WillBurrus.com

Facebook is Dead.
So I had an interesting epiphany today. Facebook is dead. Interactive Marketing killed it. I know this sounds a bit grandiose but hear me out.

We all know the great story of how Facebook came to be. It was created by some Harvard kids to essentially automate (again the 'Remote Control factor') the paper facebooks that students would use to get to know one another on campus. It eventually grew into a huge community of users who use it to keep in touch with their friends lives. Great technology, right! Great purpose. It helps us to stay in touch with people. Score one for technology once again helping peoples lives...

Enter the Dragon
Being the cool useful technology that it is, it quickly grows to 127 million users. That’s sounds like dollars and the marketers want in! They are going to throw anything at Facebook to get the attention of anyone in hopes that a viral spark will be lit and massive amounts of business will be driven back to the client! Can you blame them? 127 million people is a BIG audience? Not a problem. We can deal with some branded mini-apps and we consumers enjoy exploring our advocacy powers for brands we like. Heck, I just convinced someone on Facebook NOT to buy a Samsung Insight (I think) because I found out it was a piece of crap! Either way, I still have my community of real friends whom I can keep in touch with from afar…

Here comes evolution.
OK. So we created a cool tech, and we let the marketers in to monetize it and give us some face time with brands, but wait…something doesn't feel right. I have a lot of friends now…some of them aren't real people…some of them I don't really know that well! Oh well, it's kind of cool and gratifying to see my list of friends grow. I wonder if I can get a many friends on Facebook as I have connections on Linked in?

The Point
So what is the point of this rambling narrative? I was at a conference recently where the presenter listed his count of Facebook friends as a credential to validate his net worth or value on the internet. It was listed right along with the amount of blogs he authors, columns he writes, education background, etc. As I was explaining this in a client meeting I suddenly realized… our value on the internet is quickly becoming directly attributed to the amount of people we have access to through these social networks. The amount of people you can share a thought, link, pitch, idea, or product with at any given point is critical to your success of your personal brand. This in itself is monetizable, similar to how a user registration database full of email addresses is valuable to a web based business. If you have a massive reach on the internet, I have to believe that companies would be willing to pay large sums of money to advertise to your network through you.

And now…the Amway Effect
So your 'friends' aren't really friends anymore. They are now all potential customers. If my goal is to market my personal brand and try to be successful in this new networked age, should I try to build my list of connections as much as possible on all of these networks, irregardless of if I have a personal relationship with these users or not? If I want to validate myself in my field, how many Facebook connections makes me interesting? How many make me a rock star?

Score another one for the Marketing folks. They have turned our precious Facebook into the ultimate PR tool. Or maybe we technology folks we're just naïve in not seeing the PR potential of a technology that communicates to so many so easily.

Suddenly, I feel conflicted. What do you think? I'll think I'll blast this post out to my network on Twitter and see if I can't gets some clarity, or at least some consolation.

interactive marketing, personal brand

Congrats to AdClub Cincinnati for putting on a great Digital Non-Conference this weekend! This was my first non-technical conference so at the very least, the presentations were much prettier. A few speakers stand out in my mind:

Daphne Kwan, CEO of ExpoTV - This was a good discussion about Social Media's Influence on Buying. She was a great, engaging speaker with impressive credentials. She caught me squirming in my seat a few times wanting to hijack the conversation and take it to another level but didnt mind. Non-technical background, but in-depth understand of the new digital economy. I was particularly glad that she addressed a few key points that I have been trying to hammer home for a while now, namely that:

• Social media is Personal. But that is OK.
• Consumers have power like never before to influence brands, as evidenced by her company Expo TV. Brands need to respect this if they want to stay relevant.
• She cited a great example of the exponential audience factor (my words) in a case study of how Gillette setup a You Tube Channel to promote a Facebook widget.

Bob Gilbreath, CMO of Bridge Worldwide - The topic of this presentation, Marketing with Meaning: The Future of Digital Depends on Adding Value to Customers' Lives, was near and dear to my heart. There is nothing worse than gratuitous, noisy technology. I have been making a concerted effort lately to control the buzzword syndrome (ex. Throwing up a Facebook page for your brand with nothing useful on it) with so-so success. it was nice to see his take on this concept. Bridge actually brands applications, which I have always thought was a stellar idea. I can't help but wonder how many people really got this...

Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis.com - I am jealous of this guy because he has a great business idea in ShareThis, which is essentially AddThis on serious personalization steroids. He speaks like a techie, which of course is perfect to me, but has an awesome tool for marketers, in that he can sniff all kinds of metrics. I am going to sign up and try this thing out. I especially like the fact that his technology was USEFUL. Again, the Remote Control Factor. His presentation was of course, Sharing is Social.

Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Digital Strategic Services, Nielsen Online - This guy was a real joy to listen to and quite inspiring. His presentation, Loyalty Isn't Enough Anymore - Advocacy is Bigger Than Advertising, really underscored how much we are empowered by Social Media to make change, and how this is becoming the new norm. I'm not going to attempt to paraphrase his thoughts. If you get a chance to see him speak, do it. 

Best of all, I found another great use for Twitter, which is taking notes! I twittered through every single presentation, probably freaking out the speakers a bit...but hey, welcome to the new world! Check out my comments at http://twitter.com/willburrus around 11/14 & 15th. 

interactive marketing

I don't mean to sound adversarial but I heard something incredibly intriguing recently which underscored what I am realizing is an incredible paradigm shift in the technology world. Either that, or I have been living in a small box of technology for the last few years.

Recently I was pitching a pretty comprehensive web solution for a client. It wasn't a cheap solution, but it was well worth the investment. The client was quite impressed with the process that would have been used to qualify the budget that they were about to spend on this web project and suggested that their IT staff should hear the pitch. Not surprisingly, an IT staff member looked at the proposal, looked at the processes we were looking to execute to qualify the requirements, and then looked at the sticker and promptly freaked out. His observation was that a simple website didnt need any of this planning and analysis crap and that all they really needed was a nice design and some coding to get up and running (I'm paraphrasing, here.)

"That is why I always say that websites should be owned my the marketing department and not the IT department." This was a comment from a marketing friend whom I was sharing my day with. Wow. I had to pause for a second. Was it my pride? Have I gone over to the dark side? Have the marketing folks hi-jacked my precious technology?

You see, I was that IT guy not too long ago. I built websites, used web services, marveled at the simplicity of the prototype library, scoffed at the Jesse James Garrett AJAX bandwagon with my buddies who were used to using the XMLHTTPObject in the Microsoft IE 5.0 DOM (though it wasn't nearly as useful as it is now, because nobody cared about javascript then...). I think Container Managed Persistence is brilliant. I still use NHibernate to this day. I am a software geek at heart, and I daily get at least 10 ideas on how to make the world a better place.

Now, I find myself in a world where I am seeing that websites really are more than "...a nice design and some coding...". They are for many the first point of contact for a brand. They really do make or break the potential of a relationship with a given consumer who stumbles upon the site. Now I'm conflicted. Maybe they do need to be owned by the marketing folks. In fact, knowing what I know now, I feel dumb for ever thinking that they didn't. But at the same time, I don't think I am ready to let that go. I don't know if I am ready to trust the website in the hands of marketing...

You see, it was people like me who 'invented' websites. And we didn't necessarily do so to sell stuff. We did it to make communcation easier. Just like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, and Google; All of these great inventions, that are now turning into nothing more than high tech billboards. We are in an age of hyper-information, and I am a bit freaked out. Why? Because we can communicate on many levels now, and more and more, the message is becoming buy this...buy that. Don't get me wrong, I understand that in order for these technologies to flourish they need a business model, but when you can tweet into my pocket in a moments notice, and I have to determine whether you are an everyday joe or an interactive strategist, I can't help but feel a bit exploited.

Things are a changing technologist friends. We truly are becoming a commodity. I used to draw a funny picture of a Hand holding the World with a Flea on it. The Hand was the Technologist, the World was Technology, and the Flea was the Marketer. The world is getting smaller, and the flea is getting fatter.

Don't believe me? Just look at the sheer volume of technology consulting now listing "Interactive Marketing" as one of their service offerings instead of web design.

But wait, there's more... 

interactive marketing