As a speaker and teacher who occasionally does public creative readings and who suffers from stage fright and finds the entire experience draining at best, I can relate to the frustration and even anger associated with having my train of thought derailed.

Not that I mind questions. I tend to prefer questions happening while I’m on the topic.

I’m talking more about creative interruptions. When an artist of any kind is performing, a piece of their soul is unshielded and being shared with the audience. Enter an idiot who doesn’t know how to mute their phone. (Actually, let’s be honest, the vibrate feature makes a heck of a lot of noise too. Just turn it all off. It’s only a couple of hours.) That moment of connection between the artist and the audience is shattered and the artist is often jarred completely out of the emotional state necessary for the piece.

That’s why Kmit’s ability to accept the interruption and make light of it is such a wonderful lesson. With the world spiraling out of control and people becoming more and more self-centered, it’s important for those of us who are trying to uplift to keep our cool and turn moments around to a positive outcome.

Happy National Compliment Day!

Frankly, it’s not surprising that they should head that way. Their search results have been marginal at best for years and their lack of relevancy has cost them market share, though they still maintain 65%. The reason has been that any business who can afford it has purchased either ads, or SEO services – or both – to get themselves to that coveted page-one ranking. Which in essence means that everything you see at the top of Google has been paid for in some manner, and has probably been written for Google’s algorithm instead of for an actual information-seeking human being to read. Google also uses the number of times an article has been linked to when determining relevancy. Since any volume of those links is slow to build, there is a huge problem with stale information getting to the top because trending topics and news won’t have had the time to acquire all those coveted links. In that sort of environment, of course the results are going to suck.

About this time last year, Google tried to off-set the staleness factor by throwing Twitter and Facebook links into the mix. It didn’t help, so they stopped and are now looking to using their Google+ to establish trending topics instead. Which means that businesses are going to flood Google+ with fluffy blog articles – many generated by SEO companies who were paid for their services.

Frustrated by all this, Google has used its algorithm to take content and create its OWN results. These “answers” appear after the paid, Google AdWords results and before the paid SEO “organic” results. Yared has a marvelous graphic on his article mapping out how Google’s search results are either paid, or created internally (answers).

Now that you have the facts and the back-story, here’s my point. If all of Google’s results are, in essence, out-of-date ads, why would anyone continue to use Google? By removing the last vestige of relevancy from the results, Google has removed its own relevancy. There is an open door for any competitor willing to take them on.

He has a point. These days, any brand that has a cool sounding name or url has either 1) been around BG (before Google) or 2) has an offline brand or presence strong enough to be a search term of its own accord. For those brands too, the need to get to the top of Google’s rankings has driven them to purchasing alternate, keyword-stuffed, domain names. This is really sad.

In 2012, a brand starting out online is going to consider Google before selecting a company name. Book titles too are selected for relevancy to key terms on Amazon, and some have subtitles so long as to enter the realm of ludicrous. Thanks to Google and other search algorithms, playfulness is leaving the Web. Creative names like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, are being pushed aside in favor of more to-the-point naming conventions. Ironically, even Google would probably choose a different name if faced with the prospect of working its own algorithms to get found on the Web in 2012. Case in point, Google ranks itself as #7 for the term, “search engine.”

So has Google killed creativity? If it’s not dead yet, I think it’s suffocating. The only real cure is to return to a relevancy ranking system powered by a human brain. The only thing still capable of deciding that the person looking for information on “cat” is probably more interested in felines than in the Caterpillar Corporation. With the Web so big, this is an impossibility.

Even Google’s new ability to learn and customize a person’s individual experience is fraught with problems, all stemming from the assumption that every time I type in a term, I’m looking for the same type of information. Trust a researcher: this is majorly annoying.

It’s my hope that the creative strangulation is a temporary glitch and the new “personalized” approach to search results will allow brands to loosen up. Time will tell.

In essence, a website devoted to mobile products is suing a former employee for $340,000 because when he left the company, he took the Twitter account he’d created and used on their behalf – along with the 17,000 followers – with him. The employee of four years left the company on good terms. He claims that he created the account himself and Tweeted about things for the company as well as about personal things, which was why he got so many followers. When he left, he adjusted the handle so that it no longer had the company’s name in it and continued Tweeting. The individual claims that it’s his personal account that he had used to better the company. The company claims that it’s their account and that he had been managing it on their behalf. Because the industry standard value on a Twitter follower is $2.50, they came up with the $340,000 price tag on damages. (see: Experts: Twitter account case may blaze new trails in social media law)

There are warnings to be had here for both businesses and for the social-savvy individuals managing these accounts.

For businesses in particular, I have seen over and over again where they’ve asked an employee – usually a young one or an intern – to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts on the company’s behalf and then keep them up to date. Then the intern or employee moves on and either treats the account as a personal one, taking it with them and forcing the company to start over (which is what seems to have happened in the instance above), or more often, just leaves without turning over the username or password to the company in question so the accounts simply die.

Companies need to grow up and treat social networking as the advertising/marketing/customer service venture that it is and clearly define the role of the employee or contractor tasked with maintaining the venture as well as ownership of the accounts. Issue an email address such as social@companyname.com to create the accounts rather than relying on the employee’s personal email address. Keep the passwords in a document that a supervisor has access to. When the employee leaves or the contractor turns over, change the passwords.

For writers and others making a living as contractors in the social networking arena, you need to treat this as a business, especially if you’re essentially “renting” out a personal following you’ve built to help market a company. If you’re starting a venture for a company from scratch, it’s even more important to spell these things out in writing. This means contracts, clearly defined expectations, as well as IP and confidentially clauses.

The case promises to set precedents in the ownership of social media accounts, but honestly, kids, this media hasn’t been shiny and “new” for decades. Time to grow up and treat it as a bona fide business venture from both sides.

It works like this:

• You like brand X’s page.
• You post an update that mentions brand X.
• Brand X could purchase the ability to put their logo and company name between your post and the comment and like options so that all of your friends can see the ad.

Essentially, Facebook sold your comments.

I’m not certain about you, but I never paid attention to that stream in the first place. I must not be alone because as of January 2012, those ads will start showing up in the coveted regular news feed. Now these things will show up front and center. Not only that, but the ads will be attached to “Page likes, Page posts, Page post likes, check-ins, app shares, apps used, games played, and domain stories.”

Were I not so personally outraged by the annoyance and by the theft of my clever wit and writing skills (I do get paid to write Ad copy from time to time. Where’s my compensation?) I might think this was a clever idea. After all Facebook and brands are capitalizing on research, demographics, profiling, distribution, and ad copy creation all supplied by the consumer. Frankly, that’s brilliant and this is one of the only times in history that a brand can actually directly influence viral marketing.

While no one’s challenged Facebook yet on lost revenue from their writing (or professional photographers, artists, or models for lost revenue on their images), there is a California legal challenge based on a privacy statute that prevents a person’s photo or name to be used in a paid advertisement without the person’s consent. Facebook has been undeterred.

What can be done as a consumer?
Not much. “There’s no way to opt out of seeing or appearing in sponsored stories. Your only option is to click on the “X” in the upper right corner of each individual ad to remove it.” or, you can unlike the brand and pressure your friends to do the same.

A warning to brands:
While Facebook claims that it plans to have rate limits so that only one sponsored story per day shows up and that they’re clearly labeled, be very careful. Putting your face on people’s comments might eventually cause all but your most ardent admirers to unlike you because unliking is the only recourse they have (very binary if you think about it). Mind your P’s and Q’s.

This is an interesting ruling on a number of levels. Of most importance to you bloggers who are reporting on the world around them, is that you are not immune to libel. What essentially happened is that the blogger in question wrote a long list of negative and damaging things about a company. That company called her to task for defamation of character (libel), and she claimed that she could not reveal her sources and that she was protected under journalism shield laws. The judge said that since she was a blogger and not a journalist, she was not protected under those laws and that since she couldn’t back up her claims with facts, she was liable for damages.

Too often, bloggers feel that since they have first amendment rights to speak freely and it’s their blog, they can say whatever they want. You may have the right to say it, but anyone you happen to hurt has the right to sue you for damages – and in this case win.

Lesson: Think before you type.

On another level, this case is interesting in that the judge essentially said that if you aren’t performing investigative journalism for an established newspaper, magazine, or other media channel, you aren’t an investigative journalist. I’m not defending libel or your constitutional right to commit it. I’m just saying that the way the law was interpreted in this case opens up a few questions.

What if a professional journalist (or a writer with a journalism degree just getting started) researched and posted an article on their blog rather than for an established media? Are they suddenly no longer a journalist?

For that matter, who is to define “established?” There are lots of start-up periodicals every year. How long must they have been in business to be “established?” Does print equal “established?” What does this mean for ezines or for those periodicals that have stopped their print versions and gone solely online?

Or does “established” and “journalist” mean that money has exchanged hands for the article? If that’s the case, what if a large company starts up an industry ezine where their employees post news tidbits? How long before the company is considered “media” and their employees “journalists?”

Is it the “blog” software that should be the defining factor? Here’s one for you. Did you know that news.cnet.com uses blog software (or a content management system that behaves like a blog) to power their online presence? Any smart news media does because it’s easy for their journalists to input their own content, it organizes the content easily and intuitively, and displays the most recent articles first, automatically archiving older content. For journalists and news media like, what’s not to love about blogging software?

An attorney who drafted Washington state’s 2006 shield laws, Bruce E. H. Johnson, says that the Oregon shield law appears to have been written before blogging was accounted for and that Washington state’s laws would have protected the blogger.

Would they? Oregon’s law includes in its definition of a “medium of communication,” the words, “includes, but is not limited to…” and then a long list of examples. That is not limited to should have covered a blog. I think in this case they’re missing the point. Telling damaging lies about people or companies isn’t legal and if you can’t back up what you said you’re going to pay for it.

Needless to say, the blogger is appealing the ruling so there will be more on this from a higher court.

What does it mean for bloggers and ezines? Honestly, it’s too soon to tell. The writing and publishing industry is in flux with ebooks, POD, and self-publishing in direct competition with traditional publishing houses. Bloggers are competing with established media and any legal precedent can have lasting ramifications from protection of sources up to and including what constitutes a reprint. A federal ruling on what a “journalist” or a “media” is will be huge.

NoScript, AdBlock, and other anti-scripting plugins for web browsers have been around a number of years and have grown steadily in popularity.

There are no statistics on how many users have actually disabled javascript. This is primarily because without javascript, there is no easy way to track them, but the consensus seems to be around 3-4% of all visitors have some form of scripting disabled. That may not sound like a lot, but have a look at these numbers:

• Firefox and Chrome account for 71% of web browser usage
• NoScript for Firefox: currently it’s 9th most popular add-on with 2,168,495 users
• Ad Blocker: currently the #1 add-on for Firefox with 13,987,107 users
• Chrome Ad Blocker: 1,000,000+ users, 100,000+ weekly installs

With so many sites installing malware through javascript, it’s understandable that the public would learn their lessons and do something to protect themselves. Flashing, intrusive, ad-riddled sites have become so annoying that a growing portion of the public is doing something to reduce the irritation.

This means that there are sites on the web that can appear as blank screens when an armored visitor lands on them and if they forget they’re running script blocking software, they may go away thinking the site is broken. For a moderately bad example, here is CNN’s video page with scripting disabled:

When confronted with a screen like that and a long list of things to enable in order to see the video, I might try and temporarily enable one or two, thus reloading the page each time. If I didn’t guess right or I felt funny about the source of the scripting, I might then give up and navigate away. The funny trick about web statistics is that CNN’s traffic statistics would actually register two or more visits to the main video on that page and I never saw it. If the video was running an ad in the first segment – which most of them do these days – then CNN would report to the advertiser two views of an ad I never saw.

This should seriously concern brands who advertise on the web, especially if they are paying per view.

Washingtonpost.com has 10 or more scripts attempting to run in the background every time you load the page. I give their programmers credit that the page does indeed load the bulk of the content without the scripting, but the long list of background happenings makes me feel insecure while visiting their site. Not to mention that each script, especially those that are calling on other sites (this is called cross-site scripting and it’s a major security red flag), makes your page progressively slower to load. A sluggish site does not keep visitors who have better things to do with their time than wait on your poor coding.

User-experience aside, Brands attempting to improve their visibility on the web should take note: the most important visitor to your site does not have javascripting enabled: search engine crawlers.

So what does it mean for programmers when so many visitors have disabled scripting?
It means that we have to follow the same rules for it as with Flash: nothing mission-critical can use javascripting. The End. “But the client wants it to be smooth and pretty,” you say. Give them the numbers. If they decide a cinematic experience is what they want for their site and they are willing to sacrifice SEO and several million potential visitors to get it, then get them to sign a waiver for any SEO clause in the bid and have some fun, just mind what I said about cross-site scripting.

What can this mean for advertisers?
Well, it means that as a group, you’ve really pissed off a huge portion of the web population over the years and now you’re paying for it. Make sure when you embark on an advertising campaign that you’re aware of the programming limitations and that appropriate steps are taken to make sure you don’t overpay for whatever slot you’re buying. Avoid things that are predictable or intrusive. Do try out some creativity in your design and the angle of your message.

In the end, it’s back to basics. As far as we’d like to think we’ve come in the “coolness” department, sheer practicality always wins out.

And this is when I really got a good look at how those companies view me as a customer.

I’m not going to point fingers (glares balefully at Travelocity), but I do want to go over the unsubscribe experience and give a few take-aways.

The worst offender.
Thankfully, there was only one that did this, but let’s start with how we got to the break-up part of the relationship in the first place. Daily contacts with deals. That’s great, really. I like getting a deal and it wasn’t the same deal every day. The problem was, that clicking through to take advantage of the deal didn’t take me to a page to purchase it. In fact, the deal wasn’t in evidence at all. This offender was using a bait and switch—something that pisses me off no end. A mistake or two I can forgive, but this was a chronic offence.

Unsubscription was inevitable.

Thankfully there was an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email, but clicking through took me to a page that asked if I was sure. Ok. I can forgive that delay. We all make mistakes and it’s a good idea to make sure the customer really meant to do it. I clicked yes and here is where they lost me for good.

The language on the page read something like, “Your request has been received. Removal requests are processed within 5-10 business days.”

Excuse me? You’ll get around to unsubscribing me? Apparently this company hasn’t realized that I am in control of our relationship. Maybe fifteen years ago you could get away with something like this, but the technology now is such that it’s inexcusable. The high-brow tone from them sealed the deal. I will not do business with this company again.

Companies who could have kept me.
These were the brands who emailed too frequently and didn’t give me the option to reduce the correspondence. The process was quick, simple, and polite, and left me feeling good about the break-up.

Companies who did keep me.
These were the companies who not only asked if I was sure, but left me the option of reducing the frequency of the contacts. I chose to remain on the list at a reduced rate and I feel good about that choice.

Most importantly, why did it have to come to this?
Honestly, if your unsubscribe process needs to address the question of reducing frequency of emailings, then the brand already knows it’s pushing the limit and should probably take a hard look at its practices.

If a brand is emailing me with relevant or even entertaining messages, I wouldn’t have gotten to the unsubscribe state in the first place and that is ultimately the path that should be taken. Correspond with your list and ask them how you’re doing. If you’ve waited until the unsubscribe process to ask questions about the experience, you’re already too late for anyone casually interested in your products or services.

You know, don’t be afraid to occasionally send me something funny or gracious too. Many of the companies that I unsubscribed from made it to the chopping block because I didn’t have to download the images to know that the message was going to be some sort of discounted offer on a product that all 250,000+ people on the list would receive. If the company had varied their message and kept me guessing in the first place, I might have looked at the emails more regularly or more closely.

I might be a minority, but I would like to believe that the companies I do business with are at least marginally respectful that I’m a thinking, feeling human being and would like to be treated as such. And that doesn’t mean spending more time analyzing my shopping habits and just offering me discounts on products I’m interested in. It means remembering that I do, and am interested in, other things than shopping. It means practicing some object permanency and sending me an occasional celebratory or casual correspondence that celebrates life rather than figuring an angle to make a quick sale by capitalizing on it.

For example, I have a large number of direct ancestors both living and dead who fought to create and defend this country. Can we please show them a little more respect than reducing them to 20% off on Veterans Day? How about a nice, pretty e-card or a poem, no strings attached?

It’s just a thought.

Takeaways

1. Don’t wait until your customer is unsubscribing to ask how you’re doing with your emails.
2. Offer your customer the opportunity to receive less frequent contacts or different contacts from you before finalizing the unsubscribe process.
3. If you suspect you are emailing too frequently, either cut back or vary your message.
4. Mind your attitude at this stage of your relationship. An unsubscription doesn’t have to mean a complete break with your customer.

The problem is that if you’re constantly chasing after the Big Thing Bus, you exhaust yourself (pun intended) and can never quite catch it in time. Even when you do catch on, it’s standing room only and taking advantage of the ride is never a pleasant venture. So after trying a few times, we get smart and try to think ahead so we can be on the cutting edge of the next Big Thing – maybe be the driver on the Big Thing Bus – as if a Big Thing can be dreamed up and created. Big Things are like Pulitzer Prize Winners: if you set out to be one, you’re already going to fail.

Big Things just happen. They’re the result of a passionate individual doing their own thing as best they can. They happen to people who see a need and pour their heart into filling that need – to people who can get other people excited about their projects and engaged in helping them. Big Things take sweat and sacrifice and even luck, but mostly they take passion.

I’ve embedded a video interview of Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) where he talks about his success and how he got there. (If you minimize that ad you can reach the play button.) I feel his attitude is enlightening, especially in the wake of Twitter’s down-turn, LinkedIn’s poor revenue, and Google+’s inability to get off the ground.

Watch live video from Startup School on Justin.tv

With the Social Networking Thing pulling into a gas station, it’s time to stop chasing it and look around at what’s missing. It’s time to feel the love again for our own projects and decide the best way to infect others with that love – or allow ourselves to feel the love for someone else’s idea and help them realize it.

She goes on to say that a factor in this perception is self-control or willpower. People who overindulge in the seven deadly sins tend to undermine trust. The perception is that people who can control their urges to overeat, smoke, be disorganized, or display fits of temper, are more able to handle situations, and are therefore worthy of trust. From that trust people get better assignments, promotions, and more effective work out of subordinates.

So how does the perception of trust translate to marketing in a depression economy?

Any marketer worth their salt will tell you that a consumer’s perception is everything which is why managing a presence on the Internet, where perception can be changed in a matter of hours, is so important. More than that, the Internet is a place where Brands are held accountable. That perception needs to be backed up by reality or the Brand will be publicly taken to task for it.

Surviving in the 21st century means more than projecting an image: it means living up to it. It means delivering on your promises. It means sourcing product and services that your end user can be proud of, and then pumping up that pride so they’ll mention it to their friends.

Depression spending doesn’t equal rock-bottom price points. Frugal consumers are more careful and scrutinize every aspect of a purchase before making it, including how good they’ll feel about the purchase later. Was it a good value? Does wearing it or using it make them look and feel good about themselves? Will it hold up to use? Did it somehow support their interests whatever those might be – environmentally friendly, made in America, etc.?

If you can make your business live up to higher expectations, you can survive and even thrive in rocky economic times.