Loren Woirhaye asked:




I’m reading a book called “Marketing In the Moment: The Practical Guide To Using Web 3.0 Marketing To Reach Your Customers First”.  I’m not going to review it here, but it has got me thinking.

You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but if you want  to make it as a marketer, you have to be able to learn new skills and adapt to new technology.

When the web was new as a marketing medium (up to about 5 years ago it was new) people weren’t looking to replace day-to-day activities by going “virtual”.  Now they are.  In droves apparently.  At 38 I may be a little too old to “get it”, but many people under 25 practically seen to have their smart phones permanently attached to their bodies.

Recently I was visiting Boston and riding the subway.  Ever the observer, I was looking around at what people were doing.  Almost everybody under a certain age was spending a majority of their subway time engaged in some way with a personal electronic device.  I mean, they literally wouldn’t look at the people around them.  These young people were 100% engaged in a world of electronic communication that alleviated the tedium of real life – where you have to cool your heels riding the subway sometimes.

If I were part of this younger generation I would probably be just as engaged as they are in the virtual world they are in:  texting, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps and all that, so I’m not judging this sort of activity as bad, it’s just a little perplexing.  Probably perplexing the way the appeal of the Beatles was to parents of teenagers in the early 1960s.

So these new ways of using technology represent a generation gap of sorts.   Older people are adopting these new technologies though, and the widespread adoption of them is a groundswell that is really getting going.  I think marketers may have to adapt or die.

I’m not just pulling this stuff out of my ear – I’ve been reading books on these topics… social media and such.  Many times I’ve said the problem with social media is, well… it’s social.  It’s sort of like a party – people do it for fun.  Thus, it is sort of anti-productive to try to get work done in it.

The reality of social media marketing is that it can be effective, and the old Pareto principle (the 80-20 rule) applies.  80% or more of your social media activity will be almost a complete waste of time and energy.  Isolating the 20% that is likely to be effective is the problem.

I don’t claim to have even a small portion of the answers to the vexing questions of how to make social media and “mobile” marketing as effective as old-school direct response.  I still have a lot to learn,  but I recognize the trend is not going away.

The crux of this trend is that people are busier than ever.  In part (and this is, in my opinion, a bad thing) it’s because the availability of all this electronic stimulation and new toys is eroding the attention capacity of young people.  It could be that many of our best and brightest minds are squandering their formative years developing social skills and play-games skills, but little else.   It could lead to a dumbing-down of culture, and arguably already has.

What do you think?

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