I’m not worried about bad news regarding crime or natural disasters. I’m not afraid of news about the Dow Jones or the shitty economy. News about poverty, war and suffering feel about normal these days so I’ve given them a permanent home in my brain. It’s a good thing I did because every time someone gets stabbed or shot, I read thousands of tweets about it. Every time a tornado destroys a decades old small town in minutes erasing countless lives, I read hundreds of blog posts about it in less than an hour. Every time the investors gnash their teeth because they didn’t heed the analysts that were right about their future, my RSS reader explodes the news all over the face of my iPad from hundreds of different sources around the web.

News used to be just news. It used to be simple, like a cup of coffee in the 1950′s. While I’m not afraid of the news itself, I am however starting to feel the burn of excessive noise levels whenever anything happens anywhere in the world. Sometimes I wonder if the reason we weren’t born into a technological world in the beginning of man’s existence is because we weren’t physiologically, mentally or emotionally designed to handle the result of our own innovations, destined to eventually fill our lives as they do today.

I struggle to feel present sometimes because my head is full of constant headlines from around the world, spanning hundreds of topics every hour. Everything is a headline now. We even invented a tool for communicating that uses nothing BUT headlines (Twitter). Lately when I connect to the internet I feel like the guy who eats food until he pukes and then keeps eating and puking, eating and puking, over and over. Every time I turn on my MacBook, my iPad, my iPhone, the television, my Xbox, news pours in like a dam bursting.

The problem isn’t that there is too much news. The problem is that there are too many people repeating the news ad infinitum. The innocent and innate desire of the connected masses to create, their intent to inform and share, has constructed the largest communication echo chamber we have ever witnessed as a species in an environment known as the Internet. The new and improved value of “breaking news” has concocted a fierce global competition on a personal and individual level, a race to be the “first to share.” Hopefully trying to keep up to stay “current” isn’t going to cause a social meltdown at some point.

Nowadays, when I hear about a “developing story,” instead of waiting on baited breath, I anxiously wince at the thought of opening a Twitter client, checking news via RSS feed or watching the cascading content waterfall of strong opinions that will make up the bulk of my Facebook news feed that day.

Social media makes news consumption feel like the “World News” version of that scene in Office Space when character Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Singleton) is asked 8 times by 8 different people, “Did you get the memo Peter? The one about the TPS reports?” It’s like walking into the television section at BestBuy and then turning on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC across all 60+ TV’s displayed on the retail floor at full volume, all while you stand in the middle of it and just stare.

I worry a lot about the humans and wonder from time to time if we are capable of healthily processing all this input.

I’m not yet convinced.

Onward.

Because profitability for any business comes from human beings making the decision to invest in you or your company, I believe that the old school is now officially backwards and can almost be hurtful to your cause. In the last year or so, the concept unearthed, thanks in large part by the social aspect of the web, is that companies need to spend more time using their market research and user group studies to construct a strategy around presenting their offering as an integral part of someone’s life, rather than as a “great product or service at a great price.”  The “Hey look at me! Look at me!” syndrome that so many companies and business people fall into when they don’t know what else to do with their time and budgets and feel like nothing else was working, is no bueno.

Like It Or Not, Warm Fuzzies = Revenue

I’m not saying the quality of the products or services aren’t a priority. Hell, they have to be if they’re are to successfully become a part of someone’s life, solidifying their purchase decision to make that initial investment in their relationship with you, ensure customer loyalty and retention, and increase the frequency of word of mouth (now more valuable than ever). I’m just saying that assuming quality is already there, the next step is to make sure you are a part of your customer, not just someone they handed over money to for products or services.

If you want to know what I’m talking about, just watch Apple. Love them or hate them, Apple knows how to create the notion that their technology products are seamlessly already part of who you are as a person. The concept of the iPad, and the iPad itself, is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter if you are selling car insurance, lamp shades, financial advice or skateboards, make sure that the presentation layer of your marketing plan does the following:

• Think about a meaningful situation or experience that is most common among your market segment.
• Assess which vehicle (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs) they use most to consume information about your product/service type.
• Storyboard a campaign that revolves around said meaningful situation/experience.
• Keep your product (and even sometimes your brand in certain cases) as a background focus of your campaign, the whole time.

The above is how I would handle marketing/campaign methodology in this day and age. Catering to people’s emotions is nothing new in Marketing. Catering to segmented human emotion in a way where they can also interact with you and quickly, followed by easily doing business with you immediately, is new, thanks to the technology and tools. Pull your weight in the relationship with your customer and they’ll stick it out with you, even when your industry or company hit some rough spots.

Onward.

Ok I’ll shut up about it already.