Digital Marketing, Media, PR Analysis And Insight – The Future Buzz

You would have to be crazy to completely yield your digital presence to services owned by other people. There are so many reasons you should maintain an independent presence, and most of those who have been active digitally well before the popularization of privately (vs. independently) owned web services know this.

The number stops them in their tracks every time. When I tell people that the New York Times has more than 700,000 fans of their Facebook page, they say something like, “They have THAT MANY?” Yes they do. There’s a whole lot of hullabaloo these days in the social media world about Facebook fan pages – and with good reason.

As a perpetual observer/analyzer of what people share and why, it’s fascinating to me to study content that spreads. As such, I document/bookmark much of the web’s hottest content for my own insight/analysis, but I also share with readers here too.

The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded it to A-list technology blog Techdirt. Mike Masnick been doing a great job of covering the entertainment industry’s (rather entertaining) ongoing misunderstanding of this whole social web thing, so I’m pleased to see him share the story with his community to continue that dialog.

Kipp Bodnar recently wrote a post at HubSpot’s blog titled The Next Big Thing for Marketers: Social Magazines. In it he opens with the trend that tablets are here to stay. He’s right, but let’s think bigger than tablets. Tablets are just one type of device within the larger category of ultra-portable devices.

If you reach the level others are reacting to your content in a critical light, consider yourself successful. The fact you are being mentioned organically at all is a positive signal even if it does not seem that way initially. Media outlets have known this for years and by embracing it have formed pretty thick skin. They don’t take criticism personally, rather, they quietly (and sometimes loudly) leverage it to increase their own exposure.

Ever seen those apps that show you “how much your website is worth?” They’re sort of fun, except no one actually takes them seriously. What if you applied that same concept to a Facebook page? It would make just as little sense and be equally as silly.

I like Jesse Stay (and am a reader of his blog) and wasn’t initially going to blog this. But thinking about it further, and as someone who works both on social media and SEO clients/projects, I felt a need to weigh in and not leave this conversation unchecked.

Ben Elowitz contributed an article to The Huffington Post with the unfortunate title: “Facebook’s Like Button: A Force Powerful Enough to Save Media from Google Search.” The entire premise that media needs to be “saved” from Google search is a line that has been trotted out for years. However it’s one that makes no sense. The article also glowing looks to Facebook’s like feature as somehow being a saving grace for newspapers. That is extremely wishful thinking.

The idea of “social media addiction” (yeah, let’s put that in quotes) is one which makes no sense.

As Mike Masnick at Techdirt observes:

Over the last decade or so, there’s been something of an… well… addiction to calling any sort of overuse of a product an addiction. So we’ve seen email addiction, web addiction, online porn addiction, video game addiction, internet addiction, and mobile phones or other gadget addictions among other things.