is, that it's hard... very very hard... to be a great storyteller. Ira Glass is a great storyteller. How does he work? Wow, this Lifehacker piece delivers in spades. I'm a huge geek for pieces of content like this. So, when my buddy, Nilofer Merchant , linked to it on Facebook , I could not resist but to devour it... and share it with you as well." (Mitch for Hugh).  

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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bitcurrent

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human 20

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ira glass

jerry seinfeld

jon stewart

lean analytics

librivox

lifehacker

link bait

link exchange

link sharing

managing bandwidth

media hacks

medium

minecraft

nilofer merchant

pressbooks

robin sloan

shirtwascash

shopify

slate

social media

solve for interesting

spreadshirt

the daily show

the wilson quarterly

this american life

year one labs

How To Do The Nearly Impossible

We live in very different times.

It's hard to imagine that we live in a day and age when individuals - from a very young age - can start a business, build something formidable and - literally - change the world. We can say, "harrumph" at that, but it's huge. The coolest part? It's not just software any more. Thanks to technology and even things like 3D printers and the lowering cost of building a prototype, nearly anyone can build not just the next Twitter but the next.. whatever. As many people have said before me, we're moving from bytes to atoms. Quickly. There's this interesting conference that takes in New York and San Francisco, and it's called Nearly Impossible. It's an event for companies that make physical products. At their most recent event, they had Seth Godin deliver a keynote presentation. As usual, Seth is amazing. You may know him as the author of bestselling business books like Purple Cow, Linchpin, Permission Marketing, The Dip, Tribes, and countless others (close to twenty, actually). You may know him as the founder of Squidoo or HugDug or as one of the best professional speakers in the business, but you've probably never seen him like this. In this presentation, Seth talks about how to do the impossible and how to get people to go along for the ride.

If you're in marketing, you really need to watch this - Seth Godin - Nearly Impossible 2013:

Seth Godin | Nearly Impossible 2013 from Nearly Impossible on Vimeo.

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the dip

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twitter

Facebook Proves Us All Wrong (And It's Not Just Facebook)

All too often, we fall victim to a the market of one syndrome.

I was on Facebook when somebody I know (and respect) said something akin to: "Nobody I know has ever click on a mobile banner ad." That's the market of one. It's the, "I don't do it and nobody I know does it, so how can it work?" I hate when people talk like a market of one. The Montreal office of Twist Image is in a charming part of the city called, Old Montreal (it really is as close to a European city as you are likely to find in North America). At the end of every day, I have to trudge across the city to my house. On the journey is the infamous Bell Centre. This is our major arena. It's where The Habs play, it's where we have major concerts and events. On any given day of the week, there is a major event happening there. Sometimes, the arena is filled with close to 30,000 fans of... something. I don't know what. I'm fascinated by this. These massive get-together are happening in my city (that people spend their hard earned savings on) and, if I didn't have to drive by it every single day, I would have never known that it happened. So, if something is happening and I don't know about it, does that mean that it didn't happen? Does that mean that it's not relevant? Does that mean that it's not something that a brand should pay attention to? Of course not.

We say things that have no reality to back it up.

People are getting tired of Facebook. I don't go to Facebook anymore and neither do my friends. Nobody clicks on a mobile ad. Stuff like that. I get asked/told this kind of thing daily by people. Smart people. Marketing professionals. Senior marketing professionals. Then, Facebook comes out with their results. They were so good, that I find myself rethinking my own beliefs about what Facebook is... what Facebook has become... what Facebook will be (and, I'm already very bullish on Facebook). If you've been online today, you have seen the news. You have read the discourse. Have you really, truly and deeply thought about what this means?

Facebook's results should make you rethink Facebook.

Here's the headline: "Facebook grew revenue 61% and more than doubled second-quarter profit while making even more money from ads targeted at users on mobile devices, sending shares to record highs."

What Facebook means from a marketing perspective:

Facebook is mobile. This is huge. A company that was established as a Web browser-based platform managed to pull off one of the greatest transitions to mobile seen since the dawn of the Internet. You may dismiss this as nothing more than developing an app, I would argue that it is one of the most underrated instances of true innovation that we have seen recently. You can read more about my thoughts on this, right here: What Facebook Knows About Innovation (That Every Brand Should Pay Attention To).

Facebook continues to grow. Whether it's more people connecting to it, more geographic opportunities or simply people using it more and more on mobile devices (as more and more people adapt to mobile over computers), the fact is that you can't serve ads at this scale if nobody is using the service. You can think what you like about usage, but people are using Facebook more.

Mobile advertising is nascent (and it works). As significant dollars shift to mobile advertising because the users are there, it's important to remember that this is still early days. Mobile offers a lot of powerful advertising opportunities that display advertising had a hard time delivering against. Location, motion, context and more can all play into the power of better, more relevant advertising, and Facebook is on the cusp of delivering against that. It's still early days.

Great at local. Great at mass. Before sending an ad, Facebook knows a lot about its users. Let's repeat that: Facebook knows a lot about its users. We (as a digital marketing community) have long wanted to find a way to blend personal data, with localized unique opportunities, while at the same time having access to both scale and a more mass market. That's what Facebook is. You can get highly relevant in terms of who you want to speak to and - at the same time - they have mass reach as well.

The newsfeed is the new ad format. This is less about the ads in the top right hand of the page. The action, heat and opportunity continues to be the newsfeed. As you flip and scroll through that newsfeed, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between when a brand is posting a cool piece of content or whether it's a sponsored post to download an app. Regardless, it fills the screen in a very non-intrusive way that is a congruous brand experience. You'll scroll past the marketing stuff you don't care about - much in the same way you'll scroll past that annoying friend of yours who is posting incessantly about their annoying kid. In short, Facebook has habituated its users to graze across content without the feeling of being interrupted or annoyed by an ad.

Facebook is still growing. It's easy to dig a little deeper and see some chinks in the armor of Facebook's usage, but it's still growing. Yes, there are mature markets for Facebook, and yes, they may be stagnating in certain demographics, but the numbers and money doesn't lie. They're doing better than the analysts expected (and, if I'm going to be honest, they're doing way better than I expected as well). While they're still tinkering (and some would say faltering) with their video advertising, expect them to get this right and begin another huge push in marketing opportunities for brands. Instagram (which Facebook owns) is also slowly and intelligently rolling out advertising/content marketing. Facebook also launched a mobile advertising network last April to sell advertising on non-Facebook apps. If that's not interesting enough, the company is now claiming to have 1.3 billion monthly users. As the USA Today article (that I linked to above) concludes: "That means it has more users than India has people, and it's closing in on China." Facebook has its own world of users and it knows a lot about them today... and will know a ton more about them tomorrow (as users use it more, create more and share more).   

Don't buy Facebook stock.

I'm no financial analyst. I'm not here to tell you that Facebook is a sound long term stock investment. I am a marketing professional. I do see a lot of my peers dismissing Facebook because they're thinking like a market of one. Don't be that person. Look at the numbers. Think about the brand opportunities. As Facebook continues to grow, evolve and develop their models of advertising and marketing, don't dismiss what it can do... and should do. And, it's not just Facebook. Google, LinkedIn, blogs, YouTube, podcasting, you name it. Don't think that just because you've lost some interest, that they're still not powerful channels to connect your message with a broader and more targeted audience. The opportunities are everywhere.

Ultimately, the numbers don't lie. Where do you see the Facebook opportunity?

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Brands Can Have Real Conversations

Are there any real conversations happening out there?

It's been a long day. I hopped an early flight to Boston to speak at the Marketo customer summit. Direct flights are a funny thing. On one had, you want the ease and practicality of getting somewhere without getting too much of the airport experience "on you." On the other hand, you are at the mercy of the airline's flight schedule. In today's episode of Adventures At The Airport, I chose a direct flight to Boston early in the morning, even though I was speaking at the end of the afternoon. But hey, it's Boston. There are worse (way worse) places to spend a summer day. With that, I was fortunate enough to have breakfast with C.C. Chapman (Amazing Things Will Happen, Content Rules, etc...) and then lunch with Ann Handley (MarketingProfs, Content Rules and the soon-to-be released, Everybody Writes). I first met C.C. at PodCamp Boston a long time ago, and I met Ann a few years later. Over the years, I've had the pleasure of spending personal time with both of them. Good people. Good good people.

That's not the point.

The point is this: I met them through (and because of) social media. Without blogs, podcasts, online social networking, I would have never met them. I have a lot of friends like this. Real friends. Not Facebook friends. Friends. The problem is this: I think I know what's going on in their lives because we're connected on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever, but I don't. I don't have any idea. Don't get me wrong, both C.C. and Ann share. They share a lot. But it's a filter. It's a thin veneer of who they really are. It's the "them" that they want you to see. And, for all of the marvels of technology that connects us, when you sit down and ham it up over some coffee or talk about the woes of the world over a BLT, that's when it really clicks.

The like button is more button than like.

I used to think that the true power of social media was the ability for brands to have real interactions between real human beings. That was the drum that I was banging back in the early 2000s. Now, it's 2014, and if you look at some of the research and data, what we're finding is that brands (and consumers) aren't having that much conversation online. Yes, there is a lot of quick responses to customer service issues, and tons of new and interesting memes and viral videos being pushed out, but a true conversation? Not much.

Don't you worry about a thing... because everything little is going to be alright.

It's hard to have a conversation if the main goal is to get people to buy from you. That's the big thing that big brands (still) don't understand. They see social media as another advertising channel... another place to put a message. Sometimes, that message is personal. A lot of times, that message is just a different kind of ad. I don't believe that social media has failed brands or consumers. The technology is ambiguous. I blame the brands. I blame the celebrities. Here's the thing, social media is a great place to let people know what's going on, especially if those people are both interested in following you and responding to what you're putting out there. The problem is that when everyone follows that model, the true charm gets lost. I can filter. I can create lists. I can follow real people. I can move brands to their own special place. Most people just let the firehose do what it does best... be a firehose. They're bystanders in social media. They're letting who they follow control their experience. And, for most (I'm guessing), it's not all that interesting of an experience. It's just another kind of news and information service. There's no (or little) back and forth. There's no depth. There's no new people to meet, connect with and share.

Don't let social media turn into a one-way street.

It's easy to sit back and let the newsfeed take over. People are sharing. They're sharing articles, pictures, videos, audio clips and more. You could spend years tumbling down the rabbit hole of what your online "friends" are telling you to check out. Or, you can push back. You can filter. You can be ruthlessly diligent with who you follow. You can create more tangible encounters and push for the conversation to come back. It's hard. Willing social media back to a time when you could really connect with people and engage in civil discourse seems all but for forgotten. It isn't. I'm so guilty of letting the newsfeed rule over me. I see posts from C.C. and Ann almost everyday. Sometimes I "like" them as a form of acknowledgement, but I mostly just let them wash over me. Then, when we sit down, in our protein forms, I realize what social media really can do. 

I think it's time for brands to get more personal. I think it's time for brands to realize what social media really can do.

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