Facebook, Marketing, Memes. Fishbits, round two.

[WARNING:  DISGUSTING CYNICISM AHEAD.  I JUST TALK ABOUT IT TO MAKE IT AS TRANSPARENT AS POSSIBLE]

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:

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

https://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.

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

https://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 (https://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.