That's my business partner and wife, Giselle. She does all the really great stuff that I can't (I do the rest of it) and so I watch with interest through, albeit foggy lenses, into her world as she casts her opinion on the status quo of our industry. She's quite incredible really.
Seven years back she was telling a famous pizza parlor in Durban that their potato pizza needed a Facebook page and that "early morning coffee" would be big for them if they got in early. She marveled at the fact that the advent of social media meant that now (being then) everybody had a voice and she knew that the novelty of it would keep us all locked in for a while. But then (being now) something shifted inside of her. At dinnertime, in between bites of rib eye she'd talked about "Our privacy being important", and while we stood in front of the mirror brushing our teeth before bed she'd told me with a foamy mouth that she wasn't comfortable with the amount of info about our family 'out there'.
I try as often as manly possible to listen to my wife. She's got this girl-radar that works in a whole other way to mine. It picks up things that fly at lower levels, under my radar so to speak. She seems to pick up on the pulse of the current market while my ability has always nestled in peering into the future.
I don't believe I have to tell you that your online privacy is the subject of much global scrutiny at present.
On broader terms, I think the female of the species is more deadly than the male - and not from a negative perspective. They've just got something us males don't and I'm not talking about a makeup budget. They've got emotional intuition or something that sounds like that but actually means what I'm trying to explain in this sentence.
A series of unlooked-for girl-themed events occurring over the previous year have been resoundingly successful in changing how I work with my spouse in our content factory and sisters in the field. I've come away from each with a lesson and in our business I've shifted from, "I've got all the answers baby," to "What do you think about this because I'm not sure I'm seeing all the angles here?"
There was the content conference I went to at the beginning of this year where I noticed what seemed to be a three to one majority in favour of the sisters. They're natural storytellers. The market is looking for authentic connections. Here I learnt that "We must create stories for human beings, not for brands."
Then there's the international female-facing spiritual vogue content project we're working on that has seen me having to swap my usual role of 'key-head-strategist-activator-fellow-with-all-the-ideas-who-speaks-a-lot-and-basically-drives-all-before-him' with a silent observer role that involves me supporting the process of building a team of ladies headed up by my wife.
Why? Because as much as I think I know how to touch the female spirit through media, the truth is, it needed an all girl team to really make it perfect. All I was doing was clouding it with my man brain. "You need a woman to lead, I'm stepping aside baby. You were right." Her response and the lesson here was "Thank you, now will you please support us by standing over there. Be quiet. Be gentle. Be strong."
And then there's that random internet adventure of discovery in which I discovered (that's what happens on adventures of discovery) the teachings of Marissa Meyer, CEO of Yahoo who I've mentioned previously. She's a girl. She's cool. The former Google-Top-Tenner recently acquired Tumblr for the group.
The blogging super power will fill some gaps in the once powerful webco's offering. When you listen to her you realise a sense of level-headedness that doesn't want to toss out traditional for purely digital media. She says, "The internet creates more of an appetite for media - it doesn't replace physical books, radio or TV." She's a woman in a man's world. Larry Page, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg...they're her competitors.
The lesson from this female-fueled discovery was "blogs will rule the earth for a time...again," but more about that in a bit because there's an email.
The email was from Facebook. It was telling me as her spouse that our anniversary date had been removed from her profile. I wasn't really bothered because I only log onto Facebook once a week these days and that's only to clear out all the event spam and leave again. Is it happening? Nah. Couldn't be.
So my wife was going full tilt with this. 900 less friends and now key information was being removed as well. Amidst my dwindling visits and her new found receding friend-line, I picked up a tweet from digiday saying that Twitter was in danger of making brands cheesy. Maybe it is happening. But that was just a notion wasn't it?
Could Facebook really end up drooling down the line in the future somewhere? Could it become the reader's digest back-edition of the new millennium? What was once the go-to platform for the world could become the thing you flip through when you've got nothing else to do in the doctor's waiting room.
How could this happen? Well first off, it could lose contact with the real man at the end of the platform. It did with me. With all of the qualitative information it has of me at its fingertips (photo's, messages, posts etc) Facebook knows I am a happily married man but it still chooses to serve me adverts like this:
(This is an actual screenshot of an advert served to me by Facebook. Along with the daily SMS's I get from nail bars it really makes me wonder how these businesses are using the data at their fingertips.)
So for all the happy family pictures and data it has on me to prove my life is not suitable for this sort of advertising I still get it. Personally I feel like they may have sold their soul to the wrong bidder. In my own world I would rather pay them $1 a month to have access to an advert free service that actually allows me to stay in touch with my friends and family without fear of invasions of privacy.
I would even go so far as to say a brand free space would be swell - speaking as a user and not a marketer of course. It feels like Facebook first gave us a park to sit and hang out in, with nothing but our conversations and memories to while away the days. Then it slowly built this enormous mall around us so now we're in a food court with shops and offerings and adverts on every side.
An idealistic proposition. Food for thought. At just over a billion users, I wonder what it would look like if Facebook could convert a 10th of its people into one dollar monthly subscriptions. Its quality of user would increase, its service would remain user-focused and it'd earn a billion dollars every 10 months. Its current model raked it in 1,46 billion last quarter so I can't compare my silly little musing with what is clearly a successful money machine geared towards making the shareholders happy.
But if it could get half of its users to subscribe it would be a model that made it more. Has it sold itself in the wrong direction, its resources now split in keeping both user experience and advertiser happy?
But back to the busy mall and with it, blogs. The sheer volume of noise pouring in through my Facebook feed that has no relevance to me, even when posted by my friends has made me cheapen, in my mind, the way I rate the quality of information I receive from the platform. And so here's the thing. I think from this noisy in-from-all-angles-privacy-threatening-novelty that we may take a few steps back to go in a new direction. I think Marissa Meyer (that girl that is a CEO) sees this. They're called blogs.
"But blogs are old. They've been done years back." Yes, but years ago when Wordpress and the like first graced our screens, building a blog was kept in the realm of the techie. Everyman couldn't just publish with ease if he didn't know a trick or two and so, in a word, blogging was inaccessible. Then Facebook and Twitter came and made publishing easy for the man in the street.
But now the man in the street is growing up and he wants to niche. Silly cat pictures, emotional one-liners and libel cases are driving us to look for quality over quantity.
Instead of sharing my whole life, including my anniversary date with the entire known universe, I think I'd like to share my love of cooking or animation or writing, in a place where all the other noise is gone. Niche experiences built for smaller and higher quality communities who truly appreciate what's been said and shared. And then we'll all have tumblr blogs, and then they'll monetise the popular ones and then I'll write another article about the wheel and its infinite turning and then we'll all be old and irrelevant and there'll be chips that replicate the five senses.
"I think I'm going to start a blog," she's saying to me as she pours herself some steaming tea from the pot. "But first I'm going to delete the pictures of the kids from the book. Mom and Dad can get them out the Dropbox if they want to."
"Yes my love. Whatever you say." ;-)
