bentangle

It seems that I can’t escape them.  I’ve been through my honeymoon phase with Facebook so I’m past the crest of full immersion and on to the phase where I’ve blocked most of the game and app requests so that my news stream looks less like some sort of ticker feed from a bizarre slot machine and more like a list of random status updates and photo posts (which I’ve gotten somewhat out of the habit of reading often anyway).  And yet this morning I found that some have taken to the closed door / open window philosophy to an odd new level.

I was on my way to work, had refueled my wheels and decided that I needed some fuel myself.  So I pulled into 7-Eleven to pick up some form of caffeine-based liquid enrichment.  As I do, in the same spot they normally place their product-promoted Slurpee poster of the moment, I saw something surprising.  It seems that the current promotional cup series for this product features various Facebook games – specifically depicted were Farmville, Yo-ville, and Mafia Wars.

As an aware consumer and one who works and has worked in various levels of marketing-adjacent industries, I like to think that I get on a core level how product placement advertising works and how important demographic targeting can be to marketing success.  It would not have occurred to me to align the users of such niche games as these in an application of fairly broad but still limited reach to the consumers of such products (though in thinking more about it, perhaps it does make a sort of sense).  But typically such cross-product promotion is intended to (a) drive the consumer to buy the immediate product (e.g., get a Slurpee because it has a cool cup) and also (b) drive the consumer to buy into the brand featured (e.g., if they were Iron Man cups, go out and see Iron Man and/or buy other Iron Man merchandise).  In this case, the featured brand is a series of free games that themselves are advertiser-subsidized.  I guess driving customers to consume such products still results in increased revenue for the producer (after all, Google fits a similar paradigm and they advertise), but it seems like a step in a new and unusual direction.

I’m curious where this will proceed.  Should I expect to next see a set of iPhone app-themed coffee mugs (could you imagine the potential of an iFart travel mug)?  Perhaps this is the dawn of a new era of marketing.  Who knows.  The only thing I can know for sure is that even with the best of efforts, Farmville is inescapable.

It is often said that this word is misused (which is often correct). We will use ‘ironic’ in speech all the time in reference to incidences of coincidence or oddity or as an incorrect substitute for sarcastic. I say we because I’m certainly guilty of it myself. I try to be conscious of it and avoid it when i can, but in speech it can pass as such with most simply due to the ubiquity of its misuse.

Merriam Webster lists the following as one of the definitions of irony: “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result”. In other words, if you take action specifically to foster a certain result and the opposite result occurs, you have just been a victim of irony. This was a fairly common theme in much of Shakespearian tragedy and is often referred to as tragic irony.

Today I have come to realize that I have made myself a victim of tragic irony. You see, I had long been reluctant to conform to the masses by being drawn into social networking. I initially set up this blog because, well, I had the domain and figured it could serve as a digital journal. I hope that some enjoy reading it, but traffic has never really been a strong goal. But recently I’ve decided to try to make more efforts to grow an audience.

As some of you may know, I am now a Facebook member and in an effort to drive traffic to my blog, I’ve connected my blog feed into it. And oddly, as I’ve been getting more feedback on my writing there, I’ve watched my analytics plummet. As it turns out, the feed stream does not get tracked as a hit on my site, and having full access to the posts in Facebook, no one is coming to my site to read them.

So the very efforts I’ve enacted in order to increase traffic to my site, has resulting in a huge drop in said traffic. While I’m glad that my writing is being well received, I am already making steps alter things. From now on, I will post links to these posts manually on Facebook – thus only including a blurb and forcing people to read the full content here. I hope you forgive any inconvenience this may cause – such a move feels like I’m trying to assert control over my work as if it were some sort of intellectual property (well, I guess it kind of is, but it isn’t like I’m making money off of it regardless – I just like positive graphs). If this move seems to drive even more of you away from my writing, that would indeed be yet another twist of irony (I think).

It seems that I’m branching out.  I’ve done something that I didn’t think that I’d ever do – I signed up on Facebook.  I avoided it for a long time, but now I’m in and I can’t leave it alone.

The thing is, I’m not technophobic.  Internet technology is my life and my work.  I’ve been doing some form of social networking long before it had a name.  In college, well before the majority of the world knew what a website was (mostly because very few people had seen one yet), I had found myself absorbed into a realm of online chat rooms and bbs sites and usenet groups – so much so that I nearly failed my second semester.  Which is precisely one of the reasons that I have forced myself to be cautious of my involvement in such services since.

I use email and IM, but mostly only as needed and primarily reactively (many of my friends can attest to the fact that I’m not very good at keeping in touch).  I’ve generally reserved my use of the internet as an information tool and avoided active engagement.  Even this blog is something I do fairly casually and without any strong compunction to vigilance (readership is not a strong goal here – though I do thank those of you who choose to read).

So as I said, I took that plunge.  It was initially not intended for dedicated use (I actually created my account to be able to test something for work).  But I’m not it now and I’m connecting with lots of people that I haven’t talked to or seen in years (in some cases, decades).  I try to limit the time I spend there (it can be addictive), but I’m there and I’m embracing it.  I figure it will be an interesting way to learn some things about some of the people with whom I’ve crossed paths (and maybe they will learn a few things about me as well).  Maybe my life will be profoundly effected by people I previously barely knew.  Who knows.  The least I can do is branch out there and see what happens.

I will admit that I’m not big on online social networking.  Maybe I’m too old or it just doesn’t seem important enough, but I don’t have a page on FaceBook or MySpace (actually I do have one on MySpace, but only for work-related testing – I have no friends there, I even deleted Tom).  I don’t have any interest in Twitter, and most of the web content I read is for news/information.  I signed up a few years back on Classmates, but only to try and find some old friends from high school – I don’t keep my information current.  To all of this, there is one exception – LinkedIn. (continue reading…)