Okay… so…

In the last couple years… between normal “we all have to deal with this stuff” life events, the direction of country, the last political election, my irrationalism in response to religion…. I notice that anger seeping back in.  It is no big deal… nothing like “rage rawr anger violence”… I am just saying when the extremes of your passions and emotions get the best of you.

Passion is good, but navigating it to understand how it manifests is important.  I was completely forgetting that.

So anyhoo, I had picked it up again a couple weeks before the election and am constantly reading it, over and over.

It amazes me.  Completely.  I can feel that change.  You should see me in traffic.  I am pretty calm driver, but where I found moments of passive aggression, now it is totally… well I slow down and let whatever is happening around me happen and just flow through it.

Sounds stupid?  I dunno… but it is an amazing book.  I have found myself reading more, being online less… and just existing in a much more fulfilled and less panicked state.  We could all use that about now.

** I can say, without hesitation, two more of the most important books would be Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World” and the compassionate, moving, skeptical, passionate, humanist, atheist literature that came after that.

I don’t think this would be a time to reinvent the wheel and start buying into a moderne approach to advertising with all this 2.0 stuff.  There are some others where advertising might be wise, but we will wait and see results from these other sights as well (I am running some tests with a business I am involved with, and will see if the page hits transform into site hits into bookings).

Google Adwords are probably still a strong idea… and just having a solid, optimized website.

But when you *really* start looking at these sites: Facebook, Yelp, etc…. what is the business model?

Because Facebook has some issues now.

It will be interesting to see what happens.  A lot of people have been banking on FB… but it always has been just a part of the overall program in hotel’s cases, anyway.

Ad Campaign for the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel

aaaand…..

the Awesome Hotel Website!

great ad campaign and hotel website for Hans Brinker Budget Hotel

Why am I so angry at belief, I think?  It often doesn’t hurt single people, but it does often create the reverberations of an uncritical, credulous, and weak minded society perpetuated by lack of rigorous proof or tangible definition of how reality exists, and a lack of desire to find out.

So, I want to start a club.  An AtheistHumanistSkeptic club. I know you aren’t a humanist, but I think we could do well talking about how stupid people are about their mindless will to believe in nonsense, and how it scares us and makes us angry.

Most of you don’t have the time for this, but I know some of you are still somewhat alien to the idea of social networking and the more knowledge we have, the better we can utilize the tool.

Why Facebook Pages are important:

These “pages” leverage our brands in multiple ways. In regards to general optimizing of the website, the more our page and our links exist throughout the internet, the higher our page will bump (pardon for being simplistic). But the other side of it is that these pages target consumers MARKEDLY well… and we can get into an ad campaign later that is cheap, and incredibly specific down to keywords like “eco-hotel”, specific regions, and more. In that sense, instead of the ad appearing next to any random facebook account, it appears next to people that have relevant accounts, potentially increasing our conversion rate.

As for the pages….. since I published them, they have already been getting considerable hits without any effort *at all*. Meaning some of these pages have gotten up to 20+ page views simply for existing. In fact, Fiji has somehow picked up fans. It is remarkable really. I am going to do some very low level advertising experiments with this, and will follow up by the middle of next week.

Why Facebook is important?

Facebook is a place where users are constant “endorsers” of products in front of their friends as the targeted audience: a music video, a political figure, a local café, etc. A user “fan”’s the page, and their friends in their network see this, converting more users into your network. It can allow previous guests to touch base with staff or other guests they met, keep up to date on the resort, or post pictures and stories. It allows other people to simply wait for the right offer to visit, or fantasize from their cubicle.

What is truly incredible is that, for no fee, you can send out a “status update” to all your fans… specials, important events, etc… and it goes on their “feed”. This is important, as email is possibly in the beginning of its decline (this is another discussion entirely), and the ad will appear directly in front of their eyes, rather than hidden in an email they can ignore or throwaway.

It is also important to think of the size of some of these social networks, and the effect that one popular kingpin individual can have on the community at large. We begin looking at social networking members as individuals with high or low “equity”. The “high equity” group leaders are someone worth targeting in hopes they lead their network in the same direction.

The real impact of facebook is that it spins around the ad model where you force feed consumers endless advertising, and you target the people that want to be known as endorsers of your product. In fact, the way that hotels are going, and most businesses in general, print media is rapidly declining. I have a lot of reports with evidence that supports this. Like Here!

With this “individuality” model, endorsing specific products highlights a person’s style of individuality, bolstering their equity within their group, helping them become a more important figure for that network (including more profile hits and overall social interest, making that individual become highly desirable to interact with). In the end, you don’t have to approach them in the traditional sense with advertising…. The consumer is starting to come to us as it will benefit their standing to be part of *your* network of hotels, etc. When your brand is solid, and your social standing is good, facebook users become unaware that they are advertising for you in a personal effort to set themselves apart as an expressive and individualistic user. In essence, humans are now the vehicles for your brand, and will errantly act as walking billboards reaching more people than any traditional print media could.

————————————————

I have done a lot of work on facebook. Here are the links.

Facebook is a closed social network, but these business pages appear in everyday google/yahoo searches.

Look at them, and if you are part of facebook, please “fan” the page. If you have anyone you know that is on facebook, send these to them (cutting off the below explanation please). Upload videos and photos if you have them.

I wanted to keep this short, but a concise explanation of these and why they are important appears below.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Passport-Resorts/31208562731

PASSPORT RESORTS

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Savusavu-Fiji/Fiji-Islands-Resort-Fiji-Vacations-Fiji-Luxury-Resort-Hotel-Eco-Resort/104677890056

JEAN-MICHEL

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Big-Sur-CA/POST-RANCH-Big-Sur-hotel-Big-Sur-lodging-Ventana-Mountains-Eco-Inn-Spa/32703496590

POST RANCH

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sonoma-CA/Sea-Ranch-Lodge-Sonoma-Coast-Hotel-Dog-Friendly-Inn-Mendocino-eco-hotel/31281769323

SEA RANCH

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sausalito-CA/Sausalito-Hotel-National-Park-Lodge-San-Francisco-Hotel-Sausalito-Resort/32504522793

CAVALLO

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hana-HI/Hana-Resort-Maui-Hotel-Maui-Lodging-Maui-Resort-Hawaii-vacation-Maui/32495359821

HANA

(cause when famous people tell you to do something, you do it, Mister)

It might be the most important marketing tool in the history of business.  This is what I would like to talk about.  I bailed on facebook a couple months ago as demonstrated here:

http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco-i-just-deleted-my-facebook-account#uGX2fLe0NIteKu_XQVWZhg

http://www.yelp.com/topic/san-francisco-is-facebook-beacon-evil#-NineORULvGb3hM778Ltdg

Well now I need to do it for a couple reasons… one is that it may be killing email.  For real.

http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/674

http://mashable.com/2007/08/20/facebook-email/

So that is one reason.

But another is because I need to *understand* this thing from a business end.  It is quite rapidly changing so much of business and marketing.

SO…. here I dive deep back into the fray.  I have a couple accounts… one that is for experimenting, one that is me, and one that is a business account.  Here are some things I have noted within the first couple days:

People will friend you because you are a friend of a friend.  This is interesting.  The larger the networks, the better the advertising possibility.  If you could successfully get the contact list of a successful facebooker, the leverage there would be astonishing.  I assume, at some point, you will hear of facebookers selling their contact list to a corporation.  Very unethical, very under the table, and it might have already happened.  Think about the Obama page.

Speaking of Obama, Facebook groups as well as the newer facebook pages are INCREDIBLE.  The marketing potential behind those are epic, and get into a philisophical conversation (more on that soon). I note that many hotels or groups have pages and groups on facebook.  Both are incredible, because it offers an opportunity to directly connect to consumers who *WANT* to be branded.

It is astonishing the level of transparency in regards to consumers… the fact is that advertising is almost expected and welcomed as long as it is witty, impacting, and earnest with its effectiveness while being self aware.  But this leads to a remarkable issue.

Marketing took this default position in the past as creating a rift… or as marketers like to say “need”.  The idea was to create this imperative need in someone, so much so that they might feel less human or capable of competing in their social circle without said product.  Whether it is targeted at the insecurity of growing old, or filling our technolust driven by the marketing machine….  marketing was dehumanizing and robbed people of self worth.  I strongly believe this to this day, but now things are changing.  I am not saying that it grants reprieve to the cynicism embedded in any job that starts with “here… convince people they want this”, but I am saying that it has flip flopped.

The individual is only defined by the brands it wears on its social page.  People define themselves with branding and marketing.  People squirm in their own skin and rejoice at the opportunity to wear Dior, or Persol, or Chanel.  People are voracious to prove they are cool with buttons, patches, labels, logos, and advertising.  Even if it is some modern pop culture subgroup like hipsters or burners, they wear their anti-brand as a brand.  It gets co-opted to a significant degree.  There is a moment you cannot tell if you are talking to someone who started a trend in response to the dehumanizing consumerism, or if they are the response to the marketing trends of consumerism co-opting an explicitly regurgitating this trend.  It has happened with jazz vipers, hippies, punks, and so on.

The startling issue is that the majority of consumers are no longer passively accepting marketing like a car whizzing past a route 66 staggered billboard  ad campaign

The aspect of modern marketing being that consumers are endorsers for your product or brand… WILLINGLY wearing this as if it were an emblem on their clothing.  The Generation Z kids are not only “me me me”, but they are quite willing to leverage their “individuality” for the opportunity to be memetic “endorsers” of products and brands.  Think about that….

The facebook user becomes nothing more than an empty vessel to fill with your marketing efforts.  There is a certain point that the user is solely defined by their brand loyalty that they constantly advertise.  Whether they review a restaurant on yelp, buy something on Amazon, listen to something on Pandora, etc….

It is fascinating, and incredibly important.  In university, my degree in communication went into the idea that information is somewhat autonomous, and the information is the meme, while the human body simply a vessel to transmit these memes.

Think of that…. that information is what is truly alive.  In this sense, brands are what are memetic.  In fact everything is a brand… your name, your facebook or yelp account.  It all ends up representing you and reflecting on you… and people carry this brand image of who *you* are with them.  But what astonished me is that this ethereal, subjective theory could be viable.  I just thought it was something chatted up in dimly lit rooms at 3am over a smoky haze of forced intellectualism.

If facebook (as well as the users themselves through passive acceptance) turns users into “endorsers” or walking billboards (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/advertising/MAR_ADP_ADV/126511-10096762?goback=.ahp), it will be an interesting commentary on what creates our individualism. Are we willfully decieving ourselves into thinking, antithetical to Fugazi’s “You are not what you own” line, what brands we consume is what defines our individuality?

Or is it too late?

We will be happy and focused on the 10 people we know and are happy vacation photos, while all this meta-marketing and meta-advertising is loosely orchestrated in a way that we aren’t even paying attention to.  We will live and die, our facebook profiles will go dormant…

But in 10,000 years, someone might purchase something at Nordstrom’s due to your review.  Or possibly buy Chanel sunglasses because on your spring break you looked… oh…….so…. chic.

Shit Bill Hicks was right.

This is huge huge huge:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/21/AR2008102102477.html

huge

Al-Qaeda is rejoicing and backing McCain.

Their fascist, uber religious, narcissism needs its foil to feed off of.  If Obama wins, it shows we are thinking deeper than simply polarizing the issues, you dig?  This guy is a manifest destiny jingoist.

This needs to get out there.

This literally means that voting for McCain you are voting for the terrorists?  Or at least.. you hold the same views?

That is weird for those people, eh?

Maybe I am being too simplistic.

Okay… here is one of two rants for the day.

Can someone post all the metallica, beatles, and eminem and sheryl crow, Jay Z and Lenny Kravitz?

FUCK THEM.  This freezing of your stuff brought up an interesting argument… and basically that is the argument of a flailing and confused corporate record company.

http://www.musicunited.org/3_artists.html
who cares is right.

I am reposting this here for edddddd-ification:
http://www.edternet.com/unclefishbits/2008/05/01/so-it-is-an-organic-memetic-process-information-autonomous-moving-on-its-own-i-dig-that/
SO IT IS AN ORGANIC MEMETIC PROCESS - the idea that music is no longer a commodity.

It is interesting that these fuckers are drilling into new money and a steady business model, but still fucked up about it and taking down THE EVIL MEN LIKE CHIP.

The Economist
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12376889
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12341747
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12341817

I have plenty of traveling friend’s in bands or DJ’s.  I perform as well, and I don’t make music.  That is the base for my final opinion….

FUCK EVERYONE.  This is exactly what should happen:  getting the music out of the studios and back on the road.

THE MONEY SHOULD BE IN THE LIVE SHOW AND NOT FROM A STUDIO.  EVER.

This is like the old days of traveling big bands and soul revues.  The money is back in the live act, where it should be.  Albums should be business cards.

Screw the industry.  Simply screw it.