Facebook Ups the Ante with new Comment-by email functionality

As I've mentioned before, I've been writing for a blog called Social Media Marketing. The following is the first bit from a piece I wrote last week. To read the full article, check it out here.

Many of us have come to depend on Facebook for daily entertainment, connecting with old friends, or communication to pass the time. Since it’s launch in early 2004, the site has evolved greatly from the small, relatively exclusive site with an emphasis placed on what individuals put out there for others to see. As time went on and poking (thankfully) fell out of fashion, the way we communicated with each other on Facebook changed drastically. We started with messages, sent directly and privately from sender to recipient. When the wall was launched, most folks took their conversations public, but those conversations always ran the risk of being deleted by others who wanted to claim more space on the page. Anyone else remember those early day free-for-alls? Oh, how things have changed.

OMG, SM is totes sweet! Avoiding a Communication Breakdown

In the days of Facebook status updates and 140-character tweets, the language we use has been getting more and more concise, though not necessarily simpler (as those of us not familiar with “1337 $p34k” and the TXTing language the youth population can attest.) For businesses utilizing social media platforms, this has been both a blessing and a curse: it has forced us to quite literally consider the language of our consumers and learn how to interact with them, but it has also forces our hand a bit. The brevity of our social media interactions means we have little time to make an impression. Therefore, there is more importance placed on the crafting of those messages. Social media is often viewed as being more casual, but that doesn’t mean that all convention can go to the wayside;spelling, grammar, and clarity are still crucial to successful communication.

Want to read more? Check it out on my page at the Social Media Marketing blog.

Generational Theories: The Role of Age

When I took the ACT in high school, I anxiously awaited my test results along with the rest of the nation's juniors. When I finally got my scores, I knew I could do better, but I was happy with it--I had scored in the 99th percentile nation-wide. Immediately after the scores came in, my friends and I all compared scores, and each of us scored 98th or higher. We all congratulated each other and complained about how Spencer could have gotten a 33 when he was so lacking in common sense. But after a while, we started wondering how in the world we could all be a part of this "upper eschelon"--who would be in the 50th percentile? 25th? 5th? It came as a shock to many of us to realize that our reality was not the reality of many of our peers in other states, in other communities, in other schools. Ultimately, we only knew the people we knew, never being aware of the rest of what was out there.

In my time as a young planner, I've been approached a number of times for help on speaking and selling to my age demographic. My peers and I are considered experts on our demographic, and while I see the truth to the statements, its like my friends and I celebrating our ACT scores--we only know the people we know, and that can be a very limiting sample. I STILL don't know anything about Friendster, because thats not where my friends are--we're on Facebook. But Friendster still has 90 million registered users, none of which I'm connecting with. Much like my older counterparts, I have to study my own generation. And all of it can get a bit overwhelming...

Enter generational theories. They boil down a nation's worth of teenagers or baby boomers or gen x'ers into easy to digest, easy to support profiles. At the speed of business, the safety of an understood title like "millennials" can be a huge relief, not to mention a money and time saver. 

But are we getting enough out of these titles? How much trust can we put into these profiles? Are they working? Is there a better way to learn?

I say we need more than these profiles to guide our communication. Of course they can help start us down the right path for our own research, but it seems generational theories are increasingly taking the place of primary research, and in my opinion, compromising our results. 

In trying to differentiate your brand, in trying to create innovative communication, I urge you to keep this in mind:

"A city book can only direct you to known places." - Cretien Van Campen in "The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science"

Think on it. More discussion to come.