Social media is not antisocial

I posted a link to a movie trailer on my nephew's Facebook wall all the other day, and an application automatically generated another link to the same movie studio-hosted place, with the name of the studio on it. Someone is getting paid to get in the way.

You don't go to a cocktail party and talk about your Yaris' fuel economy and add "act now and you can receive 1.9% financing. Until Dec 31. Some conditions apply." That would be antisocial. When Facebook apps mimics this behavior, well, it ain't social either.

The term "Social media" is in danger of being appropriated by the overbearing types in old school Marketing. Go figure.

For 2008: who knows how things we call social media will look, but when I see propagandistic, slimy, hyped up, anti social marketing - I'll resist calling this social media, just out of principle.

...wishing our ruling party would get with it.

- ( favorite Ecobitz cartoon )

Splunking by sink holes

Fab post at "Talent Imitates.." on Skype phones and interim times.
- of the weight "pushing back on us from the future".

In Canada we already have Voip LAN phones that are all upside - (way) cheaper, clearer, easier. Our house adopted Voip, and we'll never go back. But we are still in a HUGE minority, though clearly the old platform is built above a growing sink hole. Same with cell phone networks - the North American companies are absolute dinosaurs and thieves - but financially successful. This means something.

In a speeded up world of shifting tectonic plates and melting icecaps, sink holes form more quickly. Understanding Mark Earls' and others' insights on herd behavior seems vital now, as successful businesses are ABOUT making the most of these sink holes. So what if this platform is decrepit, and will collapse? There is still business there, and there may not necessarily be money in the new solid platform.

Of course, many of us adopt ahead and forget to make the most of these sink holes - perhaps overwhelmed by anxiety.

Is squidoo social?

Seth Godin is the man, and when I heard that Google had "flattered" him by creating a competing product, I um, celebrated by creating a Squidoo lens on installing glass tiles. Heck, I do know some things after all.

Green in 3 dimensions

I created the web information architecture for a Green products and services company a few months back, and today I got to see the beta output. Mixed emotions. More on this later, as the site has not officially launched.

We went out to dinner tonight and we talked about informing versus advertising. I think that we agreed that with advertising, there is always an added thing, some kind of zest that we sort of pretend is added to the user when s/he buys the product. Advertising is ideational "value -added" content. Coke = refreshment, not just the drink.

It's easy to label this kind of advertising is bullshit. But there is something in it. We do want more than a product. We want the key to our existential predicament and anxiety, and this forms everything we aspire to. We want life in all its dimensions, not just a brown sugary drink, or a website that sells me stuff.

As Hugh MacLeod so beautifully put it in his Hughtrain, the market for something to believe in is infinite. Conventional branding and advertising capitalizes on the search for this quest as it emphasizes Godliness in many forms - and in a kind of belief in the importance of peak or aha moments, in refreshment, in elegance, in timelessness.

Glimpses of contentment are of course ephemeral, which works very well in a consumer driven economy. The glass was giving me refreshment. Now I've consumed it. Can't wait to be thirsty again. Hell maybe I'll have another right now.

The problem is, of course, that these same exalted products are in some cases killing our life support systems.

When we actually want the truth, and live by the truth, and believe in the primacy of truth, advertising might be hard to characterize at first.

What if it were unfashionable to believe that ignorance of global warming or that our part in it is at all OK?

What would advertising look like if the value added by advertising actually motivated and supported people in living the truth. Would it still be advertising?

And what would the business model that supports all this look like?

Moving sideways

Well Neil at Only Dead Fish is a smart guy and writes good stuff about the Ad Agency.
We'd love to know where to put smart people. Personally I think more people at the agency should either get into art or as Seth Godin says, go down the hall and help make good things in product development.
Because most ads fool us, and we're fooling ourselves.
Great stuff by Free Range Studios:

We can see a touching blue before the green.

According to Cluetrain hero David Weinberger at a recent ( Defrag) conference, the unspoken is the source of all value... and marketing should not lie to people. Nice.

Social media is the thing upon us, and with it comes the erosion of the power and myth of the personal narrative. Things happen in concert, and we have a chance to realize this in social media. Hence the tremendous human and commercial potential - because social media is more like us than command-and-control anti social marketing.

Unlike social marketing as an activity, its new platform, the Web, is implemented to keep all information - seemingly for ever. This "paper" trail is in some ways unnatural - there is always decay in nature, but by concretizing events, like any publishing instance, content and links have an appearance of permanence. And hence, we think, they might be worth alot.

Well, things keep accelerating, and these things are mostly ( like this blog!) not widely read. Just as well. Content is overrated. For social marketing to work, there is a need to get under what is the meaning of social marketing, and loosen one's grip on the Web itself, let alone its obviously flawed concrete forms ( twitter, youtube, myspace, facebook etc).

Out, new govt

Ok. So Tom and I don't think much of Canada's 'new government'.