Crastinate

It was only a few years ago that our virtual identities were spread out amongst separate and unaffiliated networks. You had a profile on Facebook which had no connection to your business profile on LinkedIn which had no connection to your blog on Blogger.

Jump to the present and we’ve got Facebook Connect, Google Connect, and a required mandate for every company to have APIs that give access to their users’ info off their site. Information between services is starting to be shared.

The question with all this is where are we going? What will the web look like in five years and how and where will we manage our digital identities? Is there a model we can look at to give us a sneak peek into the future? I’m glad you asked because there is. It’s called Instant Messaging.

While people had been chatting on IRC and dial-up message boards for years, instant messaging only became mainstream with AOL. For those who can remember, at the time AOL was a closed network for those who paid the cost-per-minute charges. All the cool people were on AOL. Sure you can chat on IRC, or via ICQ, but if you wanted to chat with all your friends, you paid for AOL. AOL eventually opened up their chat to everyone but the worlds of chat were still separate. The big players, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo all had their own networks and weren’t willing to collaborate. The way the instant messaging networks used to be set up should look familiar to you.

Eventually, based on start-ups pushing the boundaries and consumer demand, an integration of the chat networks was suddenly possible. The big three had opened up their networks to the world. While you may sign up for an AOL screen name now, or a Google talk screen name, you can talk to anyone on any network regardless of where you signed up.

In some ways, where you sign up doesn’t make a difference. What defines your personal chat experience is the software you use to chat, not the network that you used to be tethered to. Are you an Adium or an iChat mood today? Do you feel like the AIM, Gtalk, or Digsby interface today? The software, with it’s pros and cons, is what defines your chat experience. Because transitioning from one chat program to another takes minutes, developers are under constant pressure to provide the best product in the market. The power is now fully in the hands of the consumers.

If we apply this logic to our current situation, here is what we’re looking at in the coming years.

All our social identities will be accessible from any access point. With a click of a button, all our Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Twitter, Google, etc. info can be integrated into whatever interface or service we choose. The services that provide the best user experience will win the consumer’s pageviews. We already see that happening with twitter clients. Some people like Tweetdeck while others prefer Tweetie. It’s all a matter of preference. The winners of all this will be the consumers. We will get more personalized attention to our needs than ever before. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. So when someone tells you that the future of the web can’t be predicted, give them a history lesson.

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Have you ever taken a technology vacation? What I mean by that is have you ever disconnected yourself completely from your digital lives? No email, no Facebook, no RSS feeds, no internet at all? I haven’t done it in a few years but from what I do remember from that vacation I took (it was while I was in Scotland) is that it helped me focus when I came back. When I returned I realized that the world had not fallen apart and I didn’t really miss that much even though I was offline for almost two weeks.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the day-to-day and we forget why we do the things we do to begin with. This scenario is analogous to the online marketing world presented before us today. The daily evolving world of social media has taken over our lives. Everything we do, from getting food (find the menu on Menupages, order from Seamlessweb, review on Yelp) to walking the street (check Google maps for where that bar is, check-in with FourSquare, I’m the mayor!) has become a social web experience.

The marketing world, trying to keep up, has put most of its attention on getting their content in the social stream. Getting users to share their content is the ultimate goal of any current marketer. Is this the right approach?

I’ll be attending a unique conference this week created by well-known video blogger and web 2.0 personality Loren Feldman. The Audience Conference dares us to disconnect from our world of sharing and asks us to focus on the quality list of speakers and presentations at hand. Laptops are discouraged (if not banned). There won’t be any official live blogging. There won’t be a live feed. The goal is not to share this conference but to experience it like we used to experience things before the online social explosion.

Focusing on our audience is something that us marketers might have lost over the past few years (if we ever really had it to begin with). Going back to basics may be the best way to solve this problem. There are still a few seats left at The Audience Conference if you have an interest in going.

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Dear Blogger,

Over the years I have become more and more involved in the world of social media to the point where my entire career and much of my personal life revolves around the business of social media. I have also been lucky enough to have met and become friends with many amazing people in the industry including some very well known bloggers. Most of these people (well, some of them) are smart and deserve the attention they are getting. There is, however, a noticeable trend amongst these “celebrity” bloggers which I not only find annoying, but find to be antithetical to blogging as a whole.

The beautiful thing about blogging is the ability for anyone to get in the game. Anyone can be famous. Bloggers are supposed to represent the little people’s voice. So many bloggers made their name off the backs of the poor customer service and indifference to customer satisfaction of large corporations. The people finally had voices to back them. Bloggers are now recognized with having real influence. With influence and power, however, often comes greed.

Recently I’ve noticed many bloggers (I won’t point fingers) that seem to think they’re better than everyone. They think they deserve free passes to conferences. They think they deserve free cell phones or free software. They think they deserve to be treated as upper class citizens because they can wreak havoc with their dinky little site. They think their 50,000 unique visitors a month (if that) gives them some sort of clout.

Let’s be clear about this. Companies give freebies to small-time bloggers (which 99.9% are, and yes, that includes you) to flatter you. They know that almost all of what they’re providing you for free is a waste but they realize that the aggregate of this blogger outreach might have a real impact. The aggregate is where the value is. You, by yourself, and your dinky little site, aren’t worth anything by itself.

So next time you’re complaining that a hotel won’t give you a late checkout or that the airline won’t let you on the flight when you show up 30 minutes before the flight (when they clearly tell you to be there two hours beforehand), don’t complain and act like they did something wrong. Their customer service might suck but your attitude sucks. You’re not famous. You’re a blogger. You represent the people. Start acting like it.

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I recently used the blind search test whereby you search for a term and the site spits out results from Google, Bing, and Yahoo without telling you which search engine provided each set of results. It then asks you which one provides the better results. Surprisingly, for most of my searches I chose Bing. So I decided to switch my default browser in Firefox from Google to Bing and see if I like it better. Bing didn’t last long.

The next day I saw a job posting that seemed interesting and I wanted to learn more about the position. Unfortunately the listing was posted by a recruiter and I always avoid going through recruiters (it’s much better to speak to the company directly). So I do what I typically do. I copy two sentences from the posting and put it in quotes to find the exact job posting elsewhere, hopefully with the name of the real company.

Bing – 0 results

Google – 2 results

Google had picked up the job postings on two other job boards, one of which had the company’s real name and not that of the recruiter. It seems to me that Bing is a pretty good search engine but Google indexes more sites more often (this is just a guess based on my experience). I switched back to Google for now. I’ll check back in a couple months and do some more tests.

Man, that was a boring post. Sorry about that.

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Many users have developed  a significant following on Twitter. We should expect many of them to want to cash in on their new <cough> “popularity”. Company sponsored tweets were inevitable. The debate over sponsored tweets is gaining some steam. Some arguments are just ridiculous and here is why.

I’m amazed by how many people think Twitter will save the world. I was recently watching a stream from Jeff Pulver’s 140 Character Conference where one of the presenters criticized the potential of the Twitter community. Not only did the crowd boo, but someone from behind the camera actually said, “He’s crazy. We’re going to cure cancer!” This is what many Twitterers believe. They actually think they’re changing the world by retweeting funny links or getting an @ mention from Rainn Wilson.

Let’s be clear about this. Twitter has become an incredible source of public conversation. It has many uses, especially for marketers, and should be seen as such. The collective information that is gained from Twitter is where the value is for the world. The individual pieces of that collective is usually mindless drivel. It’s sort of like a Monet. Zoom in and you can see random little strokes of color. Move far enough back and take all the strokes together and you get a masterpiece.

Regarding sponsored tweets, many feel that sponsored tweets sullies the Twittering world. Some feel that sponsored tweets should be required to disclose that the following tweet was paid for by <insert company here>. These people want to regulate social media conversation similar to the way print publications all put the word ADVERTISEMENT on top of a sponsored article. The argument for this is that now readers will be able to decipher quality content from advertisement.

Where do I even begin with this ridiculous argument. What some are talking about regulating is freedom of speech. Tweets are not made by a company or part of any profitable exchange of information. Tweets are words you scream out your digital window. That’s it. The idea that any requirement or regulation can be put on them is preposterous.

Furthermore, this debate goes to the heart of the ridiculousness surrounding Twitter. Popular TV and radio personalities make lots of money and are very influential. Popular Twitter personalities, if that’s all they have under their belt for being noteworthy, are not at all influential and are probably not making a dime off their social media addiction.

Companies such as Izea, TweetROI, adcause, and Twittad are trying to take advantage of this opportunity gap in Twitter marketing. I commend them. Forget about what the Twitter-crazy social media addicts are saying about sponsored tweets ruining Twitter. Twitter will be ruined if we don’t allow these companies free reign. If Twitter REALLY wants to keep tweets ad-free than it will allow ads to show up on Twitter pages and pay people for the traffic they give the site. Otherwise, don’t complain.

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