Don’t you ever get the feeling that some agencies, some specialists, some companies are basically behaving just like children playing in the sand?

That they are just pushing their toys along, and building complicated, intricate castles and sculptured high walls that are made of sand, and ultimately will not last the distance?

That what they build, what they do, is at the whim of the elements, that it can be changed and destroyed in an instant?

That they really are doing things for their own sake? Things that really, honestly don’t, and won’t, have any long term impact on their business performance.

We have gone from having advertising agencies, to advertising and marketing agencies, to above and below the line agencies, to digital, web, seo, social, viral, specialists in facebook, pinterest marketing agencies, Linkedin experts, twitter specialists.

We have people who make a good living showing businesses how to market their product on pinterest, on pinterest! You can listen to hours of podcasts, read blog after blog after blog about the best way to upload a picture, how to put your URL in and what you should say.

We have consultants who make a big deal about the smallest changes in functionality of one of the many social channels we now feel that we have to use to communicate our message.

We have experts showing us how to apply Attention – Interest – Desire – Action to their specific channel, and in the end are they showing us anything really new? They make it sound new, but is it really anything other than what we already know? The mechanic has changed, but it’s not that different.

To make it worse, what we do, we don’t own, we don’t control;

  • Our google rankings are changed at the whim of Google.
  • Our ppc costs, and spend is – it feels – manipulated by search engines to enhance their income (it feels that way anyway – has any seen any logic to their quality scores recently?)
  • Our ability to talk to fans on facebook is curtailed to make way for advertising – we now have to pay to talk to them.
  • Our carefully crafted youtube channels are redesigned and demoted because youtube changes their policy.

So, you can find yourself having spent hours creating something your consumers love, that works, and is good for business, to have it taken away in an afternoon by an algorithm change.

People base their whole business on a channel that they don’t own, and can’t control.

It just feels like a lot of playing in the sand to me.