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Internet

When do you post and why?

by Bill on February 25, 2010

This is a quick little post that is primarily questions. For instance, if you schedule your blog posts, when do you schedule them for?

I ask this because I’m in the Atlantic time zone. Many people are in the Eastern time zone and many in the other zones all the way to the Pacific. Of course, the internet being global, there are many more time zones.

If you monitor things like Twitter and Facebook, you see activity related to those time zones. As an example, I know many people in the west and I can see, around noon my time, activity firing up out there because it’s about 8:00 am in the Pacific time zone.

So when do you find is the best time to schedule your posts? Does it even matter? If you schedule for the west, do you miss the potential of the east and vice versa?

It seems a niggly thing to wonder about, at least to me, but it could be a significant factor depending on what you are posting, why you are posting and who you believe your audience to be.

Is there a best time?

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Social media and passing fancies

by Bill on January 27, 2010

iPhone apps (cbc.ca)I began thinking today about social media and all the tools we see. There is something of a digital cornucopia of “stuff”: Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, Twitter apps, aggregators and on and on. New ones pop up everyday.

Accompanying all of these is the hype. There is the marketing from the companies that bring them out, the reviews from the various “spheres” and the conversations we carry on about them, online and off. “You can do this with it.” “You can do that.” “You can also do these things too.”

It all sounds marvelous unless you are hearing from the contrarian perspective in which case the tools and apps are frivolous or any number of other negative descriptives.

What I was wondering about, however, was how we actually use them. Are we using them just because everyone else is and they are the distraction of the month? Are we using them to a productive end? How are we using them … or more to the point, I suppose, why? What, if anything, do we get from them?

I’m also thinking less about the business aspect and more about the general population that uses them. There are a number of ways we use them as far as business goes, some effective, some not so much. But how and why do people use them, that big consumer base that gets talked about so much? I’m sure there are a number of answers to this but I also wonder if they all don’t dovetail into one or two general answers, a theme that shows how those different hows and whys all relate.

Despite all the things that can be done with social media tools, from sending messages to playing games and grabbing weather information quickly, I think all the whys can be summed into a single word: people.

There are supportive words that follow from that one word: connection, communication and information.

Regardless of all the flim flam with video, audio, Flash and games, for people to find the Internet (and social media) to be of any relevance for them, those four words need to be considered essential: people, connection, communication and information.

Even a silly video involves those words since it is pointless without connection to other people which, when that occurs, communicates and even passes along information, at least to the extent that it says something about you. (Just as it says something about those who respond to it.)

Everything else, while amusing and entertaining, is just a passing fancy. In the world of social media, I suspect that if you don’t keep those four words paramount in your mind you run the risk of becoming quickly forgettable.

***

I should add that I don’t think I’m saying anything new here or something I haven’t either said or alluded to before. I’m probably repeating myself with this post. But repetition is not a bad thing since it is often through repetition that we best remember.

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The great digital landfill

by Bill on January 26, 2010

What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

  • The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
  • The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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Who are we not hearing from?

by Bill on September 2, 2009

I really am tired of the repetitive and now long-redundant either/or debate around traditional and social media. Apart from being well worn, it risks obfuscating other issues. A good example of what gets lost lies in the Michael Valpy essay, Is this the end of social cohesion? and David Eaves’ response, Dear Valpy: social media isn’t killing democracy, it’s making it stronger.

We can probably blame Mr. Valpy because he brings up the subject of newspapers and social media and certainly makes some valid points (such as quoting Carleton’s Christopher Waddell’s speculation about seeking out confirmation online rather than challenges).

The problem, however, is that if you accept the argument that newspapers provided some social cohesion and, through challenges and debate, unifying ideas (something Mr. Eaves flatly rejects), surely we can take it further. If we were all made to own and read and study Bibles, and all made to belong to and attend Christian churches and their services, regardless of whether we were Christian or not, surely we’d have the cultural coherence and common touchstones that they had in Elizabethan England. Now that was coherent and that was a world with things in common, including shared values.

The problem is that in a democratic society that can hardly be considered democratic.

We’re told, however, that social media is. It has the potential to save the day. But who exactly is social media democratic for? The homeless? Personally, I’m not aware of any homeless people online, but maybe my social circle is limited.

Canada’s aboriginal people, those living in far off, rural areas with no Internet access? Or the ones living in poverty – do they have access? Do they even have computers? (I recently approached Canada’s food banks with the idea of using social media as a way to facilitate what they did, to reach more potential donors and volunteers etc. They liked the idea but had some huge obstacles: their disparate nature and the fact that many food banks don’t have Internet access and/or don’t have computers. The real world gave me a wake up call.)

Yes, I’ve written about this before.

Here’s the thing about social media: you need a computer or some handheld device. And you need access. And even if you do have the wherewithal for those things, you need to know how to use them and have a facility for doing so. It may be hard to believe, but some people don’t. Just as some people couldn’t balance a bank account to save their lives and some people couldn’t sing on key no matter how many lessons they took.

Social media comes with predicates. It makes assumptions about who you are and what you have. You meet those, you get to use it. Otherwise, you’re outta luck pal.

So let’s be careful when we speak of the democratizing nature of social media.

Our beautiful mosaic

But getting back to Michael Valpy’s essay … Mr. Eaves says Mr. Valpy enters the conversation three years late and that is true if the conversation is this endless traditional/social media thing. But the science fiction author Samuel R. Delany was writing about this back in the 1970s and 80s. However, he wasn’t writing about social media because what is at the heart of Valpy’s essay is not tools but people and society and our ability to find and talk to each other. Social media is a tool and nothing more.

What Delany was writing about was social fragmentation and the “What if …?” that follows when you follow it through to its extremes. In one of his novels (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I believe) the risk is cultural fugue, a kind of social catatonia. The economist Herbert Simon has said, “A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.” Delany’s novel seems to suggest, “A wealth of choice leads to an inability to choose.” Fugue.

To use a Canadian cliché, if we are a cultural mosaic what are we a mosaic of? Cultures or gated communities of the mind and spirit? Mr. Eaves doesn’t like the quote by Carleton’s Christopher Waddell about us seeking reinforcement rather than challenge online but I suspect Waddell is correct. But I think that is a human tendency the Internet facilitates rather than being a consequence of it being the Internet bogeyman. And it may be we tend to do this the more fragmented our world becomes.

Whatever the truth is, there is a problem and reducing it to a traditional versus social media argument misdirects attention. It misses the real world.

We think we know Canada and Canadians but what we know is the parameters of our own lives: friends, work, family. To everything else, we are tourists. The old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” applies. We don’t know the rest of the country, we don’t even know the rest of our own provinces. (How many people in Vancouver have ever been to, much less lived in, Fort St. John? How many of us have lived in Smiths Falls? How many in Toronto have lived in Elliot Lake? Who has been to and lived in Bathurst, New Brunswick?)

Social media can facilitate this but only if we are listening. Waddell’s question (“Do we?”) is one worth asking along with, “Who are we listening to?” Despite all the online voices, we have to constantly ask, “Who am I not hearing from?

You can be sure someone’s voice isn’t there.

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Twitter, statistics and speculation

by Bill on August 31, 2009

Allow me to inebriate some sober numbers … When we talk about Facebook and Twitter, cars and bikes, business and the arts, we are always self-referential. We think a certain way, we use something in a certain way, we believe this may occur in a certain way … and we forget that the world doesn’t always think like us. It’s a cliché, but everybody is different and just because we see something one way or use something in a particular manner, it doesn’t necessarily follow that every one else will.

I was thinking about this when I read the post, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Some people see Twitter as a marketing tool, some as a tool for news, some as way to enhance their real estate business (yes, another marketing view but perhaps also organizational). And there are some who use it for non-commercial reasons and some who just use it for silliness. The tool itself has no inherent purpose beyond what each of us brings to it. For many, there is no purpose.

I was also thinking about statistics and surveys and all the data we collect. Often, maybe more often than not, the information they best provide concerns how much more we need to learn. They highlight what we don’t know. And they are usually interpreted from a particular point of view, at least at street level.

I saw a tweet, followed by a retweet, for that posting titled, 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics. Use of the word “sobering” suggests there is something not very good in these numbers. But I thought, what if there were? What if there were other ways of seeing these? So I’ve put together an alternative — 10 other ways of seeing sobering Twitter stats:

  • 94% of Twitter users have under 100 followers (which may suggest quality has more meaning than quantity)
  • 90% of tweeting is done by 10% of Twitter users (Which is very much like the real world: 90% don’t call radio stations, 90% don’t write letters to the editor, most don’t speak out at town halls, etc. Also, some people don’t speak because they are listening.)
  • 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month (But since we don’t know who they were we have no idea whether they would have brought anything of value to the Twitter streams nor do we know why they didn’t return.)
  • 50% of Twitter accounts are inactive (Haven’t tweeted in the past week) (See the previous item)
  • 40% of tweets are “pointless babble” (As opposed to … TV? Blogs? The street? Boardrooms? Sounds like it reflects the real world.)
  • 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers (Personally, though I have loads of acquaintances, that is about how many really close friends I have. Maybe I’m tweeting for reasons other than to pitch something?)
  • 21% of Twitter accounts are empty placeholders (And what would the percentage of domain names as placeholders be? Have these accounts been abandoned? Are they in place to reserve for a future presence as a company stream, a person’s stream, a campaign stream or to prevent others from getting a name that might have an impact on theirs? Do we have any idea? For all we know it could be one obsessive compulsive guy trying over and over to open one account that is “just right.”)
  • 11% of Twitter users interact with brands on Twitter (The world, unfortunately, will always have a certain percentage of really stupid people. As I’ve written before, we don’t follow brands. We follow people. If you find a brand with a lot of followers I would hazard a guess that they aren’t interacting with it but with each other.)
  • 9% of Twitter users don’t follow anyone at all (Maybe they have lives beyond the Internet? Maybe they have no interest – just took the name because its theirs and they didn’t want someone else to have it? Maybe they haven’t found anyone worth following? Maybe they don’t know how?)
  • 3% of followers click on links tweeted (Does this include retweets? More to the point, how many links do we come across in a day – on web pages, in emails, on Facebook and so on? How many of those do we click? Is 3% about average? High? Low?)

And that’s it. Accurate assessments? Probably not. But you never know! But it’s worthwhile questioning the assumptions we bring to topics like these.

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Theories are theories and reality changes

by Bill on August 27, 2009

Every month or few months a study pops up that reveals that teens don’t use Twitter. Actually, they do. They just don’t make up the huge base some expected and are not the group fueling Twitter growth. The New York Times had a pretty good article on this (Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens) and there are others, most noting a certain surprise with this unexpected information.

I think this is a good example of how we create and buy into orthodoxies without ever really questioning them or, more importantly, revisiting them and seeing if they are still valid (assuming they were in the first place).

A few years ago in discussing font sizes, Jakob Nielsen noted that today’s young person is tomorrow’s older person and that not taking an older demographic into account and not being aware of how demographics change over time (because we age), is a dangerous stance.

The “conventional wisdom” that young people were necessary to technology may have been somewhat true but that “early adopter” demographic of the time this idea came about has since aged, becoming an older demographic. Teens now are a different group of teens. And an older demographic, while perhaps not dominated by early adopters, is not idle. They may come into the game late but they do eventually come in — if only because younger people join the ranks of older people. And late in the game is often when the game is most critical, where the most is on the line.

Also, when we speak in these general terms I think we tend to polarize: a young demographic means teens and an older demographic means retirees. We don’t really see the huge group between the extremes or how demographic groups overlap and blend.

We often get so caught up in predicting and projecting and imagining where things are going that we fail to see where they are and, relying on our various theories of how these things work, fail to see how they are actually evolving. Theories are nice, and sometimes on the money, but sometimes they deflect us from seeing things as they are or as they are becoming or as they may go. They can become shortcuts around actually thinking.

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Logos - FriendFeed and FacebookWith just about everyone weighing in on the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, I thought I’d add to the noise and toss in my riveting insight (or lack thereof).

First of all, I’ve no idea what it means. But then, no one else does either — there is interesting speculation, however. One of the first notions that was tossed out there on the Internet was that it had less to do with Facebook getting FriendFeed itself and more to do with getting the talent behind it. As one story (PC World) puts it, “… the team behind FriendFeed has quite the impressive collective résumé.” Many of them are former Google employees and worked on things like Gmail and Google Maps. So, yes, I could see why Facebook would want them.

And according to a BBC article, “As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company’s four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site’s engineering and product teams.”

From a user perspective, given how awkward, clunky and user bewildering much of Facebook is, I’m hoping this will be a good thing.

This morning the thinking appears to have shifted from yesterday’s and appears more focused on the challenge this acquisition poses to Google and Twitter. (See that BBC article, for example.) The business-tech world loves nothing more than to see these things in Stanley Cup playoffs terms.

I can, however, see this as an accurate assessment. For example, from that BBC item:

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr (Robert) Scoble told the BBC.

For me, someone who uses these social networks and the tools but who doesn’t spend much time understanding the technology, only enough to know it works, I’ve always seen these networks this way:

Size: Facebook biggest, Twitter smaller, FriendFeed smallest.

Theoretical usefulness: FriendFeed most, Twitter a bit less, Facebook least.

Practical usefulness: A crapshoot between Facebook and Twitter (for me), FriendFeed least.

Put another way, of them all, it’s FriendFeed I like most, though it’s the one I know the least about. Maybe I just haven’t used it enough to see all its flaws and maybe it does things the others also do, but I’m unaware of them. The problem with FriendFeed, however, is the old retail thing about location, location, location. So far, Facebook keeps winning not because it’s best but because that is where the most users are and most users means most useful (to me).

There are really two things about FriendFeed that I like: 1) the interface, which I find cleaner, easier to read and understand (overall) than either Facebook or Twitter and, 2) it aggregates all my other feeds so, for example, my Flickr photos show up without the need of using Facebook’s incredibly slow and frustrating photos tool or some clunky third party app.

Currently, however, no one knows what the real impact of the acquisition will be. One thought has been it’s the end of FriendFeed. If that’s the case, it brings up an interesting issue, one that hasn’t received much attention that I’m aware of: Data portability, as discussed here. What happens if, for example, Flickr were to end for some reason or other? What happens to your account? Where do your photos go?

Or, what happens if you no longer like Facebook and decide that’s it, I’m going elsewhere (maybe even drop social networks altogether)? What happens to your content? How do you get it, download it to your own computer or some other storage device?

How are you protected from data loss? Or are you protected? That’s a lot of data to just let it go “poof!”

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my_point01.jpgFor my headline to be complete it should read, “What you save in dollars you spend in time because, as you probably know, time is money.” In other words, saving dollars doesn’t always save dollars.

I’m thinking about businesses and web sites and social media. The other night I was at an event, talking to a number of people, many of them business people, and we talked a bit about business, marketing and the various tools available to leverage on the Internet.

I was talking to one guy, a small businessman, and said to him that what I usually tell businesses is that if they’re not sure what the tools are and how to use them, it’s best not to jump in. You should have a specific reason for using them and a good idea of how to go about using them so they’re effective. The biggest problem that I’ve seen is that the tools appear to have all kinds of potential – and they do have loads of potential – but what most people don’t see is the real cost, which is time.

Creating a web site and putting it in place, or getting accounts on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, is relatively easy and there is an almost zero dollar investment – it seems. But maintaining these things is hard. And it involves time, which usually ends up as a cost.

Imagine business cards for example. You get one designed and spend a bit of time figuring out exactly what information you want on them and what message you want them to communicate. And you’ve hired a company to help you with the design, information, and message aspects, and to produce the cards. And they charge you something for all this and that is an expense.

Then you come across a tool that allows you to do all this yourself with almost no cost, and you do so, and you save a bunch of money and that looks good on the books. But …

The problem is, for the card to have value, for it to be effective, you have to rewrite it every week because now you’re on the Internet. And you can’t just rewrite it with anything. You have to think through what it says, each week, and in many cases, spend some time doing a bit of research to ensure what it says is accurate. And you have to present the information in a way that prompts people to read what the card says, not just toss it aside without a look.

In other words, every week (maybe more often, maybe less), you have to spend time on it in order for it to be effective and justify its existence and your effort. Nothing works online the same way it does in the tactile world. That’s why many ads fail online.

In my experience most businesses, especially small businesses, don’t have that time. Even if they do, they don’t have the writing expertise or the social conversation skills to do it well enough to make it work and become a valuable marketing tool.

What they end up with is some reduced marketing and other expenses and some crossed-fingers as they hope it works, which it seldom does without a specific focus on maintenance. People come once, might even like what they see, but without a reason for coming back you won’t see them again.

Maintenance is critical to making any of these things work and maintenance means time and that means money. If you do it yourself, it’s whatever your time is worth to you – how much an hour? It’s also what you don’t do – “If instead of doing this I was doing that, I’d generate …” If you spend an hour of your time and that hour is worth $50 and, while you do it you are not doing something that would pull in $75, you’re losing $25. And that’s a cost. Lost revenue. It might not show up on the books that way, but that’s what it is.

You could pay someone to do it for you – in many cases, the best option. But in trying to keep costs down you go with cheap, that may be what you get and end up being how you’re represented – meaning your brand feels the impact. Regardless of the cost, make sure whoever is doing the maintenance knows what they are doing and are very good at it.

Rumours to the contrary, the web is not a marvel where a storefront can be put in place without a thought and social media tools aren’t a magic pill to reach the world with the message about your product or service … and never give either, your site or your social tools, another thought. They have to be maintained, smartly. They require time and effort in order to work.

Sometimes the desperate need to reduce costs bamboozles us into believing in the pixie dust of the Internet. But the Internet, like life, keeps teaching the same lesson: ain’t nothing free, ain’t no easy routes to financial Valhalla, work and only work makes things work.

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I play on my computer and online

by Bill on June 11, 2009

Kids playing in Odell Park, Fredericton, New BrunswickI’ve been up to no good, at least not in a practical sense. I’ve been doing what I’ve always done with computers, the Internet and writing: playing.

Some guys go out at 11:00 at night and play hockey. Some people go hiking or kayaking or running. Some people pour over recipes and try new cuisines. I play on my computer.

And as I’ve often done, I’ve put it online. It’s right up their in the header navigation, Harcourt. It’s actually a bit of silliness called Harcourt Goes to Hell.

The number of reasons to not put it online are legion. Personal branding, professionalism, and so on. As someone who works professionally as a writer — the SEO writing, the technical communications, the marketing communications, the web writing, copy and on and on — this kind of thing undermines the seriousness of my image, doesn’t it?

Probably. But years ago, in pre-Web days, when I first got a computer and first connected with the Internet, it was for the fun of it. It was for the possibilities it created for playing, which is how I look at writing (despite how frustrating it can often be). There were so many tools the computer offered and so many things to access with the Internet, I thought, “Wow! This so cool.”

Of course, I did pretend I had practical reasons in mind. And in truth, I did. I saw the communication possibilities, the efficiencies, and the cost reduction potential.

Eventually the world of marketing, and business generally, caught on to what the Web meant and the business aspects of Internet technology — software, social media, handhelds, apps etc. — and it took off like gangbusters.

The tenor of what was online also changed. (Perhaps that’s my own perception based on what interests me and where I go and how I use things.) It became more business focused and, with that focus, a bit more serious, much more aware of appearances and perception (branding).

But a lot of what is developed, at least what is developed with a consumer focus, is based on the idea that people play. Outside. Inside. And online. This is why I think putting something like Harcourt Goes to Hell online is okay. It’s a part of who I am — this aspect of playing, that is — but certainly not the whole of me. And while I don’t expect anyone to perceive it this way, as I do, it’s actually an important aspect for anyone hoping to do business online or use the tools available to market, discuss and “monetize” their business.

It means, I think, that I am in touch with people and what they often do with all these communication and other tools: play. I may not know or understand the specifics of how they play, but I do have the intuitive sense for why they behave as they do because it’s the same reason behind why I play. (That reason? It’s creative. And that makes it fun.)

Consumers are people, yes. But while people may consume (buy products and services), they do many other things as well. They aren’t automatons. They aren’t made up of code. They aren’t programmed with an overriding priority like, “To buy.” Unlike Isaac Asimov’s robots and their “Laws of Robotics,” consumers (people) don’t have a “Laws of Consumerism.” People do anything and everything and there is often no explaining why until years of research have been put in. It’s achieved after the fact.

Although we often appear to come close, understanding people isn’t a cerebral thing. It’s visceral.

Playing is a way of staying in touch with that.

Harcourt Goes to Hell is one way I play. It may be silly and not particularly good, but it’s creative and it’s fun.

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Another industry kaput?

by Bill on March 23, 2009

There’s an article by Eric Clemons over on TechCrunch about advertising and its approaching online demise. Titled, Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet, it outlines a number of problems with online advertising, referring to an anticipated fall in online ad revenues. Clemons says, “Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.”

I’ve seen the article’s comments as well as tweets online that assume he is saying advertising is dead, but I don’t think he ever actually says that. Obviously I can’t speak for him but I believe what he is saying is that online advertising won’t work as a revenue model for sites etc., at least not in the long term. As the first section of the article says with its title, “There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising.”

I think that’s probably true but I think it’s also true to say that advertising must be something other than what it has been. Clemons’ entire article is based on a traditional advertising approach, which is interruptive. But he doesn’t really consider advertising with another approach.

Maybe the problem for me is in how he defines advertising:

Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.

If this is the definition I would say yes, the odds of it working aren’t good. But is that what it is? Maybe I’m muddling the terms advertising and marketing in my mind but I think there are other ways to communicate with customers that are less intrusive and more welcome. Also: although people usually say they don’t like advertising and the interruptive approach, is that actually so? Maybe the like/dislike aspect is conditioned by the kind of ad, the brand it represents and the frequency of interruptions? (I’m thinking of Apple ads – I rarely, if ever, hear people complain about those.)

My take on it all? It’s a good start but the article ends in wishful thinking. Advertising (marketing) needs a huge rethink/sensibility shift. The majority continue to use the interruptive approach and smarmy smile approach. If people distrust advertising it is because the reality (of a product/service) did not match the claims for it and there was a failure to engage customers as people, as opposed to numbers in a spreadsheet.

Despite the title, this is yet another article speculating about revenue models on the Internet. In the end, the conclusion of the article is, “I don’t know where all this is going but I sure to wish and hope it’s the scenario I’ve imagined.”

With the breadth and depth of information available to people, with our ability to connect and converse between ourselves as well as with companies (assuming they engage), perhaps we’re in an era when the best way for advertising to work is by changing how it sees itself. Maybe advertising needs to see itself as support rather than pitch, informative and helpful rather than a message to persuade.

Maybe it’s time for advertising to “rebrand” itself and become something people might actually want.

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