I read a lot of business books and LinkedIn posts now that were written by ChatGPT, and I can usually tell. They’re always competent and usually lifeless, with the same three-part structure, the same tidy takeaways, and replete with a voice that belongs to no one. AI made writing mindless, and in doing so it made a real human voice the rarest thing in the feed.

That is, partly, why a good book still matters, and why it’s worth more now, not less. A book is the hardest calling card there is to fake. Anyone can generate a thread in ten seconds. Almost no one can produce two hundred pages that are worth the read.

A book pays off beyond the sales figures. Most don’t sell many copies, and that’s fine. The return is credibility, and the authority that comes from having actually written the thing. A book is a door. It gets a founder onto the stage, into the interview, and into rooms that were closed the week before. As Groucho Marx wrote in his memoir, he could have written a classic if he’d wanted to; he’d just “rather write for the little people.”

Two things usually go wrong on the way there. Most founders decide they’ll just write it themselves, all three hundred pages, on weekends, between board meetings. Chapter one goes great. Chapter one always goes great. A year later there’s still only chapter one, and they’ve quietly stopped bringing it up. The ones who don’t stall hand themselves to the industry that’s grown up around all this instead, which is its own kind of trouble: hybrid publishers charging five figures for what an author could do alone, ghostwriting mills that take the money and vanish somewhere around delivery, and now AI that hands back a draft in a voice that isn’t yours, but is rather an amalgam of all the stolen intellectual property from pulped and scanned books the machines were trained on. Rebecca Ackermann described that last one in The Atlantic: a client who swapped their ghostwriter for AI got a draft with a cruel edge where they’d meant to be funny. “I’ve never heard you talk about people this way,” the writer told them.

The good version of this is old. In 1965, Malcolm X told his life to Alex Haley, and the book became one of the most important American memoirs of the century. Andre Agassi’s Open, Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, and Prince Harry’s Spare were all written by J.R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer winner who insists his name stay off the cover; “the midwife doesn’t go home with the baby,” as he puts it. That’s the craft, and it runs on a strange discipline: the writer disappears so the author can stand there alone. The mills are the problem: they cash your deposit and mail back a manuscript nobody who knows you would believe for a single page.

What’s changed is the volume. When the investor Stanley Druckenmiller published a Wall Street Journal op-ed this year, readers caught the machine behind it within minutes: the giveaway “not this, but that” constructions, the cadence and tropes you’ve started to notice everywhere, and the paper shrugged and stood by it. None of the underlying impulse is new; I’ve been writing about it for years: the humblebrag economy and the phones that were always listening, the long work of performing a self. The counterfeit voice has been around forever. AI made a convincing one; it cost nothing. That’s exactly why the real one is worth more. A book written entirely by a machine can’t even be copyrighted; The Copyright Office won’t register work with no human behind it, so the one that carries your voice also happens to be the only one the law lets you own.

Doing it right is unglamorous. It starts with a recorded conversation, week after week, and a writer working from the transcripts to get the person’s story and voice onto the page, then going back over it until it reads the way they actually think and talk. I use every tool there is, AI included, and none of them do the part that matters. A transcript won’t write your book, and neither will a model; it takes a writer who’s spent years learning the difference between how a person talks and how they think they talk––one who isn’t afraid of throwing in an em dash or two when it fits.

A now-viral screenshot (below) of a satirical LinkedIn post from four years ago has been shared thousands of times—mocking the platform’s ecosystem of manufactured inspiration, where every mundane encounter becomes a profound lesson in leadership. Yet scroll through your feed today, and you’ll find posts nearly indistinguishable from the parody. We’ve reached peak professional performance theater, where the line between genuine insight and algorithmic optimization has dissolved entirely.

And now, more and more people are now using AI to draft their LinkedIn posts, outsourcing their inner monologue to machines that have never had an inner anything. Posts today are more than twice as long as they used to be, and a 2024 study by Originality found that over half of these long-form English language posts on the platform were AI generated.

LinkedIn hasn’t just digitized networking—it has industrialized authenticity, outsourcing even emotional labor to algorithms and turning professional identity into a content genre. This goes beyond LinkedIn’s occasional awkwardness or self-indulgence. It’s about how professional identity itself is evolving in an AI-saturated world, and the economic stakes are higher than we realize.

The Authenticity Paradox

Before LinkedIn digitized professional networking in 2003, career advancement relied on physical proximity and institutional gatekeepers. Professional relationships were built through alumni networks, industry conferences, golf courses, and corner office introductions—spaces that inherently favored those with existing social and economic capital. LinkedIn democratized access to professional networks while simultaneously industrializing the performance itself, making visible what was once private and intuitive.

Today, LinkedIn has over 1 billion global members, with only 1% posting content weekly, yet generating 9 billion impressions weekly. This platform has industrialized what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor”—the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display. Except now, we’re outsourcing even that labor to artificial intelligence.

The platform’s ecosystem of “broetry“—those distinctive LinkedIn posts formatted with short, dramatic line breaks for maximum impact—represents something deeper than mere narcissism. The typography itself performs sincerity, mimicking the cadence of spoken vulnerability. When someone writes:

“I made a mistake.

And it changed everything.

Here’s what I learned...”

They’re not just sharing a professional insight. They’re using visual formatting to simulate the pauses and emphasis of authentic emotional revelation, turning genuine human moments into content optimized for algorithmic consumption.

LinkedIn’s algorithm can identify robotic responses but remains surprisingly vulnerable to AI-generated thought leadership. When machines can successfully impersonate human professional insight, what does that say about the original insight? We’ve reached a point where artificial authenticity reflects back on itself so thoroughly that it’s difficult to recall what unmediated professional wisdom even sounded like.

The Humblebrag Industrial Complex

LinkedIn has transformed what was once a social faux pas into a legitimate digital marketing strategy. The platform rewards what sociologists might recognize as ritualized vulnerability—a scripted performance of authenticity that has crystallized into genre:

“I’m humbled to announce...” (success disguised as modesty, the linguistic equivalent of covering a Ferrari with a tarp)

“A stranger did something kind and restored my faith in humanity...” (virtue signaling through anecdote, usually involving coffee shops or airport encounters)

“I was rejected from my dream job, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me...” (destiny disguised as disappointment, the professional equivalent of “everything happens for a reason”)

These posts function as modern parables, teaching us how to navigate professional success while maintaining the illusion of humility.

But the economic implications are worth noting. Research by Edelman found that thought leadership influences decision-makers’ purchasing behaviors, with their B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study showing that strong thought leadership content not only strengthens a company’s reputation but also positively impacts RFP invitations and pricing. LinkedIn’s audience has twice the buying power of the average online user, and four out of five people on the platform drive business decisions.

This creates what amounts to the Instagramification of the cubicle, where every career move becomes content, every professional insight becomes engagement bait, every human moment becomes a potential case study in leadership. The performance actually matters—posts with 50 comments from engaged users prove far more impactful than those with 1,000 likes and no conversations, suggesting that authentic dialogue (however performed) still carries economic weight.

Unlike other social media platforms where influence might translate to brand deals or Patreon subscriptions, LinkedIn performance has direct B2B economic consequences.

Consider the case of Justin Welsh, who reports building “$10.3M+ in business revenue at ~86% profit margins” largely through LinkedIn content. His posts about entrepreneurship routinely generate hundreds of thousands of impressions and directly drive sales for his courses and consulting services. Welsh’s success illustrates how LinkedIn has flattened traditional professional hierarchies—you don’t need a corner office or MBA to influence industry conversations.

The Shadow Audience Effect

Erving Goffman once described everyday life as a kind of stage, where individuals perform identity for an audience. LinkedIn crystallizes this theory in digital form.

What makes LinkedIn’s artificial authenticity particularly powerful is what we might call the “shadow audience effect.” For every person who reads and engages with your post, there are dozens more who scroll past, absorbing your message without leaving any digital trace. You’re influencing people you’ll never know you influenced, creating ripple effects of professional persona that extend far beyond the platform’s ability to track.

This invisible influence explains why LinkedIn content often feels like performance art masquerading as professional insight. The poster knows they’re being watched by potential clients, employers, and industry peers, even if those watchers never engage. The result is calculated transparency—being selectively vulnerable through frosted glass. For younger professionals or those without traditional credentials, this can create a pressure to perform vulnerability as a career strategy, not as a path to connection.

What LinkedIn has accomplished is the digitization of what Pierre Bourdieu called ‘cultural capital‘—the knowledge, skills, and tastes that signal social status. Professional networking was always about displaying and accumulating this capital, but LinkedIn made the process explicit, quantified, and globally accessible. Your post engagement isn’t just social validation; it’s the real-time measurement of your professional cultural capital in the marketplace.

This is why so many users report career opportunities or new clients from posts that received little visible engagement—because the real influence lies in who’s watching, not who’s commenting.

When Machines Learn Professional Authenticity

The integration of AI into LinkedIn content creation represents an evolution in professional identity performance. AI writing tools now offer LinkedIn-specific templates—some trained on large datasets of high-performing posts—designed to replicate the cadence of professional inspiration. The AI learns the cadence of professional inspiration, the rhythm of humble bragging, the precise vulnerability-to-insight ratio that drives engagement.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle observes: “Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.” This shift is particularly evident in professional contexts, where AI-assisted content creation is reshaping how we construct and perform our professional identities.

This shift in how we perform professional identity online doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s emerging in parallel with broader workplace transformations—remote work, pandemic-era burnout, the so-called “Great Resignation,” and the rise of solo entrepreneurship. As traditional career ladders collapse or morph into lattices, platforms like LinkedIn have become a kind of stage where we rehearse relevance. In a world where your job title might be in flux and your office is your kitchen table, broadcasting a coherent professional persona isn’t just branding—it’s survival.

The implications extend beyond LinkedIn. As AI becomes more sophisticated at mimicking human professional communication, the premium on genuinely human insights—the kind that can’t be replicated by algorithms—may actually increase. We might be witnessing the last gasps of performed authenticity before authenticity becomes the only viable differentiator.

The Algorithm Made Me Do It

Andy Warhol famously predicted everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. LinkedIn offers something more unsettling: the chance to remain professionally relevant indefinitely—as long as we never stop performing.

The platform has created a new form of professional purgatory where authenticity becomes a competitive advantage precisely because it’s so rare. In a feed flooded with AI-generated inspiration and algorithmic optimization, the genuinely human voice doesn’t just stand out—it becomes economically valuable. We’ve reached the point where being authentically yourself is the ultimate professional hack.

LinkedIn didn’t create performed professionalism—it simply made it visible, measurable, and unavoidable. The platform exposed what was always true about professional identity: it has always been performative, from the firm handshake to the power lunch to the carefully curated resume. LinkedIn merely provided the stage and sold tickets to the show.

The real question isn’t whether artificial authenticity is corrupting professional discourse—it’s whether we’ll develop the literacy to distinguish between human insight and algorithmic mimicry. As AI becomes more sophisticated at replicating professional wisdom, the ability to offer genuinely original thinking may become the ultimate career differentiator.

The humblebrag industrial complex will endure, but so will our fundamentally human need for genuine connection and meaningful work. The challenge is learning to sound like ourselves—even while writing on a platform (and perhaps with tools) designed to make us all sound the same. Just perhaps, the most human thing we can do is think thoughts worth writing ourselves.

The modern spam email is a persistent nuisance in the way that flies are a nuisance at a barbecue. No longer do we have the endearingly crude Nigerian Prince rackets of the early internet—those almost quaint digital cons that served as training wheels for our collective skepticism—but instead, today’s spam is the stuff of sleek, AI-generated sales missives that bypass junk folders and have colonized every business leaders’ inbox since AI systems gained popularity. These are messages crafted by machines promising to deliver your next great business opportunity. The sophistication of this digital masquerade would almost be impressive if it weren’t so obviously serving as the death knell for genuine human communication.

The scammers’ tools have evolved from rudimentary manual impersonation to something more akin to deepfake method acting, with AI systems so thoroughly inhabiting their roles that the traditional indicators of inauthenticity—those little tells that our spam-detection wetware has evolved to spot—have become all but irrelevant. There has been a 4,000 percent increase in malicious emails just since the release of ChatGPT, which becomes even more unsettling, considering these are just the attempts we know about. Many successful ones, by definition, don’t get reported because their victims don’t immediately realize they’ve been scammed. It’s like a digital version of the old philosophical question about trees falling in forests, except the trees are bank accounts, and the forests are the byzantine network of digital financial systems that most of us interact with daily without understanding.

The internet, as we know it, is dead, and these scammers themselves are becoming oddly professional about the whole thing. There are now AI tools designed explicitly for phishing—WormGPT, FraudGPT, et al.—that come with their own user manuals and customer support. The evolution of fraud, it turns out, looks a lot like any other SaaS business model. You can get technical support for your scamming software, presumably from people using AI to generate their support responses, creating a kind of infinite regression of artificial interactions. We’ve passed beyond the event horizon of truth, where fraud infrastructure is more professional than many legitimate businesses. A Nigerian Prince email circa 2005 was essentially a freelancer, a digital artisan crafting bespoke deceptions with nothing but a keyboard and a dream. Today’s scammer is more like a middle manager at a tech startup, running A/B tests on subject lines and optimizing conversion funnels.

The corporate jargon isn’t accidental—this is what happens when crime becomes not just organized but optimized. Approximately half of all emails sent each day qualify as spam, a statistic that initially seems encouraging when compared to 2011’s staggering 80 percent. But this apparent improvement masks a more unsettling truth: spam hasn’t decreased so much as it has grown more sophisticated and learned to pass as legitimate correspondence. According to the 2024 Imperva Bad Bot Report, “non-human traffic” now accounts for half of all internet activity, with malicious bots comprising 32% of total internet traffic. These are the vital signs that the internet has begun to digest itself.

Take, for instance, the recent case of a Reddit post that garnered 50,000 upvotes and 2,000 comments by claiming ChatGPT had saved its author’s life by diagnosing a heart attack. The viral post was later revealed to have been generated by ChatGPT itself—an AI system crafting a story about its own life-saving capabilities, filtered through the familiar conventions of social media confession. The post’s popularity and subsequent revelation serve as an almost-too-perfect metaphor for our current moment: machines telling stories about machines, consumed and celebrated by humans who can no longer distinguish authentic experience from its simulation.

Rather than resisting this trend, the business world is apparently racing to embrace it. Companies can now deploy AI-powered tools to send automated emails pitching anything from gadgets to their own automated email services—using apps such as Apollo.io and Reply.io, which promise to “scale” human interaction as if genuine communication were simply a technical issue waiting for a technological solution. Each new automation tool presents itself as an inevitability rather than a choice, leaving business leaders to wonder not whether they should automate their communications but whether they can afford not to.

The particular innovation of modern spam separates it from its predecessors—its ability to simulate authenticity while simultaneously draining authentic communication of all meaning. Subject lines like, “I wonder if this might be something you’d be interested in?” flood inboxes at a scheduled cadence, each one calibrated with an opening sentence phrased by AI to mention a hobby or interest the recipient’s metadata is logged as having, in the hope that it might trigger the neurological response that makes humans feel acknowledged, creating a kind of Pavlovian loop of false recognition. The email automation services can automatically add personalized details to emails, feigning to be a fellow alumnus from your school, a speaker of your second language, or a fan of your favorite sport. The messages accumulate, stack, and multiply, each pretending to be the first point of contact in what their algorithms optimistically imagine might become a “genuine business relationship.” (The term “digital exhaust” refers to all the data we leave behind as we move through our increasingly online lives, like a contrail made of ones and zeros.)

What we’re witnessing is not merely the automation of communication but its transformation into digital carpet bombing. Business leaders, facing pressure to “scale” their operations, find themselves seduced by platforms promising to transform their sales departments into automated message factories. The same tools that were meant to supplement human interaction have begun to replace it entirely, creating a strange new economy where machines talk to machines about selling machines that help machines talk to machines. So, when one company adopts automated outreach, its competitors feel obligated to follow suit, each racing to deploy more sophisticated AI systems to cut through the noise created by previous AI systems. The result is an endless escalation of artificial communication, with each innovation raising the baseline level of digital noise that the next innovation will have to overcome.

The customer service chatbot is a now-ubiquitous digital gatekeeper that serves as a harbinger of this automated future. What began as a cost-saving measure has evolved into a corporate force field, an AI-powered barrier between businesses and the humans they ostensibly serve. The pattern now threatens to replicate across sales departments, marketing teams, and every other business function involving human-to-human contact. The question is not whether these tools work—they do (clearly, some sales leads are clicking these emails and booking calls and becoming prospects, just as many dupes click on phishing links and become financial crime victims). When every professional interaction becomes mediated through layers of artificial intelligence, what happens to the subtle human elements that have traditionally governed business relationships? When machines become responsible for initiating and maintaining professional connections, what remains of the social fabric that has historically bound commercial society together?

This automation cycle poses a dilemma for any business leader who is still concerned with maintaining some vestige of authentic interaction. The metrics that drive corporate decision-making—conversion rates, engagement statistics, sales pipeline efficiency—all seem to suggest that automated systems outperform their human counterparts. 85 percent of the Fortune 500 already use Microsoft AI, and companies like Salesforce are actively championing this dystopian sales pipeline singularity. However, these measurements fail to account for the gradual erosion of trust when every professional interaction becomes suspect, and each email must be scrutinized for signs of artificial origin. The tools themselves betray the scope of the problem. Email automation platforms might be able to skirt GDPR regulations, bypass spam filters, and generate endless variations of the same message—each feature representing another step away from genuine communication and toward a mechanized process that mistakes quantity for quality. Even the traditional escape hatch of “unsubscribe” links has begun to disappear as if opting out of communication has become obsolete in an age of perpetual digital solicitation.

But perhaps most telling is the emergence of a secondary market of tools explicitly designed to combat the first wave of automation. Spam-blocking services, email authentication protocols, and AI detection systems represent an entire industry built around the premise that authentic communication now requires technological protection. The result is a digital arms race between automated systems trying to penetrate human attention and other computerized systems attempting to preserve it. Each new tool promises to solve the problems created by previous tools, leading to a cascade of technological solutions in search of increasingly technological issues. The LinkedIn feed becomes a parade of AI-generated humblebrags, cold sales email outreach becomes an exercise in algorithmic persistence, and customer service becomes a chatbot labyrinth—all in service of a vision of business that seems to have forgotten why humans ever communicated in the first place.

The very existence of tools designed to detect and filter artificial communication suggests a deep-seated human resistance to this automated future. The same business leaders rushing to adopt AI sales tools might invest in systems to protect their inboxes from similar solicitations. This contradiction reveals something about authentic communication: it cannot be scaled, automated, or optimized without changing what it is. The cultural shift toward automated communication represents more than just another step in the progression of business technology—it marks a reimagining of how organizations relate to their customers, their employees, and ultimately to the concept of human interaction itself. When Meta briefly released and hastily retracted its AI-generated social media accounts in early 2025, they demonstrated the technical feasibility of automated social presence and its profound cultural implications. The experiment suggests a threshold exists beyond which artificial engagement becomes actively repellent.

This threshold may represent our last best defense against the complete automation of professional communication. Just as the human immune system develops antibodies to combat specific threats, the collective consciousness of internet users is developing an increasingly sophisticated resistance to artificial engagement. The backlash against obviously automated messages has forced the technology to become more refined, but this sophistication itself becomes a kind of tell—the uncanny valley of corporate doublespeak. For business leaders willing to consider it, the solution might lie not in rejecting automation entirely but in recognizing its proper role as a tool rather than a replacement for human interaction. The same technology that enables mass automated outreach could, if properly directed, serve to enhance rather than replace human communication. The question becomes not how to automate more effectively but how to preserve the essential humanity of communication in an increasingly automated world.

The truth—or whatever approximation of reality we can still access—is that we’re all unwitting participants in what might be the largest epistemological experiment in human history. It tests whether human society, which evolved around certain basic assumptions about truth and trust, can continue functioning when those assumptions no longer hold. This preservation of human elements in business communication may soon become an ethical choice and a competitive advantage. As autonomous AI systems flood professional networks, genuine human interaction—with all its inefficiencies, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections—may become the ultimate luxury good. The ability to speak directly to another human being and engage in unmediated communication could become the defining feature separating premium services from their automated counterparts. The alternative—continuing down the current path of ever-increasing automation—leads to digital heat death, where the signal-to-noise ratio approaches zero. In this future, the ability to verify human origin becomes more valuable than the content of the communication itself, and the simple act of proving one’s humanity becomes a necessary prelude to any meaningful exchange.

Such a future is not inevitable, but avoiding it requires a conscious choice on the part of business leaders to value authentic communication over automated efficiency. It involves recognizing that not everything that can be automated should be automated and that the true measure of communication is not its scale but its effectiveness in fostering genuine human connection. The punchline, if you want to call it that, is that there probably isn’t a punchline. No neat conclusion wraps this all up in a way that lets us feel like we’ve learned something valuable. We’re all just here, trying to navigate a world where the difference between real and artificial has become largely theoretical, each of us becoming our own security guard, checking IDs at the door of every interaction.

The Nigerian Prince may be dead, but his digital descendants thrive in the polished language of AI-generated sales pitches from the corporate world and automated phishing campaigns from the dark web. The challenge for modern business leaders is not just to resist this trend toward total automation but to actively preserve spaces for human interaction in an increasingly artificial landscape. The alternative is to watch the last vestiges of authentic connection disappear into an endless loop of machines talking to machines about machine-generated concerns.

Most of us are familiar with subscriptions. The business model goes back to at least the early 1800s with magazines and evolved to the milkmen of the 1860s who were paid to deliver milk door to door on a recurring schedule. Those were the early one-size-fits-all versions compared to the endless commerce options available now. We’ve splintered into subsets and subreddits of interest. From Substack sermons to Patreon patronages, we’ve all funneled into micro-tribes. Social media entrepreneurs and influencers often spout video ads arguing that those looking for passive income and side hustles should subscribe to their online courses to ultimately learn how to create their own courses to sell in their teacher’s footsteps.

In March 2023, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule revision called “click to cancel,” which aims to make canceling subscriptions less difficult. Since then, lobbyists have balked that such a rule would cost businesses $2.7 billion, and though hearings have occurred, so have delays. Consumers deserve to be allowed to opt out of subscription fees they don’t want and perhaps never meant to agree to, just as consumers deserve customer support to be as prioritized as much as “audience retention” when decision makers are considering the bottom line.

Navigating customer service these days feels like clawing through a murky cesspool, blindfolded and gagged. Want to chat about a problem with Facebook, Uber or YouTube? Good luck with those chatbots churning out scripted answers with all the humanity of a toaster. The issues of today’s customer service standards go hand in hand with the issues around the ability to cancel a product or service.

The Business Model

Any industry can contain both lucrative and predatory aspects. Some companies, like Apple and Netflix, make canceling subscriptions very simple and straightforward within their apps, and others, like GoDaddy, do the same while always providing helpful and competent human customer service.

Many sites, however, do neither. According to a survey by Zendesk, “Of those reporting a bad customer experience, almost all of them (97%) changed their future buying decisions.” In many cases, the most important digital product priority appears to be centered around shaping the user experience to drive network effect to maximize screen time and revenue and not maximize customer satisfaction.

The virtuous loop for Pinterest.

Sarah Tavel

The holy grail for most subscription services is a virtuous loop. The graphic above and the one below are both from a presentation by Sarah Tavel. The one above shows an example of one of the virtuous loops in the Pinterest business model. The one below illustrates that although Tinder has several virtuous loops, the most important metric of the site (supposedly being a successful date) is actually an offramp to leave the app, which is not ideal for Tinder.

The virtuous loops for Tinder.

Sarah Tavel

Too Big To Cancel

It has been reported that “the global subscription economy market size is projected to be $1.5 trillion in 2025.” A report in 2017 claimed that 35% of Americans are paying for subscriptions without knowing it, and a 2022 study found that consumers spend $133 more per month on subscriptions than they think they do. Who hasn’t forgotten they signed up for a free trial at some point? Scams and forgotten charges are a nuisance, but even the ones you know about can be a nightmare to cancel.

Research from Toolkits and National Research Group found that 67% of consumers would be more likely to subscribe to digital publications if canceling subscriptions was easier. The central idea behind the FTC’s “click to cancel” proposal is that if it takes 30 seconds to sign up, it should take 30 seconds to cancel. If canceling is easy, you might want to return and use that service again. If it takes three days to cancel it, you will probably never return.

When it is possible to cancel, common hurdles still include persistent nudges and discount offers to stay subscribed when you try to cancel, burying or obscuring cancellation buttons and options, requiring phone cancellations and dealing with retention-focused call scripts, and the inability to cancel directly through the website/app you subscribed through.

The image below was posted on Reddit as a proposed lifehack to finally get a cable provider to cancel a subscription by saying you are going to jail and don’t need cable anymore.

A screenshot of a customer service chat with Xfinity.

AndreIzCool/Reddit

Canceling subscriptions has become needlessly complex, with companies employing tactics like offering discounts or making cancellation options harder to find. If you try to cancel copy.ai, for instance, you’ll be prompted with a popup offering “40% off for life,” which sounds like a good deal. But if they can offer that much of a discount, then why did they charge so much to begin with? Supply and demand in the internet and credit card age has only propelled a corporate mindset of charging as much as the customer can endure.

A screenshot of a deal offered when trying to cancel copy.ai.

Nathan Pettijohn

Make Things More Complicated

In the 1980s and 1990s, companies began outsourcing nonessential work functions overseas. This led to the type of phone support with a prepared script and an inability to solve problems that still exists today, and AI chatbots are now replacing that one bad option with an even worse one. Both moves served the bottom line but not the customer.

Last fall, Tinder rolled out a widely mocked VIP tier of $499 a month for their dating app, and this month, Equinox announced a new membership that costs $40,000 per year. The strategy is clear for some businesses: Charge as much as possible and make it nearly impossible to cancel. On top of that, they’ve made customer support feel like a minefield of obstacles one must navigate even to discuss the idea of not paying anymore.

If you subscribe to the digital version of the Wall Street Journal and attempt to cancel, you will find an amusing labyrinth of confusion. Their website contains a menu item you can click that says “manage/cancel subscription.” Still, if you click on that link, the info on the page is unrelated to canceling, so you are driven in a circle to eventually realize that you can only cancel by phone. Canceling by phone is an option companies should still offer, but there is no reason (other than retention) not to allow an online cancelation function when signing up on the website is simple. The most infuriating aspect of this particular example is that there is already a button on the website for canceling—it just doesn’t do anything.

A screenshot of the cancellation page for the Wall Street Journal.

Nathan Pettijohn

For many companies, making cancellations an arduous process is a deliberate strategy to reduce churn and keep revenue flowing, even at the cost of an adversarial customer relationship. Making it deceptively difficult to cancel a subscription is an example of what has been described as dark patterns in action.

Shift To Subscriptions

If you want to, you can sign up for a vinyl of the month, a hot sauce of the month, or a pair of fresh and stylish underwear every month. This allows us to feed our need to consume while simultaneously being exposed to new products that align with something we already desire. None of this was possible before this century of interconnected niche communities spawned from the internet.

There are subscription services people utilize for their pets. Some people pay subscriptions for home security systems like Nest and Ring. You can get a meal kit delivered, so you never have to eat out again. There are meditation apps you pay for and so on. This model is so omnipresent that it feels like things have always been this way. Until 2013, though, it was possible to make a single purchase of Microsoft Office. You’d buy a physical box at Best Buy and have your very own activation key, meaning you owned the tools included, and you could use that software without paying for it again. Then, in 2013, it became a forever subscription service if you wanted to keep using Word, Excel or PowerPoint. By 2017, Adobe had followed suit and stopped selling licenses, meaning that you have to pay monthly to use tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Premier. Countless examples of this exist.

Once upon a time, we owned things. Now we rent everything, paying tithes to corporations who dangle convenience like a carrot. In February, it was reported that “99% of U.S. households now subscribe to at least one or more streaming services.” Nearly all our content is streamed from sites like Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu. Even if you buy a movie on Amazon Prime or download it from Netflix, their terms can change anytime, and you never technically own anything tangibly. The same could be argued with your cloud storage, whether or not it seems like the content is yours. The same goes for music, whether on Spotify, YouTube or Apple. Back when you purchased vinyl, a cassette or a CD, you owned that music for the rest of your life. Now it just feels like you own it because it displays on your device.

The Key Takeaways

The subscription model is here to stay, but it can be improved. Think about what it says about these companies that the FTC needs to propose a rule that says canceling a subscription shouldn’t be nearly impossible. Relying so heavily on revenue from customers who find it hard to cancel or who forget about their subscriptions is not a sustainable or smart long-term revenue strategy. Hopefully, the FTC will be able to follow through and address this headache to some extent, but consumers want and deserve more.

Companies must rise above the tactics of subterfuge and manipulation. Prioritize clarity, simplicity and unwavering customer support. Make the exit as inviting as the entrance so that leaving is a choice rather than an ordeal. This creates an undeniable trust far more valuable than fleeting profits gained through opacity. In the corporate competition for dominance, the wisest players understand that the strength of a relationship lies in mutual respect, not coercion.

Alright, not everyone is verified, but a lot more “regular” people have that once-prestigious blue checkmark on Twitter and Instagram today than yesterday, while the notable people it was invented for have been stripped. You may notice this while scrolling on your phone the typical 150 times a day––like any average American, mindlessly captivated by your social media feeds, texts, headlines, and videos. Then you notice how someone you know passingly now has that blue checkmark, while a celebrity you follow does not.

In March of 2023, Meta started offering U.S. users paid subscriptions for verified Facebook and Instagram accounts, and Elon Musk’s chaotic timeline of Twitter’s verification protocols over the past six months likely played a role in the timing and rollout of Meta’s new offering, so we will focus the conversation here on Twitter and Instagram verification. What’s happening, and why should it matter to any of us?

Who used to get verified?

Until recently, anyone could go through a process to request verification on either platform by filling out a form within their apps. The process involved uploading a photo of your identification (such as a passport or driver’s license), along with submitting press links to support your notability. This original method still exists on Meta but not on Twitter. The purpose these blue checkmarks served was to help prevent imposter accounts from frauding and fooling the public. In 2008, Shaq was the first person to be verified on social media in order to combat accounts pretending to be him.

Whereas that sweet blue checkmark used to mean that you were really somebody, today, it is presumably being sullied in the gutter through its rushed monetization. As of this week, if you don’t pay Twitter, you could lose your legacy blue verification checkmark like Beyoncé and Ronaldo. In fact, most of the once-standard offerings on Twitter have been removed from accounts that don’t pay the monthly fee. If you don’t pay the subscription, you aren’t allowed to protect your account’s security with two-factor authentication, and you aren’t even allowed to run ads on Twitter. In short, if you decide not to give Twitter money every month, you aren’t allowed to give them more money through their ad platform.

How to get verified now?

On Meta, you can simply sign up like any subscription service and pay a monthly fee. For both Facebook and Instagram you’re looking at around $27 a month total. Meta’s process involves uploading your identification, so in that sense, they still earn the title of “verification,” while Twitter’s newest process is something of a poorly managed dumpster fire. Twitter’s new offerings include Twitter Blue for individuals at $8 a month, and Verified Organizations, which is currently priced at a staggering $1,000 a month. Payment is all that’s needed, as Twitter does not require any identification to actually verify your identity. The word “verification” on Twitter is now being used much more loosely.

Recent discussions on the topic of mass verification have mainly centered on the easily quotable statement that, “If everyone is verified, no one is verified.” In other words, the exclusivity of notability was the allure for many, and the point of such articles is to lay claim to how we were better off how things were before. The truth is, things weren’t ideal before, and we certainly aren’t marching in the right direction now.

How it ought to be:

Imagine that you were charged with setting the policies for social media sites from scratch. What would the ideal relationship be between humans and these apps that are presumably meant to connect humans? If social media didn’t exist before today and we were all deciding how and where it fits best in our lives, then paid verification would have a clearly beneficial role to serve two main purposes:

1. Every account would have a verified identity by uploading identification proving they are who they say they are. This would effectively eliminate bots, trolls, spam, and imposters.

2. The paid subscription model would negate the need to see advertisements in your feed, possibly with tiered levels such as Hulu. If you’re paying a subscription, you shouldn’t also be beaten over the head with ads.

Twitter and Meta have taken very different approaches to this dilemma at nearly the same timeframe. Neither one of them tackles the real values of verification from the user’s perspective. Effectively, both programs are nothing more than opportunistic money grabs. Meta’s paid checkmark does at least include verifying your identity, in addition to making you seem cool. The ads, though, never stop. For that, they accomplish one of the two benefits listed above.

Twitter’s current iteration provides neither benefit. While Musk deserves credit for spurring movement on these ideas, the way Twitter has incorporated paid checkmarks has been a never-ending comedy of errors, and it will likely change its policies another dozen times this year. The point, again, is that you just have to pay Twitter for the checkmark — you don’t have to upload a license or passport or anything, so the checkmark itself just means “I pay $8 a month,” and no real value is provided otherwise, except for them letting you turn back on your 2FA, run ads, and access other basic features.

One perspective would be that if social media were to truly operate at a level that benefited its users, then surely life would be a breeze. No trolls, no surprises. No fake reviews on restaurants, hotels, or movies. We would live in a digital, egalitarian utopia where, like in China (or an episode of Black Mirror), you would be monitored and given a social credit rating and every verifiable aspect of your life would be recorded on the blockchain. That’s one take, at least. Today we face a handful of looming contradictions: from our government’s inability to pass legislation regarding the internet at a pace that keeps up with innovation, to our general passivity regarding our privacy and data, to the age-old idea that if we just throw more money at something, it must get better.

The problem personified:

One could probably make some sort of devil’s advocate-type argument that anonymity is an inherent good that has always existed on the internet. In the same breath, such a debate could likely be framed that trolls, bots run by AI, spam accounts, catfish, and any other anonymous voices are valid in one form or another simply because that’s the way things have always been. The arguer could claim that it is really our regulation attempts that are reminiscent of imperialist tyranny, imposing our modern assumptions on wild and free, eternally evolving digital personas that may be real or fake. Social media ads, similarly, seem acceptable merely because that’s the business model that worked until now.

The fact is, the advertising model for social media is flawed. Social media sites should not be serving us ads if we are paying for their service. Some sites, like Amazon and Google, do make sense to serve hyper-targeted ads because they know what you’ve bought and that you want to buy something else. You’re on Amazon to buy something. You’re not scrolling Instagram or Twitter as a mere consumer, or are you? Maybe the idea of living 30 seconds without seeing an advertisement is unrealistic entitled silliness, and maybe the idea of knowing you are communicating online with a sentient being is just as outrageous.

It is not likely that social media sites will die off, but they will likely not be the juggernauts they are today if they’re restructured to benefit users. This all may sound like a pipe dream, but if you set up the internet today, knowing everything you know now, it is far from likely that you would choose to structure our largest social media sites and our relationships with them in any form currently in place. Right now they’re trying to get the best of both worlds: paid verification, ads, and at least in Twitter’s case, no thought given to actually verifying identities. Verification used to mean something, and it could be a valuable step forward if it was done with appropriate intention.

In astrophysics, an event horizon and singularity are the two basic components of a black hole. According to study.com, an event horizon is “A boundary within spacetime itself beyond which events that happen can’t affect you. Events beyond this boundary are either so far away, or so disconnected from you, that you cannot see them, hear them, or receive any kind of knowledge that they happened.”

Whatever happens beyond an event horizon cannot be seen, and in many ways this can serve as an apt metaphor for how our seemingly infinite access to information is actually drowning us in a sea of misinformation right now, along with facts, breaking news, conspiracy theories and the like. It’s nearly impossible to know who to trust or how to see what’s really going on anymore. The axiom “Trust but verify” has now evolved into “Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not.”

The scientific method

Either social media has destroyed the scientific method or we have hit the event horizon and better learn to live with it.

As you would see in any eighth grade biology book, “Learning about the scientific method is almost like saying that you are learning how to learn. The scientific method is a process used by scientists to study the world around them. It can also be used to test whether any statement is accurate.” The scientific method breaks down as the process of coming up with a hypothesis, performing experiments to test that hypothesis, refining the idea, performing more experiments, and then coming to a final conclusion.

Social media, however, operates on advertising revenues from clickbait articles just as news sources rely on sensationalist coverage for more eyeballs. Any bit of information or misinformation is shared, covered and discussed. The more absurd, the more attention it receives. Meanwhile, actual scientific voices amid the Covid-19 pandemic have been largely silenced or ignored in many of the world’s most powerful countries. If something reported is wrong, news sources will print a retraction at the most, but the advertising dollars will still stay in their pockets.

The amount of censorship, politics and class disparity in the supposedly “pure data” has now contaminated that data. It’s been altered to such a degree that we can no longer predict the future of human behavior. Even looking at past events seems to only offer us limited insight at this point.

This is all out of a playbook

There’s a lot of true stuff in the news lately that sounds like it’s crazy and vice versa. But it’s clear that there’s enough true stuff not being covered, and we should be concerned about the censorship. Every “expert” advertisement or well designed obfuscation feels and reads like gaslighting. Even something like the recent conspiracy viral video “Plandemic” which was quickly banned by Facebook and YouTube, plays a part in our web of information. The mere act of tech companies banning that video gave the story a certain credibility to its anti-vaccine audience and helped Judy Mikovits sell even more books. The hot button topic then becomes “Who qualifies as an expert?”

If we demanded a commitment to the scientific method before allowing governments and news media to broadcast something as truth or breaking news, these sorts of conspiracy theories would hold less credence and wouldn’t even be mentioned by serious journalists, or banned by our tech companies. There would be no reason to if we all cared enough about the truth to follow proven science. Because of our current flow of information, these theories attract the skeptical among us. Anyone with any theory can find confirmation bias just as easily as finding information contrary to their opinions.

On the same day, you could find an article online that says that Hydroxychloroquine may be effective in treating Covid-19, and you could find an article saying that it isn’t effective. You can hear that the president of the United States himself is taking that drug, and you can hear claims that he probably isn’t. You can find disagreement over whether masks work or don’t work. You can find a piece that says that children don’t get seriously ill from the virus, and you can find a piece that says that children may be at risk from the virus. You can read that the tests are unreliable, and you can also read that the tests are accurate. Even the reporting metrics for tests has been wrought with issues state by state. There is no lack of contradictory claims or news stories on a daily basis right now. That misinformation then breeds even more misinformation.

More than a fifth of people in England believe that Covid-19 is a hoax and half of Fox News viewers in the U.S. believe that Bill Gates wants to use virus vaccines to track them. According to Carnegie Mellon University, nearly half of the Twitter accounts discussing “reopening America” may be bots. The public is left operating out of confusion and fear while the federal government has opted out of providing any sort of leadership or clarity, or any sense of respect for the scientific method. In Russia, doctors keep falling out of windows. In China, news of the outbreak had been suppressed since December. And in the United States, well, we basically invented modern propaganda.

The text most applicable here is “The Medium is the Message“ by Marshall McLuhan, in which he explains that, “The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered.” Social media has helped to weaponize and destroy the scientific method, and now fake news aggregators are making up facts without sources.

Everything seems difficult to piece together these days, and so we may be at an event horizon where so much crap has contaminated the raw data that we’re just unable to predict the future anymore, at all. In South Korea, schools were reopened and then closed hours later, which in hindsight seems like it would have been predictable or preventable. We do need all types of input and debate. We don’t need “protected” from even the craziest of ideas. Even if there were 100,000 tin foil flat earthers protesting outside with assault rifles, there would surely still be enough people who are able to see around corners and have unique enough insights that could lead us in the direction of truth and reason.

We need to return to the scientific method

At the end of the day, the logical conclusion is that we desperately need credible data that can be openly debated without influence or censorship by governments or tech companies. The fact that debate and engagement is how these companies make money is another reason to discredit the claims of media ownership creating fake news. It’s capitalism at its finest, and its worst. The irony is that any CEO would insist that their company should use the right data points to promote a marketing campaign on social media, and yet the information the public receives on these same sites regarding our health and safety during a pandemic is itself riddled with inaccurate data points.

We’ve reached something similar to what Aviv Ovadya predicted as an impending “Infocalypse.” Science is politicized and has now essentially become about marketing. The data we are given is badly skewed at the very least. How about just pushing for a return to respecting the scientific method and rigorously challenging a hypothesis? Failure to do this is the cause of fake news. Facts are facts and should withstand rigorous debate. It’s the debate that should spread ideas.

I co-wrote this article along with my friend and colleague Aaron Ray.

On June 30, 2017, the New Jersey rapper Tay-K (born Taymor McIntyre and also known as Tay-K 47) uploaded a music video called “The Race” to YouTube. Wanted for murder in connection to a crime committed when he was just 16 years old, Tay-K had been on the lam since escaping house arrest three months earlier. The music video shows him waving a gun and making it clear that he had no intention of going to trial.

Both the song and the video have a raw authenticity that helped them go viral. Tay-K was rapping about his own truth and wasn’t simply another posturing artist fronting a facade. Today, “The Race” has 168 million views on YouTube. Tay-K wasn’t so lucky: Working off tips that streamed in on the heels of the video, U.S. Marshals arrested him later that day.

Tay-K’s story paints a clear picture of the absurdity of “self-snitching,” a phenomenon in which people post evidence of their crimes on social media. Most high-profile cases of self-snitching come from the rap world: For example, both Chicago rapper Chief Keef and New York rapper Tekashi 69 have run afoul of the law thanks to videos posted online.

However, self-snitching is just one symptom of a broader cultural phenomenon. We are living in a time when young people literally fall off buildings while looking for a perfect Instagram shot. Desperate for the dopamine hit that comes with social media likes and shares, people are going to increasingly extreme measures to get immediate notification gratification. As a result, many people post first and ask questions later—only to find that their choices come back to haunt them. They’re accidental self-snitchers, and this might be their moment.

Rise of the self-snitchers

Social media hasn’t just made it more tempting to self-snitch on purpose. By multiplying the number of platforms available for online sharing and removing any friction from the posting process, social media has also made it much easier to self-snitch by accident. With the click of a button on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or any number of other apps, an inattentive user can ruin his or her reputation and possibly their career. Rather than a quest for likes, this kind of self-snitching usually arises from simple stupidity.

The poster boy for this kind of self-snitching is Anthony Weiner, who infamously tweeted a lewd picture of himself because he didn’t understand how to send a direct message. Ted Cruz—or the staffer who ran his social media—could be a runner up for the title. In 2017, Cruz’s official Twitter account liked a pornographic tweet, setting off a flurry of speculation about the sexual habits of the conservative senator, who previously defended Texas’ ban on sex toys.

But while rappers seem to end up in prison or worse for their crimes, the political class rarely seems to suffer for their own self-snitching. In this case, at least, what Donald Trump said seems true: He really could shoot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, by virtue of being a politician—at least, if the evidence was posted online.

On a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” the bespectacled host described numerous offensive posts and tweets by Australian politicians who were somehow still able to run for office. The posts included anti-Muslim, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments, as well as a rape joke and “a plethora of lewd photos” one candidate posted to his personal Facebook.

Closer to home, the former governor of Virginia’s poor judgment was exposed when the public discovered his medical school yearbook, which included photos of him in blackface and Klansman attire. Even Weiner had a real chance to resurrect his career after his first offense. (It was a later incident involving sexting a minor that finally put him in prison.)

We can only imagine what would have happened if Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had access to social media in high school, when he allegedly raped a classmate. But experience suggests that even if damning evidence of his misdeeds had been posted online, the end result might have been the same. Politicians—particularly white, male politicians—have long self-snitched online without real repercussions.

Soon, however, that might change. As investor Mark Cuban pointed out in a recent Inc. interview, software can already predict your purchase habits and product preferences based on which posts you like and who you follow on social media. Someday, that same data could be used to predict other actions, including your likelihood of committing crimes. It sounds like something out of the sci-fi world of Minority Report, but it’s not far from reality today. All of us—including white, male aspiring politicians—would be foolish not to prepare for it.

Think twice before posting

The takeaway is simple: People should curate what they post online and stop posting stupid stuff. If posting something seems questionable, then you shouldn’t post it. In our social media-obsessed universe, too many people believe that the more likes they get, the happier they will be. If wild and crazy content earns more attention, that public approval must make it okay to post.

But the truth is that most people will be just as happy with 14 likes on a post as they would be with 80,000. Social media “success” will never bring enough happiness to justify centering your life around your uploads—let alone risking your reputation. In addition, around 70% of hiring managers screen candidates’ social media before deciding to hire them. If nothing else, people should understand that their posts impact their potential career success.

If you’re struggling to stick to a social media diet, just repeat this mantra: Not everyone needs to know every single thing about your day. Up until the last decade or two, our species survived just fine without posting every thought they had, so your day won’t be ruined if you don’t know the shape of the heart in Karen’s latte. Even if it doesn’t seem like it now, in our constant rush of 21st-century technological innovation, your life on social media is much less important than your real life—and more people should remember that. At some point, the best answer may be to just unplug.

Subscribe now

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

In 2017, Sarah Solomon woke up in a hostel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Days earlier, she’d left her life as a high-flying New York publicist to travel the world. Now, she was on the greatest adventure of her life, using freelance PR work to make ends meet as she roamed the globe with her boyfriend, another digital nomad who’d quit his job at a lucrative consulting firm.

Solomon’s radical break from the office grind might seem like an extreme lifestyle choice—but it’s actually one more people should emulate. In 2019, most people suffer from some form of technology addiction. In fact, Americans check their phones an average of 52 times per day, including keeping tabs on work during personal hours. But that’s just an average; some admit to checking their phone 100 times per day or more. We’re spending our lives glued to screens while the real world passes us by.

This phenomenon is best described as the “attention economy,” in which dangerously addictive digital stimuli vie for our limited attention, leaving us frazzled, burned-out and less creative than ever.

As a result, today’s entrepreneurs don’t necessarily dream of a $100 million exit. Most people would rather blog about making pasta in Italy than burn the midnight oil for a corporate overlord. After all, why work more and produce less for companies laying off employees left and right when you can launch what marketer Drew Sanocki calls a “lifestyle business”? Instead of making lots of money to spend on more expensive gadgets, people are realizing that investing in experiences leads to a more fulfilling life.Today In: Leadership

While taking a step back at work might seem counterintuitive, it might be the only cure for our widespread technology addiction—and the only way we’ll actually have time to enjoy life.

People are always plugged in—and their work isn’t better for it

Today, people lead busy lives that seem built on constantly being plugged in. At work, emails, text messages and social notifications continuously pile up—all at the same time. People pride themselves on their hustle, their drive and, most of all, their ability to multitask.

However, studies show the idea of multitasking is a myth. Multitasking means simply jumping from to-do-list item to to-do-list item, never diving deeply enough into anything to come up with new creative ideas. No wonder science found that this constant hurried pace dulls your IQ as much as skipping an entire night of sleep.

It’s also no wonder that more than half of employees report feeling overworked, citing longer than 40-hour work weeks necessary just to stay afloat in a job market with faster turnaround times and lower job security. In an environment that seems to demand more and more of workers and bosses alike, burnout has become epidemic. A recent viral article summed up the experience of modern adulthood this way: “‘To adult’ is to complete your to-do list—but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.”

The biggest problem? Despite the fact that today’s employees do more, they produce less. Or in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ terms, despite this rise in hours worked, productivity is growing at the slowest rate ever.

Luckily, there’s a middle ground between being constantly plugged in and being professionally unplugged.

Focus on what’s truly important and let go of the rest

You don’t need to renounce your smartphone to access the benefits of unplugging. Instead, you have to be aware of how tech companies manipulate our attention and take steps to reclaim your ability to unplug.

Tristan Harris spent three years as a design ethicist at Google. He knows firsthand that, in the race to monopolize our attention, tech companies design interfaces that pit our psychological vulnerabilities against us. Apps purposely interrupt us, prey on our fear of missing out and disguise the real breadth of choices available. Now that Harris isn’t working for Google, he urges people to regain control of their attention by recognizing and resisting these mechanisms.

Another example of this is what author Greg McKeown calls “Essentialism,” or the practice of making space and time for only the most important things and exporting all the rest. In his book of the same name, McKeown argues that Essentialism is “not a business phenomenon, but a human phenomenon” that can yield better work-life balance.

Essentialism isn’t simply walking away from it all to go live in a shack with no cell reception or Wi-Fi, though that could certainly be your answer. It actually comes when you balance the activities you love with work you love. So, if you stop pretending to multitask and actually focus for a few hours on a single project, clients will be happier with the work, and you’ll have extra time to travel around the world.

Think you couldn’t possibly make the time?

Exhibit A: Marc Benioff. As the CEO of Salesforce, he’s a busy guy. He also recently bought Time Magazine and even took on helping provide funding for the homeless in San Francisco.

And while the stock market had its worst year in the last 10 in 2018, Salesforce stock grew 34%.

Why? Because after a two-week vacation where Benioff completely unplugged, he realized he was too busy and named a co-CEO, so the two could “divide and conquer.” As a result, he has time to do the things he cares about.

It’s true, though, not everyone is a billionaire who can export half the work of their lives to a co-CEO. How can you take the same lessons of Essentialism to help you focus on what matters while still doing great work before taking off to Thailand or Timbuktu?

Use automation to its full potential

In choosing where we spend our attention, technology doesn’t always have to be a negative force. Automation technology can free us from constantly monitoring work on our devices.

It might seem like it takes a special touch to pick the right Instagram story filter or email subject line. However, social media, email and other admin duties are some of the easiest tasks to outsource, delegate or automate, freeing up time to spend on more important things in life.

There are plenty of ways to test this approach on your own workflow, from adopting the Fortune 500 CEO mindset of using virtual admins to streamline the day to using software tools to automate posts across various channels, creating the consistency necessary for growing a following.

While it’s not as glamorous as becoming a travel blogger or Instagram influencer, it’s an easy and practical way to do better work and not just work more.

Less is more

Today, technology is designed to keep us constantly plugged in, yet never fully satisfied. Instead of renewing our energy or enhancing our connections, technology leaves us feeling drained by the constant barrage of notifications that prevent us from truly living.

It’s not always easy, but taking a step back is the best way to open up the creative space necessary in today’s business world. Tomorrow’s economy is knowledge-based, which means deeper thinking, innovation and creativity aren’t just nice-to-have skills; they are need-to-have competitive advantages. While it might feel good to check small administrative tasks off your to-do list, every minute spent handling work someone else could do is a minute not devoted to the next big idea.

There’s a balance between strategic unplugging, delegation and automation—and within it, there can be more time for the things that matter but also more results for the clients that matter, too. Sometimes it’s true that less is more: More time, more focus and more business.

Subscribe now

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

If Apple’s apology about employees snooping on private Siri conversations is any indication, our devices are listening to us in more ways than we realize.

Compared to previous eras, nearly everything today is recorded and stored for posterity. Computer science academics at Northeastern University conducted research with 17,000 of the most popular apps on Android and as Gizmodo reported, apps were found to be “recording the phone’s screen and sending that information out to third parties.”

To be fair, the likelihood of audio files of every conversation you have being transmitted and transcribed in full and then analyzed by an actual person is low. However, there are plenty of ways for algorithms and artificial intelligence to “listen” to you — and then use that data to target ads to you. While we’re aware of popular audio triggers like “Hey Siri” or “Alexa”, these sites and apps may also have hundreds or thousands of their own triggers used to store data points when you say what you like and where you go.

Over the past few decades, what used to require tedious sleuthing has become automated, as users have unwittingly given their information away freely. Nobody reads the terms and conditions, we just want to log in and share with our friends.

According to Gallup Research, 80% of millennials place “some” or “a lot” of trust in companies to keep their data secure, and are the generation most likely to say they think that their data is kept private. The truth is you have no right to privacy — and you probably never did.

Your data is already “out there”

Perhaps you downloaded FaceApp in the heat of the #OldAgeChallenge, then deleted the app out of concerns it would take your photos and data. Once you’ve downloaded and authorized the app, however, its creators have access to whatever data they want. Deleting it afterward does very little to protect your privacy. Some companies even acquire defunct apps simply to access user data.

Steve Wozniak said about private data: “I’m worried about everything. I don’t think we can stop it though.” His advice to anyone who cares about their privacy is to “figure out a way to get off Facebook.” The problem is “leaving” any social platform doesn’t erase the data you or your network has shared — and it opens the door for a lot of other sacrifices, too.

There’s little recourse considering none of what is happening is illegal. The entire system of social media supported by ads is flawed since it’s all geared to benefit advertisers and not users. And the results range from effective advertising boosting shareholder profits to swinging elections. Unless the laws or online advertising ecosystem are changed, then these tactics will only become more refined.

Big data, AI and algorithms deliver more than just ads

Technology companies use algorithms to target ads more effectively, and the more data they have, the more precise the campaigns are. This makes these ads much more influential than ads meant for a general public. Technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains it this way: machine learning has enabled algorithms to learn, adjust and improve advertising targeting to the point that no human would understand or know exactly how it is targeting users. More disturbing than that is the possibility that “a platform like that could decide to turn out voters for one side or another,” Tufekci said, “and how would we even know about it?”

The Netflix documentary “The Great Hack” also suggests that the data being collected is just allowing ads to predict our behavior extremely accurately, rather than simply listening to our microphones. Even if one of your friends authorized an app on their Facebook, that app still managed to harvest a lot of your data — and with enough data points you can scale this to impact elections and policy in entire countries, not to mention the consumer behavior of people in certain vulnerable demographics.

Ways to protect your online privacy

Despite the fact that it might seem hopeless, you should still care about your privacy even if you have nothing to hide. So what can you do if most of your data is already available and there’s always a better way to track and capture the rest?

One step you could take is to use some services based in countries with more strict privacy laws.

If you’re looking for anonymity, you’d use the Tor browser for any web browsing. You’d only want to use a search engine that respects your privacy like Duck Duck Go, StartPage, or searx, and use an encrypted email provider based in Switzerland like ProtonMail, or one based in Norway like Runbox. For your phone and devices you can use screen protectors and camera covers. You can turn off your phone’s microphone and for private messaging you’d use apps like Dust or Signal to send encrypted texts. You can find more digital privacy tools here. And for apps connected to Facebook, you can make sure to log in and remove their permissions.

Your phone and the apps within it are collecting signals based on many different data points. These signals can and will influence how advertisers can target you. As other people can access this data in very easy ways, you should be mindful and prudent about what technology you use, and whether the benefits you get from it outweigh the loss of privacy.

Because unless you use a flip phone and a typewriter, your tech will want to track, analyze and sell to you for the foreseeable future.

Picture yourself preparing for a vacation to Sedona, Arizona. As you search for the best tips on where to eat, hike or spend a day at the spa, you’ll probably find yourself flipping the pages of a travel magazine or scrolling through articles online. Sure enough, you find the suggestions you’re looking for and start booking your vacation.

You might guess the article you’re reading appears in Travel + Leisure or Condé Nast Traveler. But you’re actually reading Airbnbmag, a branded magazine partnership that pairs Airbnb’s travel insights with the power of Hearst’s world-class magazine production.

Airbnbmag is an example of how branded content is transforming the way brands engage their audiences. When the publication was launched in 2017, Airbnb was valued at approximately $30 billion—but its execs knew that simply competing in the hospitality space is no longer enough to ensure long-term success.

To foster loyal brand advocates, Airbnb needed to enhance its image as a premium lifestyle brand—a challenge Hearst Magazines had already mastered for 25 national magazines with more than 300 global editions. The partnership proved lucrative for Hearst and opened new opportunities for Airbnb to compete with legacy travel brands in media.

Today, successful brands think of themselves as media companies by investing in premium content that performs well on multiple platforms, cuts through audience fragmentation, and engages customers in real dialogue

Cross-platform content will replace single channel brands

Businesses that rely solely on a website and traditional advertising to hold their audience’s attention will soon fall behind. Today’s media landscape demands a cross-platform approach with multiple touchpoints for connecting with consumers.

Brands today compete in a flattened media landscape. When people consume content online, in print, on podcasts or through videos, they’re more likely to care about the quality of the content than who created it or even where it appears.

Media companies and traditional businesses are adjusting their idea of where, how and why content is created and published. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are designed to make branded content feel as relevant and accessible as content from a friend or a media company. In fact, the distinction between branded and non-branded content is so subtle that the Federal Trade Commission developed new guidelines that crack down on brands that disguise the promotional purpose behind their content.

To cope with this shift, brands are increasingly embracing a cross-platform approach. Instead of creating a branded blog or Instagram profile, smart businesses repurpose their content and optimize assets for multiple platforms. A successful brand is instantly recognizable, no matter where its content appears.

For example, Marriott invests heavily in a global brand studio that nimbly crafts content to engage millions of people around the world. By hiring media professionals, Marriott uses creativity and storytelling to create memorable premium content that engages its audience.

In 2015, Marriott produced a 24-minute short film called French Kiss about an American business traveler who’s staying at a Paris Marriott only to be drawn into a romantic cat-and-mouse chase with a playful French woman.

In a single channel approach, Marriott might have posted French Kiss on its website and waited for people to discover it. Instead, the film was released on YouTube, where it has attracted more than 6.2 million views. French Kiss was also screened at a gala hosted at Los Angeles’ Marina del Rey Marriott, ran in movie theaters, and became an in-room entertainment option on Marriott’s televisions and website. By starting with one content asset, Marriott launched a cross-platform campaign that reached its audience through a wide variety of channels online and in person.

Any company that invests in premium content should maximize its initial investment by taking a cross-platform approach.

Content needs to reach fragmented audiences

Today, people consume more content on a wider range of platforms than ever before. According to Nielsen, American adults spend up to 11 hours consuming media each day, including up to six hours of video content split between streaming platforms, mobile apps, traditional television and websites. As the recent wave of layoffs across the media industry shows, this fragmentation presents serious challenges for content producers.

Traditional targeted advertising still plays an important role in content creation. Before brands invest in content like Marriott’s short film, they should audit audience data that informs them where content should be targeted and what should be created in the first place. While Marriott’s business travelers might enjoy its short film, other businesses might attract an audience that wants to curl up with a magazine or listen to a podcast at the gym.

Content should be published on and optimized for platforms where your audience naturally congregates, directly engaging the people who are most likely to share it.

For example, Panera Bread, the popular sandwich and pastry chain, recently launched a new labeling system to help customers understand how its food supports a healthy diet. Panera Bread used this seemingly mundane administrative shift as the catalyst behind Food Interrupted, a new six-episode digital video series that published content weekly.

In addition to publishing the episodes on a mini website dedicated to the project, Panera Bread embraced the fact that food content is a mainstay on Instagram, which features more than 319 million posts with the hashtag “food.”

For its Food Interrupted campaign, Panera Bread repurposed video clips from the series as Instagram posts for its 477,000 followers, using a branded hashtag. The strategy worked: One Instagram video of a recipe for baking whole grain bread attracted nearly 17,000 views. The video was shot in the same style as BuzzFeed’s popular Tasty series, showing easy-to-follow instructions paired with an overhead shot of a person’s hands going through each step.

Panera Bread’s savvy content strategy leveraged its audience’s existing presence on Instagram to craft content optimized for the platform. Although viewers still flocked to the Food Interrupted website to watch full episodes featuring celebrities like Marcus Samuelsson and Rainn Wilson, those who didn’t migrate from Instagram still had the opportunity to directly engage with optimized versions of the video content in platform.

Content should spark authentic dialogue with audiences

Brands should use content to directly engage their audiences, incorporating readers’ and viewers’ feedback to enrich the content itself.

Most newspapers and magazines feature a Letters to the Editor section that invites readers to share their own opinions and insights. Similarly, brands can leverage user-generated content to enter a public dialogue with loyal fans.

Vans provides a smart example of how user-generated social media content can enhance an e-commerce website. The California-based shoe company sells customized shoes and backpacks, allowing customers to select colors and materials and even upload their own designs. The e-commerce pages selling these products prominently feature user-generated Instagram posts of custom designs.

By inviting fans to post images of their custom products and rewarding them with a spot on the company’s website, Vans uses content to prove it not only talks to customers but also listens to them and values their contributions.

Brands can even engage in dialogue with each other to catch fans’ attention. On Twitter, brands including MoonPie, Wendy’s and Denny’s have all mastered the witty banter that tends to go viral on the platform. The brands’ social media exchanges regularly receive media coverage and thousands of shares and likes from fans. The Twitter content these brands post is genuinely clever and engaging, and some posts are memorable enough to spark conversation that lasts for hours or even days, such as MoonPie’s response to a picture of a “Mooncake” on NASA’s official Twitter.

Content doesn’t require an explicit sales goal if it improves customers’ overall awareness of and experience with a brand. As online platforms encourage direct engagement between brands and followers, content should serve as an opportunity for authentic dialogue.

Investing in content pays dividends

To win new customers and earn greater loyalty from existing ones, brands should invest in high-quality content.

Companies are increasingly partnering with media outlets to produce branded video series, editorially rigorous magazines and ambitious audio shows. These partnerships yield content that’s subtly branded and highly creative, achieving the same level of quality audiences expect from non-branded content.

For companies that lack the budget to embark on a premium content partnership, there are still plenty of ways to create content like a media company. Online brand partnerships with influencers can tap into new audiences in an age of growing fragmentation, and all companies can repurpose their content for multiple channels to maximize the value of each asset they create.

To stand out in today’s media landscape, companies need to embrace the reality that “content is king” and start investing in high-quality media that uses audience insights and brand advocates to inform, entertain and inspire customer loyalty.

Subscribe now

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

In November 2016, Ja Rule introduced Billy McFarland as his “partner in crime” to an eager audience at The Web Summit. It was the beginning of a partnership that yielded Fyre Festival: what you might call a happy accident that became the third level of a fraud after McFarland’s Fyre app tanked. If not for McFarland’s inability to price his scams properly, he could have actually pulled off the ultimate convergence of social media influencers, venture capital and entertainment. Instead, it all culminated in an epic meltdown that captivated the world in real time.

In the months that followed, Ja Rule’s offhand reference as a “partner in crime” gained a significance the hip-hop mogul never anticipated. Ja Rule had served as Fyre Festival’s public face, partying in opulent, influencer-studded promotional videos that quickly went viral. Especially after McFarland was sent to prison for wire fraud, people started questioning whether his “partner in crime” deserved some of the blame, too.

Ja Rule himself certainly doesn’t think so. In January 2019, shortly after Netflix and Hulu released new documentaries about the rise and fall of Fyre Festival, he defended himself on Twitter. “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked(sic), lead astray!!!” he told his followers. It’s undisputed that Ja Rule’s a naive and foolish dummy, but that’s not rare in this story, and it doesn’t make him the villain. In this interview, Marc Weinstein explains the many reasons that he too was fooled along with everyone else and posits that Fyre Festival was really just a microcosm of a culture obsessed with social media combined with a narcissistic scam artist.

Ja Rule caught a lot of flak for that tweet, but here’s the thing: He’s right. He doesn’t deserve the blame for Fyre Festival. Like everyone else, Ja Rule was duped by Billy McFarland, the latest in a string of insidious Silicon Valley hipster-nerd scam artists like Martin Shkreli.

Ja Rule wasn’t the only one who believed in McFarland’s vision for a luxurious music-filled party in the Bahamas. When Fyre’s now infamous campaign filled influencers’ Instagrams with squares of the brand’s signature orange on December 12, 2016, funding from established investors began pouring in, including a $4 million investment from fashion executive Carola Jain.

Setting aside what we now know about the end result, the basic idea of Fyre Festival still holds up. People really do want to party on a beach with supermodels to the sound of Blink 182 and Major Lazer and then sleep in a luxurious villa at night. Someday, someone will attempt a similar event—and with the right team and a responsible production timeline, they’ll probably pull it off.

In an interview with Revolt TV, Ja Rule defended the validity of the idea of Fyre itself. “I’m no way, shape or form ashamed of my vision of what it was to do this,” he said. “I wanted to create something amazing.”

Unlike Fyre Festival, influencer marketing is real

Fyre Festival was pitched as a way to promote the Fyre app, and ultimately the festival became a ponzi scheme to make up for the app’s losses. No one is going to be able to replace agents and managers to book an artist like Beyonce to sing at a wedding through an app, and any real knowledge of the entertainment business would tell you that.

Fyre’s app and festival both lacked substance, but they brilliantly utilized influencer marketing as their smoke and mirrors to drive ticket sales and hype. Posts from well-known influencers like Kendall Jenner captured what people want—from splashy status symbols like private jets and yachts to the social capital that comes from associating with models and scoring thousands of Instagram likes.

Most consumers today are bored with traditional advertising and distrustful of its messages. According to recent research by Deloitte, streaming services and adblockers have made ads optional for most consumers, 75% of whom engage in adblocking tactics. Influencer marketing has stepped up to fill the void. The industry is expected to be worth $2 billion this year, doubling its value since 2017.

Fuck Jerry, the agency that oversaw the social media promotion for Fyre Festival, took full advantage of this trend. Instead of investing in traditional ads that consumers would probably ignore anyway, they targeted proven influencers whom people already admired, tapping into the public’s desire to emulate what they saw on social media.

Influencer marketing has also always had its dark side. In 2017, 90 influencers received warnings from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which stepped up efforts to crack down on those who don’t clearly disclose their promotional content. Even influencers who don’t run afoul of the law engage in somewhat shady practices. For example, several Kardashians shill questionable weight loss teas on their Instagram accounts.

Viewed in this light, Ja Rule’s appearance in Fyre Festival’s promotional videos says less about the problems with Fyre Festival and more about the downsides of placing too much trust in influencer marketing. A flashy commercial and big influencer push sold out two weekends of a brand new festival. The fact that tickets sold out almost instantly is proof that influencer marketing works—and also proof that people really do want this type of curated luxury experience.

Without a focus on content, Fyre Festival failed

Fyre Festival failed because it was selling a concept—a pipe dream designed to score envy on social media—instead of content. Because Ja Rule was specifically employed to sell people on the concept of the event, it’s no wonder he wasn’t fully aware that the content, including everything from the infrastructure to the music headliners, wasn’t in place.

While would-be festivalgoers were being served cheese sandwiches, Fyre Festival was already sparking debate about everything from the ethical responsibilities of influencers to how easy it is for tech startups to raise significant capital without a proven concept. The upside comes from the light this festival shines on these tactics.

The most important lesson is the simplest: Content is king. Sure, people wanted to sip tequila on yachts and hang out with models. But above all, Fyre Festival was promoted as a music festival featuring popular artists. Without Major Lazer and Blink 182, it wasn’t a music festival at all.

Most people aren’t prepared to shell out thousands of dollars for a luxe in-person concert experience, but they don’t think twice about signing up for a $10/month subscription service if it means instant access to desirable content. The average American spends approximately $237 on subscription services each month. Media outlets are increasingly locking their content behind paywalls as readers demonstrate their willingness to pay; between 2017 and 2018, the New York Times’ online subscriptions increased by 46%.

The reason is simple: People want to stay plugged into the content that drives conversations. Whether it’s a splashy festival, a must-watch television show or a viral article, the impulse to engage—or risk irrelevance—remains the same.

This voracious appetite even extends to branded content. A look at the most engaging social media content of 2018 shows that people flocked to posts that dealt with weighty issues such as Burger King’s bold ad about net neutrality or Dick’s Sporting Goods’ timely announcement that it would no longer sell assault rifles. If Fyre Festival taught us anything, it should be that companies looking to market themselves should prioritize authentic content over flashy marketing or traditional ad campaigns.

Ultimately, Fyre Festival provided a teaching moment

Fyre Festival provides important lessons for both influencers and consumers. Ja Rule seems ready to apply what he’s learned from the experience: In February 2019, he teased the idea of a new festival in an impromptu interview with TMZ. It’s still a good idea, though he probably doesn’t really understand why the last one failed. Someday—perhaps sooner than we think—someone who understands the importance of authentic content is going to create a successful version of Fyre Festival. But honestly, it probably won’t be Ja Rule.

E-commerce is booming, and one player is leading the charge. Amazon is expected to drive 80% of all e-commerce growth this year. That is tough market domination for anyone to crack.

Enter Google, Amazon’s long-time rival, which has recently begun pouring resources into its alternative e-commerce platform, Google Shopping. And the timing couldn’t be better: according to a survey from Survata, search engines’ share of U.S. consumers’ initial product searches grew from 28% to 36% between 2016 and 2017, while Amazon’s dropped from 55% in 2016 to 49% in 2017.

This isn’t the first time that Google has disrupted an area which Amazon dominates. They recently expanded their Home device range to directly compete with Amazon’s Echo line of devices. The reviews are split, despite Amazon’s long market monopoly; Google launched Google Home in November 2016, a full two years after Amazon debuted the Echo smart speaker and had launched two versions of the smaller Dot. The competition between the device’s voice assistants—Google’s Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa—remains just as tight.

And as the two Goliaths fight over e-commerce, small to medium-sized e-commerce companies have an opening.

Kyle C. Murphy, practitioner faculty of strategy at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, knows e-commerce inside out. Here are a few of his insights as to how smaller companies can profit.

The convenience of Google’s Shopping feed

Amazon is the e-commerce incumbent. According to researchers at eMarketer, Amazon is set to take 49.1% of all U.S. e-commerce sales in 2018—that works out to 5% of all retail sales in the country.

Google Shopping is a direct challenge. The goal is to allow users to search and then click “buy now” directly from Google by using Google Express. “Google facilitates the transaction without the need to go a vendor’s website and navigate the purchase process,” says Murphy. “They’re trying bring customers and stores closer together through Google search.”

Google has experimented with its Shopping feature for a few years, but it is just now becoming a game changer for small to medium-sized e-commerce companies. That is in large part because of the convenience that is being built into the product.

“People buy a lot of things on Amazon because it’s easy; you just click a button and it is done,” says Murphy. “People aren’t going for the lowest price, they’re going for convenience. That’s where Amazon dominates. Google’s trying to get in on that.”

A friendlier deal through Google

Amazon’s platform has matured in a direction that makes it difficult for smaller e-commerce companies to stand out. It is very hard to show up in an Amazon search due to stiff competition and a proliferation of knock-offs. Also, while Amazon used to encourage more organic search results, it now practically requires that companies buy ads to show up in searches—most of the time the top three products that are listed are sponsored. In addition, Amazon then takes a cut of the revenue for any purchase.

The numbers are pessimistic. According to a report by e-commerce market intelligence firm PipeCandy, Amazon has over two million sellers worldwide, but only about 100,000 sellers make $100,000 in profit a year. Cumulatively, those 100,000 sellers have paid $30 billion in commission to Amazon—and that doesn’t even include any advertising the sellers paid for.

For the 85% of e-commerce companies that generate less than $1 million in revenue (again according to PipeCandy), Amazon may no longer be an attractive option. However, those smaller companies can gain an advantage by getting listed on Google Shopping.

As Google innovates, it is building an environment friendlier to smaller e-commerce sellers. For example, while Google does require some advertising in order to be seen, companies “don’t have to spend as much to show up in searches if they get their product feed to Google working well,” Murphy says.

Challenges still exist through Google Shopping

There is one small downside to Google Shopping: to get listed, sellers have to jump through a few hoops.

For one, Google pulls all its listings data directly from a seller’s website, and it expects the information on that website to be extremely clean. The company can choose to exclude sellers who do not comply with its strict listing standards. “If you say ‘sale’ or some promotional information headline, it’ll kick it out and won’t accept it,” Murphy says. For wannabe Google Shopping sellers, carefully constructing product content to meet Google’s product data specification guidelines is a must. That means attending to details like the file size of the product image—non-clothing products use an image of at least 100 x 100 pixels, and clothing products use an image of at least 250 x 250 pixels, for example.

In addition, Google asks sellers to update their listings every 30 days, otherwise the product will drop off Google Shopping.

In other words, submitting to the feed management tool can be time-consuming and require a lot of attention to detail. Sellers must check and double-check small details to ensure the product data meets Google’s requirements, like whether the listing is in the right category and if the headline keywords are correct, for example. There are third-party services that optimize and manage listings on the seller’s behalf. These can often smooth the process and can be a smart investment.

Though it may not be quite as simple to use as Amazon, Google gives smaller e-commerce companies a greater opportunity to generate profit. E-commerce sellers simply need to follow Google’s guidelines carefully, and they could reap real rewards.

Subscribe now

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

If you are in Birmingham, United Kingdom, you might check Yelp to find a good Argentinian-style restaurant. You might even see a review that Ivan Stravensky wrote about his favorite restaurant, and decide to eat there based on his glowing recommendation.

There’s only one problem: the review is fake, much like Ivan himself.

When buying something new or trying out a new service, many of us head online to check what other customers think. In fact, over 80% of adults in the United States occasionally read online customer reviews before buying something for the first time. But only half of those who read reviews think they give an accurate description of the product, according to the Pew Research Center.

That is because online reviews and ratings can be manipulated. I know firsthand just how easy it is to fake credibility online: in 2017, I created a fake Russian named Ivan Stravensky. Clearly, Ivan has never been to the Argentinian restaurant in Birmingham, but that didn’t stop “him” from writing a five-star review for it. One person even found it “useful.”

All that is needed to create a person out of thin air is a unique name, a few social media accounts and some content—and this can be done repeatedly to create several shell accounts. With new online identities, anyone could easily review CEOs on Glassdoor, products on Amazon, hotels on TripAdvisor and dog grooming services on Yelp.

But blockchain could soon make it more difficult to create convincing fake accounts. The result could be a more trustworthy, reliable and transparent internet.

Radical transparency of online reviews

Last year, a U.S. based car dealership was forced to pay a $3.6 million fine after it was discovered that it had planted fake reviews. You might also remember the guy who managed to manipulate TripAdvisor’s ratings system to turn a shed in his backyard into the top-ranked restaurant in all of London.

But with blockchain, there will be ways to track whether the person leaving a review actually ate dinner at the restaurant they’re reviewing, groomed their dog at the salon they’re rating or purchased the product they’re giving five stars.

Blockchain records quantifiable data and stores it in a block, which is then added together in a chain of similar information blocks. Each block needs to be verified across a network of computers before it can be added to the chain; once it has been verified, it cannot be altered, meaning the data is both transparent and secure.

This system can be used to create a digital map of someone, almost like an online ID; birth records, home addresses and university certificates can all be kept on blockchain.

Blockchain could also track our day-to-day activities. When linked with data generated through the Internet of Things, blockchain can record and verify that an employee was at a certain office location on workdays via location data, or track customers’ shopping habits through their payment data.

In short, blockchain enables us to track and authenticate that we have firsthand knowledge of the products and services that we are reviewing.

Early-stage startups missing the mark?

Reviews are big business—so much so that one man is being sued in the U.S. for a three-star review he left on TripAdvisor. The lawsuit alleges that he did not go on a specific tour that as he claimed he had been on in his review. Using blockchain, the tour operator would be able to quickly verify this information.

Blockchain will be fundamental in the creation of new and radically transparent versions of review sites like Yelp, Glassdoor and TripAdvisor.

Indeed, the system’s radical transparency is already transforming other industries. All Public Art uses blockchain to verify the provenance of works of art. The core principles of blockchain—namely, its ability to authenticate and verify transactions—can easily and quickly guarantee the validity of a previous transaction, thereby confirming the ownership of the artwork.

But startups using blockchain to verify online product reviews, such as Zapit and Revain, are currently focusing on using cryptocurrency to pay users when they post true and accurate reviews. But blockchain is capable of far more than simply offering an “incentive for honesty.” Instead, a review could be immediately authenticated by checking a user’s ID and their transaction and location history on the decentralized database.

The downsides of anonymity

User anonymity is central to the spirit and personality of sites like Reddit and niche networks such as Amino apps. Usernames can be basic or creative, and do not need to reference the user’s actual real-world identity, which helps to foster communities where people feel free to express their opinions. At the same time, anonymity also frees individuals to express hateful views and make threatening remarks that, without the internet’s veil of namelessness, they may not make. But when it comes to looking for unbiased information to help make purchasing decisions, anonymity is not helpful to other potential customers: how can they trust the review, when for all they know it could be written an entirely made-up character?

Sites that have systems of verification are more credible. Apps like Uber, Turo and Airbnb are tied to Facebook accounts and credit cards. Face ID, thumbprints and other verification methods give users confidence in the reviews; they also make users care about the reviews they receive as a “guest” or “rider,” because those ratings will follow them around afterwards. Obviously, it would be easy to create accounts on these platforms under a shell account, but these methods—documentation, user data, facial recognition—are solving issues of verification.

Soon, this conversation may take on a higher level of importance, especially now that AI bots are able to write reviews that are strangely convincing. In fact, it will soon be impossible to tell the difference between reviews written by bots and those written by real people.

Therefore, blockchain’s contributions to radical transparency and an increase in trustworthiness on the web is a positive development. It may be the innovation that puts our minds at ease about fake news and fake reviews.

Being realistic about implementation

However, verification and decentralization do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Imagine that Walmart uses blockchain technologies to track apples from the farm to their store to your table. How do you know the apples you bought are actually organic or from a certain farm if Walmart owns every node on the chain? At the beginning of the chain you are trusting that farmer; throughout the rest of the chain, you are trusting Walmart the same as you would without the blockchain.

Verification protocols need to be incorporated with the wealth of data available and a certain amount of decentralization to make any sense. When it comes to creating a more trustworthy world, blockchain holds incredible promise; however, there is still a ways to go.

Subscribe now

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

If you follow me on social media, you might have noticed that I’ve recently liked and shared a few articles by someone named Ivan Stravensky. A graduate of the art history masters program at the University of Bristol, Ivan mostly writes essays on poetry and philosophy. According to his Twitter profile, he’s an avid amateur pianist; his Instagram is full of loving snapshots of keyboards and baby grands. Perhaps you’ve seen or liked one of his posts yourself. He posted one of his essays to the Philosophy subreddit and got more than 900 upvotes and 120 comments within a few hours, which got his Medium blog more than 20,000 views overnight. Online, at least, Ivan is a pretty talented and popular guy.

Here’s the thing: Ivan doesn’t exist.

I hastily concocted Ivan’s name and scribbled his background on my notepad during a slow Sunday in September. With Russian election interference in the news, it seemed appropriate to make him a Russian—but which Russian? I decided to name Ivan for the composer Igor Stravinsky, who is often credited with coming up with the much-quoted expression, “A good composer does not imitate, he steals.” Which again seemed appropriate.

I took a screenshot of the actor Mads Mikkelsen from the 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky to use as Ivan’s avatar, gave Ivan a passion for piano to match his namesake’s, and then I was ready to go. I set up Ivan’s social media accounts in the same sitting. That was September 22, 2017. Here’s where his follower counts are at now: Facebook: 8,200 friends; Twitter: 2,400 followers; Instagram: 13,000; LinkedIn: 3,200; Medium: 514. Around 27,000 total friends or followers so far.

At first glance, this might not seem like a lot. Many would consider “influencer” status as having at least 100,000 followers. With 27,000 followers, Ivan is still at a micro-micro level on every platform, but unlike most users with only hundreds or thousands of followers, I can guarantee that his reach can continue to show hockey-stick-shaped growth metrics month over month. Why? Because I’ve applied some of the same tactics I use to help my actual human clients extend their social influence and reach; get them more likes, views, clicks and downloads; and shape what pops up in search results when you Google them.

Sure, Ivan didn’t steal anyone’s identity. He doesn’t have a driver’s license. He hasn’t posted anything rude or controversial or done anything sinister. Ivan has mostly just shared philosophy essays and news about classical music. But you could imagine how easily a fake person like him, one with a strong social media presence, could rile up controversy or be a convincing voice in the online conversation—much like fictional Pennsylvanian Melvin Redick, which was one of the first Russian-created fake accounts to post anti-Clinton propaganda to Facebook in 2016. There’s more commonalities than you’d think between online advertising and the spread of fake news, and I created Ivan in part to explore them.

But what goes into making an Ivan (or a Melvin, for that matter)? And what exactly can you do with them once they’re made?

How to make your own fake Russian

1. Pick the right name. An ideal fake online person has a unique name, so he or she won’t have to fight with real people (or other fakes) for internet real estate. When I came up with Ivan’s name, I typed “Ivan Stravensky” into Namechk to make sure it was available on most platforms, which it was.

Then I bought ivanstravensky.com and set it to redirect to his Medium blog.

2. Automate interactions. I set up Ivan’s Twitter account so that if you follow @IvanStravensky you’ll get an auto-reply from him thanking you for following him, along with a link to his LinkedIn profile and an invitation to also connect there. There’s a simple bot running on his Twitter account that is following and unfollowing accounts that include descriptions such as #arthistory or #pianist. This is all happening in the background and growing both his LinkedIn and Twitter numbers on autopilot. His follow-back ratio on #arthistory is at 6.75% so far.

I use another bot on Ivan’s LinkedIn that will send messages, endorse contacts and invite people to connect based on any search criteria or message I enter. Notice how many people have already endorsed him back for certain skills or liked his blog posts based on his activity rather than his tangible figure. He has 3,200 LinkedIn followers and that number is growing steadily.

3. Beware of fake followers (mostly). When you’re automating your follows, you want to make sure that the people you’re following are of a certain engagement rate. Followers that have zero posts and zero followers look fake, and if platforms detect even one such fake following you, their algorithms will make your content rank lower in feeds and your engagement rate will suffer. Conversely, if your followers all have decent engagement rates, your content will show up higher in more feeds and might even begin showing up in “who to follow” lists, which would then increase your numbers exponentially.

4. Don’t be afraid to spend a little money. Online, building a community of true fans is all that matters, but psychologically it can sometimes help expand an audience if it looks like you already have a thriving community they can join. That might mean buying a few followers to get things started. On Instagram I bought fake followers (despite reasons not to listed above) from a third-party site in order to get him to 13,000 followers. (I wouldn’t buy fake likes on any of my real client accounts, but Ivan has been his own special project, which is why his most recent blog has about 700 retweets.)

On Facebook I was able to buy media efficiently enough through the Facebook Ads platform to cheaply get the page to 8,000 fans so far. You can reach real people with paid media, and in many cases you have to in order to reach people beyond your existing “friends of fans” audience.

5. Create (or steal) great content. Ivan’s blog articles have been solid, which has made all the difference. I was given permission from a friend of mine, Jacob Stump, to repurpose his essays from college, so I had the advantage of starting with quality original content and then incorporating various marketing and growth hacking tactics to get them shared. The 500-plus followers and all the claps on Ivan’s Medium blog are organic—because the posts themselves are actually good! As usual, content is king, and tactics are just tactics. It would have been just as reasonable if I’d filmed close-ups of a talented musician playing Stravinsky and then promoted a YouTube channel called “Stravensky on Stravinsky” or had Ivan write guest blogs on other sites or combined his blogs to create an ebook.

6. Tap into existing audiences. Here’s a place I haven’t taken the Ivan project yet. Ultimately, the best way to grow Ivan’s audience (or anyone’s) would be to tap into existing audiences through partnerships. If I were to create the aforementioned “Stravensky on Stravinsky” YouTube channel and Snoop Dogg tweeted a link to it, that kind of stamp of approval would grow Ivan’s numbers far faster than any other tactic. Finding intersecting audience interests is key, like a Venn diagram with spheres of influence. That makes way more sense than just buying your way to two million fans with ads or bots alone. But the fact that you can do so much with bots—and a carefully crafted fake name—is worth being cognizant of.

And why would you do this?

If I’d kept Ivan a secret project, I could have gone further. I could have had him contribute to guest blogs or be a source to services like Help A Reporter to get quotes from him published in reputable news sources over the coming months. Then I could have used those publication credits to establish even more credibility for Ivan (by citing those articles in creating a Wikipedia page about him, for instance). There are no claims that Russian fake accounts have gone that far, but how would you even know?

I’m not just here to spread doom and gloom about fake news, however. These tactics aren’t only relevant if you want to swing a foreign election or build influence for yourself online. You can find value here from a marketing perspective just as easily.

Most of Ivan’s connections on LinkedIn are philosophers or have “art history” in their title, and I mostly focused his outreach in the United Kingdom. Let’s say that now that he has 3,200 LinkedIn connections, I can click export here and get a csv file of names and emails of those art history and philosophy folks in the U.K. There’s a lot you can do with such specific email lists. Maybe I want to sell products to them or have them take a survey to help me decide something. I can use Facebook ads or Survey Monkey and target them without ever actually sending them an email or letting them know how or why I collected their information.

I could just as easily have created another profile named Sara Huntington, a chief financial officer in Des Moines, Iowa, and then had Sara connect with specific groups of finance professionals (such as other CFOs of mid-level companies in the U.S.). Next, I could have had her share opinions about the industry and then grown her reach in the same way I have for Ivan (as long as I had a bank of high-quality content or opinions for her to share). By growing and exporting that specific email list, I could then utilize my email list of CFOs of mid-level companies in the U.S. for whatever campaigns I dreamed up. #fakefinancenews

With a few interns, anyone could easily be managing more than a hundred accounts like this with little effort, building spheres of influence based on a number of factors and saving that data to create segmented targeting lists of all sorts. In fact, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t someone out there doing exactly this today.

The bots are here to stay

The fact that these characters are out there influencing opinion is not a new phenomenon. As seen in this episode of “Escape and Control” about Twitter bots from six years ago, much earlier and simpler bots could already dramatically affect how a network or community interacts. Facebook now estimates there could be more than 60 million fake profiles on its site alone. The reality is that fakes aren’t going away anytime soon. They’re simply too fun, too useful, too easy to make.

It took me about 10 minutes to set up Ivan, and maintaining him currently takes me less than 10 minutes a week. I’ve spent under $300 all told to keep him growing to this point. The only reason he may now get flagged and removed from some sites is because of my candor in sharing this info here. The fact is that Ivan isn’t the only fake guy out there. He’s just the one I told you about.

Subscribe now

This article was originally posted on Forbes here.

Recently I was invited for an evening smoke at an upscale, private cigar lounge, and the owner told me with pride how adverse he is to anything digital. He has a flip phone. No email, no social, no frills, no nonsense. Can’t even find him online, he says. Just the flip phone. You can call him or send basic texts if you happen to know his number. The business seems to be doing more than okay just on personal referrals, why should he bother?

But I looked for his business online and there is an obsolete website, an abandoned Facebook page with about 100 fans – the last post from 2012, some good and bad Yelp reviews and found several articles about them. Took me about ten minutes to see a much different perspective. If I’d read these reviews and been looking for a cigar shop on my own, I probably wouldn’t have gone inside. In fact, a couple of the Yelp reviews say the shop has closed down and moved, which I know isn’t true.

Tl;dr: A cigar shop owner that is doing just fine today on word of mouth referrals won’t maintain much long-term credibility if he doesn’t ever Google himself.

In time, if he doesn’t keep track of what others are saying about him, he will lose all control of his company’s narrative. He probably hasn’t ever heard of Yelp, and definitely hasn’t ever heard of apps like Where to Smoke. If you know that people are complaining in reviews you can either start treating customers differently and address the issues, or start encouraging your happier customers to write better reviews of their own. Perceptions matter, and I can pull a pretty decent audit of anyone and any company within 30 minutes just with their name, Google search and some screenshots.

1. Seriously, How Do I Google Myself?

Open an incognito window (I’m on the Chrome browser, though on Safari it will say “new private window”) then go to Google.com

By doing your search in private or incognito mode you’ll avoid seeing personalized searches based on your cookies, log in, and so forth. Your IP address will still affect local search results if your company is a neighborhood pizza shop, but you should still do your searching in incognito mode. If you’re feeling crazy you can check other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo while you’re browsing privately.

Screenshot the results and save them in a folder or email them to yourself for posterity. It’s good to track this progress over time, as it all takes time. You can also track your rankings over time with services like RankScanner.

If you haven’t already, you should log in to Google and set some alerts for your name and business name so you’ll get an email when anything new is published. There are sites like BrightLocal that help you track all your reviews for as low as $5 a month. If you’re focused on your business and need help crafting keyword phrases for articles and content, you can use sites like SpyFu to track competitors and sites like HitTail to suggest keyword phrases for your own content. (* I’m not an affiliate for any of these sites.)

2. I Prefer to Be Low Key

Many people will just say, “I’m kind of like the cigar shop owner. I prefer to keep my private life private and not be all over the Internet.” Fair enough, but if you are a public figure or business executive and there’s going to be press about you either way, it may be good to at least know what other people see when they search for you. I’m not saying you have to make your Facebook and Instagram public. This isn’t “all or nothing.”

If there’s a Wikipedia page about you and/or your company, then that will almost always be the first thing people click on to read. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and revised whenever new press comes out that can be linked to – a perfect example for a common missed opportunity to help control your digital narrative. If you don’t have a Wiki but there is enough press online to prove you’re notable, you should create a page, with an infobox, photos and internal linking to other Wiki pages.

If you don’t proactively think about this, someone else will and who knows what their intentions will be. If you don’t believe me: I’ve made many Wikipedia pages that weren’t paying clients of mine. I just wanted to. My friends and colleagues are all at risk. Chris Denson and Robert Lawrence both have Wikis now, not because they thought they needed one or asked me to create them – but because I decided they needed Wikis, and I wrote the two above on my own volition, among others. Same thing with domain names and user handles: tell me this doesn’t apply to you, and I may go buy yourname.com just to make a point. You prefer to be low key? Maybe that isn’t entirely up to you.

3. Steps You Can Take

Even if your goal isn’t to raise your profile, this stuff matters. See an article you don’t like when you Google yourself? It may be difficult to convince the site owner to remove the content just because you disagree with it. For instance, I had a client in 2011 ask Corduroy for help with a negative article on him from a prominent newspaper. We couldn’t actually remove the article or move it down, but with linking and sharing other relevant articles for the same keywords, we were able to move everything else around that one article up. I just Googled the same keywords today and I don’t find the article now until the third page of results. When I did find the article today, I did not click on it. If you do, you’re telling Google that the result you just clicked on was relevant for your search phrase, and you’re making that link even more powerful.

It is never too early or late to start caring about this. Until recently, I had neglected my own personal brand for some time. You don’t have to have an entire site dedicated to you. Just put in nathanpettijohn.com and you’ll get redirected to my biography on my company site. I have a fairly unique name, but Nathan Pettijohn the musician has the benefit of music and media showing up higher in search results. If I want to even compete for my own name online, I have to care enough to work at it with purpose.

I am consistently one of the top results if you search for “product placement companies”. This is not because my company does a ton of product placement, it is because I wrote one decent article about it that some people linked to and shared.

For the client I mentioned above from 2011, this was a long-term strategy that didn’t solve his problem around the negative article immediately, but did within several months and is an even more successful example now after all these years. Essentially, everything you see on the first page of results when you Google this person now was chosen and curated ahead of time with a long-term strategy. So how did we do that? As far as bumping the other positive sites and articles up, I’ve covered broad strokes on linking for search before.

Otherwise we created a search-friendly website with content and blog posts that now shows up first for his name, and made a Twitter and LinkedIn page that also show up near the top, and promoted media so photos and a YouTube video would all be on first page of results. A LinkedIn page matters, a Google+ page matters. Once again: these things are not a passing fad. Don’t use Yelp? If there’s a review on there that says your shop closed down six months ago – there’s no way I’m going to drive over to check for myself.

CLICK HERE TO ENABLE ADS

I use Google Chrome for nearly all my browsing and like many people I use extensions like Adblock and Adblock Plus. Though, I honestly didn’t install these initially with the intention of blocking video ads but instead to block “pop up” ads. Still, I get served skippable ads on YouTube, and have to disable the adblockers in order to watch content on certain sites. I’m subscribed to the version of Hulu with ads yet most of the time I am instead served this static screen pictured above. Personally, I’ll sit through ninety seconds of a blank silent screen over almost any ad. No question.

Ad software and ad blocking software will continue battling it out for a while, but the ultimate takeaway here is that ads suck and we know it. Our company is active in buying a fair amount of online ads on behalf of our clients while personally I do my best to avoid online ads at all costs.

“My particular peeve is pre-roll. I hate it. What is even worse is that I know the people who are making it know that I’m going to hate it. Why do I know that? Because they tell me how long I am going to have to endure it — 30 seconds, 20 seconds, 15 seconds. You only have to watch this crap for another 10 seconds and then you are going to get to the content that you really wanted to see. That is a model of polluting content that is not sustainable.” – Bradley Jakeman, President of Pepsico

With traditional “lean back” television ad distribution, ads were played before content to a captive audience and that was the model that paid for production of said content (and could serve as a convenient time to use the bathroom). One of these thirty-second spots on primetime television can now run a brand $400k and there’s no way to know who’s watching it on the other end. The costs are prohibitive, the creative is limited, the format is unappealing, and the results are almost impossible to track and attribute to any real sales metrics.

Subscription services like HBO and Netflix don’t rely on ad models in order to create original content. Companies like Apple and Facebook are now jumping on the long-term investment of quality original content. Ad targeting online can be as granular as advertisers are willing to pay for, which means there is a wealth of of audience data, a wealth of insights, technology and targeting abilities – but a lack of high quality talent-driven original content being sponsored by brands in order to capitalize on those insights and those targeting capabilities.

“Is this ad relevant to you?”

When Hulu introduced their feature during ads where you could say “yes” or “no” to the above question, the idea was that you could help tailor the kind of content you had to sit through. Personally I clicked “no” anytime I was served something other than a movie trailer with the hope that I would eventually only be served movie trailers.

If I see something like the Geico Caveman pop up on my screen I’ll click “skip” immediately, almost by instinct, but if I were offered a sponsored piece of content that was engaging and worthwhile (such as “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” for instance, “brought to you by” an Acura or Geico, etc), I may actually choose to watch the entire piece of content, end up entertained rather than annoyed, and have a better association with that brand for not telling me to just buy something. We’re not talking about product placement. We’re talking about brand sponsorship of high quality original IP.

We are far from the first to boast exploring the digital future of native advertising. South Park and John Oliver have both made great arguments for why there shouldn’t be advertising dollars hidden behind content such as news. We do agree with this logic, though if done transparently brands can sometimes help tell stories that matter to both the brand and the audience. For example: NYT writes a piece about repealing Citizen’s United that Ben & Jerry’s pays for simply because B&J genuinely care about the issue. Similarly, Expedia did a campaign recently with a temporary installation at a hospital that consisted of doing something wonderful, filming it and sharing that moment. That’s the formula: provide value and show something meaningful or at the very least entertaining.

We also aren’t the first to come up with the idea of a sponsored web-series. What we did was to put together a digital strategy solution for creative, production and distribution to combine compelling content with opt-in media, social amplification and data driven audience insights. Our high level access with top talent, creative, and software allows us to provide our clients with customized creative and distribution recipes based on data.

Look at what Red Bull does: by having a channel of great, fresh content running all the time, they are able to push content across all platforms while providing value for their audience. This is how brands should be thinking from a content perspective.

An Introduction to Product Placement:

The 2004 documentary “The Corporation” has a segment about real life product placements that companies pay for (such as people paid to talk loudly in public about a song they just heard or a product they just tried like in “The Truman Show”), which I think is a scary extreme of where branding was already headed ten years ago. I suggest everyone take the time to watch it sometime, and yet with a daily dose of skepticism I still see value in the future of brand integrations bridging the divide between creativity and commerce. There are bad integrations that go overboard and are obvious and painful and there are good integrations where it is not noticeable at all and feels natural. And finally now with online branded entertainment there are web-series that are completely produced by the brand’s agency to appeal to specific audiences of customers.

When done correctly, integrations don’t impact the actual story at all, but are merely the clothes the character has on, the makeup they wear or the beverage they drink. And they don’t talk about the brand by name because real people don’t usually do that. If done poorly, it can end up feeling like watching a two-hour advertisement. Most people don’t mind watching commercials before a show if it means the entertainment is free and the shows are void of outside interests. This is the model that worked for so long, after all, and kept shows free from too many overt brand placements. With DVR’s came the need to re-up placements and in many cases it has been used poorly as a means to get funding and remind you to buy stuff in case you forgot.

When Is Product Placement Appropriate?

As Mark Harris illustrated in this GQ article in 2011, and as Steven Soderbergh similarly pointed out recently in his speech at SFFF about the state of cinema, the number of studio films produced each year keeps dwindling, meaning indie filmmakers and smaller production and film finance companies are taking up the slack and heading up a majority of productions being shot. With so much money at stake even in indie films, there must always be some cleverness in film financing: such as foreign pre-sales, tax credits, crowdfunding and other practices. It should be no surprise to anyone that blockbusters can drive a high price tag for integrations, even for only a couple moments of screen time. Studios use this to help fund big budget actioners, which often come off as obvious and result in throwaway and forgettable movies that can ironically hurt the integrated brand’s image.

For the indie filmmaker, product integrations can be equally helpful in offsetting production costs, such as props, wardrobe, picture vehicles and signage, even if the brand doesn’t pay for the placement. Integrations can be used incorrectly or overused in indies as well when they are paid, so don’t do that. After all, many companies do not ever pay for integrations (Apple, for example), yet they make products people want in their films so they are usually happy to at least provide their products and clearances without much of a hassle. Another good way to go is using local companies and brands. I managed integrations for one film that shot in rural Colorado and one of the characters drank a certain wine – so we reached out to local vineyards and used their wine for the scenes, getting them exposure and helping us on cost of props. That whole film’s budget was somewhere near 300k and the product/wardrobe secured was worth somewhere near 30k in rental or purchase costs. Renting props and wardrobe from the big guys usually requires large deposits and insurance, so if you can save even ten percent of your budget by using real brands in a subtle way, it does help the indie filmmaker.

When integrating products it can either provide a subtle sense of realism or when done sloppily can ruin the experience of seeing the film altogether and make it feel bastardized. Once you get to the point of mentioning brands in dialogue or making a concerted effort to have the label out in your shots, you’ve missed the point of integrating something from everyday life into a creative art form (that people pay to go see). I won’t be listing a bunch of examples, as there are many posts online that list specific integrations and why they were good or bad. I will say that I believe when a brand “sponsors” a show or webseries (such as many shows on Vice.com) it allows the show creators a budget and creative control to create something original, and is an ideal scenario really since the majors aren’t producing anything but remakes and sequels anyway. HBO has been a beacon of great entertainment for years, doing a stellar job of something studio execs had a few decades ago: the ability to bring together tremendous talent and let them do their thing. Netflix now has some original series as does Hulu, and both have more attractive models than one can find through this country’s cable providers.

Product Placement For Indie Filmmakers:

Despite the rant in “Blue Velvet” by Dennis Hopper’s character about how Heineken isn’t as good as Pabst, which seems like something a real crazy person might say, filmmaker David Lynch has held a consistent hatred for product placement in films, but I believe he is referring to paid integrations in films that are obvious and take one out of the film. Bad integrations. I think Lynch would agree that he makes films he can basically finance himself and most indie filmmakers are not in that position, and need free props where they can get them and sometimes paid integrations are done well and work for the filmmaker as well as the brand. I think as long as you’re not Amish or don’t grow all your own food or live as a hermit somewhere you’re probably not selling out by using real items on scene just as you would in the real world.

If you’re producing a short or indie film, and have no big name stars or distribution secured, you don’t have any chance whatsoever of getting paid to place products in your film unless you have a connection at the brand. Sorry to burst any bubbles if that was unclear earlier. Most brands, as I said above, are fine with granting you clearances and even providing free product if you reach out enough in advance so that their inventory can handle your needs and the brand can sign off on the request. Many people don’t realize this and try like hell to avoid showing logos or signage in fear of being sued, but the rule of thumb is generally that if the product is being used as intended you shouldn’t have any issues. For example: if a character in your scene is using a certain brand of laundry detergent to do their laundry, and their laundry comes out fine and the washing machine doesn’t explode or anything, you’re probably fine.

If you’re using a certain brand of laundry detergent to poison somebody in a scene, or if the laundry detergent breaks the washing machine, you will run into some problems getting a clearance for that brand of detergent. All major brands have a “brand image” they try to adhere to, but unless you are using the product incorrectly or it causes damage to something or someone — you are probably safe to use it. Another misconception is around cars, since having a hero’s car can drive big dollars in studio films (such as the BMW’s in James Bond franchise). You do not necessarily need a clearance to show a car’s logo unless you alter the design of the car in some way or use the car in some nefarious fashion. I once reached out to a car dealership on a shoot and was able to get them to loan us a dozen brand new cars for a scene we were shooting in exchange for taking a few photos they could keep of the stars in front of the vehicles. It was beneficial for the shoot and for the dealership. Going local is a great tip I’ll try to keep mentioning.

If you put your mind to obtaining a certain song clearance, or brand mention, or a dozen picture cars such as above, its perfectly possible as long as you act professional and courteous with everyone you’re encountering, and only use brands when absolutely appropriate to the script. I’ll also say that art directors can manage making their own labels for a lot of products and changing a letter or two to avoid the need for clearances or permission (many shows set at the White House use a sign that says “resident of the United States” rather than “President”). If you have a scene in a supermarket or convenience store it may be helpful to make the background less distracting by removing familiar logos, but there is a time and place for everything and like I’ve said before, as long it is completely natural to the scene I don’t see how it can hurt the integrity of the film. My point being, if you have a good art director they can usually tell when and where it’s appropriate.

How to Get Product Placement For Your Movie:

Finally, you’ve got a script and you’ve casted and scouted locations and you’re getting prepped and want to see if you can swing any product to help save on costs. You’ll want to start by going through your script with a highlighter to find out what you could use clearances or free product for and write down or highlight anything you see that could be a product. If you’re shooting a western, perhaps Levi’s or Carhartt could help provide the wardrobe for your main characters. Maybe the character wears Ray-Ban sunglasses or Nike sneakers, or drinks only one kind of beer or has a lot of conversations on his phone, or headset, or it all takes place in his car. You get the point, you’ve made a long list of brands that you can argue are essential to this character.

Once you’ve got a list of the brands you want to approach it’s again just a matter of being professional and courteous to the gatekeepers. You’ll go to www.erma.org — which is the Association of Entertainment Marketing Professionals, and do a search of each item on your list to find out which product placement agencies represent each one. Give the person listed a call and tell them what kind of project you’re shooting and sell up any aspects you can. Like I said earlier, with a few stars or some distribution deal you can go a long way. If it isn’t a feature or you don’t have any credibility you may need to give more passionate reasons for why they should work with you, but if you do it right they are almost always willing to help get their brand seen by more eyeballs.

As Soderbergh said in the speech I linked to earlier in this post, ““The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made…. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.” The artist should be able to focus on their project first and foremost, but as we live in a capitalistic society the artist must get paid to make art, so if product placement is done correctly and to supplement production expenses I think it serves a real purpose. If it is done in your face with mentions of how great the product is or whatever, it obviously serves no purpose other than to sell something and as Mike Ryan said here, it should probably be a free movie.

We’re a society that freely shares a lot of our information publicly while (occasionally) pointing out that we should be entitled to a certain amount of privacy. Whether snooping is being done by governments, corporations, or individual hackers (or all of the above), there is a wealth of information out there about each and every one of us, beyond what we share publicly on Foursquare or Twitter, and your digital footprint can say a lot about you.

Many advertising data providers already have information on you that they acquired by tracking your credit card purchases at Target, shopping patterns at Nordstrom, your answers to a question on a dating site, or where you were a certain day based on automatic license plate readers or where your cell phone location was. There are many ways we’ve lost our rights to privacy in the name of security, but rather than wax helplessly, there are some things we may do in order to keep our information more secure. As Mikko Hypponen points out in his Ted talk, one logical solution is to choose to use open source software.

Secure Email:

The above is a trailer for “Terms and Conditions May Apply”, a new documentary by Cullen Hoback about the state of our online police state. As their website ( www.trackoff.us ) says, “In a world with no privacy, people’s data gets mined and sold by companies. In a world with no privacy, law abiding citizens become suspects of the government. In a world with no privacy, low-income people face economic discrimination and advocates for free speech get their emails wiretapped.” You can view the full documentary online for four dollars here and see their AMA on Reddit here.

When you agree to the terms and conditions for new Apple software, or to sign up for Gmail or Facebook you are giving a third party rights that until the advent of the internet would have seemed preposterous. There are a number of possible solutions to this problem, one of which was a provider called Lavabit, the email service Edward Snowden used. Lavabit suspended its operations in August in defiance of the federal government and has since been embroiled in a legal battle. Ladar Levison, the site’s creator, has also launched a Kickstarter campaign that still has a few days left to make an open-source version of Lavabit happen.

Secure Cloud Storage, Search & the Rest

As with email, the future of search and cloud computing will have to start drifting in a more secure direction than has been standard in the past. CRN has a list here with their top five most secure enterprise cloud apps, and Lifehacker has a list of their own here. Obviously the most secure way to store your files would not be to put them in the cloud at all, but the convenience of cloud computing makes it seem like an inevitability that almost everything will be in the cloud eventually.

As far as search goes, www.DuckDuckGo.com has made a clear point for several years that they don’t track searches, and Google says they don’t track your searches if you’re logged in (unless you click on an ad). I like the idea of all the meta-data being collected being made public, and being able to limit what my grocery store loyalty card shares with advertisers. Certainly, we could at least do with more transparency. I personally tweet and check in on Foursquare and share a lot of information publicly, but even just a hint of anonymity can be refreshing and reassuring. But, as the Cable Guy said, “the future is now” and all we can do is help shape it the best we can.

BJ Mendelson’s new book, “Social Media is Bullshit” claims that the buzz surrounding social media is overblown and uses semantic arguments, case studies, and his own experiences to make that case. At the heart of this book is a counterintuitive soapbox for furthering the direction in which the web and capitalism are both already headed. In sections, the author is simply saying that we need to check our expectations and realize that many “success stories” in social media advertising were responsible from a full-out media push and huge ad spends, and that social media was only one component of their overall marketing strategies.

This all rests on how you define success, however, and many brand managers and marketing officers may very well agree with the author, because he only considers a campaign a success if it has tangible, direct and immediate results of sales that can be monitored and tracked and not attributed in part to anything else. This kind of focus on metrics and click-throughs in the short-term is what I think is wrong with marketers in any medium, and is why I take offense with this book. This is the old way to look at marketing, no matter how you slice it.

Mendelson also references Malcolm Gladwell’s piece “Small Change” in which Gladwell points out that the movement and organization matters, not the platform individuals use to accomplish those goals (there would have been an Egyptian uprising with or without the existence of Twitter). Indeed, this is a very important statement, and one that the author should have spent more time focusing on. Those who try to take advantage of marketers, brands or advertisers claiming to be “social media gurus” and prognosing a certain number of exact steps one must take in order to be “successful” online are bullshitters, indeed. I couldn’t agree more.

Whether you are an individual or a brand it wouldn’t hurt to read some of the literature this author condemns, though, as it is still a new platform with unfamiliar etiquette and workflows. He would do just as well to call paperback bullshit because there have been those who have written “how to write a novel” books and lectured and given courses and made money off giving bad advice or editorial strictly for profit. There have always been schemers and there always will be — but with certain new technologies there is more opportunity for transparency. What changes are made depend on what the public demands.

Search Engine Optimization can’t replace good content — neither can social media campaigns, a cool website or a radio jingle. You must have something of real value before ever expecting advertising to help you. This is my thinking, but I’m also not from the age of Don Draper ads. This is the age where everything has a sponsor, and product placement and marketing have become almost ubiquitous in our lives. We have become walking billboards and are attempting to replicate the same experience online. Instead of making technology fit within our lives, we are fitting our lives within the current limitations of technology.

Wendell Berry once wrote, “That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in “the future” does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.” Wendell, a farmer and essayist, wrote freehand and his wife typed his works for him on typewriter, providing a seamless workflow that allowed his wife to contribute much to his editorial process and nothing about typing on computer would have added anything substantial to what Wendell found important.

Until our technology finds ways to improve aspects of our lives such as those listed by Wendell, we are overselling the power of the web in some respects, and the author would be correct in bringing our expectations down to earth. Today, however, social media can be used much more powerfully than most mediums have ever been able to (for good and bad, as shown, for example, in the YouTube series “Escape and Control“) and telling people to put their voice online is by no means hurtful to society (even if that person has unrealistic expectations about how “viral” his voice will go). I think telling people that corporations have already consolidated all the good platforms and blog sites and that there’s no point in trying to compete is a much more harmful approach to bringing real discourse back into our culture than encouraging people to focus on creating compelling content that is not completely self-serving.

So it’s true, perhaps, that anything can be used as bullshit, and thus the worry that something utilized for bullshit must be done away with is an empty statement, because words themselves are the vehicle of truth, lies, or bullshit. However, this sounds a bit like Gorgias speaking with Socrates, saying it is not his fault that the students he teaches sophistry to use it for bad instead of good. He says if a boxer teaches someone to box, it is not the teacher’s fault if he uses it to pummel the innocent instead of other boxers in a ring. In one way, he is right — boxing or sophistry or social media are in some ways “morally neutral.” However, there are certain things that, because of their particular nature or power, are more prone to misuse. So a nerf ball and a handgun can both be used virtuously or viciously, but the handgun can do far, far much more evil (and good, no doubt), and thus, saying “I simply taught someone how to shoot, not what to shoot” is ultimately a cop out.

As Wendell Berry illustrated, if this technology exists solely as a surrogate for real human interaction then it has no original or practical application in the future of technology. Dog Bless You trains and donates service dogs to American war veterans, and for every thousand ‘likes’ their Facebook page gets they donate another dog to a veteran. We are putting many similar programs in place for various military charities through America Stand United, and there are clearly many other ways that social media is not only allowing “connection” in the sense that we’ve come to know but actually creating new experiences and connections, such as the first Jumboltron event that was hosted this year at the Forge.

Yes, we need to manage our expectations and yes we should be diligent before ever hiring or buying advice from a social media consultant, or anyone for that matter. What we don’t need to do is say that because the author has witnessed a plethora of so-called ‘gurus’ that spout off the same nonsensical advice we should abandon the potential these platforms truly do offer us. As ‘Escape and Control’ illustrates, there are many sinister practices in place by brands and governments attempting to control the Internet and we do need to always remain skeptical to be informed, but the good that social media can offer far outweighs the bad.

Writing about why social media isn’t the immediate arbitrar of profits is as constructive for the future of technology as saying our president’s four years in office is responsible for the entire stability of our economy. We don’t seem to look at the 50-year plus results we’re seeing from policies in order to make a short-sighted political point. Likewise, we don’t think about creating an authentic and sustainable community online as opposed to looking at immediate sales figures. We need thought leaders to give suggestions on how we can help others, prolong peace, and provide economic and political stability before thinking about the business bottom line.

If your focus is on being authentic and helping others, you give your customers a reason to remain loyal, and the bottom line can have a future. Otherwise, brands will begin to see they do not hold all of the power in a democracy, and they will have to learn that the public is not happily defined merely as billboards and listed as metrics and click-throughs on quarterly reports. If we want a better Internet, or society, its up to us to begin acting more cordial and human to each other online and off, and by doing so the bullshit will be more evident and we all will be much better off.

Once everyone has a voice, what can you do to stop hearing all but the ones who agree with you? After all, not everyone has something constructive, informed or agreeable to say on all matters (such being the cause of most bullshitting), and things now are often put in writing that otherwise may have been said in passing, dismissed or forgotten. There have been numerous papers and articles already discussing why all this is hurting our ability to concentrate and our ability to be social and thoughtful people, but there has yet to be a good proposal for how to address the “bottom half of the internet” in terms of making reviews, ratings and comments be more representative of real, helpful human feedback rather than the wild west of integrity it continues to be.

There is a ‘ceaseless profusion of data’ and an abundance of ways to stay ‘connected’ without really seeing or speaking to one another, so how do we all really make ourselves heard and how do we use this technology to improve access to quality information, corporate transparency and political honesty while minimizing spam and trolling?

SEO & THE NEWSROOM:

Many blogs allow a user’s name in a comment to link to any site that user chooses, making thoughtless comments more common for the sake of gaining a link from that website (is not a good SEO tactic unless your comment furthers the conversation in some way, obviously). If you have the time and resources you can moderate your site’s comments, but there will always be middle-of-the road comments that aren’t necessarily spam but definitely don’t elevate the conversation. Many talented bloggers such as Matt Gemmell have explained many times their reasoning for not allowing comments: essentially, that the reader is there because of the site’s author(s) – not some anonymous Joe Shmoe who landed on the article, thought for 5 seconds then made a brash comment; and that if you want to make a thoughtful reply you should do it on your own blog, or in 140 characters on Twitter.

The New York Times has been trying to incorporate showing more “trusted” comments first, similar to Amazon or Yelp reviews, but for the most part newspaper and magazine websites haven’t done much in the way of making comments any better. In fact, some have even tried defending anonymous comments, as if it is our right to anonymously have the freedom of speech. Being anonymous online is perfectly fine, but commenting on or reviewing certain things should have to tie to a verifiable human of some sort (this could also provide more transparency about governments and companies paying people for positive comments and reviews, as you would see what sort of posts he or she has made before), and there should also be a way devised to score how trusted someone’s opinion is on any given social media network.

These proposals will all depend on the culture of each site and which social networks make sense to incorporate into the integrity score, as verification of this sort would probably be most helpful for reviews and news sites. I don’t think any of us necessarily expect or deserve to see articulate and comprehensive feedback for an amateur video of a kid’s ballet recital, or a photo of someone’s lunch; the openness of Reddit usually leads to interesting conversations no matter how off topic some comments may get, but I do believe the conversation can and should be elevated on most other sites. Livefyre, OpenID and Disqus all seem to be at some stage of solving the anonymity issue of many sites’ commenting sections, so I see the issue of thoughtless and under-educated comments being the main problem to fix.

We can try to have a more civil Internet by doing a number of things at home and in our schools, and/or we can rank comments and reviews by an algorithm of online integrity rather than simply by number of up-votes or followers. So, this is where I propose a solution be worked out: If some sort of public ranking system was put in place similar to Yelp or Amazon reviews, where you can mark someone else’s Tweet/comment/review as helpful or not, many people who post rude or insensitive comments would get their comments ranked, most likely, as unhelpful, and their comments would from there on be less likely to be shown; also there could be a score next to his/her avatar saying how much “Online Integrity” he or she even has.

Whether the handle is anonymous, verified or a pseudonym, I think the score would be helpful. Reddit’s Karma system works similarly, and this seems like it could be a valuable tool in displaying comments on a number of sites. I propose that such a scoring system would be much more sane than the celebrity worship nature of Klout scores. In fact, a similar app, mockingly named Klouchebag, has a much more thoughtful approach for ranking your digital footprint, however crude it may be. The issue here is inevitably that some people are more active commenters and the ranking is all subject to cultural whims; in this sort of digitized democracy it can become too easy to bury an unpopular opinion just with enough down-votes, however valid the opinion may be.

THE INTERNET PARADOX:

Writing a good comment or review requires you to stop and think for a moment. This is why Facebook hasn’t ever added a “dislike” button. People are too quick to jump to the negative. I see this on Instagram sometimes, where liking is easy to do with a double tap of your finger, yet the comments are very often by trolls and spammers, or by people who see so many photos that very little constructive thought is able to go into the comment before they move on to the next photo. In a time before the digital age you would probably never see so many photos, let alone have such lackluster opinions about some of them. A great line about this comes from an article by Lawrence Weschler: “(Some years later, I had occasion to meet another artist, Robert Irwin, who for the first several decades of his career forbade any photo documentation of his work at all, on the grounds that a photograph could capture everything the work was not about and nothing that it was—which is to say, it could approximate the image but never convey its presence.)”

Too many people see a delete button to the Internet as though it’s the same as an eraser is to pencil and paper, rather than as an index that exists in one way or another long after you delete it, and the reasoning of “I can delete it” allows for way too many thoughtless comments. In working for clients on social media campaigns, we’ve encountered people online who have their social profiles connected to their company’s website and bio, completely transparently, and they still act brazenly un-human to others on Twitter and elsewhere. Such is the nature of rude or thoughtless people, but the act of typing to a screen dehumanizes the experience even more. The medium affects the message, and the further from human the medium the less thought invariably goes into the message.

Further, the lack of a face to face interaction on the web has, up until now, bred many anti-social behaviors, among them trolls who don’t hesitate to put in writing things they could never say in person without being attacked or ostracized. If we see a face on the screen, such as through Skype or Facetime, it at least helps contextualize our interactions and feels more like a human experience where you’re looking someone in the eyes while talking, but the nature of the Internet still begs for anonymity in many respects. Even Benjamin Franklin enjoyed writing articles under a pseudonym, and thinking back to prank calls before and since the days of caller-id makes it clear that anonymity, whether in being playful or hurtful, has some role and value in society.

NOTHING IS FOREVER (WHAT IS A COMMUNITY):

Nothing lasts forever, so we shouldn’t expect the Internet to either, and our time should be spent in real life when possible, outside or with friends and family enjoying being alive. With that said, its important to realize the Internet will probably be around for many generations to come, and the content we’ve uploaded will continue to exist in some manner within the index. We’re the first generation to have uploaded all our home movies and family photos and recorded life events, check-ins and relationships on social media sites, and when you die, most of this may continue to live on, memorialized. The same goes for comments, reviews and posts. Ever since Gmail began offering larger and larger storage capacities, and now with the move to store everything in the cloud, it is as though we have become digital hoarders, keeping every email and keystroke logged somewhere in the cloud, and it should be no surprise to you if the government has a copy of it somewhere. You can even install UneditReddit to see deleted Reddit comments in Chrome, so saying you deleted something doesn’t mean that no one saw it, or that there isn’t a screenshot or a copy of it somewhere.

I agree that as a blogger or website admin you’re entitled to encourage interaction or feedback on your site however you best see fit, but I am of the mind that the “no comments” approach is doing nothing to fix the problems of spam, trolling and haters. I also don’t think we should say, “some people are jerks” and just deal with the state of comments with moderation. Some people are bad drivers too, but we police them and keep a record of their violations tied to their license. I think digital personas should at least be accountable for their posts in form of a score based on their past interactions; until there’s such a service that can rank online integrity I’m fine with just using the Facebook comments plugin feature here on our site (below), so please feel free to continue the conversation with your comments and we’ll feel free to moderate them as we see fit.