Archive for category Business
Changing the conversation, not the channel
Posted by admin in Business, Communication, Improvement on January 4, 2012
In my 10 or so years in marketing and communications the one principle that I have lived by above all is “if you do not like what people are saying, change the conversation”.
Naturally our instinct is to change the channel. We ignore complaints, run from them, or remove the people complaining. It is my natural tendency and I am willing to bet it is yours as well.
Sometimes, in fact I would dare say most of the time, the problem isn’t the channel but the conversation. Sometimes it is an outspoken person who finally says what everyone is thinking, sometimes it is a conversation you keep changing channels on instinctively. Usually however there are nuggets of truth in that conversation that are hard to accept.
Couple of case studies. First, United Airlines. In 2008 a local musician watched baggage handlers throwing his guitar around as they were loading it on the plane. After he recovered his luggage he found his guitar broken. This became the United Breaks Guitars incident. The musician went through the channels alerting employees and eventually corporate. They all ignored him, saying he missed a timeline for reporting or that it was an accident.
The musician, Dave Carroll, then decided to use his musical talents and create a youtube video parodying his guitar breakage. The song became an instant youtube hit. United instead of trying to change the conversation changed the channel. The result cost United roughly $180 million in stock value.
The second case study is not an incident but a long trending organizational problem. Domino’s pizza had a problem, it made a crappy pizza. When you are a pizza company making a bad pizza is probably not good for business. Dominos was ranked so bad that it was tied for last place among popular pizza chains with Chuck E. Cheese.
Domino’s customers complained and they ignored them. Employees complained and they fired them. Most importantly in this is not the number of complaints or firings but how many customers went somewhere else or quality employees quit for another job.
Unlike United, Domino’s after changing the channel for several years decided to change the conversation. New CEO Patrick Doyle decided to hear the conversation and find out why it was being said. He then took that very conversation and used it in their favor, changing products based on what customers complain about. The result is that the conversation changed. Domino’s is no longer known for cardboard crust but for customer service. The result is that in the past 2 years Domino’s has seen its stock grown 230+%.
There are hundreds of other case studies that show both sides of the conversation. Companies, organizations, and governments who have changed the channel and lost in the long run or changed the conversation and experienced gains. There are very few absolutes in marketing and PR, but when faced with a crisis of any sort I’ve yet to see this fail.
Understanding modern buyer flow
Posted by admin in Business, Improvement, Marketing on October 27, 2011
Every morning when I wake up I immediately turn over and look at my phone for any emails that came in over the night. Without fail I typically have 5-6 emails from various brands and companies who send me an “eblast” that is time stamped at 12:00 a.m.. So naturally I jump out of bed, throw on some shoes, and run to the mall to take advantage of the sale right? Wrong. The basic problem here is something that has become rampant across digital marketing and ecommerce. Companies have began to completely ignore buyer flow.
In the old days when consumer’s main interaction with purchase decision making came inside the actual store marketers got it. Companies spend (and still do) millions of dollars studying buyer flow in a super market or retail store. Marketers analyzed where on shelves the average consumer looked first, some areas have more prestige than others for example and make a customer feel like the product is of higher quality. They analyzed what flow customers purchased, so the cereal for example is typically placed at the front right of a store and milk in the back left because we knew that customers would purchase milk after cereal, not the other way around, and that is the movement of a typical consumer (front to back, right to left).
In retail and clothing shopping this was also true. Say you run a clothing store in a mall. You place items that typically garner attention toward the front where it is visible from the outside to draw people into the store. Once there you place low selling items between two groups of high selling in order to stimulate sales from people moving between the two product groups.
Mass marketing understood this buyer flow as well. Most high value shopping was done on the weekends. As a result markets would load the Sunday paper up with retail ads, most of them highlighting high value products in an effort to draw consumers into the store. During the week when budget shopping took place (groceries for example) marketers would send out coupons and sales with the desire to attract their spending.
Now, back to my eblast example. Something is lost here. Instead of trying to influence buying decision making moments marketers are just throwing out information to check it off their list. They ignore the flow of the modern consumer. The best time to reach a consumer is when they are about to enter a decision making scenario. Additionally, now you have to understand what device they will be receiving information at when they are into that buying flow and format it for that usage.
For example, recently I met with a large clothing retailer. Most of their purchasing still comes through a physical store rather than online. Most of their online sales are repeat items such as shirts with the same shirt size, underwear, socks, and other items like that. Why is this? Because people want to know that the item fits before they order it online to not deal with the hassle of returns. The decision making happens inside the store for the majority of consumers.
By trying to influence the decision through a midnight email (which thankfully they do not do) they would miss that influential moment. Why? Because the stores do not open until 10, by the time the person read the email in the morning until the time the store opened the influence has passed. Secondly if they did make a decision to purchase online we know that retail type online purchasing is typically done in early afternoon or, increasingly, during the prime time hours (7-10 p.m.).
In this example in order to play on buyer flow the retailer should look for ways to transfer in store buying to online buying through smart phones, because that is the device they have on them when in a store. Also we know that tablet browsing tends to spike as well during the prime time areas, so build a tablet friendly site and work on ways to drive people to that site during that time frame.
Anything marketing outside of the buyer flow decreases ROI and brand identity. The good part for marketers is that data in digital is highly reliable and very easily available. Study your analytics. Set up custom reporting to understand when people are making purchases and how they arrive at that decision. Analyze your email campaigns, don’t just look for open rates, look at click rates and then bring those into the flow of your site analytics to find out when and if those campaigns translate to purchases. Don’t be afraid to play with timing through A/B split campaigns to see what works best for an audience.
Above all learn about your customer. If a customer feels like you understand them then they are more likely to buy from you. Working into a buyer flow is as much about relationship marketing as it is about influencing buying. When I receive an email at midnight I know that the company does not understand me. When I receive one near a decision making point my relationship with the brand becomes positive.
Thoughts on American Innovation
Typically in this space I try to focus on marketing and communication related topics. There are a number of other things that make up my day I leave out. For instance I frequently joke that I probably know more about industrial energy efficiency than any marketing professional in the state. I have enough professional development hours in certified energy management to cover 5 engineers this year alone.
One of the areas that I spend a lot of time with is innovation. As a part of my dual employment I set on 2 of the state’s largest innovation organizations and interact frequently with most of the other major players both statewide and nationally. It has given me a very in depth perspective of what America is doing to increase innovation.
Often, especially if the government gets involved, we struggle to practice what we preach. As a nation we have come to realize that innovation is about the only chance we to continue to be relevant as an industrial nation. So to help spur innovation we look at how companies in the past have become innovative and try to find ways to promote that. We look at processed brain storming for example. We try to make ideas systematic, if you follow step 1-24 you will churn out a shiny product that will save your company and a nation. We look at traditional models for idea investment. We encourage individual innovators to quickly patent and sell.
The problem with the American innovation initiatives is that it is no longer innovative.
This is not to say that American innovation is dead however. It is very much alive and, well, innovative. We are seeing something truly amazing happen with the social world beginning to take over innovation. It completely changed the way we communicate and market ideas and products. Now it stands a chance at changing how we make them in the first place.
One idea that I’ve fallen in love with over the past year is Kickstarter. It solves a couple of the major problems I’ve seen in my two years inside the innovation world. First there is the whole product market problem. Trying to gauge the potential market for a new idea is always difficult. Many innovators dump a lot of money into bad ideas only to discover no one wants them. On the flip side there are many good ideas floating around that people are hesitant to (or don’t have) invest money in development out of fear that it will not sell. By tying investment into the development with actual product sales these problems are eliminated. If a project meets the funding threshold the innovator gets their money and can gauge the potential market, or not. Plus good products usually get a decent amount of marketing coverage that you could not possibly buy.
The next big step is social collaboration among innovators. I don’t mean teams working on products, I mean products working better with each other. As APIs for digital products become more of a norm an entire industry of new products utilizing those APIs has developed. Soon you begin to have product hubs such as twitter, facebook, Instagram. I saw a number of products at SXSW this year relating to the photo industry that use these APIs to develop new products and if digital even kick out their own API.
This creates a world where as one product innovates other products around them innovate as well. It crosses both digital and physical product boundaries. Apple creates the iPhone and introduces the iOS API allowing for apps. Instagram takes this API and develops an app and releases their own API. Instant print cameras that were once dead take this API and use it to create a physical printer for instant photographs. If any one of these groups innovates the entire chain will. If Apple adds camera features, it enhances the other two. If Instagram enhances their app some of their enhancements can find its way back into the iPhone and the physical printer. The printer itself if successful causes both Apple and Instagram to innovate to support it more.
This is the type of innovation government should be funding and encouraging. This is the future of innovation in the US.
*Note, while I work for innovation organizations and help distribute some of this very government funding, my ideas are my own and as far as I know are not shared by any organization I am a member of.
Why relationships matter most in marketing
For a couple of years now I’ve been promoting what I call relational marketing. If you have never read this blog, essentially I take the approach of building and maintaining positive personal relationships with customers in non-direct sales type of way. I always value the relationship over the sale and I believe out of that approach you can generate more sales over time. The catch is, you must authentically care about the customer, not just pay lip service.
Over these couple of years I’ve pitched this idea in everything from job interviews to consulting gigs. A handful of people got it, most were indifferent and several outright mocked me. The few that got the idea have shown me examples over and over of how a company can succeed. The ones who mocked me are struggling to stay in business right now. Neither of these scenarios has anything to do with me personally I might add.
A couple of months ago I stumbled across @garyvee’s new book The Thank You Economy. The summary sounded good so I downloaded a snippet of the first chapter. It was right in line with what I have been trying to preach. I immediately preordered the book. I am about halfway through it and I have found confirmation to some ideas and clarity to others. I firmly believe this is the future of marketing.
At SXSW this week I had the chance to hear Gary speak and expand on some of his ideas. At dinner that night we happened across a get together by an interesting new company called Happy Cog. They were giving away copies of The Thank You Economy. I took one with every intention of giving it away. I thought about doing one of those book giveaway contest on this blog, but I struggled with that idea because I don’t think it fits the theme of this book.
About a year and a half ago I met @pstrack. He asked me to go to lunch with him to hear about what I do. I spend a minor amount of money on print every year. I am essentially a small fish in a small pond. Despite that Paul invited me out to his print shop for a tour. When I arrived Paul had a small board set up that said “Welcome Greg Henderson”. It made me feel like I was the most important thing in his day.
Over the past year Paul has never tried to sell me print, I give him my business because I feel like he cares. In this time he has not only gained my business but that of many others. He does this because he makes every customer feel like his interaction with them is the most important part of his day. As a result his business has grown, and he has become a good friend. If he sends me something I listen not because it is a slick email or postcard but because I know he wouldn’t send it to me if it didn’t matter.
I am giving him the copy of the book because I think he embodies this approach. He gets it. It is my way of saying thank you to him. I am giving him the book though with his promise that he will find someone else who shares this same vision that relationships matter and pass the book along to them. My hope is that this will keep going. If the book gets too worn to pass on either buy a new one or let me know and I will buy a new one for you.
Bottom line: Relationships matter. People matter. Don’t create a marketing campaign, create genuine relationship with people. Tell them you appreciate them and mean it. Once the relationship is there the business will be there.
The local paper problem
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement on January 25, 2011
Someone told me once that it might be a bad idea as a communications professional to talk bad about the primary newspaper in the state. I apparently didn’t listen. It is not fair of me however to put them down constantly without a full explanation of why.
This has nothing to do with pay walls online as a lot of people want to highlight. It is all about the content, which in case you have not read a paper in a while, makes up about 90% of what is in a paper. I will explain why this is the problem, but first, a history lesson.
See not too long ago newspapers were the primary way we received information about both local issues and national. Papers would take all the information from the previous day, mostly in the form of newswires like the Associated Press, mix in a few local stories and send it to you. That worked great.
This model began to get a little shaky in the 90’s with the rise and adoption of 24 hour news stations on television. The primary problem with tv news however was that while great for breaking news, you had to wait to hear about topical news that interest you. Papers survived on allowing you to directly get the information you want. Once a day at least.
Internet presented the next big hit to newspapers. This transition was slow at first. The combination of slow support from the news media and limited adoption of broadband internet gave newspapers some time to adjust and get in front of the curve. Most big papers with a little extra resource did. They began leading the way in pushing out news. As broadband adoption rose in the late 2000’s so did the consumption of news online. It became easier to go online and have instant access to what is happening around the world. This was the pull phase, readers went and pulled information from the sources.
Then the 800 lbs. gorilla walked into the room. News sources started pushing information both actively and passively. I get breaking news on email, my phone and socially. Even more critical is that news sources have made it simple to share stories so now I am 75% more likely to read a story that a friend shares.
I said this was not about pay walls, and it is not. These news sources however are freely available and easily accessed. Most of the national news feeds can be found in some form or another online, which brings me back to content. Some local papers panicked when online adoption started to rise. They made a critical business decision to save resources by tapping into more feed stories and hiring fewer reporters for original content. The problem with local papers is not the reporters. I know plenty; most of them are overworked and are given less and less space to show their quality talent.
As local papers began to push out more articles from feeds they began to dig their own grave. I as a consumer am already receiving my national news both by push and pull methods. Most Americans are in the same boat. I start finding less and less information that I want to read in a news paper because it is a feed dump from the day before, most of which I have already read. The stories I care most about, which are the local ones I do not receive from my national news, have be shrunk into paragraphs or ran once a week because of fewer reporters.
See, local newspapers cannot compete with regurgitation of national news. They must look at focusing on local stories and impacts. The day of a catch all local paper is dead and the start of specialization has begun. Papers can no longer focus a once a daily or weekly paper on news items, rather they must move more toward editorials and impact stories.
A clear example of how this works is Arkansas Business. Full disclosure: I have a lot of respect for them; many of their employees have become friends. I advertise and pitch them stories because they do it right. They save (for the most part) breaking news updates for the web. Even then they try to add commentary about how it impacts us locally. They focus the print edition on telling stories about businesses locally and the impacts they are making in the community. This move to a story telling approach is what made them successful in a changing news climate.
Local/state papers in order to survive must shift to this story telling approach. Yes ADG has publications that do this like Sync, but they fail to embrace the concept with their core (and rapidly dwindling) audience. Give people stories they care about and they will start to care about you again. That is how to fix the local paper and people will even pay for it.
As always everything I say is up for debate. I appreciate feedback, just be willing to defend it.
Social media hates you
Posted by admin in Improvement, Social Media on January 4, 2011
I like to pick up a few social media consulting gigs from time to time. I do this less for the money and more for the challenge of looking at another business situation and analyzing how they can create better relationships. Recently I had a meeting with a wonderful company that is on the verge of rolling out a great new product for their customers who they value. In this meeting I was hit with the simplest yet most complex question.
Why should I care?
Here is the reality. If you are a traditional marketer you shouldn’t care. Social media hates you. You push out messages and want no response other than a sale. You think of your customers in terms of sales numbers. You want to be able to tie a marketing event with a consumer action. You want customer service to handle product complaints. You want to disguise the reality of your product in lingo and lies. You should honestly stay as far away from social media as possible because you can’t handle what it means.
I’ve been careful in my consulting to avoid these types of companies. I’ve turned down a number who want to use social media to push a product. To be successful a company practice love, not sales.
Love, in social media, happens when a company who cares more about customers than products. That is a company that cares more about building positive relationships than selling you what is hot today. The funny thing is that building this positive relationship creates far more product sales than simply selling a product ever could. You should care about social media only because you care for your customers and desire a positive relationship with them. Customers want to be loved, not sold.
Co-creating business
Posted by admin in Business, Communication, Vision on November 23, 2010
I am currently working on a larger paper trying to bridge the gap between interpersonal communications and business communications. My main stance is that if businesses treat all communication like interpersonal communication we can build better and more positive relationships. I am still working through the research but I wanted to share a bit with you as I am working on it. I will try to release the full paper when finished. This particular section is focusing on our relationships with our customers and clients and has been edited to speak to the blog audience.
Most often we think of interpersonal relationships as existing between two individuals. Most businesses however interact with their customers every single day. These interpersonal relationships can exist between businesses (or those representing it) and their customers. I believe that for small businesses to communicate excellently they create a social world with their customers.
Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), which I have introduced here before, claims that our social worlds are co-created through communication with one another (Pearce & Pearce, 2000). CMM is considered a macro theory, looking interpersonal communication as a whole rather than specific communication instances.
CMM is traditionally applied to person to person interpersonal communication. In 1996 however a group known as the Public Dialogue Consortium (PDC) approached the city of Cupertino, CA to incorporate a more productive form of communication. Their goal was to apply this to the most important community issue, which was identified as the city’s rapid change in ethnic composition (Pearce & Pearce, 2000). I believe this case study is a clear example of how CMM can function between an organization and its customers.
To understand how CMM can be applied to small businesses and organizations I want to look at two main findings of the Cupertino project with interactions between my own business and its customers.
Communicate
First, the primary goal of the Cupertino project was a focus on creating conversations. To do this they took a communication perspective which consist of “viewing the events and objects of the social world as made.” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 408). This focus on creating conversations allowed them to later move the people to action.
In my current business we do training events and consulting projects for medium to large companies in the state. We do regular marketing activities such as email marketing and direct mail. The vast majority of people who respond to our marketing campaigns are companies that we have engaged in personal conversations with during the past year. As a result we have shifted the marketing approach to establish personal communication first and then follow with traditional marketing.
Engage
Secondly they created the means for relationships to form. PDC encouraged the city to create a new communication architecture. The city government began to participate “in conversations about residents’ concerns, their visions for the future, and the actions (to bring) desired futures” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). This allowed the city government to create a positive social world which both groups co-created.
Recently our organization introduced a new training service to our clients. We waited until we launched the service to tell clients about it. We held the first training event for it in November 2010 and we experienced a record low turnout for a new service. When promoting the event I informally questioned a few clients about why they were not interested. The two main responses I got were “it doesn’t match our company’s direction” and “it does not address our current business problems”.
What does this mean to business?
In the case example I showed some of the results of the Cupertino project and compared that with recent activities that I have experienced in my own business. I feel that the Cupertino project provides a bridge between understanding CMM as person to person and business to person. From studying this case I have developed two main findings.
First, by focusing on creating conversations and relationships with customers they are more likely to be compelled to action. With the Cupertino project engaging the citizens in conversation early the residents “saw a model for and experienced talking productively with members of other ethnic groups” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). In my own organization having conversations first with customers allows a discussion about how our services fit into their business model. This is not achieved well by mass marketing because it is not individualized to each company the way a conversation can be.
Second co-creating the conversation allows for the best possible product. In the Cupertino project they were able to listen to the citizens and hear their concerns and visions for the future. This in turn lead to the city leaders identifying various political processes that “were insufficient for most vexing issues” (Pearce & Pearce, 2000, pg 409). In the example of my business we rolled out a product without first having conversations with our customers to see if the new product was useful to them. As a result we wasted time and money on solely creating a product that our customers did not need.
For small businesses to engage in excellent communication with their customers they must co-create a social reality with them. Organizations that co-create their relationship with their customers in turn create the best outcome for both the business and the customer.
What should I do?
Posted by admin in Personal Branding, Vision on October 27, 2010
So I am going to take a break in the middle of my communicating better series to discuss something a little more timely. This unlike most of my other post is from the heart, not the head.
Nike this week, in time with the start of the NBA season, released a new commercial titled “Rise”. This features Lebron James talking about what people expect of him. Here just watch it:
Lebron ask what should I do, should I be what you want me to be?
I struggle with this. I talk a lot about personal branding which is essentially figuring out what should I do. Do I listen to what my friends tell me I am? Do I listen to my business partners tell me what they would like for me to do? Do I listen to others tell me my ideas are too revolutionary that I should give it up? Should I stop blogging due to the people who do not listen or keep doing it for the handful of people who do? Do I listen to people who say I am mediocre of the ones who have told me I can be great? What should I do?
A part of me wants to say that I should do what I want to do. But I know that is not actually possible. Our perception of who we are and what we should do is tied so deeply in the people around us that it is impossible to separate the two. Yet, I am at a crossroad in life and I need direction not contradiction. What should I do?
I am not satisfied with watching the flaws of the world around me. Every ounce of my body sees the problems and wants to explore ways to fix it. I am not sure people want to listen though. I will never be satisfied doing bad work though just because it is the only way that our narrow vision can see how to do it, there is something better. I can do better and we can do better. Together we can work to fix the problems with the business world or we can sit back as idle spectators and watch our world slowly crumble like the statues of ancient Rome. What should we do?
So do I take the leap I want to take, not knowing if I am jumping to a higher ledge or falling into a pit? If I did would my friends call me crazy, my business partners call me stupid and others ignore me. Or like the dust can we all rise up together to make this little city a better place? Maybe the state will move with it? Maybe we collectively can make something that impacts a nation? Or maybe we just make ourselves and our businesses a little bit better, but isn’t that still worth it?
What should I do? (feel free to comment)
What we create when we communicate
Posted by admin in Communication, Improvement, Marketing on October 26, 2010
Sorry for the long delay. This is the second in the communicating better series. Last time I looked at ethics in communications. As always feel free to drop comments here, on twitter or verbally and I can assure you it will impact future discussions.
The old days
Remember walkie-talkies? We thought they were the coolest thing as kids. This was before cell phones hit critical mass and every kid older than 7 had one. Later in life as a camp counselor (poor kids) we used them to communicate around the camp. With walkie-talkies you pressed the button, said what you had to say and waited for a response. This was a transition based communication.
This is how we use to view communication. I sent a message, you received it and then you sent back your response. The focus in this model quickly becomes on how I craft the message I push out. My hope was that you would interpret the message with the same meaning that I intended and vice versa. Sadly this is how most of us still function with our business messages. We send a press release, ad, put up a website or say something on social media, and then we sit back and hope it is interpreted the way we intended. Ineffective, hopeless
Tag, you are It
The major problem with this type of communication is that we start viewing customers as “It”. We push out an email campaign and monitor the open and click through rates and use that as a measure of success. We monitor ad impression rates and try to find correlation between impression and sales. We count our twitter followers, our newsletter subscribers and the circulation numbers on our press releases.
Repeat after me: Customers are not a metric
We have to move beyond viewing customers as it. @Bryanjones wrote a great post looking at social engagement in which he references Martin Buber (who I am a fan of). Buber talks about the need to move from an I-it relationship to an I-thou. Essentially by doing this you are viewing people not as metrics, but as people. Isn’t that what they should always have been?
We create something
Allow me to introduce you to another great person, his name is Barnett Pearce (read his blog sometime, great wisdom). Pearce along with pal Vernon Cronen developed a concept known as Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). CMM says that when we communicate we create something. Instead of me sending you a message and you sending me one back we exchange messages together. From those messages we develop a shared meaning based on our unique relationship. This relationship is different from any other that I have, and through understanding what we have created I am able to communicate with you to the absolute best of my ability.
This moves beyond the walkie-talkie communication model and we try to interact with our customers and build relationships. I’ve said for years this is the real interactive marketing, not building a web page or advertising online. Is it really that hard to form a relationship with each of your customers? Unless you are Wal-mart or some large retailer I would think not.
So maybe communicating better is becoming more aware of the people we communicate with. We become aware of what we are creating with them. We become aware of what they need. Ultimately they might just become aware of us. And that is a good thing
The Social Bubble
Posted by admin in Social Media, Vision on October 12, 2010
A lot of people (for whatever reason) have asked me lately where I think social media is heading, or what I think the next big thing in social media is. Honestly most of the time I give them a pretty crappy answer because I have had a hard time facing what I believe to be the truth. Social media is a bubble.
Blowing up the bubble
The reality is that social media has become inflated beyond reality. Everywhere you look you see a social media startup, social media experts and social media links and references everywhere. I used the bathroom at a local bar recently and written on the wall was “For a good time follow @KerriJack” – ok so I might have made that last line up, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see it reach that level of hysteria.
In the 90’s we had the dot com bubble. Web was new; people were artificially inflating what the reality of the web was at that point in time. The web was awesome and all, as much as animated gifs can be, but the industry had not matured as fast as the hype. The bubble was inflated and it burst. The bubble of the ‘00s was subprime mortgages. On the surface it looks great, people went crazy over them. But the concept lacked maturity and caused it to fall apart and bring down the economy with it.
Inside a bubble
So why has social media grown so rapidly? At the heart of the matter really is humanity. As we transitioned into a digital age we suddenly became inside a bubble ourselves, separated from the world outside. We sit in offices and send impersonal emails, only speaking to people in meetings, and in this we have slowly lost personal relationships.
Along comes social media and it pops that bubble. Suddenly we find people again. We have conversations, share ideas and become a little more personal. We found out that we really like being around humans again. A lot. So we go crazy over social media. Suddenly someone says “hey, if I can connect with people, what if I can actually give my business humanity?” Great, human businesses are fantastic. There is of course the shady side of marketing which has begun to creep into the picture, but somehow we maintained our humanity and love it.
The bubble pops
Like all bubbles though this one is bound to pop. I think the big bubble of the early ‘10s to pop will be the social bubble. Believe me, I’ve made decent money off of social media consulting and have a hard time facing this reality just as much as you. If we are lucky it happens sooner rather than later. I believe like the dot com bubble we must come down to a realistic level of what social media is and grow maturely from there.
Like dot com, social media is not going away. I think in the future we will consider it a part of our digital lives much like a website, email address, cell phone number. We will share through it. However now that we have had a taste of humanity I think the digital bubble as a whole will deflate just a bit. We want to get out and be with people. @LRtweetup has shown us all that.