Beyond the Buzzword: Gamification

Let’s be honest: All of us can be kids at heart. When it comes to content marketing, gamification offers the play time all of us desire. But gamification is more than just a substitute for recess. It’s ideal for increasing important metrics and creating brand affinity in spades.

The Simple Definition

“Gamification” can be a mouthful to say, but it’s not nearly so complicated to define. Simply put, gamification is the art of making a game out of your content marketing. Apps, interactive tools and even quizzes can fit the gamification bill.

Though not a new concept to the Internet at large, gamification has become a go-to tool for many content marketers. It’s hardly surprising why: Gamification can yield a slew of coveted marketing benefits.

Engagement is the most obvious of these results. Though engagement is a buzzword in its own right, it translates into very specific metrics. Time on site/app, bounce rate and social sharing all fall under the engagement umbrella, and each of these benchmarks can be improved with gamification.

For example, GrubHub offers a classic video game experience while customers wait for their food. Rather than let users exit after purchase, GrubHub Fastfood Runner utilizes gamification to increase the time each customer spends in the app.

Common Mistakes

Before you start designing gamified features, there are a few roadblocks to overcome. First and foremost, consider your budget. In order to pull off a game that users actually want to play, the game must be well planned and well designed.

Unfortunately, this achievement doesn’t come cheap. A clean, functional app will cost $10,000 minimum (though intricate designs can run upwards of six figures). For a full rundown of app design budgets, check out SavvyApp CEO Ken Yarmosh’s detailed advice.

As always, you must also consider your audience. Do users tend to visit your site on the go? If so, consider a game that takes no longer than 30 seconds. If your audience is more charitable with their time, you may be able to increase that. Just be forewarned: Very few games should last longer than a couple of minutes.

Finally, gamification can go south quickly if you don’t optimize for different platforms. While this may increase your budget significantly, keep in mind that mobile now outpaces desktop traffic. If you aren’t optimized for mobile, desktop and tablet, you might as well not attempt gamification at all.

How to Get Started

If you’re convinced that gamification is right for your brand, it’s time incorporate it into your overall content marketing strategy. But what type of gamification should you pursue? Luckily, there are ample opportunities for gamification that work at every stage of the funnel.

1. There’s an app for thatAs we mentioned above, app design can claim a chunk of your marketing budget. Yet don’t discount apps just because of an upfront cost. After all, apps are one of the most evergreen forms of gamification.

Whether paid or free, an app can result in long-term returns for your brand. For example, addictive games or useful features keep users engaged with your brand during many everyday moments where they need your product or want to kill some time.

Apps are also great for ongoing data collection. When do users open your app, and can you glean any buyer insights based on that information? Do users jump out of the app at a common point? If so, you might have a glitch or needless feature on your hands.

Before you assume apps are only for tech companies, consider that some would argue you need an app as part of your product portfolio. Chances are, if you’re selling something, an app is worth investing in.

2. Personalization

Gamification doesn’t have to take the form of intricate apps or video games. In fact, most gamified features are little more than interactive building blocks.

Let’s take Blue Nile’s Build Your Own Ring as an example. The online engagement ring retailer encourages users to build their own ring using a straightforward pathway. Users are taken through diamond selection, ring setting and of course, purchase.

This type of personal gamification is a win-win situation for users and Blue Nile. On the one hand, users avoid the overwhelming task of filtering through thousands of rings. It’s especially useful for those who may be new to the world of clarity, cut, color and carat.

Blue Nile receives its own gems, as well. First, the brand gains invaluable insight into user preferences and taste. Not only does this help Blue Nile marketers improve its site and strategy, but it also helps operations and business teams make future product decisions.

Also, gamification allows Blue Nile to build a relationship with its audience. The Build Your Own Ring feature is a registered trademark, giving Blue Nile immediate street cred in the engagement ring arena. What’s more, the gamified feature conveys trust and expertise in a way that simple articles or photos never could.

3. Interactive Sweepstakes

When it comes to brand sweepstakes, there is such a thing as free lunch. Audiences love an opportunity to win prizes, especially if entry is easy. Gamification can take sweepstakes to the next level, offering a fun factor that most sweepstakes lack.

Take VSP, for example. While eyecare may seem like a relatively humdrum category, VSP has gamified its content marketing. In fact, the brand hosts a gamified sweepstakes every single month. Users simply play a 20-second game to receive an entry into the contest.

VSP also recycles many of its game features each month, which is a smart idea for any content marketer who wants to host an interactive sweepstakes. While VSP’s games may vary from Whack-a-Mole to Memory, it uses the same icons, framework and microsite.

4. Product Announcement

Obviously, you want any new product to make a memorable entrance. Gamification is a fantastic way to announce a new product or feature in a way that wows.

EA Sports released NFL Madden 15 in just such a way. Its NFL Giferator allows users to pick a football team and GIF (pulled straight from the video game, of course), followed by an opportunity to personalize and share the GIF. Engagement, high pages per visit and social sharing? Yes, please.

So… we got a little too “in to” finding the right gamified content examples from the #MaddenGiferator site.

You, too, can create a game that allows users to have fun with your new product. Not only that, but users can have fun with the game long after your product has been released. Just make sure you tweak it accordingly.

One more thing: Please don’t forget a call to action (or seven). After all, the whole exercise is pointless if no one remembers your new product.

5. Post-Purchase Engagement

Any marketer worth their salt knows a long-term brand strategy isn’t all about first-time purchase. A brand needs repeat purchasers and brand advocates to succeed.

This means engaging users even after their purchase is over. Enter gamification yet again. Gamified features in this scenario are unlocked only after a customer has completed an order.

Domino’s is one of the pioneers in this category. Since 2008, the pizza delivery brand has utilized GPS technology to let users know exactly where their pizza is in the delivery process. This registered trademark process keep users engaged and on the site even after their credit card has been approved.

If you have a long delivery cycle, this feature obviously won’t work for you. However, you can offer other post-purchase gamification. It can be complex (i.e., GrubHub’s Fastfood Runner) or simple, such as automated social sharing.

Now that you have an idea of the wide world of gamification, it should be clear that you really can engage users at every stage of the funnel. Let’s see how that breaks down:

• Awareness: This top-of-the-funnel stage focuses on attracting new users. Gamification is ideal for this, namely in the form of apps or sweepstakes.

• Engagement/Evaluation: In the middle of the funnel, users get to know your brand. Product announcement games are perfect for this stage.

• Commitment: The very last stage of the funnel entails commitment and purchase. Intuitive, well-designed gamification will smoothly transition users into buyers. Consider personalized product-focused games, such as Blue Nile’s Build Your Own Ring.

• Loyalty: Finally, gamification engages users beyond the funnel with brand loyalty features that unlock after purchase.

Though you must plan and budget for effective gamification, it’s well worth your time for most brands. Plus, who said content marketing can’t all be fun and games?

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Three ways to invent and improve automated content

Depending on whether they’re in the awareness, education or action phase, different customers need different content. Here are three tips for automating it.

It’s worth aspiring to construct your retention content strategy around real-time interactions. Certainly, watching customer behavior and automatically sending the exact perfect message at the moment of truth for each decision point is the ideal.

Recently, however, I’ve been having a lot of strategy conversations with marketers struggling to get off the ground. What is needed is a framework, from which we can start the engagement conversation, track activity and learn about what content and offers are most interesting.

A review of your content approach is worthwhile if you are just starting out or if you are going after a new market or segment. And if your automated content program has been running for a while, it may just be in need of an upgrade.

I like to construct this framework based on life stage. Start with three to six content experiences – which could be online, in your app, via email, on Twitter, in the retail store, even over the phone – based on what you know about your customers and synched to the kinds of problems that your offerings solve.

Watch how people interact and engage with the content. As you learn, and study your analytics for experiences you can add in between, you can trigger more of them for real time.

There are usually three questions at this point:

1. Which life stages matter most?
2. What content is most likely to resonate?
3. When, and how frequently?

Regardless of topic, the answer to marketing strategy questions is always the same: “It depends.” (“Test it” is also a very good universal answer!) Customize your approach based on this simple framework that can work for nearly any audience.

Just as there are three questions, there are three major life stages and complementary content strategies:

1. Awareness

Usually, this is basic content to make an introduction and show a little personality.

Is your brand fun and whimsical? Stoic and serious? Whatever it is, be authentic, and let it shine through while you introduce your position in the market and your value to customers.

Refrain from either strong pitches or making it all about the product at this stage. Use top-of-the-funnel material to attract leads, not close them.

2. Education

Blog content works great here, since it’s usually the freshest material that addresses the unique trends and activity in your industry.

Customers in this stage are actively looking for information, so make that easy to find: online, in person and through your sales or customer service team. Being helpful and informed is most important at this stage; these are the activities which will lead to a sales conversation.

The hardest part is to stay in education mode until the customer is really ready. I think it’s OK to hint strongly – but don’t scare them away.

3. Action

You know when someone is truly interested. An action could be a download from your library of whitepapers, a first sale from a deep discount coupon or a newsletter sign-up.

The beauty of automation is that you can trigger a follow-up action immediately after each, which gradually brings your customer or prospect toward a richer relationship (and larger sales opportunities) with your company.

Content here still needs to be educational, but it is oriented toward the action. Always give people a chance to contact you directly in whatever ways you make available, be it a sales team, a retail outlet, customer service hotline or even online comments.

That leaves the question of timing. Again, the answer is, “It depends.” It’s hard for marketers to be passive about timing; we are so excited about our products and services that we often rush the customer with more information than they need or can consume.

It’s definitely frustrating to see a lot of people in the upper funnel who never go any deeper. While it’s always worth trying to increase the conversion rate from Awareness to Education, it’s probably a better use of time to concentrate on the move from Education to Action.

The operative word in constructing your content cadence is “respect.” The best marketing makes it all about the customer’s needs, and not about the product (or the hard sell).

It’s hard to build content that is effective at the Awareness stage because people are all over the place with their needs and intentions. Still, map out a set of conversations that you are willing, able and qualified to have with your customers, and focus on content that allows free interaction on those topics.

Often, this is about the problems your company solves, not about the product itself. Make it too broad and you risk building awareness among people who will never be your customers. Make it too narrow – “how to post a podcast in iTunes” – and you will limit your opportunity. (Unless, of course, your product is really only about posting a podcast, in which case, have at it.) The timing for how long you engage a customer during this first stage can be anywhere from one minute to one year.

The education stage cadence is usually most tricky. Start with two or three interactions that lead toward an action and see what the response is.

Tweak it from there: add in more content paths if needed to capture segments of the audience that think differently than you originally planned, or create more paths to the same action. For one B2B technology client recently, just adding podcasts built from previous webinars helped boost the number of interactions – and lead to higher conversation to action.

There is, sadly, no magic formula to marketing automation and content strategy, which perhaps means good job security for all of us. However, it is one of the most important strategic foundations of successful marketing and lead generation, and deserves constant nurturing and analysis.

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Social Media Posting Guidelines For Business

Wouldn’t it sound weird if you said the same thing to every person you encountered throughout the day?

Well, think of your social media posts in the same way. Each platform is different, and your posts should be too.

Even if you’re linking to the same content on your own website, each post on your various social media accounts should be tailored to succeed on that specific site in terms of tone and appearance. Here are some social media posting guidelines on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Facebook

Facebook is for social sharing, so go ahead: add photos, add links, add events, add it all.

The Facebook feed is very visually oriented, and aesthetics are important: use high quality photos (1,200×628 pixels is ideal) and replace visible URLs with well-written text to create a visually appealing post that arrests the eye. Photo-based posts (rather than text-based ones) actually get 39% more engagement on average. And remember to make it friendly–after all, Facebook is for your “friends,” right?

Pro tip: One gentleman from a manufacturing company in the midwest told me that their Facebook feed “is like the company newsletter.” I thought that was great advice.

Twitter

Tweets, on the other hand, must be economical. They’re meant to be short and pithy and to capture the audience’s attention with intrigue and wit rather than explanation.

Don’t worry about aesthetics here; just make sure you maximize your word allotment. Use tools like goo.gl or Bitly to shorten your links (many social sharing tools will shorten links for you automatically, too), saving space for valuable hashtags that increase your tweet’s exposure.

You can also add photos (ideally 1,024×512 pixels) and tag them, neither of which takes up any of your 140 characters.

Pro tip: We’ve found Twitter to be a great tool for finding influencers in an industry or on a topic, and also is good to send cues to search engines to index new pages you tweet about.

LinkedIn

While social sites like Facebook and Twitter can be used to share any relevant content, yours or not, LinkedIn is a more professional platform and your posts should reflect this.

Companies and people often neglect posting to the LinkedIn news feed, even though it can send up to four times as many people to your homepage as Facebook and Twitter. This influx includes potential clients or even business partners, so try to highlight professional growth or achievements.

An appropriate post might be an article you wrote that demonstrates your prowess in your field, or a link to a press release or news clip that sheds positive light on your company. Photos are also great on LinkedIn (are we seeing a theme here?), but always make sure to adjust it to the optimum size.

Pro tip: Your LinkedIn posts don’t just need to go on the company page. Encourage employees to share messages on their personal profiles as well, and make sure your personal profile on LinkedIn is as good as it can be, too.

Now, there are certainly other social platforms that companies are using to generate awareness, find partners and drive website traffic, but managing too many social media platforms can be overwhelming because of the time involved and because you really need to tailor each of your messages to each social media platform for best results.

Third-party applications like HootSuite can definitely make it easier and quicker to manage your social media accounts, but they’re not always the most effective method. By taking the time to ensure every post is optimized for its immediate audience instead of cross-posting the same one across all social media sites, you can leverage your content on each social media platform and ultimately drive traffic back to your company website.

Finally, posting and managing social media could be a full time job for many B2B companies, so don’t spread yourself too thin. Consider scheduling social media posts so you have even distribution throughout the day/week/month.

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Where Does Blogging Fit Into Your Content Marketing Strategy?

If you’re in marketing, you know two of the largest buzzwords in recent years are “content marketing” and “blogging.” But how do you develop a content marketing strategy and where does blogging fit into that plan? Read on to find out.

Before you begin, it’s important to get the basics down first. Companies may define aspects of their content marketing strategy differently, but the concept is generally the same:

1. Set content marketing S.M.A.R.T. goals. Don’t dream about your goals, put a plan in place to achieve them. To ensure you stay on track, make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. Define your buyer personas. As defined by HubSpot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based off research and data from your company’s current customers. The better you know your persona, the more successful you’ll be in your content marketing efforts.
3. Decide which type of content works best for your business. Based of your buyer persona(s), decide which content will resonate best with them like blogging, ebooks, white papers, podcasts, etc.
4. Create an editorial calendar. Once you have the type of content you want to create, it’s imperative you put a plan of attack in place to develop and promote this content. Scheduling plans out at least 90 days in advance will help to ensure you’re on track.
5. Market your marketing. What good is your amazing content if nobody knows about it? Get it into the hands of your buyer personas through social media, email, blog (SEO efforts), and so on.
6. Measure your results. The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s so easy to monitor your results. Keep an eye on your analytics and base your efforts moving forward on those results. See what works and what doesn’t and optimize from there.

So where does blogging fit into this content marketing strategy? You’ll find that no matter what your business is, blogging will work well for your company! Blogging should be used as an awareness-stage piece of content that educates your audience and answers questions and pain points they may have. Blogging contributes significantly to your content marketing strategy by providing the following benefits:

1. It helps to drive traffic to your website. Every time you write a new blog post you’re adding another indexed page to your site, which Google and other search engines love! It proves your website is active. Each page you add gives you another chance to be found in search results (which is how most people look for content these days).
2. Blogging can get you discovered on social media. If you create great content on your blog, people will want to share it via social media (you should share it on social as well to your personas). The more people share, the more visits you’ll get, and the more it will help your SEO results.
3. Blogging increases conversion. How you may ask? You can add lead-generating CTAs to your blog posts that direct to landing pages with relevant content and offers your visitors can convert on. The more blogs you have, the more people will see you CTAs, which increases the odds of conversion. More site visits and more leads? Blogging is a win-win.
4. Blogging establishes authority. If your answering common questions and solving your persona’s pain points in your blogs, people will start to look at you as a leader in the industry and will begin to trust your company. The more a person trusts your company, the more likely they’ll be to turn into a customer someday.

Blogging is a no-brainer when it comes to your content marketing strategy and fit’s into your plan from the beginning. No company is too small to not blog and no company is too large. How has blogging helped with your content marketing strategy?

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Chat Apps and Social Media: What All the Fuss Is About

You've probably seen several articles about chat apps recently. You’ve likely also seen predictions, some compelling and some dire: Chat apps are the new social media! Chat apps will replace social media in 2015! You may have seen those same sentiments in the form of questions. In this article I’m going to break it down for you. I’ll review how people use chat apps, and the impact they are having on social media. I'll tell you why marketers and brands are so interested in them, and how I think chat apps will integrate into the social media mix. More importantly I’ll tell you what you should be thinking about regarding how to marketing on chat apps, and tell you how brands are engaging customers on chat apps today.

What are chat apps?

Chat apps are apps like WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Viber, and Line. You use them to send text messages and in some cases make calls. They typically make it easier to chat through text from mobile devices, and provide additional easy to use features for sending images, videos, and creating groups to chat with. As I said, some chat apps take it further and include VOIP calling. Many chat apps try to be more private. They are inherently more private because you have to invite people to chat with you (for the most part). Some chat apps, like Snapchat, take privacy further by deleting content after a specified amount of time. Some chat apps support ads, others don’t. Some have separate channels for publishing content. Snapchat has a new Channel, Snapchat Discover, where media partners like CNN can publish news related content. Snapchat even has its own original series, Snapper Hero coming out. 

What’s all the fuss about?

People. To marketers, people are reach. Reaching people provides the opportunity to raise brand awareness and make your pitch to current or new customers. Chat apps have experienced huge growth in the number of people using them over the last two years, so everyone is interested.  How much have chat apps been growing? WhatsApp added over 100 million users in the last 4 months of 2014 alone. Martin Beck’s recent article listed 4 of the top 6 social networks (based on active users) as chat apps.

In addition to all of this, many marketers tend to feel that chat apps are effective channels for marketing. That intuitively makes sense, since chat apps tend to have more intimate conversations between parties that know each other. After all, if you hear an opinion from someone you know and trust, it tends to resonate. On top of that, the droves of users moving to chat apps have gotten the attention of social media experts. As I said in the opening paragraph, there have been a lot of articles, predictions, and discussions. The headlines of some of these articles has amplified the fuss. I'm a social media consultant, and I’m partly to blame. We teach people to write attention grabbing headlines with power words like SECRET and AWESOME, and power phrases like “CHANGING LANDSCAPE” and “DISRUPTIVE TRENDS.“ This is one secretly awesome disruptive trend where you need to read the content rather than focus on the headlines.

Are chat apps changing the social interaction landscape?

Yes. People who spend more time chatting in chat apps, may spend less time on other social platforms. Moreover, since a large number of people can potentially be reached on chat  networks, those networks and apps are places that brands and marketers need consider when looking to extend their reach, or to reach the audiences that populate those networks.

Is Social Media as we know it dead or dying?

In short, yes. But, before you freak out about how your brand just got its Instagram account where it should be, social media as we know it dies every day. A better way to say it might be that social media changes every day. Social media is not a static landscape. It’s a constantly changing mix of technologies, use cases, personas, user types, and issues. People like to put things in boxes, because things in boxes are easier to understand. The most common social media box regarding business and marketing is, “you have to be on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.” You’ve probably heard that. It’s been good advice for several years. It’s good advice today, and it’s going to be good advice next year as well. Social media changes with every new social app, every new type of social network, and every new issue that comes into focus. Most of the time the changes in the social media landscape are numerous and small, requiring periodic adjustments. Sometimes changes are impactful and large, and generate more immediate responses. If you want to keep up, you need to stay plugged in, and wear a good pair of running shoes.

A look back at past disruptive changes

I use this analogy when talking about chat apps and other disruptive technologies because it seems provide perspective. The original social media app was the Internet's original killer app – email. That was followed be the world wide web and websites for people and brands. Then ecommerce sites. Then came SEO awareness, the secret to make sure your website could be found in a world of websites Then SEO became a moving target, enter search advertising and pay-per click. Then came social media. Users flocked. Brands built pages and touted organic reach. Then organic reach became a moving target and social media ads matured. Get the point?

So let me ask you:

• Do you still put thought and effort into building a great website for your brand?  Yes you do. You have to have a place for your customers to go, to sell your products, and to get your message out.
• Do you still optimize it for SEO? Yes you do. People still use search engines to find things, and it’s always better to be found sooner rather than later.
• Does search advertising still work and do brands still use it? Yes. Digital advertising is growing at an enormous rate. Social media advertising makes up 30% of that, while search advertising is 40%.  Those numbers will change, but search advertising is important and will continue to be important for some time. In fact, the bigger disruption in digital advertising currently is mobile vs desktop. The Woodside Capital Partners report on Digital Ad Tech: Growth, Disruption, and Consolidation has lots of stats of interest to marketers.

Don’t forget, the biggest marketing event of the year is on boring old TV – the Superbowl. Also don’t forget that Facebook is now bigger than any country in the world when you compare users to populations. Those aren't just static numbers, almost 900 million people visit Facebook daily. Facebook isn't diminishing in importance.  

How might chat apps change things?

Chat apps tend to have the following usage similarities (these are very general):

• They are used by younger audiences (from tweens to young adults). This audience tends to use the heck out of these apps. If this is the demographic you want to reach, you need to add this to your marketing plan.
• They are used for private conversations. A lot of opinions and recommendations will be exchanged in these chats. Again, if you want to influence them, you will need to find a way to be part of them, have a presence near them, or generate buzz that gets your brand talked about in them. 

I can see lots of social media scenarios where chat apps are part of the mix. Chat apps are likely to be the place for private conversations between smaller groups with more active participation. As private conversations and active participation move to chat networks, “traditional” social media may be used for wider reaching conversations with more passive or sporadic interaction. One example that comes to mind is a media or sporting event. People might monitor traditional social media to capture the broad excitement, crowd level enthusiasm, and sporadically share and comments – color commentary. At the same time, friends may connected and constantly chatting back and forth with each other through chat apps – play-by-play. That's just one potential scenario. There are many marketing scenarios that brands, marketers, consultants will have to sort out. 

What you should do

As with most new technologies and trends, a thoughtful approach is often best. The following process will give you insights about whether you need to change your marketing approach, and how: 

• Listen: Listen to your audience. Find out where they are hanging out, and what their interests are, and what’s compelling about your brand, and products, and how you stack up against your competitors.
• Investigate: Get onto a few chat apps. Use them with your team, your friends, and co-workers. Research use cases to see how other people and competitors are using them.
• Measure: Always measure your own efforts and web traffic. See what’s generating results for you and your brand on Social Media. This will give you insights on what's working and what could improve. Analysis can help you determine if chat apps need to be part of your marketing approach.
• Act. If appropriate for your brand. If chat networks have users you want or need, act to get onto those platforms and interact with those users. How? Brands are doing it in many ways. You might advertise on one of the media outlets partnering to be on Snapchat Discover. You might use tools built into that platform (such as WeChat) to engage customers, or use other methods to engage. Sprout Social’s Jennifer Beese wrote an article detailing three ways brands are engaging on Snapchat.

What’s the future hold?

There are other disruptive technologies coming. Desktop computer interactions are moving to TVs. Content providers are building integrations to online and social apps. You will soon be able to watch the game on one part of your TV screen, have a Twitter chat up displayed on-screen next to the game, and a WhatsApp chat directly under the Twiitter chat.  And none of us know what next big thing is coming.  We might, however, have some insights where users be in the future. Here’s a one forecast from Bob Hutchings on where social media users might go in 2016.  

If you have thoughts or experiences integrating chat apps into your marketing efforts, please leave a comment. 

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Why you should take a social media sabbatical

One of my clients told me that social media sabbaticals are the new treks through Nepal. Taking a social media sabbatical is trendy, takes some courage, and for most westerners, it’s outside the realm of possibility. But (thankfully for me), it doesn’t require as much physical fitness as a hiking the Himalayas.

I’ve spent the last two months on a break from social. No tweets, no instas—nothing. I went an extra step and stopped sending newsletters or doing interviews, as well.

Rewinding to whatever “the norm” was before my break: I spent lots of time on social media. As an author, product maker, self-employed, brand-builder type person, I’ve used social to build awareness of what I do and what I sell. I use it to connect, network, and stay in touch with friends (most of whom I’ve become friends with on those networks).

There haven’t been active notifications on any device I own for years (they’re far too distracting). So even before my hiatus, I only noticed social when I logged into it, which was often.

I went from a few hours a day on social to none.

And it was quiet.

Almost eerily quiet.

Remarkably, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it’d be. The time I would have spent tweeting or posting photos was spent working instead. And my work was done quicker. Not just because the time typically spent online socializing was replaced with space, but because I had no choice but to work on my work for longer. Which meant I could get more efficient with it.

For those of you who may have been following along with me, you already know about my penchant for experimenting. One of my favorite experiments is to take something I think I can’t live without and try to eliminate it from my life.

Sometimes I fail (for example, living without furniture is possible but really bad for one’s back). Sometimes I realize what I thought would be lacking isn’t lacking at all (like when I turned off all notifications on all my computers and phones). One time, I realized that giving up spending any money for six months (other than for food) makes it really hard to publish a book that requires money to hire experts (like editors, photographers, etc).

What I liked about my experiment to take a long break from social was that it opened up space. Space to think. Space to be alone with my thoughts. Space to explore.

And most of all, space to focus.

But that’s boring!

Neil Gaiman (who’s at least 42.7 times more smart than I am) says that the best way to come up with really awesome ideas is to get really bored. But we don’t let ourselves get bored anymore.

When all the small gaps in our days are filled with refreshing or sharing, there’s no room left to just sit and breathe and let whatever thoughts that want to happen… just happen. There are more ideas—not fewer—when you remove noise.

There is no longer space in our lives. We can’t wait in line without getting on our phones. Or sit on a bus. Or eat. Or wake up. Or wait for an elevator. Or watch a sunset.

Extra, dangling seconds force most of us to reach for our pockets and pull out our tiny computers that connect to the Internet. We must scroll and react to whatever shows up on our screen, as if by some neurological impulse.

Social media definitely forces me to think about whatever is on my screen. Sometimes it’s something I don’t want to think about, like football (American or European). Sometimes it’s something that riles me up, like proposed pipelines going through my Province. Sometimes I’m taken from a happy place to being angry, frustrated, sad, or hurt.

It’s all outside of my control because I’m passively letting whatever stimulus floats into my tiny screen affect me.

When social is gone, I’m more in charge of my stimulus. I get to pick what I want think about (sometimes) and what I focus on. Or what I want to learn more about or not learn about at all.

When you work for yourself, social media is almost like a water cooler. I miss that aspect of it, because most connecting in my day happens online. Sure, I still text with my good friends or email or Skype. But the circle of people I connect with is much smaller when I’m not on social.

Without social, I only connect with people who I’m decent friends with. Not the periphery of people I like and like to interact with, but am not very close to. Without social, there are no new people in my circles, either. So my world got smaller.

Sometimes a quiet small is good.

There are no interruptions, no comparisons of what I’m doing versus what others are publicly achieving. No mob to join in with or chastise when current events become the hot topic. There’s just me—myself, my thoughts (a scary picture – painted by rats with a penchant for the macabre), and my work.

I realized that society doesn’t stop happening if I’m not tuned into it 24/7. Bigger things will find their way to me, maybe not instantly, but when I’m ready for them. Important people will stay in touch. Even though 60+ days passed, social won’t be a drastically different landscape with new rules and customs.

Who knows if I’ll be on social media less now that my randomly chosen amount of time to be off it has passed. Or if I’ll go back at all. Most of the time now, unless I’ve got something silly to say or I miss people there, I don’t feel like I want to go back. I don’t mind that the space it used to take up is now simply kept as space.

Unlike a trek through the Himalayas, I’m not sure if I’ve come back from this sabbatical a changed man or with a radically different view. I’m certainly not more worldly (although I have grown a dishevelled beard). But it does remind me that sometimes feeling like I could be missing out is really just missing out on the present.

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