Did I just say that? I did.

Online advertising has quickly lost its promise. Why?

1. It over promised.

2. Google trained us all NOT to use Google. With a poor user experience (half a dozen tries to get close to the answer you needed) and dozens of vertical competitors. Now if you want to buy something you got to your brand name store with a smart online presence. If you want to get an answer for your homework, you go straight to Wikipedia. By pass Google, go direct. Why pay for search ads?

3. Facebook devalued the meaning of friends. Having snookered millions out of personal information, its ads simply do not return sales. Why? Facebook is boring. Most folks are self-censoring their posts or using FB for businesses and professional reasons. Dull Dull Dull! Facebook may have buckets of personal information but if users don’t use the service its got bupkis.

And all the misguided venture capital backed offspring of Google/Facebook: Foursquare, Yelp…you name it, are now twisting in the wind. Its not just the recession folks, we would have arrived here without it, it just would have taken more time to get here.
What are the indicators? Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let me repeat that: Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let that sink in. Oh, and they are not advertising about advertising on Google ON GOOGLE. No, they are advertising in print, on television and at trade shows.

And that brings it all back to Face Time: a true measure of a prospective customer’s engagement with your company, your brand is if they take the time to meet you face-to-face. And the value of that interaction is far more impactful than anything else you can do as a company.

What happens next? Online marketing will become far more complex and demanding: the place where those face-to-face relationships are tethered until the next face-to-face encounter.
That is the next chapter in online marketing. Stay tuned!

Print publications had this problem in the early days and so the BPA provided circulation audits. Yes media kits still whipped up the marketing spin, but as a planner you could lay those green sheets and yellow sheets side by side and make some objective baseline judgements.

This is not too much to ask from media companies today.

After BPA came broadcast and Nielson, boxes on sets reported back to the home office. Beyond that Nielson ratings were a bit shaky but overall, they provided a level playing field.

With perhaps the exception of Life Magazine, (and that is a stretch) no print publication ever came close to the monopolistic power of Google and now Facebook. Even Hearst, with all his power was puny by today’s standards.

And Broadcast bloomed and diluted into 200 channels in three short decades. But that was after the FCC came in and regulated local markets carefully limiting cross media ownership of local licenses.

Monopolies are bad for business.

Today we have ventured into far more dangerous waters. Marketers have become cheerleaders for the media monopolies that are frankly, stealing money from our clients — and frankly from all of us too.

Marketers have always tended to self-delusion and selling self delusion to clients. Those  of us truth tellers in this business are truly misfits. But when you work with a mid-sized B-to-B operation. When you are sitting across the table from the guy who is pulling those dollars out of his own wallet, if you want to earn his trust you’d better speak the truth. You and your client are on the frontlines. If you and your clients play in this very large slice of the market, you’ve taken your knocks. You can smell BS from 20 paces.

And here is what we smell:

Social Media is NOT effective in many cases, Facebook has not provided any answers on true activity. Who will benefit? Why we should buy? They have provided so many reasons NOT to trust them, their “auction” pricing is the least of it!

Search is no longer right for many companies — increasing cost is a huge factor. Google could help by making its auction far more transparent. When you buy shares on the NYSE you know the volume, the last tick — that’s the least Google could do. Who is bidding, how much and when? Why should I trust Google?

SEO has always been smoke and mirrors populated by hyperventilating “experts” who jump tag any twitch of the needle as a Google conspiracy. And yet, marketers are fixated by it! I was at a pre-Bing meeting at Microsoft. The guys there were promising a different sort of search engine, far more open. I said, “Really? How long will that really last?” Not long. It ended when we left the room.

When media companies are making what Google, Facebook et al. are they will never succumb to a tepid third-party audit scheme. Say what you want about Hitwise and Alexa they are not delivering what only the horse’s mouth can.

The only way to get what we need is with swift and sharp government regulation — don’t hold your breadth.

In the meantime what do the truth tellers do? They find their client’s True North. Judiciously, with care, testing, analyzing, tweaking programs and never, ever, following the marketing lemmings.

Activity by Age No date range, no trending, no numbers. Essentially meaningless.

All charts about Men v. Women Ditto. And the claim that women “Get Talked To More” by whom? Other women or by men? By businesses? Those are completely different dynamics.

Facebook “Factbook” Facts? Hardly. Over the last six years people have spent 55 minutes a day on Facebook. That tells us nothing. What are they spending RIGHT NOW on Facebook and is it trending upwards or downwards (I strongly suspect the latter). And the only people who care about FB’s valuation are talking heads who want to see who’s in on the IPO. Consider it gossip futures.

As of August 2009 (ancient history in web time) 50% of users were active. How about fresh data and overlaying it with demographics: age, gender, location. And how about trending that data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are millions of FB deadbeats who sign on and never come back or comeback infrequently. We all have them on our accounts — no photo, two posts, five friends.

Facebook Users Like Food Pages OK Hubspot are you a site of real value or the cover of 17 Magazine? Where’s the beef?

Facebook Pages & Buzzwords Wow, let’s play Madlibs! How can any marketer with a straight face recite these to a client?

Facts about Facebook Infographic No dates, all hype and judging by the most popular FB pages more ancient history.

Most Liked and Least Liked Facebook Page Types Meaningless data based on averages. See yesterday’s post.

Facebook v. the United States Data so old its useless and again, nothing is trended.

I am a professional marketer who tells the truth, speaks with bell ringing clarity. I fight to give my clients the most clear, fact-based info possible, because their success and ultimately mine depends on it. It’s their money for goodness sake and they are paying me to advise them wisely.

Hubspot you are undermining our profession by purveying this vacuous baloney as gospel.

Here’s what we’d do: First we’d present the document to Joe and say, “Hey Joe, every member of the team has seen the document and likes it, how do you feel about it?” of course Joe would say, “well if everyone else thinks its O.K. I do too”. Then we’d go to Jane and repeat the process. At some point, the document achieved Religious Significance, no one had any more to say about it since no one else had anything to say about it and, well, then it was gospel, and we considered it approved. Amen.

Now here we are AB (AFTER the BUBBLE) and the Internet is providing that same experience on mass scale with a twist, I call it: Crowd Religious Significancing.

There is no better example than a recent Hubspot article: Least Liked Facebook Page Types.

It features a chart based on data from “a proprietary program”. Start worrying. (Who wrote it? What were the parameters? Has the program been tested?) And this program delivered these results: it counted and averaged the number of LIKES on Facebook Pages and organized them by category. Oh dear. There is not much there, there. Watch it unravel:

The first respondent to the article was a Christian group who was rightly up in arms about the results. It showed religious groups as part of the “least liked” pages chart on Facebook.

It all sounds very middle school to me: Who’s the most liked? Who’s the least liked? When in fact the chart simply shows the AVERAGE number of people who “liked” pages in a certain category. It does not show the number of pages in the category so the data is totally unreliable.

One person did note the data was hardly viable and cogently explained why. BUT that was ignored by the majority. Here is a typical response: “Thanks for this information. I am surprised that Religion is the least like facebook page. Anyways thanks Hubspot for this findings.”

Findings???? FINDINGS????  These are more like SCRATCHINGS.  And here is where Crowd Religious Signficancing begins. Tissue thin “findings” are presented by self-proclaimed “experts”, then tweeted and retweeted (160 times at last count in this case) and suddenly it is gospel! And this is all because the folks with the REAL solid data refuse to release it to the people who need it most: their customers. (I’ve written about this “Basic Questions Facebook Must Answer”)

Facebook, Google et. al. are holding their cards so close that all that’s left is a world of sketchy experts scratching away at nothing to fabricate facts.

Well here is one fact for you: No one knows anything.

Start there, test with care and you’ll come to know some of what need to know – for you.

But beyond businesses buying Facebook ads, there is the question of whether or not to participate in social activity on Facebook: Where is the measurable ROI?  A company can sink time and money and time and money and eventually maybe something happens, but no one is ever really sure. Gee, sounds familiar doesn’t it? We’re back to the good old days of Public Relations!

But in this modern age of being able to “measure everything” it is time for Facebook to cough up some basic information that would allow businesses to make educated judgments as to whether to spend time and money with the Facebook product. Here is my wish list:

1. Percentage of FB users who are actually active at anyone time
2. Percentage of FB users who are actually active: log on at least once a week
3. Levels of engagement: How many users are adding at least 10 new friends a week How many users are posting more than once a week? more than twice a week? daily? multiple times a day?
4. Levels of engagement by demographic: Here is where it gets down and dirty: who is doing what when? what markets are REALLY and TRULY using Facebook.

These are simple questions for that Facebook can easily provide data. Not detailed personal data, but meta data – in the same way that print publishing historically provided circulation data.

This is not too much to ask.

1. Productivity (which they say is by far the most important)
2. Compliance, regulatory issues and concern over inappropriate messaging
3. Bandwidth usage (a distant third)

The question of productivity is nothing new. Telephones and “personal” calls or worse “personal long distance” calls caused the same productivity and cost concerns for companies in the mid 20th Century. Businesses had no ability to restrict access  so, in the absence of tech tools, they exerted professional discipline on their employees. It was expected that people would stay focused and stay off the phone on personal business. And, in some firms phone bills were spot checked after the fact. Unfamiliar long distance calls were questioned.

Compliance issues do hold a special concern, posting inappropriate content or corporate secrets to blogs, Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook is an issue. But the sharing of confidential information is nothing new. Inappropriate memos and insider trading have been with us forever and there are laws and consequences for such behavior.

So if bandwidth is not an issue, why are CIOs playing Kindergarten Cop?   Given other hugely important issues such as Security, shouldn’t CIOs be focusing more time on that and leave the issues of professionalism up to HR and management?

I was awe struck at how ineffective the CIOs were at restricting access to the Internet – people are simply using their mobile digital devices for Internet access – untraceable, available, personal. If ever there was a reason for HR to step in and set parameters for personal professional behavior, mobile access is it. Attempting to control employee Internet access is a total waste of precious CIO productivity.

Yelp routinely highlights negative customer reviews unless business owners agree to advertise on Yelp.

“Lady Justice needs a lawsuit filter,” writes Yelp Co-founder Jeremy Stoppleman. PUHLEASE. The arrogance! Yo, Stoppleman: you are supposed to be the champion of small businesses. How about answering the way a small business has to answer: “Gee, that’s terrible. We are looking into it immediately. If anyone is doing this heads will roll, we promise you that.” He is nothing but tone deaf. (The tone deafness only a $100 Million in VC funding can bring!)

Small business people know that there will always be wing nuts who sashè into their shop with an ax to grind.  AND consumers know that there are businesses out there who are schysters.  Traditionally the Better Business Bureau served as the wing nut/schyster filter. Overall, they did a pretty decent job of it. Beyond being tone-deaf,  Yelp needs a wing nut/shyster filter, but being a free-wheeling open forum, Yelp simply cannot provide that on the scale required by the millions of small businesses.

Yelp is  most likely, voraciously burning through its $100 million. I can hear the VCs, putting pressure on Yelp to deliver.  And why would small businesses pay for what Yelp is offering – which is essentially bupkus? Their businesses are listed on Yelp already. I have no doubt Yelp resorted to shaking down small businesses, because that is the only “value” they can offer.

If it happened to you, join the suit. Make it a class action. They deserve it!

SMBs whether selling B-to-B or B-to-C find themselves confronting two voracious converging online trends:

1. Intense flattening of our markets: regional enterprises go online to find they are now competing with other regional enterprises around the nation – and the world. Price wars ensue, in a race to the bottom.
2. Ever increasing customer expectations: first it was web 1.0, then web 2.0 filled with engagement mechanisms and video. Mobile is on the horizon, if not already here. With each iteration, SMBs find themselves having to spend more to keep up. Even though programming development costs are going down, the average cost of a full-featured web site has not changed much since 1995 – it costs to stay in the game.

An environment this chaotic is unforgiving. SMBs find themselves in the challenging position of having to out smart the web to succeed. Our new offering will help them do that. Stay Tuned!

Love it or hate it Facebook is the elephant in the room. Funny, I said that about Google back in 2004. Speaking of which, I should remind everyone, that Google will become increasingly less relevant and sooner than we think. Google will face that Microsoft Moment. That Windows vs. Mac moment. I’ve been saying this and writing about it for a long time.

Typical of tech cycles, we work from chaotic fragmentation to behemoth to orderly fragmentation. Facebook will be going there too, not to long after Google has its moment of truth.

But here’s the catch: ACTUALLY MEASURING. The online analytics that were made to measure web “traditional” activity (referrals, uniques etc) are pretty useless. They give you a baseline, but they don’t measure sentiment. That comes down to mushy qualitative grunt work. And there is a point where measuring that is just too costly.  Tools are emerging, but OMG they are not close to prime time yet! For example, the Camarès Team had a simply miserable experience with Kontagent a product claiming to measure viral spread of Facebook efforts. Miserable! We could not get it to work to save our lives and when pinging tech support we were told: “We only help paying customers.” That was exactly what we were attempting to become! (Having seen way too much vapor ware in my lifetime we always try before we buy.) No money lost there, just a lot of time.

The meta challenge is that Social Media remains fragmented and not yet fully understood. SEO and Paid Search and the Web in general were in a similar space in 2004. But there are a few things that the Camarès team has come to understand about what works on Social Media. And by that let me be very SPECIFIC: “works” means gets traction relatively quickly on social media platforms:

•Consumable products that are shared: specifically hard-to-find specialty foods.

•Consumable products given as gifts: Flowers, as an example, are given on holidays, birthdays and for celebrations.

•Products that are related to an already passionate OFF line market: Snowboarders, snorkelers, musicians — in this case the Passionista networks are already in place off line and the on line world simply supplies the platforms for increased communications.

•Information to already highly networked political or religious organizations: as with recreational and professional Passionistas mentioned above, these are highly engaged off line networks that are super charged by on line tools.

•Entertainment products with a good hook: for example, books, movies, music that reach into an under served markets.

There are many many products and services that will simply not get jet-fueled social media traction. The question for marketers: Does this product or service have a highly engaged off line network of passionate users? Is this product one that is shared or gifted? If not, then look long and hard at why people would even care to talk about the product. It is extremely difficult to generate passionate responses if the passion is not there to begin with. OR if the passion is highly individualized as in: in my service you are buying my unique genius, I don’t share my trade secrets. OR even if your product/service falls into the categories above you must ask, is the market large enough to support the effort?

Aside from these general broad brush strokes, there is very little more we know about how effective Social Media is – no matter what the “experts” are saying.