The age of procrastination, a stupid key and the revenge of the users

Ok i did not really want to talk about it but i have a side comment concerning the fuck up at digg.
A couple days ago, last time i checked, the article with the key from doom9 had about 24000 digs. This was in response to the previous removal of user accounts and articles by diggs admins.
Now allegedly reddit faces an invasion of digg users.

In any case, this made me think of what Bruce Sterling was saying some time ago about the the web2.0 tech bubble and the revenge of the users. This is just another example of the volatility of the web2.0 buzz. The users are not loyal to any service and they have a nomadic behavior always migrating where the grass is greener.

This is an age of procrastination and where too many choices are toxic for the untrained person (Seth Godin in a conference was saying that he only has 17 minutes of free time a day).

What does is all mean?
Does youtube have a real loyal user base? Or do i really care about my myspace and hi5 three hundred 'friends'? Ok facebook has a more personal approach with a more emotional charge, but i would still let it go for something different.
So, users bring advertisers and advertisers money.

We have a problem.
We all know that marketing is finding ways to sell lies. The problem is that for some time now the marketing agency sells lies in both directions (the users and the clients). The metrics are very complex and usually an in-depth analysis shows that almost all the marketing money goes into notoriety and too little into direct user buy-in (just think of Shai that albeit the enormous number of visitors failed by far to make the predicted sales)

Yes we live in a content oriented advertisement environment, where users willingly consume the ads (immersive experiential websites, funny videos, viral campaigns, etc), but this does in no way insure that the user will buy the product. All those commercials have only entertainment and notoriety value. And simply notoriety is not a strong enough dimension to make a user buy the product. (Red Bull found a way. By means of edgy adrenaline pumped real-life events.)

Blogs will die, videos will stay free, fame is ephemeral, social networking will get canalized, participative democracy is the only way, ad agencies better wake up, branding is about living the promise not about speaking the language.

-- Octavian Mihai