No, I don't mean MTV's award-winning series on musicians performing with acoustic (i.e. unplugged) instruments. I mean unplugging and taking a break from our cell phones, our texting, our computers, our iPads, our tweets, and of course our Facebook. And yes, blogging. (Which - good news - will make you feel, well, groovy, according to my friends Paul and Art!).

As a society, we have without awareness slipped into a new social norm; one with expectations of always being “on," instantly accessible, having your whereabouts and activities known to all, and finding out anything and everything immediately. Underneath it all is our dubious societal addiction to instant gratification.

Most marketers feed the notion that instant gratification is a good thing. We promise faster and faster, which we imply is better and better. There is however longstanding research that proves otherwise. Here's Wikipedia's summary of the classic Stanford Marshmallow study:

To test the theory of a person’s ability to delay gratification, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (1972), conducted by Prof. Walter Mischel, at Stanford University, California, studied a group of four-year-old children, each of whom was given one marshmallow, but promised two on condition that he or she wait twenty minutes, before eating the first marshmallow. Some children were able to wait the twenty minutes, and some were unable to wait. Furthermore, the university researchers then studied the developmental progress of each participant child into adolescence, and reported that children able to delay gratification (wait) were psychologically better adjusted, more dependable persons, and, as high school students, scored significantly greater grades in the collegiate Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Delaying gratification as a four year old is linked with happiness and better grades ten years later... amazing!

Can you pitch delayed gratification or slowing down as a good thing that results from your product or service? If so, think "benefits segmentation." Determine what segment of your market would value or perceive benefit from unplugging. It may be way more folks than you think!

P.S. Check out the new nonprofit Sabbath Manifesto and their 10 Principles. They have an app (no irony here) too to support people unplugging. And it is purely a happy coincidence that the first National Day of Unplugging started on my birthday!

I was the "branding guy" on a Social Media panel in San Diego yesterday. Most of the attendees were from biotech, pharma, and life sciences. I recommended these rules:

1. Just because you can, does not mean you should. Deploying social media has an upside and a downside for your brand. Do not make the mistake of automatically doing social media just because it is available and popular. It is a strategic choice that needs to be integrated into your overall business planning.

2. Assess the value of social media like you would any other marketing and communication tools. Separate out the "cool and trendy" factor and evaluate how each tool individually and collectively will impact your brand. Think of the variables that constitute blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and other tools; things like speed, interactivity, reach, user control, etc. Each tool has its trade-offs.

3. If you do it, do it right. Maintaining an effective brand presence in social media requires a sustained commitment. You need to keep providing updated content of value, manage and moderate it, and track results. Otherwise, it will backfire as a broken promise.

4. In one word, social media is about engagement. Customer engagement with your brand leads to customer intimacy with your brand which leads to increased revenues (check out this Gallup study). Customer intimacy reflects a fundamental set of values and priorities that directly shapes how you do business and what constitutes success. Are you as committed as you want your customers to be?

We'll see you out there!

What a marketer LuAnne is - making money from her blog! She recognized how to apply the law of supply and demand to transform her little brother's need for computer time into a revenue stream. Now kids all over the world can learn the economics of blogging from the Sunday comics... see, entertainment can educate!