“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”
—Plato

Why are email marketers asking me so many questions?

Want some subject line examples?

Could a three-martini lunch improve service?

Is Your Child Ready for Sleepovers?

Have You Googled Yourself Today?

Is PageRank Important?

What is the most overused Linkedin Buzzword?

What’s wrong with social media marketing?

Shouldn’t they be giving me answers instead of asking me questions?

Hey, look: It’s Fats Waller — and yes, that’s Lena Horne. Classic.

Neither, I say!

A post this morning over on Social Media Today talks about how Twitter has an inherent edge over Facebook as an advertising medium. It says that “people do not go to Facebook expecting to see ads.”

I disagree. People expect to see ads on Facebook; they just don’t plan to be clicking on them … and are you suggesting that people go to Twitter expecting to see ads? (Or, at least, more so than they expect to see ads on Facebook?)

It feels like Facebook and Twitter have been with us forever, but it hasn’t really been that long at all. Facebook launched in 2004 while Twitter launched in July 2006.

Still and all, there’s evidently a vast divide between social media experts, who preach interaction and conversation at every available soapbox, and marketers, who’ve never met a method of interrupting people they didn’t embrace.

When, oh when, will marketers as a whole wake up and realize that interruption sucks when it comes to social media?

Instead of thinking “How can we trick someone into seeing our ad?” or “How can we make it harder for someone to close the popup window that contains our ad?” (those light-gray buttons on clear backgrounds are really getting old, people), marketers need to be thinking, “How can we engage people?” and “How can we provide the tools and materials that make it easy for our most passionate customers to spread the word about us?”

Because as far as I can tell, we’re still in pretty much the same place we were about five or six years ago.

Haven’t marketers learned anything in that time?

Takeaway for marketers: Stop thinking print and television. Get with the program, already, willya?

The signal-to-noise ratio in my feeds lately seems to be all about less signal and more noise. There’s information that matters, information that matters to just a few and information that no one in their right mind should care about.

Usually the majority of information I see falls into the second category. Lately, it seems the third is taking control. For a few examples:

Katie Couric Gives Us A Glimpse Inside Twitter’s New San Francisco Nest (no one should care unless you work there; quite unlikely)

Prince Harry Gives Facebook The Royal Boot (no one should care unless you’re unable to get your fix of Prince Harry anywhere else; also quite unlikely)

Five Things Bacon Can Teach Us About Content Marketing (stop, just stop; now you’re shamelessly trolling for backlinks)

Whether it’s in the trade press of social media and the internets or the 24/4 maw of cable news networks, the lack of real news is never an excuse for having something to say. After all, there are links to create and hours to fill.

Think I’m gonna log off for a while and go read a book.