Quite a few different posts recently have brought up the subject of collaboration online, time management or interruption, and community building. In fact, it’s been a quasi theme of a couple of my recent posts as well.
There are many different schools of thought on the best approach to these very subjects online, which is to be expected as the Internet as a daily part of our lives is a new thing and we humans are notoriously late adopters. So how does our desire for order and a slower pace of living as a species mesh with the influx of new technology which make it easier (supposedly) to interact and connect with people, and the inherent expectations as to immediate responses and engagement? It’s a tough one for me and I am a huge fan of the Internet, Web 2.0, and community building. It can be hard to keep up sometimes with the combination of email, IM, cell, blogs, RSS, etc… let alone get anything truly accomplished while trying to do so.
From 37Signals:
The way I see it, interruption is being mistaken for collaboration. The are drastically different things. Interruption is productivity's biggest enemy. It sounds counterintuitive to many, but we should be working harder on staying apart and less on getting in touch too much. A healthy dose of physical and virtual distance is a good thing. If we want to be highly productive we need more alone time.
Which brings me to a question – how far will we be able to push the frontiers before we encounter the ocean (to use a bad metaphor)? How much interruption will we, as consumers, be able to stand before the inevitable push back begins? Pop-ups and telemarketing used to be okay. Not anymore. Pop-unders and interstitial are going the way of the dinosaur. Music on your site… only if I turn it on. Email marketing? Hello spam and filters. It’s starting to look as if managing and responding to comments on your own blog is getting to be too much of a drain for some. How many people subscribe to RSS feeds and never check them? How many have time to visit numerous social networking sites per day? Will fatigue set in, and if so, what form will it take? Or will someone invent the next great piece of software and solve all our problems as we continue to move forward?
Not questions to which I have answers, but ones I hope to keep a look out for as we continue to grow into the Internet age.
We marketers continuously seek new and innovative ways to get the message into the right peoples hands, but we also need to constantly look forward and consider the larger societal implications inherent in ever intrusive media. Which is why, I believe, the smart marketers will need to be customer evangelists first and engage and solicit feedback from the people we are hoping to reach. They’re the only ones who can let us know if we’re starting to get too in their face with our own brand evangelism.