Business of Marketing and Branding Marketing and branding ideas for business marketing

We’re all drowning, and all you do is raise the water level…

I started this blog in 2005, with a pretty clear purpose; share my ideas at no cost to a global audience, profile myself as a marketer and participate in a community that was vibrant, creating fantastic professional connections. Connection based on a shared interest in Marketing. Along the way, I found out where people lived and sometimes we exchanged emails of a more social nature.

We've built relationships, and I've learned more from you, (complete strangers mostly at the other end of the world) than I could have hoped to have learned in ANY other way.

Now here is the thing that bothers me....I've stopped participating the way I used to. I don't read the blogs I used to read. I don't really comment on blogs anymore. My attention switched to Twitter and Facebook rather than an RSS reader; after all, everyone in my network would use these places to promote what they had to say anyway. That was the theory.

I think I'm going back to me RSS reader and here is why. Twitter and Facebook have polluted the stream of information I actually value from the people I follow. Most blog posts are on-topic. Mostly, no more than one a day. Most Twitter post are off-topic and posted many times a day...How am I going to keep up? And why do you make it so hard for me to find the stuff I want to read?

Facebook is even more difficult. Perfect for my personal life, but I don't really want to share my personal life with my blogging friends or work mates. It's not what binds us. It's what binds me to my family and personal friends. I don't really want to read what my colleagues do on their holidays either, or that they rode their bikes this morning... not because I don't care about them, but because it is not what binds us.

Maybe it is because I don't get it. Or maybe our fundamental social make up hasn't changed and we are still made up of different personas; private and public. I'm a father, son and brother. I'm a manager at a company. I'm a participant in a global marketing discussion. I'm (very infrequently) a musician.

But I don't talk to my mother or music buddies about marketing, because it doesn't interest them. I don't talk to my boss about my private life (in any detail) because he's not interested in the detail and possibly likes to have a little distance. We are selective who we share information with, because (among other things) it makes us more interesting and relevant to the people we share the information with.

Relationships are built on the things we have in common, the things that bind us. I can't have personal relationships with the everyone I know. There is no time, for one. Of course work friends can become close friends or even family. (and I should know).

The challenge for all of us was (and is) that there is only so much you can read and create and still do your day job. It's just too much, and I don't think I'm alone.