Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 354

The Social/Anti-Social Network

Online social networking continues to change and evolve.

The latest news is all about Google + (you can read some of my initial thoughts about the platform right here: Co-dependency In The Age of Facebook). This week, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page announced that Google + has over 10 million people using it in less than two weeks with over one billion pieces of content shared. That is mind-blowing, impressive and not all that surprising when you consider how popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook are, and how people are looking for newer/cooler social networking experiences.

Google + lets you be selectively social.

In tinkering with Google + and listening to what some of the cool kids have to say about it online, it's very clear that the majority of people see Google + almost like an online social networking "do-over!" Their Facebook profiles are a mess, because they jumped in and wound up either over-sharing or not working with the privacy settings in an optimal way (which was never easy, as Facebook continues to change and evolve those settings over time). When I ask my connections in other online social networking sites what they like about Google + that's currently not happening in places like my Blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc... the most common response is the ability to segment the social graph (Google + calls them, "circles"). The ability to share information and splice it into a more natural flow of your physical life (i.e. personal or professional) or by interest groups (marketers, tech people, etc...) using the "circles" functionality of Google + seems to make top billing. That, and the flow of the stream - which is not limited to 140-characters like Twitter - and it seems to have a better user interface than Facebook (mostly around how conversations are threaded and displayed). The circles are also interesting because those who follow you do not know which circles they are in - this means you can filter and bucket people and their importance in your life. So yes, it's a social network but it mimics your in-person network more accurately (people got frustrated when I first talked about this in 2009: The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite).

It's a different kind of "social."

Ultimately, it's four quarters for a dollar, if you know what I mean. All online social networking platforms are created to let you share and connect. If the "big win" with Google + is the fact that it's easy to control who gets your messages and it's easy to share content, then that's great. Personally, none of these areas are of concern to me (and yes, this is me being a market of one). From day one with any online engagement, I make a plan of what I want to share and how I want to share it with the assumption that everyone (both public and private) will see it. The truth is that I have never used Social Media as a channel to stay connected to my closest/inner circle because I don't want any third-party having that kind of data and history on me. It's a personal choice.

Know why you're doing it. 

Will Google + really be a valuable social network if all it really does is help people segment, block and chose who sees what? Probably not. Where Google + could become most interesting is how it connects with the other Google tools that people use daily (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Places, Google Analytics, etc...), how it integrates with Android and then into other mobile platforms. But, here's the big one that Marketers need to pay attention to: advertising.

Google + is a new, massive advertising and marketing opportunity.

Don't ever forget why Google is free: they want your data and they want to target you with more effective advertising. With over ten million people joining in the first week and over one billion items being shared, this is a treasure trove of new advertising and marketing inventory and opportunities. Couple that with the information they can now gather: from how you browse the Web (with Google Chrome), to how you search, to your email, to your mobile and now, to your online social network, and Google starts looking a whole lot more like the media company that all of the traditional mass media companies wish they could be.

Whether or not Google + does become the darling of online social networks, Google continues to look a lot like the future of media.

Tags:

a market of one

advertising

android

anti-social network

big data

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facebook

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google

google analytics

google chrome

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google places

google plus

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marketing

media company

mobile platform

online engagement

online social network

over-sharing

privacy settings

social graph

social media

social network

social networking platform

the future of media

traditional mass media

twitter

My Blog Writing Dilemma

Everything was fine and dandy until the other day.

To write my Blog posts, I use a Windows-based piece of software called, Windows Live Writer (by Microsoft). I love it. I love it so much, that when I switched from PC to Mac, I installed VMware for the sole purpose of being able to write my Blog posts with Windows Live Writer. I'm not overly techy, so I don't even use the software to publish to my Blog directly (I actually copy and paste the source code into the Blog platform), but I'm simply in love with a few key features...

Writing view. It allows you to type up Blog posts as if you're working in a standard word processing file (you can format, and this includes adding links, etc...). Then (and as needed), you can switch to "source" view, which is the HTML stuff. This way, I don't have to think about HTML (which is important because I don't know HTML), but in the source view, I can simply copy and paste little pieces of code (like YouTube embed codes) and I can copy and paste my entire text from the source view to place in my Blog platform for publishing. I like the flexibility of being able to toggle between a regular writing view and the source HTML code version simply and easily.

Links. This is the main reason why I can't quit Windows Live Writer. I love linking to everything. I believe that linking is what makes online publishing interesting and that linking is what makes flat text become three-dimensional. Windows Live Writer has an "auto linking" feature that allows me to save my links. Any time I type in a word that has been saved to the "auto linking" feature it will automatically create the link for me, but only for the first instance that I type the specific word (or phrase) in a Blog post. This feature is not only a time-saver but a life-saver.

Formatting. From bold and italic to bulletpoints and more, Windows Live Writer does the trick. What you see is what you get... and there are no surprises. If I indent something, that's the way it will look on Blog. If I hit "enter" to start a new paragraph, it works as well. I've mucked around with other Blog writing software only to find out that it misses the mark in understanding the formatting I was intending, which is frustrating for someone like me who struggles with HTML... and time.

The auto linking isn't working any more.

When I try to create a link now, the software crashes. One of our IT leads here at Twist Image has been helping me to get it fixed, but so far, nothing has worked (yes, we've been Googling and trying all of the fixes we can find). While I hope we can get it to work, I was wondering if anyone knows of any good Mac-based Blog writing software that has similar functionality? More specifcally, the auto-linking feature and the ability to write in a wysiwyg format but be able to toggle to the source/HTML version too.

Any thoughts?

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blog editing software

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html

mac

microsoft

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pc

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vmware

windows

windows live writer

youtube

Perpetual Start-Up

The majority of our world is filled with people who are concerned about their job.

The lucky ones are concerned about how they're going to reach the next plateau or get their full bonus at the end of the quarter, but there's a huge swath of people who are mostly just trying to get by. These people are punching the clock and trying to make ends meet. They're less concerned about where they're going and much more concerned about not being let go from their jobs tomorrow. Beyond that, there are many people who are unemployed and would welcome the kind of misery that those clock watchers are enduring. You know the saying, "the grass is always greener." 

If you look at the global job market, things are not pretty.

That was the crux of Thomas L. Friedman's column yesterday in The New York Times titled, The Start-Up of You. His premise? The job market is not going to get any better because the jobs of yesterday are gone and that the companies with the big valuations (he names Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, etc...) aren't looking for the types of workers that companies used to hire decades ago. Instead, these new companies are looking for smart engineers, but beyond that, it's all about, "people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can't, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever."

Forget the fact that big corporations have to think and act like lean start-ups, why don't more people think about their careers in the same vein?

Check this out: "Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley -- besides co-founding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the board of Mozilla -- has a book coming out after New Year called 'The Start-Up of You,' co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: 'Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here's how you build your career today.'" There is a secret to business today that few of the major corporation will readily admit: you can do a whole lot with very little. There are many viable companies that are made up of less than a handful of employees (check out InstaPaper's Marco Arment for glimpse of what this can look like). In Friedman's editorial, he makes it clearer: "You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don't employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they're all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers."

Get lean and start thinking like a start-up.

It's hard for people who have traditionally had a job to think like an entrepreneur, but it's more critical than ever. I often tell people that an entrepreneur is someone who is trying to create the future that doesn't yet exist, while a businessperson is someone who is trying to mitigate risk and minimize mistakes. If you take that analogy and apply it to how you're guiding your professional development, where do you net out? The most valuable players on any corporate team are not the ones who are mitigating risks, but the new breed is all about those who are adaptive, nimble, flexible and creative (in everything that they do). It's not going to be part of the standard job description either, it will be the baseline for those who thrive versus those that may just survive... maybe.

What would happen if you started to treat your own career like a lean start-up?

(side tangent: Start-Up Festival starts today and runs through to Friday. After reading Friedman's editorial, I'll be attending the sessions and looking at them with a whole new prism).

Tags:

ben casnocha

clock watcher

critical thinking

employment

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marco arment

mozilla

perpetual start up

professional development

reid garrett hoffman

silicon valley

start up

start-up festival

technology

the new york times

the start-up of you

thomas l friedman

twitter

unemployment

zynga

The Case For Myspace

In the end, the buying and selling of Myspace will be a positive business move for News Corp.

I realize how silly that may sound to investment bankers and venture capitalists, but it's true. In June 2006, Myspace became the most popular online social networking site in the United States. It's a position that it held until 2008 (that's when Facebook starting taking over). Many people thought that our world had gone insane when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and many other media companies) bought eUniverse (the owners of Myspace) for $580 million in July 2005 only to sell Myspace (which was valued at $327 million in the initial sale) to Specific Media for $35 million in June 2011. For those weak in the math, that's only six years later. Did Facebook's success and the changing landscape of Myspace make it an undesirable business moving forward for News Corp.?

The data tells a very different story.

According to the Wikipedia entry for Myspace, the company had a 2009 estimated revenue of $395 million with over 30 million users as of June 2011. And, while the company was estimated to be worth somewhere between $50 - $200 million when News Corp. put the company up for sale in February of this year, there's another piece of data that many media pundits don't know: through the Myspace website and affiliated ad networks, Myspace is second only to Yahoo! in terms of it's technology and capacity to not only collect data about its users, but its ability to target them with more qualified ads. This tells a very different story than the one we're getting in the mass media (and from those who are playing armchair quarterbacks from the comforts of their keyboards).

What do you think News Corp. learned about new media during those six years?

Education should be expensive. And, while this is a lesson that Rupert Murdoch is now learning the hard way through the News of the World phone hacking scandal, the opposite could be said about Myspace. News Corp. owned Myspace prior to it becoming the number one online social networking hub. They were there when the magic happened. They were able to live and breathe not only the excitement of the new consumer, but the innovation, insights and new media strategies that were required to get it to number one and keep it there. News Corp. had intimate knowledge of what worked (and what didn't) in the Social Media sphere. Money was pouring in (unlike Twitter and Facebook, Myspace was always an advertising-driven initiative), and while the story goes that Murdoch was said to be frustrated with Myspace in terms of it being a hub for Fox's content, what News Corp. got (beyond the dollar amount) out of owning Myspace should never be diminished.

What do the other mass media news companies need to succeed?

If you asked the same media pundits who are snidely taking potshots at News Corp.'s perceived failure of Myspace, those same pundits will tell you that companies like Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, etc... need innovation and better insights. That these massive companies need to think like a Facebook or Twitter or that they need to create the next Facebook or Twitter. The truth is that few companies will be able to be that entrepreneurial. The truth is also that for a company like News Corp. to be like that, they will have to pay a premium to get those skills. I consider the sale of Myspace to News Corp. that kind of premium. Would News Corp. have pushed out something like The Daily iPad app had they not started to integrate the culture of Myspace into the organization? Who knows, but they're learning and trying to build new media platforms in a world that favors two people and a Skype connection running a new media start-up over a massive media corporation. We'll see whether or not Justin Timberlake and Specific Media can turn around Myspace now.

The tragedy of this deal will be if News Corp. wound up learning nothing from it. The true value of this deal should not be mitigated by the amount paid, but how it changed, evolved and pushed a traditional mass media institution to think about their business in a very different and new light.    

The above posting is my just-launched/twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post called, Media Hacker . I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:

The Huffington Post - The Case for Myspace.

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media hacker

media pundit

myspace

new media

news corp

news corporation

news of the world

online social networking

phone hacking

rupert murdoch

scandal

skype

social media

specific media

the daily

the huffington post

time warner

twitter

venture capital

wikipedia

yahoo

Twitter Is Random

I'm not very good at Twitter.

I understand it. I use it. But, I just can't make it bend to my will. You have to know why you're doing something to really get the value out of it, and I've made a decision that while I love having so many people follow me on Twitter and I do love posting little snippets and thoughts that don't flesh out into ideas for clients or Blog posts or Huffington Post columns, that I'm not great at the real-time heat and action that comes from Twitter in how it has evolved. I'm not good at thanking all of the people who say kind things about me and I'm probably a little worse at responding to every question simply because when I finally get around to it, I feel like the Twitter feed has moved on. I'm pretty weak at the whole "public chat" that Twitter is and I'm humble enough to recognize which platforms work for what I'm trying to accomplish with my agency, Twist Image. That being said, Twitter is one of the best platforms for brands to do all of the above (and yes, they don't have an excuse like I do ;).

Twitter is not Facebook.

MarketingCharts ran a very interesting news item today titled, Tweeters More Engaged With TV Shows, that said:

"A considerably higher percentage of Twitter users who tweet while watching a TV show discuss the show they're watching than Facebook users who log in during a TV show, according to May 2011 data from TVGuide.com. The TVGuide.com User Research Study indicates 50% of Twitter users discuss a show they are watching, one-third more than the 35% of Facebook users who discuss a show they are watching."

It makes a lot of sense.

If you're lazying around watching a TV show, odds are that you are flicking around on your mobile device too. Twitter's true innovation was that it was an equally great platform on mobile as it was on the Web... in fact, I would argue that Twitter is actually better on a mobile device than the Web experience. Facebook on mobile isn't so easy and simple (have you tried the Facebook iPhone and iPad app? Exactly). Beyond that, the types of interactions that work best on Twitter are those that are happening in real-time, whereas Facebook has that capability, it truly is something that can be enjoyed in a non-real-time environment.

Think about it this way...

If you were going to a concert, you might mention it on your Facebook status and you might even follow that up with a status update when you got home along with uploading some photos, but if you really wanted a digital experience to complement your concert experience, odds are you would not only be tweeting from the show, but following along with the hashtags as well (you just never know who you can meet or how much more fun a live event is when you can have a shared experience with others). Don't even get me started on how cool Instagram is when added on to that live experience.

Easy wins too.

Twitter allows you to publish those random thoughts on the fly, but they also made the platform incredibly easy. I'm not saying Twitter is better than Facebook. I am saying that Twitter is different from Facebook. That news item from MarketingCharts proves it. If there were no Twitter, I'm sure the activity on the Facebook status functionality would be on the rise, but Twitter is much easier for the randomness of life (and it's one of the main things people like about it - the serendipity of it all).

The question is will easy and simple always rule the day?

(and, for the record, I'm not all that great at Facebook either).

Tags:

blog

brand

digital experience

facebook

hashtag

huffington post

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iphone app

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publishing

real time web

tv guide

tv guide user research study

tv show

twist image

twitter

How To Jump Into Marketing

Episode #261 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Christopher S. Penn is a deadly weapon... and I mean that in the kindest sense of the saying. Yes, he's a practicing Martial Artist, but he's a more dangerous Marketing weapon. He's that rare breed of deeply tech savvy professional combined with an understanding of Marketing that will make your head spin. His full-time job is at Blue Sky Factory, but he's also one of the co-founders of PodCamp, co-host (with John Wall) of the great Podcast, Marketing Over Coffee, and a very passionate Blogger at Awaken Your Superhero. More recently, he self-published his first business book, White Belt Marketing, with the hopes of helping those entering the Marketing realm to think differently about what Marketing means in this day and age. And yes, he's also an active participant in our Media Hacks Podcast (when we get around to them!). 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 #261.

Tags:

advertising

awaken your superhero

bite size edits

blog

blogging

blue sky factory

book oven

business book

cast of dads

cc chapman

chris brogan

christopher s penn

digital dads

digital marketing

facebook

facebook group

hugh mcguire

in over your head

itunes

john wall

julien smith

librivox

managing the gray

marketing

marketing over coffee

media hacks

new marketing labs

online social network

podcamp

podcast

podcasting

pressbooks

six pixels of separation

social media 101

social media marketing

strategy

trust agents

twist image

white belt marketing

Study Art

The greatest thinkers and the greatest businesspeople have a passion for some kind of art.

It's easy to get all smug about a comment like that and think to yourself, "it's easy for successful people to have a passion for art, because they're the ones who are rich enough to buy it... and have the time to spend on it." That's a myth. Whether it's art, music, dance, photography, architecture or literature, it's easy to have a passion for any of these art forms on the cheap. No, I'm not talking about making a yearly pilgrimage to a museum or stepping into an art gallery on a busy tourist street as your commitment to the arts. You can watch documentaries about artists, you can read books about them and you can - without question - consume a ton of content about any type of art that interests you online.

Having a passion for art with make you smarter, richer and more creative.

Sadly, many people think that enjoying art (and having a passion for it) is for when you have nothing else to do. Make the study of art a priority in your life... and watch your life change. I'm quirky. The art I enjoy runs the gamut from heavy metal music to comic books and from the stuff I see on Lost At E Minor (hat-tip to Arjun Basu for pointing that gem of a site out to me) to reading books and watching documentaries on artists (everyone from architects to stand-up comedians). You're probably laughing at me, because you think that art can only be associated to names like Degas, Monet or Astaire. Not true. I get more out of listening to a Miles Davis album than I do out of watching a symphony orchestra (though I can appreciate both) and I get more out of reading an issue of Batman from the 1960s than I do looking at an exhibit from Keith Haring (though I can appreciate both). Art is amazing because you can chose your own adventure.

Don't just consume it. Study it.

The real trick of making art interesting is not in the mild consumption of it... it's in studying it. Watch a documentary about DC Comics or the history of Batman, and you'll understand the creative inspiration behind it, the challenges in getting the idea and concept to spread, the business foibles and mis-steps, etc... If you think it's hard to get people to buy your concepts in a meeting, start studying the history and background of some of the world's greatest artists and you'll soon realize how easy the majority of us have it. Where this will hopefully lead you is to two unique places:

You will think more creatively. Learning about what inspires the great artists to create will definitely inspire you to think in a more creative way. And, if the world needs anything at this point in business, it is people who can think more creatively.

You will realize that your work can (and should be) your art. I always felt a little uneasy about saying that my writing for this Blog was the art that I was meant to do or that the ideas that our company, Twist Image, brings to our clients in the Marketing sphere is my art. It made me feel pompous... or full of myself. Reading Seth Godin's book, Linchpin, changed that for me (and if you have not read it yet, you should!).

If you study art, what I hope you will soon realize (beyond developing a deeper level of creativity and passion) is that your work is your art as well. If it's not, it should be.

Tags:

architecture

arjun basu

art

art form

art gallery

astaire

batman

blog

book

businesspeople

comic book

content

dance

dc comics

degas

documentary

inspiration

keith haring

linchpin

literature

lost at e minor

marketing

miles davis

monet

museum

music

photography

seth godin

thinker

Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #55

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, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so 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:

Effeminate Lumberjacks and Stuffed Turtles - The Good Men Project . "With my daughter nearly a year old, and my wife and I splitting time between work and home, I'm no stranger to late nights and the inanity of baby-talk. Nothing has quite captured the sense of the sleep-deprived, three-day-dirty-sweatpants haze that is the last year of my life like this article from Goodmenproject." (Alistair for Hugh, who will nod in agreement).

Paranormality launches in the USA....and the Friday Puzzle! - Richard Wiseman Blog . "This is both a statement on the changes of publishing, and a rant. Richard Wiseman's book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There is a healthy dose of skepticism. The book has done well in the UK and elsewhere. But not so in the US: American publishers didn't want to release it, largely because the American public likes to believe in things that aren't real. Some publishers even recommended he re-write it to suggest that ghosts were real and psychic powers existed. What to do? Well, Wiseman's publishing it digitally, with a Kindle version now available. It's a great example of how today's digital books pass yesterday's pulp-and-paper gatekeepers. It also lets me dig on people who believe in unicorns." (Alistair for Mitch).

Stephen Elop's Nokia Adventure - Bloomberg BusinessWeek . "Sometimes it's hard to fathom how quickly the world changes. It must be even harder if you are mobile phone giant, once totally dominant, now reeling from a new universe opened up by a computer-maker turned smartphone pioneer and a search engine company turned mobile OS producer. Canadians seem to be well-represented among the mobile-giants-in-freefall: RIM, maker of the BlackBerry is on the ropes. And charged with turning around the floundering Nokia is Stephen Elop - a Canadian and former Microsoft exec. The leaders of these companies have their hands full. It's hard to imagine how either company will emerge victorious, but stranger things have happened." (Hugh for Alistair).

A Tight-Knit Community - Slate . "With the impersonal scale of social networks like Facebook, it's hard sometimes to remember the real power of the Web: connecting people who share passions, however obscure. Ravelry is a community of knitters, and probably one of the most successful online communities out there. It's been around since 2007, and anyone interested in building community online should study how Ravelry has succeeded." (Hugh for Mitch).

StumbleUpon Drives More U.S. Web Traffic Than Facebook - AdWeek . "There's not much more to say about this article that that the jaw-dropping title doesn't say. My first reaction to this article was, 'what? really?' But, as you dig in, you start to realize that while Facebook may have a lot of traffic, it's looking more and more like a walled garden than a reflection of what drives traffic to other online destinations. That's interesting in and of itself, but it starts to tell a new narrative: How 'social' is a platform like Facebook when it doesn't help drive people to other destinations?" (Mitch for Alistair).

You Are More Likely to Survive a Plane Crash than Click a Banner Ad - The Atlantic Wire . "I wrote a Blog post called, The Truth About Display Advertising (And Why Consumers Hate It) , that I posted yesterday. Over on Facebook, Ethan Holland, pointed me to this news item from The Atlantic that really made me laugh out loud... and cry at the same time. Look at these stats: 'you are 31.25 times more likely to win a prize in the Mega Millions than you are to click on a banner ad.... you are 87.8 times more likely to apply to Harvard and get in...112.50 times more likely to sign up for and complete NAVY SEAL training... 279.64 times more likely to climb Mount Everest... and 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad.' I'm not sure how this data was captured, but if it's true, we have another indictment on advertising industry." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

Tags:

advertising

adweek

alistair croll

amazon kindle

banner ad

bitcurrent

bite-sized edits

blackberry

blog

bloomberg

book publishing

businessweek

complete web monitoring

daddy blogger

digital book

display advertising

facebook

gigaom

great links

hugh mcguire

human 20

librivox

link

linkbait

managing bandwidth

media hacks

microsoft

mobile

nokia

online community

online social network

paranormality

pressbooks

ravelry

rednod

richard wiseman

rim

skepticism

slate

smartphone

stephen elop

stumpleupon

the atlantic wire

the book oven

the good men project

year one labs

The Truth About Display Advertising (And Why Consumers Hate It)

Call it banner advertising or call it display advertising, if you look at the data: consumers are just not that into it.

In the past, I've waxed poetic about how display advertising as a marketing engine is failing online consumers while padding the wallets of publishers (more on that here: The Web Has Failed Advertising and here: Banner Advertising Is But One Small Component Of Digital Marketing). There is no one specific reason why it's such a mess that underperforms. It has to do with everything from the technology and delivery of the creative to the actual creative itself. While publishers will extol the magnificent response rates that full-page take-over ads get or the ones with video in them, the majority of consumers find them distracting and annoying (I often wonder how much of the advertising results culled from these campaigns are real consumers engaging vs. real consumers trying to figure out how to make it go away/stop).

But, there is something more going on here.

At a recent conference, one of the keynote speakers (I wish I could remember which conference and which speaker, but I can't!) said that display advertising is struggling because if you have four ads (or more) running on a TV show, the likelihood that someone will sit through all four in consecutive order is very unlikely (and we're discounting those who skip television commercials in their entirety because they have a PVR), and a Web page is a similar experience. At first strike, this made sense to me: how many messages is one consumer going to sit through? But then I realized that display advertising is in a way worse position because the advertising doesn't happen in consecutive order... it happens all at once.

Test this out:

Go to the website for your local newspaper. How many display ads, banners, buttons, text links, etc... do you see that are ads? Mine has over 15. That's not in consecutive order... that's all at once. It's hard enough to get consumers to sit through four TV ads in a row, so what did you expect to have happen when you blast them with 15 ads on one page, all at once? Foregoing the aesthetics and the basic Marketing lesson that an ad will experience diminishing returns based on how cluttered the environment that it's placed in is, does anyone really believe that this is the best way to advertise to consumer's in the digital spaces?

Think about screens. Think about experiences.

Obviously, not all display advertising fails. There are many creative examples of brands that have broken passed the dismal results that display advertising has delivered over its short lifespan. This Blog post is in no way calling for the death to the banner ad (that would just be more clutter on top of a topic covered all too often). The digital experience now transcends a website on a basic computer screen. Digital is now mobile. Digital is now touch. Online experiences have to work across these different platforms, and the advertising is going to have to own up to this. Cramming a box and call to action into every available digital white space is not going to cut it, and neither is having a handful of messages blinking consumer's attention away from the reason why they're on the site in the first place (the content). It's complex and it's messy, but it doesn't have to be this way. Clean it up!

We don't expect consumers to sit through 15 advertisements running at the same time on their televisions, so how is this acceptable in these new media channels?

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The Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

Social Media is a funny thing. By "funny thing" I mean that it is sometimes very pathetic.

Few people are able to identify their own narcissism (I've Blogged about this before: Confessions Of A Narcissist), but it's there and it exists. Being humble is the ability to not only identify your own narcissism, but being able to work with it. Narcissism isn't inherently bad unless you let it get out of control. I'm reminded of the story that Jeffrey Gitomer often tells to an audience when discussing the power of closing a sale. He asks the audience this question: "in the middle of a business situation, who is the most important person in the room? You or your customer?" Naturally, most people say, "the customer!" Gitomer then goes on to ask: "if you and your customer are in a room and one of you has to drop dead, who do you want it to be?" It's a funny line, but it illustrates my point: self-preservation over everything else (a little narcissism is a good thing).

If you're telling people to be open and transparent in Social Media, shouldn't you do the same?

I've seen multiple instances in Social Media recently that have led me to think about the saying: "practice what you preach." In the past little while there have been a handful of Digital Marketing professionals (who are super accusatory of brands and how transparent they are in Social Media) make the same move: they get a new gig and they spend multiple paragraphs Blogging about this great new opportunity (how thrilled they are to be joining such a world-class team, the people and clients they will be working with, how important of a step this is in their professional development, etc...). It's all over their other online channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc...) with lots of bravado and chest-thumping.

Then...

Then, six to eighteen months later, the job didn't work out, they're no longer at the company, the word is out on the street, but there's no mention of it anywhere in their online streams. Not a peep. Nada. It's business as usual. When you think about it, it's understandable. Who wants to now Blog or tweet about how it didn't work out? How it wasn't as great as they thought it might be and the experience certainly didn't live up to the expectations set forward in those initial Blog posts and Facebook status updates. It's difficult to be self-critical, isn't it?

There's a big Marketing lesson here.

Brands (and individuals) do control their messaging. They can decide how much personal information they want to integrate into their streams of content within the social channels. The challenge is that our human nature wants to know more and more personal information, so those that publish in that vein need to take caution with this. Because, in the end, if all you're doing is promoting the good stuff and hiding the not-so-good, all authenticity is gone and - to make matters worse - your credibility is lost to. What looks worse: saying nothing about it (especially when everyone knows about the big change) or writing a Blog post about lessons learned, how you feel about it not working out and what you're going to do about it next? It's not an easy thing to do, but aren't we constantly telling our clients how difficult Social Media can be?

If you're constantly pushing brands to be open and transparent about the good, the bad and the ugly, shouldn't you be held to the same high standard?

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