Webupon

Look at the information that we as a people are willing to put out there about ourselves. Didn’t I hear someone once say something about being careful that a hacker doesn’t get a hold of your credit card information or social security number? Wasn’t there a time that paper shredders were flying off the shelves of Wal-Mart to stock those home offices for the purpose of keeping the dumpster divers from stealing our identity or the identity of our customers?

It seems everywhere I read there is a new blog popping up and more people rush in to post not only there personal information but the personal affairs of all of their friends and family members including pictures and locations.

Something truly amazing is taking place in the world today. How many times have we said “this really is a small world isn’t it”? It is getting smaller all the time as the social networking mediums continue to evolve.

It wasn’t that long ago when consumers were pretty much bent by the will of the corporations. Now what is happening? Not only has the financial markets gone haywire but now consumers are in a position to kick them when their down. Not many people would go into a place and yell at the top of their lungs about how unhappy they were with a service. Most of us would have been too shy to make such a scene. Now we can go online and voice our opinions in very candid ways and within hours the whole world knows our feelings. We no longer can be passed over. It is an empowering time we live in to be able to voice our say so and have hundreds or thousands of people we have never met stand shoulder to shoulder with us in agreeance. We may even end up with a spot on a talk show further expressing our feelings and receiving more validation for our comments.

This is a real power that we have tapped into and just as power can be useful in many forms; it can be useful in many forums online. We also know that power can be used for good or it can be alarmingly destructive if not regulated.

I was sitting in deep thought recently and reviewing all of the changes that have taken place in advertising over the years. My household is probably different than many households in that we did what I couldn’t have conceived as a kid; we took out the cable and satellite TV several years ago. I just didn’t like what I saw coming into my house through that medium. So much of my time I felt was wasted by enduring all of the advertising that was interrupting the show I was watching. But then someone decided to incorporate branding into the show itself, and point out what they were doing, to the point that I just lost interest as I was distracted from what was originally a great storyline. About the time I shut off the TV, DVR’s were coming out. I remember back when we realized that we could record our favorite show onto tape with a VCR how empowering it felt to be able to come home and fast forward through all of the commercials. Nowadays DVR’s handle this job effortlessly and they are so much smarter and user friendly than that VCR that sat there flashing the time constantly distracting us from the movie because all we could pay attention to was the thoughts running in the back of our minds. Who turned off the power? I had just figured out how to program that darn thing to get it to stop blinking and now look at it. When does Tommy get home from school? Kids always know how to get these things figured out and they tend to enjoy programming things more than the grownups anyway.

So now we start skipping through the commercials and now we have a whole lot of companies who are spending a whole lot of money to sell us things that we don’t even know about anymore because we cut it out and just watch the show that we wanted to see in the first place.

Then the Internet starts growing and computers and networks get faster and faster and now all anyone wants to do is “play on the net”. Now this becomes the new place to advertise. In fact it didn’t cost anything to start a business and with all the tax breaks of owning our own home-based-business and realizing that we could email the whole world without putting one single stamp on any of those advertising campaigns we were sending out we just about drove each other crazy! Oh and the phone directory disks that we could run reverse searches with and find out everyone’s phone number and match their numbers with their emails. Now we had a rather inexpensive ad campaign and we were really able to get our names out there. Oh did we ever get our names out there alright! And when we got the automated calling services set up on our home computers to call those lists and send out mass emails while at the same time being able to be the only one’s sitting down at the dinner table eating without our phone ringing because our phone line was tied up calling every computer in the world to tell them about our new home-based-business. Weren’t those the good old days?

Now companies are having quiet a time trying to sell us on an ad in any format. Now we have a generation who has grown up with a cell phone stuck to their hands and they can type faster on them than I can on a keyboard. My kids are too busy playing video games and texting their friends to find time to watch an advertisement. I commented on all of the ads I see on the major blog sites to my kids and my kids don’t even notice them when I make comments about how I disapprove of all of the sexual media that pops up on everything. I thought sex sold! Isn’t that how they would get our attention when all else failed? With all of the stuff out there we have even become desensitized to that now.

Businesses have been struggling and we are seeing large corporations close their doors after many successful years. How do they reach us? How are they supposed to get our attention? How are we supposed to know about the new product lines so we know where to spend our money?

Well we do it the same way we always have, by word of mouth. Only nowadays we can speak a whole lot louder than we used to be able to and we get the word out much more efficiently all the time by what has come to be known as social media marketing.

I think this is an awesome time we live in with such incredible means to communicate with one another. The world we live in is like a small town with party lines from the good old days. People shared a phone line and had to pay extra for their own if available back then. Now we pay extra to be able to text rather than call each other.

Something I hope to encourage is the small town atmosphere. People watched after one another. They knew each others business but they didn’t abuse each other because of it.  Oh sure people felt so and so was too nosey but over all they all knew that they cared.

There are some major changes happening in our world both online and in the real world (IRL). Let’s find ways to adopt that small town atmosphere as we network with the world. It is definitely society who has a tremendous power over the corporations and the government. I would like to encourage each of us to take a second thought before raising our voice over a matter just because we can. Too much power that is unregulated will destroy itself and everything around it but with the right means to distribute the energy it can conquer the WORLD-wide-web. Spamming was free but it interrupted a lot of families at dinnertime to the point that a law was written to stop spammers. I hope we all will use our technology respectively…there are enough laws already.