Over a year ago Stowe Boyd remarks here
about a possible future of social networking, marketing, advertising
and e-commerce in general. While I would LOVE if this came to pass, I’m
sure that the market doesn’t move as fast as I want it to, nor do I
believe that it will necessarily move in the direction I would like.

You see, we are in an era of redefining the way we want to be
consumer-ized, if that’s even a term. We have one of the first examples
in the 30-second skip function of Tivo, and all of the uproar by the
broadcast networks about their television ad-revenues being eaten away
by it. Another is the so-called ‘ad-blocking’ plugins for various
popular web browsers. Google’s AdSense and various other ad-services
have been battling click-through versus actual conversion rates for a
long time and have been trying to be more effective in those targets
and conversions. Many of us consumers, however, naturally rely on our
own communities of information in order to obtain recommendations for
consumer purchases.

Crap, okay, so the first two examples I was going to use about cars and
pizzas in television commercials didn’t hold water as I know most of us
actually MIGHT say I want that pizza or that was just on TV because it
looks appealing. However, for many purchases, such as music players,
home appliances, clothing, furniture, etc… we generally rely on our
communities to recommend products and services that they, themselves
have enjoyed. Honestly, while television commercials might still
influence me and my friends, word-of-mouth recommendations hold much
more water than advertisements that are either obnoxious or are
downright insulting.

I guess I need to make a point. I would LOVE to participate in
marketing objectives where companies actually cared about the
intelligence and opinion of their target audience and treated us in a
way that displayed respect instead of arrogance. The methods Stowe
mentions in this post would be most appealing to me because they do
just that. They are an example of letting products speak for themselves
instead of spinning the truth around a product to get it out the door
and into a “sucker’s” hands. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I
have never liked being treated like a sucker…

So I’ve been quite busy this summer with my job, yard work, family
activities and general hobbies. Lately I’ve been hearing a bunch about
Facebook in the blogosphere and in my real “social” network. I’ve also
had the chance to become semi-addicted to it and actually catch up with
some of my old friends from high school and my slightly more recent
singles scene days. Fortunately, my wife has been on as well, and most
of my old single friends were also hers, so there’s no “conflict of
interest” issues in that regard :-D.

Anyway, between my supreme annoyance with MySpace and the popularity of
comparisons between MySpace and Facebook, and between the general lack
of usefulness of LinkedIn at the time (though it has since improved
significantly with its Answers features…) I decided to give Facebook
a try. I also decided to import this blog into my Facebook account,
although it has been quiet for quite some time, so I haven’t figured
out exactly how much value my Facebook inclusion adds to the blog, or
vice versa. Expect more analysis in this regard soon. Based on this comment on one of Guy Kawasaki’s blog entries, and a comment leading me to this blog entry,
I hadn’t fully understood the connection (and I still probably don’t)
or the implications of personal and blog branding. Now, however, these
posts have been prompted me to make a better connection and try to
streamline the scopes of my blog and my general interaction with the
Internet and my social circles around me.

So, my posts should start to take on a more directed and
subject-oriented matter. I’ll leave my personal rantings for either a
separate blog or at least a topic dedicated to that purpose ;-). If any
of my (probably small number) followers (read interested parties, not
’sheeple’) have topics they’d like my thoughts on, or research on, feel
free to email me or comment on various of my articles.