Last week Bill Lee wrote a controversial article in which he claimed that “marketing was dead” (yet another clever use of a traffic-grabbing title.). It was later (correctly, IMHO) pointed out that what Lee probably should have said was that “advertising was dead”. Regardless of where you come down on this debate, it’s nice to see a lively discussion around the disruption that social channels have wrought; despite the hyperbole, it’s still a significant pain point for organizations everywhere, and few have it figured out.

However, at the moment, the conversation seems to be largely unsophisticated – more of a contradiction than a true debate of ideas (I’m reminded of the Monty Python “Argument” skit – where the argument becomes about what, exactly, constitutes an argument). So I’d like to throw another perspective into the mix. Marketing isn’t dead – the big disruption is simply that it’s now everywhere, and everything, that a company does.

From user manuals to the now largely undisputed notion that customer care (or, for that matter, any customer interaction) is an important part of the brand experience, everything you do is marketing. Even if you’re not a marketer. Social and digital channels have accentuated this shift, in no small part because of the firehose of content that they demand from brands and enable users to create; figuratively spraying brand experiences (good and bad) all over the web. To put an even finer point on it, the metadata around your content is now also part of the marketing experience, and something that is not often considered. I’ll provide you with a few examples:

The author of this excellent post on why words matter (“I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar“) probably didn’t consider how their headline would translate into an URL, which would explain why, from a metadata perspective (ie: if all you ever saw was the link, shared, unshortened, via email or elsewhere) you’d think the article was on a different topic altogether, a topic not likely to be covered by the Harvard Business Review.

You need to consider everything that's findable on the web, even your comment signature.

This is a personal example. It occurred to me several years ago that every time I (hopefully) leave a reasonably intelligent comment on a blog post, it would be a pretty good idea to help establish my credibility to make that comment based on where I work and what I do for a living. So I started including a little more metadata, and in the process ended up providing some incremental exposure and marketing for my company.

Missed opportunity: this image out of context is meaningless

Of course, these days it’s a foolish writer that doesn’t mention Pinterest at least once in every post! All jokes aside, Pinterest is a great way to check your metadata, and, let’s face it – as the fastest growing website ever, it’s also something you need to consider. In this example, MOMA misses an amazing opportunity to promote their upcoming Ellesworth Kelly exhibit. By failing to provide the “what, when and where” in their image metadata, they’ve lost the chance to ensure that no matter where this file is shared (by someone interested in Ellesworth Kelly!), important details will provide context and a marketing opportunity for the upcoming show.

Bulgari has it right - give me the details!

Bulgari gets it – their product images will travel across the web with full details, though they have neglected to include their brand name (viewing the image as a discrete file, out of context and as an independent object, should inform how you think about its ability to act as a marketing vehicle. It could end up anywhere).

Flash websites, ugh.

And finally – the dreaded Flash website, which doesn’t let me share much of anything, on Pinterest or elsewhere (never mind mobile).

In researching this post, I also found something a little surprising: when we think about marketing in this context, that it’s essentially everywhere, and every image, file, graphic, video, whatever your organization produces, needs to be looked at through that lens, guess where best practices in metadata popped up? On sites that are fully accessible to the visually and hearing impaired. The descriptive text, while generally missing brand names and a marketing perspective, was far superior to the limited data surrounding websites that did not comply with accessibility standards. Interesting convergence.

So – is the fact that marketing is everywhere a good thing, or a bad thing? Are you thinking about it this way? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Cam Finlayson is the Director and Group Head, Client Strategy & Innovation at Social Media Group. Follow @CamFinlayson

I was recently asked for my thoughts on Facebook ‘unfriending’ and what effects on Facebook users – a topic that I can honestly say has never crossed my mind. After saving face with a relatively generic answer to the question, I decided to do a little online digging.

Similar to most people on Facebook, I have a core group of people who are actually friends, then family members, some coworkers and a network of acquaintances. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never been unfriended. However, I’m not entirely sure I’d even notice with majority of the people in my network. Reasoning being that if I were observant enough to recognize that someone disappeared from my news feed, my initial thought would be that the person simply wasn’t using Facebook.

Anyway, the original question got me thinking: do people actually monitor their friends to a point where they could catch someone in the act of defriending them? And if so, how? What have I been missing? After a little bit of research, here’s what I uncovered:

The psychology of social ‘unfriending’

Typically there are two types of unfriending: (i.) You’re experiencing too much activity in your news feed and you decide to cut down on the noise by removing people that aren’t close to you; and (ii.) you have a real-life issue with someone and you decide to maliciously defriend them with the hope that the act will send a message. Some research actually suggests that a vast number of Facebook breakups happen as the result of a real-life issue. But does it really have a psychological impact?

Read Write Web recently published an article highlighting the factors that increase the pain of being unfriended. Their article summarized a scientific study on human behaviour and the consequences of someone terminating a social friendship. This study suggests that the more time someone spends on Facebook, the closer it is to the emotional impact of a real-life breakup. Makes sense, I guess.

Regardless of whether the act of unfriending is innocent or malicious, the question remains: how do people actually monitor all of this?

Unfriending 101: The How-to Guide

Unfriending someone on Facebook is incredibly straightforward. However, if you’re incapable of figuring out the process, Facebook has a How-to page dedicated to the act of unfriending.

Identifying when you’ve been unfriended, however, is a much more difficult thing to navigate.  Facebook does not currently offer a way to receive notifications when you’ve been unfriended. Good news though, this hasn’t stopped people from creating their own ways.

First off, there’s the tried and true manual method: you notice someone isn’t active on your news feed and you visit their page – to your surprise you see ‘ad as a friend’. Bad news, you’ve been unfriended.

For those that are tech savy, there’s a way to add a script to your Facebook account to allow for instant updates. And for those that aren’t tech savy, but really require real-time notifications, Mashable has a pretty extensive article with a step-by-step tutorial here.

And finally for those paranoid people on the go, there’s, of course, a dedicated app for the price of $1.99.

After all of this research, I can’t help but feel that I got a glimpse of the dirty underbelly of social media – a place where childish insecurities, popularity contests and stalkers hangout. That said, to each their own. At the end of the day, they’ll always have each other.

Here’s what we’ve got on tap for the fall – hope to see you out there!

4th Annual Employee Communications, PR and Social Media Summit
Oct 3-5, 2012, Microsoft Headquarters, Redmond, WA
Topic: “The Five-Step Social Media Plan: a practical step-by-step guide to developing a social media strategy within your organization”
Register here.

Toronto Board of Trade, SMB Exchange Conference
October 9th, 2012, Toronto, Ontario
Topic: “Business Development and Marketing ROI”

Breakthrough Strategies for Corporate Communicators Conference
Nov 28-30, 2012 at SAS World Headquarters, Cary, NC
Topic: “The Art and Science of Content Marketing”
Register here.

Disney Social Media Conference
February 6-8, Orlando, FLA
Topic: “Sleep Number and Social Media ROI: a case study by the numbers”
(Registration not yet open)