Into the Dark Forest We Go
I’m encountering more and more friends that are retreating from social media and finding new ways and places to engage. Tired of the spam, trolls, fake news, real news, and more… they are done. Yancey expresses this trend well.
The Internet is becoming a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
Podcasts are another example. There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large.
Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process).
These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.
That isn’t to suggest Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others are going away. But some of our attention will. And that has huge implications for marketers.
So much for all the talk
Amazon generally gets it right. But with all that data, all the opportunity to know me, you’d think they wouldn’t have a message like this on a bast-selling product that they make. Sometimes Amazon doesn’t stand-up to all the touting of retail perfection from people like me… Maybe a new Kindle is coming… 
On Jack Ma
Great read from the AFR on Jack Ma (paywall).
Two quotes stood out for me:
“Spending money is more difficult than making money for me today,” says Ma, the richest man in a country with more than 300 billionaires. “I did not expect I would be that wealthy and now I’m that wealthy, I have convinced myself that wealth is not mine.”
“I understand that Jack Ma and Jack Me, they are different. Jack Ma has become the model image for a lot of people. But I’m not that guy,” he says. “I don’t want to take all the credit for Alibaba. It’s not me. When people in the media say ‘Jack Ma is so great, he launched this thing’, I say ‘I saw it on the news, too’. It is the team that is making it great,”
Effectiveness vs. Efficiency
The plague that is consulting is hammering marketing budgets everywhere. Endless mindless Powerpoint that could have been done in a fraction of the time and points to obvious principles. and at a fraction of the cost. Thanks to Richard for the pointer to this read which makes the point well.
I don’t know how many digital strategy presentations I’ve been asked to sit through that look just like the presentation I saw at the previous client. Somebody has generally done a find and replace on client name and spiced it up with a few insights.
Something the locksmith had not grasped, but which the IT company and consulting firms understood all too well, is the role played by justifying bullshit in the modern economy. For every hour of economically productive work, ten must be spent in senseless activity to maintain the illusion that what you are doing is more difficult and labour intensive than it really is.
Dave Trott also made a similar point here.
It’s why we started Group Lark – advise, coach and counsel but in a fraction of the cost and with a focus on ensuring as many dollars from the effort drive business outcomes. Upend the traditional consulting model. Here is a simple diagram to understand what the effort will result in. Upfront alignment of total spend is everything.
