Your Hip Grandma

What am I: An internet property that organizes and filters Web content for its users. A place where people can keep in contact and share things with family and friends. A service you can find like-minded people with similar interests in groups. And it includes a messaging application where you can instantly chat with anyone with whom you chose to connect.

Of course I'm describing Facebook, right? Wrong. I'm talking about AOL. Yes your grandma's AOL.

It's not that much of a secret that the idea of a "behind the fence" or "gated" internet community was first manifested by that old dinosaur AOL, and is what in part inspired Mark Zuckerberg to do the same. It's also apparent that the old AOL "away" message is the antecedent of the Facebook status update.

But there are important behavioral differences and these are critical to marketers. In addition to providing access to the Web, AOL was a place where people sorted through the internet for solutions to their problems, conduct research, access services and to buy things. So in many ways it was closer to Google than Facebook.

And hence there's the rub with Facebook. Facebook is not the place where people go for information, to research solutions or to buy stuff.  They go to keep up with their friends, for amusement and, let's face it, to be diverted. Someone who's looking for diversion may not exactly be in the buying mode. Even when it comes to news, I know very few people who use Facebook as their primary news source, and if they do, I fear how they might vote in the coming election.

So yes, there are millions and millions and millions of users that spend hours a day on Facebook. But just because they are there, it doesn't make them ripe for the picking. There used to be the same numbers of people watching Friends on TV in the 1990s, but,

except for the most big-bucks marketers, were they looking to buy what businesses had to sell?

On Labor Day (and other hollowed holidays)

No, that's not a typo. I did mean "hollowed" rather than "hallowed". It seems that as more years go by, these three-day holiday weekends are further and further removed from the origins and intent of the events that spawned them, so they have been sort of hollowed out. Now they seem to be uniformly about beer (nothing wrong with that) barbeques and much-needed time off for the beleaguered American worker, who works longer and harder than anyone in the industrialized world (if they get any time off at all in this service economy). And mattress sales. I don't know what it is about three-day weekends and mattress sales, but you could realistically change Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day to Mattress Sale Day One, Two and Three to avoid confusion.

Labor Day in particular has been hollowed out by the fog of time. It was originally proposed by an American machinist in 1882 to celebrate workers and promoted by the American union movement. It was formally adopted as a Federal holiday in 1894. International Workers Day, celebrated pretty much by the rest of the world on May 1, actually has is its origins in an American event -- the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886, when police fired on workers protesting for an eight hour workday, killing four. Still most Americans are unaware of the union and socialist origins of Labor Day, and a Republican lawmaker even went so far as to say that Labor Day is a chance to express appreciation for all those business owners that create jobs. Now I'm a business owner but even I went -- huh?

So what does all this mean to your communications? Well, usually people in business feel compelled to say something about a holiday that sounds wholesome and appropriate, like one client who on Memorial Day insisted on using that occasion to thank the brave men and women around the world who are protecting our freedom. Well Memorial Day is about remembering men and women in our armed forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the past and hopefully the service men and women they were referring to will never have to make that sacrifice. Or on Veteran's Day, where it's more appropriate, thanking men and women for their service on your website or Facebook page becomes like wallpaper because everyone is saying it. So here are some tips for making the most out of acknowledging a holiday:

• Make it specific to the original meaning of the holiday
• Tie the origin of the holiday to how we live today
• Put some meat behind it: If it's Labor Day talk about what you're doing for your employees, if it's Veterans Day, talk about the support you give to veteran organizations and so on. 

If you do this, your message will resonate with more depth, will more likely get noticed on the Web and in social media and you just might educate a few people too.

Getting Saturated (And Not Just by the Rain)

As Hurricane Hermine was preparing to strike the Florida Panhandle last week, here in Northeast Florida I was deluged by a torrent of another kind -- wall-to-wall "storm coverage" by both local and national news outlets.

Now although the storm did create some serious havoc along its direct path, we along the fringes were subject to breathless speculation about wind speeds, rainfall levels, storm path possibilities -- all widely varying and as it turns put completely wrong. On top of that you had local politicians posturing to be somber and leader-like, intoning on how prepared they were and why we should take this threat seriously.

This scenario has played out several times over the last few years as we've been lucky enough to escape major storms here in the hurricane capital of the U.S. (Hermine was the first hurricane to strike Florida since 2005). And you get the sense (justified or not) that the media weather departments can't wait to put their crack storm watch teams into some live action, sort of like invading a country because you want to do something with all that gear and training.

The problem with all this of course is that people start to tune the information out -- sure, whatever you say, heard it all before -- and then when there's a real need to, they won't be listening. But Larry, you might ask, beyond your usual grousing, what does this have to do with marketing since this is a marketing blog? Well I'm getting to that.

I've run across so many companies who think that more is necessarily better. Flood the Facebook page with posts. Send out those email blasts every other day. I actually ran across a prospect who placed the same print ad every day in the same position in the paper.

This is obviously counter-productive from a communications standpoint. You become like wallpaper and people start to tune you out. What's more, with email marketing, open and click-through rates diminish with increased frequency and with Facebook, the more posts you throw out there with no engagement, the less likely you are to get in anyone's feed.

So pick your spots carefully. Make sure you have engaging content with something that will hook your audience. And don't feel the need to beat them over the head with it. Take your cue from David Byrne and the Talking Heads' Psycho Killer:

"When I have nothing to say my lips are sealed
Say something once, why say it again?"