By all means, create branded content, and shoot for the moon when it comes to earned media. But in all cases know that your best-case scenario is to be a part of the social stream. Throw a rock in a raging river and watch how quickly those ripples are subsumed by the greater powers of the current: that’s what you’re up against.
The point of marketing in this environment is to create the types of jetsam and driftwood that our users can grab on to; find purchase on; point-to in passing … and move on. Don’t worry, you get credit along the way. It builds up. Eventually you’ll have built an indomitable ledge of stone. This is branding.
We cannot continue to view the Person as the temporal and causal antecedent and the Profile as something that is the subsequent result. We have clear evidence that the person is also being co-constructed by the Profile. Experience creates documentation and documentation creates experience.
(via socialuxd, wildcat2030)
As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”
This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?
According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously.
