Admittedly, disconnecting is a hard thing to do even during “Me Time” before and after work. I constantly catch myself checking email, surfing blogs and listening to podcasts. Usually all at once while indulging in my Netflix queue or watching another rerun of that same episode of Law & Order: SVU. It’s a miracle my eyes havent crossed and my brain can still function normally. It usually takes something drastic and urgent to pull me away from my digital connects but within a short period of time I’m back at it.

The past few days, the whole Mid-Atlantic has been getting pounded by Hurricane/Tropical Depression/Tropical Storm Sandy. With high wind, relentless rain and falling trees, many people were forcibly disconnected from their computers, tablets, smartphones and TVs when the power went out. This is usually enough to push most teens, “tweens” and some full-grown adults into full blown panic. Luckily this time around, my power stayed on which allowed me to track the storm in full 1080p, 60K vivid color detail while others stumbled around in the dark looking for a flashlight. And as nice as it was to go to relax watching HGTV with my family, I was jealous of those who were sitting in the silence.

Why am I jealous? Well because of all this technology for the past two days I’ve been “telecommuting” along with my co-workers, working from the comfort of home. But besides having a reason to be a slacker and watch the Price is Right all day long, I’m jealous of all the time those people without power are getting to spend with their own thoughts. It’s not that I don’t enjoy avoiding the traffic to the office on my morning commute or that I don’t enjoy the presence of my growing family but it’s all just more distractions to deal with. The crying baby, the urge to poke around in the fridge, the feeling to need to watch the TV glowing over my shoulder and family and friends texting and calling to see how we are. Even thought I raise the volume on my headphones, silenced my cellphone and closed all the other windows on the computer, I can still hear the chime of all the emails I receive, the phone vibrating on the shelf behind me and the TV commercial jingles that are 20 dB louder than the volume of the show my wife is watching.

Paul Miller, One of the writers of The Verge, one my favorite technology news sites, has been living without the internet for a little over 6 months now proving that you can exist in today’s world without technology…but the real question is, without constant connectivity can you stay relevant? If you were to ask him, I would image that the answer would be a resounding yes. But it wasn’t all that easy to get started. In his most recent post, Offline: missing out, Paul Miller outlines some of the nagging, compulsive, repetitive things we do each hour of each day to ensure we’re not “missing out” on literally everything going on around us and how he was able to overcome them. Having abandoned the internet, he has felt more in control of his time. He writes about how much easier it is to focus on one task at a time, kind of like a mental deprivation chamber, eliminating the distractions and dead-end stray paths we commonly get distracted with.

Though I don’t see how I could personally do all that he has living without the internet but it’s certainly reassuring that commerce, friendship and life can exist with, or without, the internet. I would certainly encourage all of you to venture into the unknown and unplug for an extended period of time. Start small and see if  you can go 6, 7, 8 or even 12 hours without using the internet. Don’t check twitter, don’t check your Facebook, email, or text messages, watch broadcast TV and step away from the computer. It’s scary at frist but once you get over that initial fear of “missing out” you’ll see how much more you can get done and how much more you can do and how clear your thoughts can become.

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If that’s the case then I encourage all of you to check out Unpolitic.me. This handy Chrome extension will block out any political garbage from your Facebook and Twitter news feed and replace it with pictures of adorable cats from Instagram. Cats not your thing? Surprisingly the extension allows you to customize your Oba-mney blocking images with whatever feeds you desire. Just know that at least for the next two weeks Facebook and Twitter will be a little more cute, cuddly and significantly less obnoxious.

via TheNextWeb

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We all have our favorites and as Pete explains in his whitepaper, The Truth About Branding, a brand can become many things to many different people. But how do we learn about brands in the first place. Well, that is just about as complicated of an answer as it is to define the universe. However, one of the many way’s we can learn about brands is through search. In today’s world we often value brands and their sites with what shows up at the top of a Google search result page.

Over the years Google’s algorithm has gone through many changes. Some of the updates have severely punished new sites and young brand websites while others have put an emphasis on brand SEO and local search.

SEO is more important than ever before and brands are forced to work hard to get noticed and retain customers. Today, brands have multiple opportunities to appear on a search results page from organic results to paid listings (Adwords), product search, local search, Google Instant and  that doesn’t  include any social media links that might show up.

Click to Enlarge

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I don’t think this is a big surprise that advertising in general often misses it’s intended target and never really gets 80-100% visibility. Things are going mobile, especially for Facebook and other social networks. The problem with that is Facebook (and others) hasn’t figured out how to migrate ads and all of the functionality of the website to a mobile experience, yet. One of the other things I’ve been reading about is that a fair amount of users make profiles but never return to use the site. Some of that population ends up using Facebook as a login service or only use the site once an access to their mobile services.

I believe some of that some of the speculation is true but it’s not as big of a deal as some of the articles, including this one, make it out to be. It’s an area that’s never been explored before and Facebook’s initial growth over the past 5-6 years has been our only benchmark. We are finally seeing Facebook’s traffic waning a bit as the site and the experience becomes more ubiquitous and integrated with other services. Traffic comes and goes in cycles and up until this point there’s been a lot of upward movement and I think we are starting to see things come down and start to level off, finally.

Truth is, Facebook is still the largest social network, available in the most countries and has the most active user base, desktop & mobile. One downside is that Facebook faces is that its rivals [LinkedIn, Twitter, & Google+ (which really isn't a social network)] have had time to figure out their game plan and use some of Facebook’s bad press to attract some users to sign up and either use their services exclusively or in addition to Facebook, both lowering Facebook’s market share.

When Facebook finds a way to monetize their mobile experience, we will see another major shift in the dynamic of the network as more people leave or switch back to desktop/tablet usage as a way to avoid ads or at least minimize the effect of ads on their experience.

My last article, Can Facebook Ads Make You Rich? Yes. Well…No. Maybe?, touches on why Facebook ads can be a little hit or miss, especially if you don’t know what you are doing. I think if companies like Ford, GE, & Coke are finding value on the platform through Ads and Pages then I have to believe that the platform has potential. Even if you aren’t increasing sales, you are increasing your brands share of voice (SOV) and brand equity, which some would argue is just as important. But whatever you do, make sure that you are there for a reason and develop a strategy (and goals) BEFORE you start.

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Privacy’s always been a big concern on the Internet. Ever since the invention of “cookies” back in 1994 there’s been an ongoing (and sometimes contentious) debate over who gets to collect personal data about users, how that data is collected, and how it’s used.

On one side are the marketers, retailers, advertisers, and publishers trying to gather as much data as possible in order to target advertising more efficiently, sell more products, and deliver content tailored to users’ needs and wants. On the other side are privacy advocates, “hacktivist” groups like the now-infamous Anonymous, and consumer organizations who contend that collecting data about online behavior is an invasion of users’ right to privacy. But while the privacy advocates have won a few skirmishes in the war over the decades, the trend vectors have always pointed towards collecting more and more information.

Recently the debate flared up again over Google’s moves to capture and aggregate data from across their many properties (including Google+ and their ubiquitous search engine) in order to form incredibly detailed profiles of users and their online behavior…

To read more of Sean’s The Dirty Secret Behind User Data Collection & Tracking please visit March’s idfive Whitepapers.

And while you’re at it, if you would like to receive more insightful articles written by the lovely team of idfive, please sign up to be a part of our mailing list.

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Our reliance on Google, Yahoo, Bing & Aol to serve up web pages has become a debilitating disease from most people using the web today. If something doesn’t exist on the first two or three pages in our minds it probably doesn’t exist and has developed an entire industry of “experts” to help companies find there way to the top. Although there are exceptions, we often choose to explore only the first few choices provided to us. And one of Google’s latest inventions, Google Instant, is amplifying the problem.

So, what’s the problem with instant search results and algorithms that pull content based on words and phrases in web pages? Well, nothing really.

There’s another part of the equation that isn’t immediately noticed when you are searching the web or even Facebook that is plaguing the internet — personalized search results.

Aside from the links we click on, algorithms, “pandas” and spiders are the ones who help decide what our choices are on the web. Normally this is a good thing, we can find more information related to our search query that is relative to other topics, interests and sites we’ve visited in the past and Facebook’s instant personalizations of web sites can also help you identify articles your friends have read and enjoyed. However, as Eli Pariser will explain in the video below, this method of personalization can cut us off from the rest of the connected world by filtering out what it thinks we “don’t” need to see. It can exclude anything from breaking news and events happening locally or around the world.

What do you think — Does instant personalization of the web lead to better productivity or a limited view of the world? Is there a happy medium? Where should search engines draw the line?

Video originally found on Lifehacker – The Problem with Your Google Search Result Feedback Loop (and What You Can Do About It).

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Facebook has taken many steps to ensure the “quality” of each ad they show on their site is consistent and appropriate to all audiences. Some of their requirements will come as no surprise but others will make you stop and ask “What’s the big deal?” If you’ve ever stumbled along the Common Advert Mistakes page then you probably already know how much of a pain it can be to get passed the approval process while building your campaign’s structure but aren’t quite ready to finalize the ad copy or images. However it is a great form of quality control that standardizes and limits what advertisers can do and virtually levels the playing field for all of us.

Facebook has also developed strict rules a that only apply to dating services and which ones can or can’t advertise on Facebook. They’ve also set a strict set of guidelines on how they can a display their ads. Their Help Center is full of useful tools and resources, as well as, a complete list of reasons why your ads could be disapproved. I would suggest giving all this a good look before jumping head first into a Facebook Adverts campaign. It will save you a lot of time and effort later down the road when you can’t figure out why you haven’t cracked the “Facebook code”.

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And so, I always hoped for a way to make calls from my computer at no cost. Between Google Talk and Google Call, you’ve got the bulk of what makes Skype appealing – except Google is free (for now).

In one day, Google 1 million calls went through Google Talk. Vonage, Skype, make way for the gorilla.

Google, if you are listening, connect Google Talk to Google Voice for free and I will stop writing about how you are the devil. I promise. Also, as a friendly FYI, you should start coming up with better names for these products… you’ve got Google Voice, Google Talk and Google Call. It’s confusing.

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Social networking is not going away – Social networks are fast becoming our main resource for purchasing and activity decisions. We are much more likely to trust someone we know than someone we do not, and especially more likely to trust someone we know than the company trying to sell us something.

Social networking is not new – Humans have evolved to create social bonds and work together as a group.

People don’t have one group of friends – We each have important but separate social groups in real life. Why is it then that all of our contacts are blobbed together in one group on our various online networks? Not just on Facebook, but in IM, Twitter, etc.

Our social capacity is and always has been about 150 people – Nomad groups would split in to two separate groups once the numbered over 150. Roman soldiers were split into groups of 150 so everyone would know each other. We can of course know more than 150 people, but staying in touch with more than 150 people’s lives is difficult or impossible.

We each have weak and strong ties - Out of all the people we know, on average only 2-6 of them will be ‘strong ties.’ These are our support structure. They are who’s opinion’s we trust the most. The other 145 people in our network are ‘weak ties.’ Social networking interactions need to be designed with strong ties in mind.

Mapping influence is a tricky thing - There’s a lot of research being conducted on how influence happens. We’re heavily influenced by the people physically present around us. We’re also heavily influenced by our strong ties. Think about the last time you research a product or service? Who did you ask for advice? Our decisions are more and more frequently being made by our social group.

People care deeply about how they appear to others - Social networking is an extension of identity and to that end, people put in a ton of effort in shaping how they appear to their social circle. Our identities are multi-faceted, which is why it’s important that as social networks evolve, they respect the desire and need to control how we appear to different groups of people.

People care deeply about privacy – Only 8% of Facebook users have their profile open to the public. 64% have adjusted it to “Only Friends.” 71% change their privacy settings in some way. It’s up to social networks to make these settings and the implications of them even more legible to their user base.

Privacy enhances trust – And when you trust a company, you’re much more likely to do business with them.

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