Fifth Blog Post

This is a picture of Valparaiso Cafe and Roastery, which is on 744 “P” Street in Downtown Fresno, in the Warehouse Row office complex. They’re open weekdays from 6:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the coffee is piping hot, they serve food, it's reasonably priced, and it’s quite good. If you live, work, or play downtown (and you should be doing all three), this is definitely a place to check out.

Read on for a personal story.


EDITING ALERT: I used Lightroom CC’s “auto” lens correction feature on this one.

Something funny happened to me last night.

After nearly (or maybe over; I haven’t kept track) a year of having left social media, I decided to create another Facebook account. As a marketer (albeit not a terribly successful or good one), I figured I needed to be “where the people are” in order to promote myself as a graphics designer, and, I suppose now, a blogger.

It didn’t take me long to realize the people have all gone elsewhere. There are a few hangers-on and loyalists (or, perhaps more succinctly put: people who don't know where else to go), but Facebook has become the equivalent of the nightclub everybody used to go to. It is, for all intents and purposes, MySpace.

My phone’s screen is busted into a zillion pieces, and I’m dead broke (like I said, I'm a marketer that sucks at marketing), so I can’t post on my Instagram account anymore. But even when I was there, I noticed that, while the eyeballs are there, they’re not there for very long. You can get them to look for a second, but you can’t get them to keep looking long enough to pay attention to or absorb anything.

And that’s a feature, not a bug: it is precisely because of what Instagram is that makes it a terrible platform for marketing for most businesses. In order to make it more appealing to marketers and advertisers, you’d have to make it less appealing to everybody else. The owners and creators of these social media services understand the catch-22 they’re stuck in (multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests), and they seem to have no clue what to do about it. I think they're just riding the wave and holding on for as long as the checks clear.

So, what’s the problem?

I think it has something to do with us having reached the apex of what the digital/attention economy is capable of. It had been, in the past, touted as the “solution to everything,” but we’re finally starting to discover that it’s only the solution to some things…and the number of things it’s the solution to seems to be decreasing.

And besides, even if you get the eyeballs looking at your posts and videos, if you can’t turn it into paying customers, what good is that for your coffee shop, your sushi joint, your small retail establishment, or your struggling tailor?

And all the marketers who make all the promises about “conversions” and “results-oriented marketing” and other claptrap are promising you all the things they have no means to deliver. I would also add SEO to this category as well; even if these things were once useful, these techniques have begun to outlive their usefulness. The long and short of marketing and advertising hasn’t changed a bit over the centuries: it all comes down to letting human beings know you’re out there, hope they respond, and make the best damn product and standard of service you can in order to keep them coming back. The most important part of this equation (other people responding) is the one you have zero control over, and while it's a bitter pill for adherents to the Cult of Positive Thinking to swallow, that does not make it less true.

The digital attention span is necessarily short. If you want real business, it’s time for a new strategy. And in an age when every “tried-and-true” marketing tactic has been tried past the point of truth and well into absolute uselessness, the only thing that people are going to respond to is novelty. And established businesses will falter because they’re too fearful to take a risk at a time when taking no risk at all is the biggest risk you can take. It’s an environment ripe for real disruption.

The digital attention span is necessarily short. If you want real butts in your seats, it’s time for a new strategy.

All I can say is, this is the beginning of this conversation—not the end.