Remember those days when old school marketing could give you a heart attack? The press broke down…the magazine ran your ad on the wrong page…an unseen typo lurked hidden until the Yellow Pages ad ran? The downside was either delay, or worse-—long term marriage to the mistake that saw ink.
Today’s marketing arsenal includes social media, most typically Facebook and Twitter among the lot. So what happens when both go hinky at the same time?
It makes you nuts (which pretty much explains my level of frustration the past two hours). For an interminable amount of time today, Twitter was down, then up, then down…Facebook kept returning messages saying you weren’t connected to the internet (making one wonder how they sent that message to begin with)…Pieces of Flair, the virtual lapel pin add-on for Facebook, kept responding with error messages…and in the brief ”on” moments Twitter had, the “search” function pretty much decided to ignore everyone. Either that, or a few million users decided to delete their accounts simultaneously.
So what’s this all mean?
It means you need a bottle of Advil at the ready, 24/7. Plus Pepcid AC. And a quarters jar, if swearing like a sailor is on your short list of bad habits to break.
It also means that what makes you want to scream one hour will likely be fixed (we hope) in the next hour. Unlike typos and poor placement, the digital world allows adjustments and corrections on the fly with immediate results. And, unlike traditional media, you can come up with a promotion or concept at 9:00 a.m. and have it rolling along full steam by lunch time.
Does this angst make me second guess print and broadcast marketing efforts? Nope. Not for a moment. All bases are necessities, and all bases have an audience. If your customer base demographic includes both online junkies and those of us who still curl up with trade publications in our pajamas, well, all the better to stick with both.
Besides, short of someone kicking the lamp plug out of the wall, that print ad stays on and functional, regardless of what server issues exist in the world. Now…if only my reading glasses weren’t a necessary part of the process…..
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