Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I’ve read a few blog posts recently from a tribe of people I’m going to call the “Grumpy Old Marketers.” Not because they necessarily are actually grumpy, but because their rants remind me of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character from Saturday night live. Members of this group include grizzled industry veterans who insist that, “In my day, we didn’t have all this social media stuff. We spent 60 hours a week cold calling people who cursed at us and hung up on us until our ears were bleeding. That was the way it was and we liked it!”

If it stopped there, it wouldn’t deserve a rant. But one article recently set me off. The author had a sales and marketing automation system running on a Digital minicomputer back in 1982. He insists that his customers enjoyed the marketing collateral and white papers he sent, lovingly arranging them into three ring binders. In his post, the author wants us to believe that mailing brochures is the same as crafting an e-book, and pressing the flesh at a cocktail party is the same as connecting on LinkedIn. And while I agree with his central point that human behaviors are the same as they have always been, his final conclusion – and thus his advice – is simply dangerous in my opinion.

Permission Marketing

He argues that they did “permission marketing” back in 1982.

How exactly did he know when somebody no longer wanted their propaganda? Does he really think that people took the time to fill out his little postcard and mail them back to stop receiving his junk mail? Doubt it. And today’s permission marketing is all about people opting into the medium as well as the content. He had one tool – direct mail – where now, people can subscribe to email or RSS, fan pages, Tweets, SMS, etc…

Content Marketing

He argues that they did “content marketing” back in 1982.

“They [customers] received high quality, current information about products and the industry free of charge.” While this may be true, it’s like a caveman laughing at a tank saying, “We had artillery back in the stone age too! We called them ‘rocks.’” His brochures and white papers cost his company a fortune in production, printing and mailing costs. Today, I can write my own e-book with free open source software, upload it to a cloud-based host like Scribd for free, register with an affiliate sales channel for free, Tweet it, share it on Facebook and have it downloaded by a million people without spending a nickel. I can record high definition video on a $150 Flip camera and upload it to YouTube where millions more can watch it – for free.

Furthermore, his content was not discoverable. Your name had to end up in his database somehow or a colleague had to give you his/her copy. You couldn’t simply type some keywords into a brochure search engine and have it magically fly onto your desk.

I don’t think today’s low/no cost multimedia environment is anything remotely like what he’s describing.

Social Marketing

He argues that they did “social marketing” using telephones back in 1982.

Again, that version of social marketing was done on a one to one basis, where today’s version is one to thousands to millions. Apples and oranges.

Social Networking

He argues that they did “social networking” at trade shows back in 1982.

This one’s just flat out wrong. The definition of social networks today is a many to many network of producers who are also its own audience. When you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, you are a producer and the attendees are the consumers. Period. Completely different paradigm.

Marketing “In Enfilade”

His conclusion is that marketing is “simple” and hasn’t changed at all – only the technology. I strongly disagree. When the machine gun was first introduced into warfare, they tried to use it the same as they would a rifle; head on. It turned out not to be very effective since they were so immobile. But when they figured out that moving them “in enfilade” (flanking the formation shoot along the longest axis), they created interlocking fields of fire that became the death traps in Word War I. The point is that the battle strategies had to change dramatically when they went from single shot rifles to machine guns.

Likewise, just because there are some similarities between direct marketing tactics and social marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean the strategies are the same. In fact, they are very different.

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You may have heard this already, but this social networking thing is starting to get popular. It’s fundamentally altering the way we conduct our daily lives and that has lots of people coming unhinged. Daily shrieks on my Facebook wall warn of a new plan from the modern day Trilateral Commission(Facebook, Google, and Foursquare) to turn us into strung out, ad-clicking junkies so they can cut off our heads and mount them on pikes. News reporters who wouldn’t know the difference between a browser cookie and an Oreo cookie write terrifying stories about web sites stealing deep, dark, private secrets: like the URL for your Facebook profile that is already indexed by Google.

But I had to write this post after reading the latest prediction of the privacy apocalypse from the Intelligentsia. In a February Wired Magazine article titled “Your Life Torn Open,” Andrew Keen wails that we are being led down a primrose path to Hell with these social networking sites. Fear mongering has a long and glorious history – especially in journalism and politics – because it’s such a powerful emotion. If Gordon Gecko were a journalist instead of a wall street banker he would have said, “Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.”

While being concerned about your privacy is very important, articles like Keen’s focus the attention in the wrong place, in my opinion. In an effort to warn people about an impending doom, he’s inadvertently doing more harm than good. His article peddles three untruths that I see commonly thrown around and I will take exception to them now.

#1 – Social Networking is Narcissistic

In my opinion, this is the laziest, most gratuitous slap anyone can take at social networking. Almost invariably, they cite Tweets about what someone had for lunch or wall updates about their pet did this morning. Since social networking begins with us talking about ourselves, it’s really easy (too easy) to make quips about it being narcissistic. But it’s also demonstrably false.

If social networking were truly narcissistic, then NOBODY WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES. And that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of a social network, wouldn’t it? The very fact that someone has Facebook friends or Twitter followers annihilates the argument. I follow other people because I either learn something from time to time, or am entertained by that person, or want to keep my relationship with them warm by seeing what they’re doing. I’m interested.

There are billions of people on this planet who could not possibly care less about what I have to say. From their perspective, I’m obviously self-absorbed for writing about stuff they don’t care about. But I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to few hundred or thousand who do care. I’m talking to you. Does that make me a narcissist?

Now, I have no doubt there are true narcissists in social networks, but that’s because they are already narcissists and would be whether Facebook existed or not.

#2 – We Aren’t Naturally Social Beings

This line in Keen’s story made burst out loud with incredulity. This is absolutely demonstrably false. There have been countless experiments that illustrate the fact that much of our irrational behaviors are specifically geared toward social acceptance and group dynamics. Fear of public speaking is an example. We developed a fear of standing out from a crowd as a survival mechanism because there’s safety in numbers. Cognitive researchers have shown that our decision process is highly dependent on and easily swayed by others’ opinions. This helps promote harmony in small groups so that consensus can be reached on important decisions.

Keen opines that “human happiness is really about being left alone.” Really? Do I really even need to make an argument against that? Everybody likes some alone time now and then, obviously. But for my entire adult life I’ve heard about how our social fabric is being torn apart by people moving out of cities and into solitary lives in suburbia.

Now all of a sudden we’re all Greta Garbo? Here’s a free tip if you’re feeling too “social” – shut down your laptop and turn off your phone for a few hours. Problem solved!

#3 – Social Graphs Are Evil

Whereas the first two points I’ve made are demonstrable facts, this one is a little more of an opinion and personal preference. However, I feel like the whole paranoia over privacy settings gets a bit hysterical sometimes. First of all, you’re in complete control over what data you want to share and what data you want to keep private. Yes, reasonable people can argue about whether or not it could be more user friendly but the capability is there.

Second, we’re not talking about sharing social security numbers and credit card details. We’re talking about the brand of car you drive, your favorite songs and television shows, and news articles you’ve read. Lots of people think it’s “creepy” that this information can be used to target advertisements to us when log into Facebook or visit a newspaper website. I prefer to think of it as spam-blocking. I’m all in favor of giving these websites information that lets them improve the ads I see and offers I receive so that it’s more relevant to me.

Let’s Be Smart

OK, please don’t waste our time by mis-characterizing my point: I am not saying you should make everything public. I am not saying there’s no such thing as identity theft. I am saying that you should be concerned about the important things, like strong passwords and recognizing a phishing attack when you see one. Those are much, much more important than preventing Facebook from telling someone your favorite artist is Justin Bieber.

Well, maybe you do want to keep that one private.

Let me know what you think about privacy and targeted ads. I think there are more dangerous things to worry about but maybe I’m missing something.

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I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

I’ll be conducting an inbound marketing workshop at the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in a couple of weeks. We’ve just launched a blogging contest that is giving away an iPod Touch. Although I’m judging and not eligible to win, I’m linking this article to help spread the word.

Browser content (i.e. HTML on port 80) now accounts for less than 25% of all Internet traffic.

Your entire Internet marketing strategy may be based on a mirage. Many companies are focused on search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. This is all well and good as long as Google remains the gatekeeper of the Internet. But here’s the thing; there’s a new sheriff in town and the entire 18 year old ecosystem of the world wide web is in danger. This is according to Wired Magazine who today published “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

The premise of this article is that we are willingly giving up the freedom and openness of the traditional world wide web in favor of a more closed, less free version; apps. Wired argues that like the rail system and electrical grid before it, the Internet is entering a period of consolidation and domination by a few power brokers.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Now. let’s keep in mind that Wired is not entirely unbiased in this debate. They and their publisher, Condé Nast , have put a large portion of their eggs into Steve Jobs’ basket. But to paraphrase the late Kurt Cobain, “Just because you’re biased doesn’t mean they’re not right.”

Tilting at Windmills

We laughed at Prince when he said it, but this article should make every marketer’s blood run cold. If our usage of the Internet is indeed moving from open, HTML-based web sites to the walled gardens of applications and streaming content, it means that search engines are indexing an increasingly small piece of the pie. They simply aren’t the ubiquitous arbiter they once were, since much of the Internet’s activity is happening outside of their field of view. Basing an entire Internet marketing strategy on search engines is like looking at a windmill and seeing a dragon.

That doesn’t mean that you should halt your search engine marketing tactics. It does, however, mean that it should be a shrinking share of your overall marketing strategy. The question then becomes, “What fills that vacuum?”

Gift Marketing

Moore’s Law has resulted in bandwidth and storage costs that are becoming too cheap to meter. This enabled the Web 2.0 sites we’re all using today and led to the emergence of social networking. Consequently, we’re able to scale our peer groups and get increasing amounts of information and recommendations from trusted sources instead of advertisements and algorithms. The problem for marketers is that much of this takes place inside the walled gardens of Facebook. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

And so we have brands jumping into social media. However, one of the problems they’re grappling with is the juxtaposition of norms; economic versus social. They’re not used to this whole social thing and many of them are trying to transplant the old advertising models that were based on economic norms into the world of social networking.

Think of it this way…  You’re having a dinner party and invite some close friends. Your doorbell rings and it’s a smarmy, uninvited used car salesman. He lets himself in and starts denigrating the car in your driveway and listing all of the special deals they have. While this behavior may have been tolerated on his lot, it certainly doesn’t belong at a dinner party and you kick him out. Imagine, instead, your best friends call ahead of time and ask if they can bring this really cool guy who was great fun at their last barbecue. He shows up and in the course of normal conversation finds out you’re having trouble with your headlights. He takes a look and shows you how to adjust their alignment and fixes the problem. You find out later (from your friends, not him) that he works at a car dealership and you commit to visiting him when it comes time for you to upgrade your vehicle.

In this new trust economy, companies are going to have to start thinking much more in terms of social norms. Even though the name of the game is making money, they are going to have to follow a different set of rules than they’re used to following. The first rule of inbound marketing is creating compelling content that people want to share. The secret to creating this content is thinking of it as a gift.

Is repackaging your brochure into a blog post a gift? Not so much.
Is showing up unannounced polite? Definitely not.
Do gratuitous, insincere compliments build trust? Not exactly.

Search engine optimization is certainly not dead. But as Hans and Fanz said, “Hear me now und believe me later,” that giant sucking sound you hear in your marketing strategy is the vacuum being created as search shrinks. You need to be prepared to fill it with content marketing that focuses on building new customer relationships socially.

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Paul Adams is the Senior User Experience Researcher at Google. He posted a presentation on Slideshare that is providing a glimpse at the philosophy behind the rumored “Facebook killer” that Google is working on. This presentation indicates some fundamental differences between its view of social networks and the way in which Facebook is currently implemented.

The title of the presentation is “The Real Life Social Network” and it exposes some fundamental differences between the way our relationships exist in real life versus the way they are modeled on Facebook (or pretty much any other social network for that matter). Given Google’s specialty – writing algorithms that model relationships – it’s easy to see how their background in search algorithms has imprinted the thinking in this presentation.

Groups

One fundamental design flaw with most social networking applications is that they force us to into using one generic group of “friends.” Adams says his research indicates that people actually have between four and six groups of relationships. When they examined 342 groups that people used to describe their real life networks, only 15% actually contained the word “friend” at all! Furthermore, 61% of the names were unique, which means that there is not a lot of common ground in terms of how we categorize our real life networks.

Connections

Not all connections are created equal. Adams talks extensively about “strong” and “weak” ties between people. Strong ties exist among family and close friends and tend to be in the single digits. Weak ties make up the remainder of our relationships, which caps out at around 150 (see Dunbar’s Number). Any connections beyond that are classified as temporary connections.

Privacy

While it seems almost too easy to assault Facebook for privacy concerns, Adams does so by tying it in with the concepts of groups and connections. If it’s true that we have these different relationship groups and that the strength of our connections within each of these groups varies, then it logically follows that our desires for and expectations of privacy will differ greatly as well. It will be important, not to mention challenging, to support these different models in a way that is easy for people to understand and implement.

The interactions between these different groups and different types of connections is a complicated dynamic that, according to Adams, is greatly oversimplified in current social networking applications. Presumably, this document is a sneak peak at Google’s major push toward a new platform that aims to end the threat Facebook poses to Google in the form of social search. They’ve clearly identified three major weaknesses that they plan to exploit.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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