I work in advertising and spend a great deal of my day working on campaign strategies for clients.
I listen to Pandora all day and get the Living Social advertisement shouted at me just about every 17 minutes.
I go home, turn on the tube to catch the NCAA tournament and get blasted with 30 and 60 second spots.
I check my phone and I have 2 new Facebook invites to events I have absolutely zero interest in, furthermore, they were sent to me by "friends" that I should have never "friended" anyway because all they do is SPAM me with crap.
And finally, I check my GMAIL to see that I have a new email from Groupon and about a half-dozen other retailers that I've purchased from recently.
I'm getting annoyed with reading all this junk and so is everybody else.
Yeah, I know, I signed up for these things at some point.
I realize that.
But when I did the volume and frequency of the communication was nowhere near where it is today.
Shit, back in the day I was excited when I got a Twitter DM, now I dread them because it's usually someone asking me to RT something.
So I've started retreating and have been really cutting back on communications, especially the digital and social media forms.
For an early adopter like me, the thrill is in the discovery.
I like being a part of a beta.
I was one the first of my circle to explore Quora, Qwiki and Hashable.
Not even going to get into how long I've been using the big 4.
But once the discovery and beta are over and mass adoption peaks - I'm pretty much over it.
For me, when the noise gets to loud I get going.
What I've learned is I prefer utility over cool.
Function over form and quality over quantity.
With hundreds of thousands of applications available in the iTunes store, my phone has about 12 installed.
All of them are utilities.
I use apps that help me get stuff done.
Could care less about Angry Birds.
Personally, I think this is the struggle with most marketing strategies I see.
They are all based on creating buzz, trends or going viral (eesh I hate phrase).
Very few aim to create a utility that will enrich our interactions with each other.
Social Media marketers preach that we should measure all kinds of Key Performance Indicators to validate that what we are doing as advertisers makes sense.
Some of the KPIs are based on sentiment, engagement and now...
Klout.
But these are all criteria that measure how much noise you've created.
Last time I checked, I had enough noise in my life.
How about you?