Most of us have heard of Mission Creep or Project Creep. Have you noticed how many Creeps there are in online marketing?
Email Creep. I’m trying to consolidate all my emails down to one, and not having much success. For one reason or another, there always seems to be a group or a project or a client that requires its own unique email.
Calendar Creep. Very much related to Email Creep. In the old days I had a big fat paper Franklin Planner where I could do all my calendaring. Now I have about five virtual calendars, some of which integrate and some of which don’t.
E-book Creep. Everybody wants to do an e-book lately. Now sometimes an e-book makes sense, but quite often a regular blog post will do. Why should I go to the trouble of downloading an e-book if I could read the same information on a blog post?
Community Creep. This is the big one. Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, private b2b communities, blog communities, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, FriendFeed … the list goes on and on. One day there has to be a shakeout, or we’ll be spending all our time logging in and out of interactive websites. There won’t be any time to communicate.
Hey, I love social media and blogging. All I’m saying is, are things getting out of control? What do you think?
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Online marketing is indeed creepy and I very much agree with your ebook point but I suppose it’s just how we set our mindset. To many thinks e-books have more insights on things and while that maybe true sometimes, it’s not always the case.
Salwas last blog post..Traffic Monday: Driving Traffic Using Article Marketing Techniques
It’s true,I find it difficult to keep p to date with everything.If we want to communicate we have to communicate , not just going fro one place to another.Apart from that, there are too many gurus out there.I ask myself ¡why aren’t we all rich?
Patricias last blog post..El Poder de los Abrazos
Hi Salwa, In some cases I suppose e-books provide formatting that you can’t easily get elsewhere, which is a good reason to go that way. But there should be a reason, right?
Hi Patricia, Good point! There’s been a lot of discussion lately about people claiming to be experts – what is an expert exactly? Someone who has actually accomplished what they teach is one good definition.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Online Marketing Is Creepy
Brad, Community creep may be a symptom of confusing activity with effectivess. I have a friend on the “left coast” who is too busy keeping in touch to get her job done right. She’s be better off with a good old fashioned fountain pen and snail mail. Bill
Bill, I think there are a lot of people in the same boat as your friend. Social media is addictive and can become unproductive very quickly. It’s a good practice to step back every couple months and ask yourself, what business purpose am I advancing doing this?
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Online Marketing Is Creepy
Hi Brad, there is definitely a creep factor and things can get out of hand very quickly. I try to limit myself to blogging & twitter… and that is more than enough
Joanna Youngs last blog post..By Words the Mind is Winged: Quotes on Writing and Breathing Space
Hi Joanna, You are very disciplined. I’m about 50% blogging, 30% Twitter, 5% Facebook, 5% LinkedIn, and 10% “other”.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Online Marketing Is Creepy
But Brad, just how much time do you think I fritter away on Twitter?!?
Joanna Youngs last blog post..By Words the Mind is Winged: Quotes on Writing and Breathing Space
Joanna, There are some things we should keep to ourselves … time spent on Twitter may be one of them.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Online Marketing Is Creepy
Brad
It is. You are right. Period.
But there is a sweet spot somewhere between the kumbaya-crowd and the black hats that will work. Interesting post by Nicholas Carr (Rough Type) about Twitter (or check out the my most recent tweet about it… heh heh)
Denniss last blog post..Being good isn’t good enough
Hi Dennis, Yep, it’s all a matter of balance. Social media combines business and personal, which makes it difficult to tell why you’re spending time on it.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Online Marketing Is Creepy
It’s filled with creeps as well as intelligent people who make money with little effort..
I will recommend using http://ePostMailer.com for all email marketing needs. Its the best desktop email marketing software I have used so far.
Brad,
You are right on there, particularly, it seems, with respect to the concept of ‘community creep’
It’s great that there are so many online communities out there, but it can become a little difficult to manage if you become involved with too many.
The ideal way, in my view, is to prioritize as much as possible – to pick a few of the most important communities and spend more time on quality interaction with members of those communities. Less time can then be devoted to less important communities, or perhaps involvement with such communities could potentially be discontinued.
Andrews last blog post..India’s Enron
Hi Andrew, Discipline is a theme that keeps coming up … for a business, the first step is to figure out where your customers are hanging out. Seems to me if you’re in b2c, you probably need to be on Twitter. If you’re doing b2b, maybe not.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Get to Page 1 on Google with Content Optimization
I agree with Joanna, and also limit myself to Twitter and blogging.
Oh, and running the new forums.
But wow, it can really get out of hand…that’s why stepping away from the keyboard is such a good thing.
Enjoy, Barbara
Barbara Ling, Virtual Coachs last blog post..Making images clickable
Barbara, We have a consensus: Twitter and blogs are the places to be. And your forum is pretty awesome, too!
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Get to Page 1 on Google with Content Optimization
All the more reason to be regularly measuring the effectiveness of each tool in some way and consolidate when appropriate. Brad, does your work life have to fit into that 10% other?
I have a few email addresses, but only get them in two places — my PC’s email client and Gmail. The other emails are forwarded to one of these two places. No problem.
Calendars — my system would make a person cross-eyed. I prefer to use Palm’s Desktop application because I enter most of my to dos, calendar items, memos and contacts through my computer. Well, it syncs with Outlook — which syncs with the BlackBerry and Google Calendar.
Ebooks — I don’t know how people make a living off of them when there are so many out there plus free ones. I prefer to read shorter stuff like in blog posts.
Social media — I just try to connect my accounts with each other and frequent the big three: Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
We can’t keep up with it all. Instead, just do the best we can and I think we all are.
Hi Fred, Nah, the 10% is only 10% of my social media time, which is not that huge a percentage of my overall time.
Hi Meryl, Thanks for sharing your system. We all wind up with our own tracking systems, don’t we? I’ve come around to your point of view on social media – go deeper on a smaller number of sites. Otherwise it’s just too much information.
Brad Shorrs last blog post..Off to SOBCon09
you internetfacebookytwittering people are all creepy. Yes all of you! you might think everyone as far as you know is on the internet, aren’t they?….except maybe those over 90 and under 5.
Well actually there are some people who just live in the real world and only use email for sending info to work colleagues, and the internet to check the surf conditions. I like to spend time doing things like being outside in the fresh air, and holding hands with my kids, sitting beside my friends talking with my mouth and listening with my ears and hugging with my arms, when appropriate…I dont usually have time for wasting staring at screen and typing to no one in particular, like right now…..oh no! i hope this isn’t the beginning of my internet-facebook-twitter pastime…god no! help….quick ….see yas… Im gunna go do some reading in bed.
Hi Nikki, Now I can see how being offline makes a person more relaxed and accepting.
Truth is, people I know online are very much aware of the dangers of being too much online, and do realize there are plenty of people who don’t know what Twitter is, or care. Not everybody is the same, online or off.
One thing that I learned is that things may be getting out of control, but you better have control of your lead generation. My lead generation system revolves around online video. Which was way out of my box when I began, now it’s easy and fun. I create short videos that lead viewers to a free offer on my site. Traffic to the video mostly comes from posting my video free to a video marketing site called http://www.Adwido.com that works wonders for my targeted-traffic.