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.

A most remarkably huge section of the Wall Street Journal was wasted today on Follow The Tweets an article by three professors who set out to attempt to predict which movie would do best at the box office based on Tweets.

Reading the article was like watching a bunch of accountants put a dollar value on “good will” in a business valuation. These three academic stooges created a “model” of course. And used LOTS of servers to store LOTS of Tweets on three movies launched on the same day.

They used Twitter’s “advanced” search feature that is “capable” of measuring whether a Tweet is good or bad based on emoticons vs . OMG!  Even our academics had to admit this is not scientific. I hung in and read on…

Their “model” was a “bit” more sophisticated. REALLY? Their model adjusted for “language” issues, as in when people are talking vacuum cleaners and Tweet “it sucks!” that would be a good Tweet. Language is nuanced and notoriously tough to measure in any quantitative fashion, and it certainly can’t be done on a broad scale (thus Twitter’s silly emoticon measurement).  How much more sophisticated could these professors’ model be beyond emoticon measurement? Not much.

They were able to successfully “predict” the biggest grossing movie – but only in retrospect, which is not really predicting is it?

Beyond the obvious problems, they’re data was purely relational, there was no way of knowing how many Tweets make a winner, just that one movie got more “positive” Tweets than the others. But it could have easily been a statistically insignificant number. And here is the kicker: the true predictive information was available within 24 hours of the first weekend release, not in Tweets, but in the box office receipts. DUH.

This only proved one thing: there are enough Tweets about movies to give three professors enough data to write something utterly inane and enough ignorant editors at the WSJ to approve the article.

For other large industries this model is hardly applicable.  Products do not launch at the same time. Not everyone who Tweets is your customer. There maybe a whole lot more people who are your customers and have very strong “predictive” feelings who NEVER Tweet.

For the rest of us, in businesses and industries outside mass appeal – that would be the vast majority of companies and small businesses – this exercise is TOTALLY useless.  We are trees falling in a Tweetless forest.  Turning to Tweets as a predictive measure is a waste of time. Meaningful interactions with our customers and prospects via the medium THEY prefer a far better use of our time.