Lorton Data

We were somewhere northbound on Minnesota Highway 61, of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, when I posted a photo to Twitter of me at an ice bar enjoying a frosty beverage and shivering. Shortly after that picture, I went silent for nearly forty-eight hours. As we continued our drive north to the Bearskin Lodge, our cellular reception slowly faded. When we got so close to Thunder Bay, Ontario that my Blackberry actually went on international roaming, I did the unthinkable and shut it off for the weekend. My wife and I had joined eleven of our friends for a ski weekend in Northern Minnesota, and while the idea of propelling myself forward on fiberglass sticks at death-defying speeds wasn’t compelling for me, the opportunity to jab my wife with the pointy end of a pole was appealing enough to make me unplug from the electronic world for a weekend.

Those are not cell towers in disguise.

I wasn’t technically shut off from the electronic world. While there was no cellular service in our location in Superior National Forest, we did sort of have internet. The lodge had a satellite connection that was on such a tight bandwidth restriction that half of one “cat playing a piano video” would max out the connection for the day. Seeing as I didn’t want to be the cause of a digital Tragedy of the Commons, I turned the Wi-Fi off on my phone and didn’t turn it on again until the drive home on Sunday.

Instead, I talked with people. I laughed and drank a few beers. I hiked and played broomball and did the sorts of things I did before social media became such a large part of my life. To be honest I had an easier time staying unplugged from Twitter for forty-eight hours than some folks had going thirty minutes without asking me if I could survive forty-eight hours without Twitter. It was a relaxing weekend, and a nice reminder of the value of getting away from the non-stop, always on, post-modern world of being connected to everyone all the time. It was nice to escape the Pavlovian response of checking my Blackberry every time that little red notification light starts flashing like someone just tucked a hockey puck into the back of the net.

While I didn’t actually have a life altering epiphany while I was away in the woods, it was really nice to get away from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail for a weekend and it really did allow me to recharge my batteries—of course that could just be the wicked bump on the back of my head from a particularly vicious fall during Saturday night’s broomball game. Either way, there’s something to be said for shutting it down for a few hours here and there to regain perspective on what is really important. It isn’t always about personal branding development while measuring the ROI based on cross-platform, value-added, thinking outside the box, content creation. Sometimes, it’s about getting a really bad night’s sleep on a tiny bed and spending some time talking to people without a computer screen as an intermediary.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” I realized the value of this ethos as I trudged alone through the snowy woods on Saturday. It wasn’t the thick wool socks and gloves, nor the Thinsulate boots and coat, or even the fleece lined hat keeping me warm. It was the burning embers of desire to have a loved one suffering with me out on the trails protecting me from the cold. In other words, one man’s harrowing tale of being in a world without electronic communications is another man’s story of growing a lumberjack beard, reading Walden and coming to the realization of what is really important—having your loved one be just as miserable as you. Honestly, based on how lost I was using the lodge map, a GPS unit would have been nice as well.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go post a bunch of photos of my trip to Facebook because sometimes even new habits die hard.

“Will they or won’t they get together?” It’s a theme Hollywood has built an empire on and then ground to dust by the fourth season when every dedicated fan pleads “just get them together already.” By that point, most of us are wishing the show would end in a dramatic series of events like Romeo and Juliet. Just give us some finality to the story so we can get back to giggling manically at people getting hit by large padded swinging objects on Wipeout (Note: I don’t actually watch Wipeout, but I do make my wife replay the commercials over and over and over again). However, it’s the magic words “I love you” that drives the audience to wait for the big payoff. Those words reward the time and effort involved in watching twenty-two episodes and approximately 15 hours of insurance commercials a year just to see the main characters ride off into the sunset together. It’s the validation we’ll be rewarded with a happy ending rather than a conclusion of tragic love we learned about while drooling through the Shakespeare unit in high school English.

In social media, “like” has replaced “love” within the context of emotional validation. Like my Facebook update. Star my Tweet. Heart my Tumblr post. +1 my Google+ +thingy. Review my restaurant on Yelp. Check into my store on FourSquare. Enjoy my bamboo on Pandabook. Despise my minions on EvilGenuisSpace. It’s enough to give anyone validation exhaustion. It’s especially tiring when businesses expect it from us rather than friends or family and they are simply looking for the unrequited type of love.

“I’m the top garbage disposal distributor in the Northern Midwest Southeastern Region; follow me on Facebook to learn more.”

“We’ll cut your cat’s bangs just the way you want ‘em. We are the Twin Cities top hair salon for pets. Learn more on Twitter!”

It isn’t so much the volume of companies that want you to like them, it’s the volume of companies that want you to like them but fail to provide any value in return. Generally it’s repetitive status updates sharing a website link or the exact same tweet every day. Maybe it works for your business or maybe the one-way street method of communication is being ignored by current customers, or worse being passed over by your potential customers. While the tenants of direct marketing still apply to social media, it isn’t as tangible or front of mind as mailing a coupon. While I always have Twitter in hand (thanks to my smartphone), I don’t remember marketing messages for long. If your tweet doesn’t have an immediate impact, I’ve already moved on to the next one. I’ve probably thought a hundred times that something is cool, but it doesn’t stick in my head for more than five minutes because I’m not really engaged.

Social media needs to be interactive. You need to “like” your customers as much as you want them to “like” you. We can’t all be selling Ding Dongs or sneakers or the world’s most amazing fish tacos that can drive an unrequited relationship without customer interaction. So if you want to be successful on social media, you need to give your customers a reason to like you, and more often than not, it’s by letting them know that you like them too. I may have grown up in a Sam and Diane Cheers world, but I know Sam would have moved on to someone else well before the surprise end of season four. It’s the same thing for businesses. If you don’t give your potential fans or followers a reason to like you, they’ll pass you right over for someone else. If social media is a part of your marketing efforts, make sure you are directing those efforts in the right place—meeting your customer’s needs.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get my cat’s hair cut before her audition for Feline Wipeout.

Between the dining room and living room in my grandparents’ old house there was a white arch. Every holiday season, that arch would be covered from top to bottom on both sides with holiday cards. Decked out in vivid greens, reds and whites, with religious symbolism or irreverent reindeer, cards would travel from as far away as Arizona and as close as down the street to end up taped to my grandmother’s arch. Growing up, seeing all those cards from people I knew, or possibly would never meet, was as comforting as the baked ham and cheesy potatoes we’d eat for Christmas dinner. Those cards were a tangible, physical reminder of the many people my family could call friends and loved ones.

As I moved around in my twenties and early thirties, I lost track of that feeling. I had forgotten how nice it is to receive a simple reminder in the mail. Now, we send eCards for birthdays, and the Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn and “OH MY LORD I can’t ever get away from you people” nature of Social Media, the perception of the value from sending a piece of mail has been diminished. Instead of cards taped to an arch, we have fleeting “happy birthday” posts on a Facebook wall, or an online photo album of pictures we won’t ever remember to check. The reality is, while we are constantly warned that what you post to social media sites will be out there forever, well wishing messages on Social Media sites are fleeting.

Which is why I was surprised that an unlikely source, the Social Media blogging platform Tumblr, was what reminded me about the value of simply getting something in the mail. This time last year, I was gearing up for a trip to England with my wife for a wedding. As part of that, I dropped a quick note to some of my Twitter/Tumblr internet connections asking if they’d like a postcard. I was shocked at the overwhelmingly positive response. So I collected the addresses and carried with them me across the pond.

I spent a cold and snowy day in Cambridge reliving the semester I spent there in college and in the early afternoon, nipped into a warm pub next to a roaring fire to write my postcards over a pint of beer. Shortly after my messy scrawl filled the back of pictures of Cambridge, I dropped the cards off at a post office and promptly forgot about them.

Much to my surprise, shortly after returning from my trip, several of my internet friends had posted pictures of the postcards I sent them. Many had been stuck on the fridge with a magnet or taped to a mirror. It was a simple reminder that someone had made more of an effort to make a human connection with them than just some translated ones and zeros on a monitor. And there’s a lot of value in that.

I recently joked that if every man, woman and child sent something like eighty additional postcards a year that we’d have the USPS budget shortfall taken care of pretty quickly. While that’s never going to happen, I’m going to try and do my part. Not because of any intellectual reason, but rather because postal mail means something more to people. My wife and I have moved well past fifty on our holiday card list and hopefully some of those cards will end up taped to a white arch as a simple reminder that my wife and I care.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go fight with the mail merge function in Word to get my address labels printed.

According to Google Analytics, the hits to my blogs have been steadily declining over the last few posts, and I’m not sure why. It could be my content–maybe my articles have been written poorly. Or it could be the subject matter. In a cyber world inundated with blogs and authors pounding out character after character on direct marketing and social media, maybe there’s just too much noise. There could be a myriad of reasons why. Ultimately, there is a random confluence of things that have limited my readership.

In marketing, the general mantra is to go with what works until it stops working, and then try something new–or go back to basics. With the advent of the internet, this means that photos of cats with adorable captions is the go-to to drive blog traffic. But my lovely wife sent me something much more meaningful yesterday, PENGUINS IN SWEATERS. Yes, that’s right. Penguins in sweaters! No pants of course, because that would violate the laws of cartoon biology. Now unfortunately, you just can’t find Creative Commons licensed photos of penguins in sweaters these days like you used to, so I’ll just have to share a couple of links.

Here’s the interesting thing about penguins in sweaters. It isn’t some Halloween pet torture passed down from the Inquisition to today. Instead, it serves as a useful enhancement for the tuxedo wearing birds that are the victims of oil spills. Many of the links included today describe the problem in-depth, but here’s a little background. When you get crude oil from a spill on the feathers of a penguin it displaces the natural oils on their feathers. The natural oil helps to keep them warm and provides waterproofing. Also, penguins clean their feathers with their beaks meaning they ingest the oil and, as we all remember from that kid in third grade who would eat anything, crude oil is bad for you. The sweaters keep the penguins warm and prevent them from eating the oil until they are rehabilitated and can be released back into the wild.

Now, this story has popped up several times over the last decade as oil-spill troubles affect the region around Australia and New Zealand. For some adorably compelling reason, people feel they must continue to knit penguin sweaters. They’ve knitted so many that the Tasmanian Conservation Trust has collected 15,000 sweaters to be included in their oil spill response kits. With that many sweaters available the little penguins (Eudyptula minor for those scoring in Latin) could probably be renamed the Dr. Cliff Huxtable penguins.

However, the backlog of mini-sweaters helps out only one small area. With the current oil spill off the coast of Tauranga, the most populous city on the northern island of New Zealand, there is a need for penguin sweaters somewhere other than Tasmania. Knitters and penguin lovers all over the globe are able to spread the word via social media that 1,300 birds have been killed by the 300 tons of oil that have already washed up on the beaches, and provide a simple call to action (well it’s a simple call to action if you can knit). For example, a friend of my wife’s came across the Skeinz blog referenced above, she posted it to Facebook, my wife read it, forwarded it to me and now I’m sharing it with you since my typing is only slightly better than my knitting.

What does this have to do with marketing, social media or blogging? Probably not much other than on the internet, a blog about penguins in sweaters will always trump the next article about Facebook or email marketing. To put it another way, old fashioned ideas, such as knitting, doesn’t necessarily mean old fashioned marketing. Even if the vehicle for communicating your message has changed, it doesn’t mean you have to redefine the message.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put this tracksuit on a polar bear.