Is it any wonder that the last four major programs rumbling through the corridors of Camarès have heavy print components? Is it any wonder that the major thrust of many of our clients’ 2011 marketing plans is to go to trade shows/events/conferences  and actually meet prospective customers? No. Having ridden the waves of Paid Search and Social Media since the early 2000‘s and discovered an unstoppable increase in pricing for paid clicks across all search engines and social media advertising there is no ROI left for mid-sized businesses in online marketing.

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!

I am on a hunt. A hunt for real numbers. Can Google, Bing, Yahoo and Facebook be transparent?

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.

I have been asking, begging, demanding for real USEFUL statistics from Facebook for months and months and now Hubspot steps up with what can only be described as a CIRCUS of statistics that tells us absolutely NOTHING, no let me be polite: look like they were produced by a high school freshman attempting to plump up an essay. Forget being polite. Lets unravel them shall we?

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.

Years ago, BI (BEFORE the INTERNET) we coined a phrase at Camarès. The phrase is Religious Significance. That was what we achieved when we used the “we-have-to-get this-document-approved-and-no-one-has-the-power-at-the-client-to-approve-it technique”.  (Think global telecommunications company with 25 mid-level managers on the same project).

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.

I have been a huge proponent of Bing — amazing since I will eternally despise Microsoft for inflicting impossible inelegant kloogy software on all us worker bees. But Bing is the one thing Microsoft has done right. It is the National Geographic of the 21st century. Breathtaking in both aesthetics and usefulness. Useful that is if you use it to buy plane tickets (love that buy-o-meter!) or shop for the lowest prices.

Its major failing has been search. Bing’s search simply has not been as granular as Google’s.  Today’s new announcement will help: Bing will start including status updates from Facebook. Even though most FB updates are drivel, many retailers are now actively using FB for promotions so this will help shoppers for one, but it will also fill out the Bing search experience with more rich media content among other things.

It is high time that Google had a tough competitor and if Bing stays on top of the improvements small advertisers may see some relief. Click inflation, the relenting up tick in Google CPCs is absolutely killing small businesses and businesses selling products at lower price points. If Bing becomes a contender in search we will see Google blink and start to offer more promotions to small advertisers. I believe that Google loyalty is eroding and I predict the tipping point for Google is well inside five years. FB has already surpassed it. And Google’s chronic lack of positive user experience (it should not take 200,000 answers for one stupid question) has trained users to go elsewhere: Wikipedia, Amazon…and Bing.

I have seen major advertising success on Facebook and equally terrifying failures. I recommend Facebook advertising to my clients ONLY as a test. If it hits, great, if not RUN.  And then there is the pesky question of Facebook provided analytics. We have seen them change up and down for the same time period, leading us to believe that they are completely unreliable.

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.

Recently I met with a dozen senior IT folks.  Though I have known for a long time that major corporations restrict employee Internet access, I was surprised to hear how vehement these dedicated IT senior managers were about it. They cited three reasons:

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.

Media Post has confirmed what my Alexa toolbar has been telling me for months. Facebook is the Big Number 2 on the web. As frustrated as I have been with FB and its kloogy interface for users and advertisers alike, I have to give them credit for re-inventing the Web.

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.

So here this morning, to end our infamous decade, is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: Technology and the New “Me” Generation, in it Rachel Marsdon kvetches at length about how technology has made us narcissists. I hate to break it to her but humans have been narcissistic ever since the creation of the myth of Narcissus. All technology has done is taken our self-love to hyper heights.

She does make an excellent point, and it is one we should all remember as we reach for our pocket computer – Iphone, Blackberry, Android – whatever: the action being taken is more about the user reaching for their phone than about the message received. It is a selfish act that screams, “I’m too fabulously important!” like the old song screamed “I’m too sexy for my shirt!” (At least the song was ironic).

Screaming into cell phones, going into Blackberry prayer mode at the conference table, taking calls in meetings – I once had to listen to a client talk to her housekeeper about her dog’s rash and visit to the vet – simply declare that you are the most important person in the room and frankly telegraph that you are taking pleasure in dissing anyone nearby.

Facebook is the narcissist tool de jour. Ironic isn’t it? Narcissus stared at his face in the water and we stare at our faces on Facebook. Most posts are self-serving complaints, breast-beatings or promotional. At Camarès we are creating Facebook games, the most viral ones let users show off how smart or clever they are. And if you want to go super viral,  do it with a laugh.

There is an explosion of personalized products enabled by technology: my face on everything! If the 80’s were the decade of logo’d apparel and accessories, the 00’s has been the decade of me-logos. The final death knell of the logo’d outfit maybe the recent infamous launch of SouthButt by a young college student – reversing the NorthFace logo – as a commentary on the mindless wearing of logos. “I know my face from my butt!” he says. But do we?

All this is really no surprise. And as a marketer, I’ll use any tool I can get my hands on that gets my client’s products into their markets effectively. But we all have to ask ourselves how do we use this technology to make our lives richer? (Asking this will serve marketers as well!)

Perhaps the answer is limiting it, making when you interact with it more thoughtful. (And marketer’s messages more relevant.) So here are a few ideas for the next decade:

Face-to-face interactions OF ANY KIND come first. That means no calls at the register when purchasing something, no taking calls in meetings, no shouting on phones anywhere (truthfully all you have to do is speak normally, its a technical thing, the phone doesn’t feed your voice back to you as the old Bell phones did, so you feel a need to shout when you don’t need to), no phones in the restroom — now really must we?

Look at your Facebook page no more than once a day preferably once a week – and when you spend some MEANINGFUL time there, do take care to comment compellingly on your friends’ posts. And conversely say something remarkable in your comments box.

On January 1, Unsubscribe from EVERYTHING that comes into your email box. De-friend anyone who is annoying you with vacuous comments. Un-fan any page that dishes self-serving junk. Then re-subscribe to only those that feed you. And for those of us marketers who send emails, email only when we have something important to say.

“What, this is coming from a marketer?” Well yes, aside from finding incessant messaging  overwhelming, I’d like to return to RELEVANT messaging, distributed with care to the RIGHT people. The good news is that technology enables us to do that.  And in doing so it will serve us all better.

Is it me, or is Linkedin most dreadfully dry? It seems so static. So lifeless. So unfun. Networking on Linked in is like walking in slow motion through a silent movie. No chat, no photos, no energy.

Sure, it is supposed to be the professional place to connect. In fact, I have more connections on Linkedin than I do on Facebook. Admittedly I’ve been on Linkedin longer. Since practically its inception. But it seems to slump through Webland like a Cro-Magnon misanthrope, hunched over and grumpy. After years of telling us to connect only to people we trust, we have not listened! It is us who can’t be trusted!

As if to rebuke us for our nefarious connecting, Linkedin has treated us to a new, really exiting feature: slide share. Just what corporate pros need, MORE PowerPoints!

Over the years I have found it useful for two things: advertising for job openings at my firm. I’d get quality responses in manageable numbers. It was always better than Monster for that. And the second thing…um…I forgot.

Funny as much as I find Facebook terribly kloogy and unintuitive and utterly shallow most of the time, I do find it fun sometimes. Especially when I see an entertaining video or someone posts something of interest to me. It isn’t consistently fun, but it is fun enough, like a slot machine in Vegas, it gives you a winner just enough times. So I actually look forward to checking into Facebook to see if its a three cherry day.

But Linkedin is like taking a walk in a fossil field. Sure I get very juiced about all the great and wonderful business and social potential of the web, and so do many people on Linkedin, but Linkedin itself doesn’t pick up on that vibe and transmit it. It provides a platform for people to talk AT each other rather than WITH each other. And that is not very social, is it?

I have tried and reached out to others over the years on Linkedin, but often get stuck in “yellow” light purgatory.  Then there are their artificial limits…”sorry, no more group joining for today”, “sorry you invited more friends than truly trust you” (or actually remember you – look I am not that forgettable, but we all have our memory limits! We hardly need Linkedin to punish us for it!)

Speaking of memory, I just remembered the second thing. Linkedin is helpful keeping track of people when they move from job to job, provided they make they remember to update themselves.

Now if only Linkedin would blow the dust off itself and give us something to stand erect and cheer about!