Today is 2 months to the day that I deleted my Facebook Account.  I knew I’d be back.  I had several solid reasons for deleting it.  Well, let me qualify and say, that I deactivated my account; I didn’t delete it.  Yes, there’s a difference.  I remember right after I deleted it, several of my colleagues contacted me to inform me that I had just committed career suicide.  After all, how could you possibly run an interactive team and preach to clients the need to be on Facebook, if you, yourself weren’t on it.  Fair question, and something I definitely took to heart.

So at about day 3, of my post Facebook world, I decided to make this into an experiment.  A classic marketing decision, if ever there were one  For 60 days/2 months, I’d live without Facebook.  Yes, I realize this isn’t going without food for 60 days, but for a marketer to voluntarily withdraw from Facebook, it has similar implications.  The experiment was to challenge myself to be the clients, the stakeholders, the doubters who ask the question, “what’s the value of Facebook…I don’t get it.”  I’ve done similar experiments in the past.  For 30 days I used a feature phone exclusively, for example.  This one seemed equally as simple.  Oh, how I was wrong.

Let me preface the next few passage, by saying, I, as an individual learned, I don’t need Facebook.  I also learned that, so long as I had a brilliant team and put in the time to read/learn about the constant changes to Facebook, I was as equally as knowledgable about Facebook as I’d always been.  That said, here’s what I learned:

1. I still can’t get over the number of people who have completely shifted away from sharing information via email, text and other forms of communication; all in favor of Facebook.  Not being on Facebook, definitely puts you on the outside, looking in.  You’re constantly the last person to learn about someone’s engagement, new baby, new job, recent purchase, etc.  Simply put, you are at a social disadvantage.
2. The Facebook eco-system doesn’t change that often.  60 days later, even after all the hype about Facebook deals, the shadowbox approach for looking at photos, check-ins getting more popular for Facebook places, etc. it’s the same Facebook.
3. I missed the single sign-on that is Facebook Connect.  I’ve declined registering for sites, tools, platforms, etc. because the only way to bypass the litany of questions being asked was to use Facebook Connect. Sorry OpenID, you lost.
4. There’s a small set of people who only interact, engage, share and communicate with their “friends”via Facebook.  A few of my really good friends fall into that category.  Keeping in touch with them proved harder than I thought.
5. I didn’t miss the chat functionality, I’m primarily a Google Chat, iChat and AOL Instant Messenger user.
6. The one thing I missed the most was the birthday notifications.  There’s some cool and sad about Facebook being better prepared to say Happy Birthday than we are as individuals.
7. I’m on the fence with how I was impacted by the Facebook events feature.  I missed a lot of invitations…but were they events I would have attended?  I don’t think so.

Facebook is a force that’s not going away. It truly is the 10,000 pound gorilla.  The way it’s become engrained in our daily culture, is simply scary.  As you listen to “water-cooler” conversations you realize that if you didn’t see it on Facebook, you missed it and you’re out of the loop.  Scary.

I think this experiment will help me in the future when I sit down with clients, colleagues and the like to talk about the future of social, the role of Facebook, and why Facebook is more than a website.  I have a certain perspective that I simply didn’t have before.

On February 26, 2011 I tweeted, “Just deleted my Facebook account from 35,000 feet. Feels good.”

Last year, right around this time, Nielsen published a study that indicated the average internet user spends over 7 hours a month on Facebook.  That works out to almost 4 days a year.  And that’s just the average!  Facebook users as a subset, spend 55 minutes each day on Facebook.  Did you hear that?  55 minutes every day.  Which works out to roughly 14 days a year.  I shudder to think what the stats look like for millennials, who according to reports from many leading research firms, are basically addicted to Facebook.  I’m sure that my time spent on Facebook was more than 55 minutes.  When you consider the time I was spending on it for personal reasons, work reasons and research reasons, I was definitely a power user.

In short, Facebook can be a time suck.  This isn’t new information.  Between pokes, status updates, photos, apps like Farmville and more; Facebook, by design is setup to keep you on the site and keep you coming back.  It’s been almost 2 weeks since I did the unthinkable and you know what?  I still feel good. Great in fact.  Not having to care about a status update is refreshing. Not worrying about my security settings and if the right people have access to the right content is liberating.  Not having to ignore the countless event invite requests makes me giddy.  Not getting sucked down the rabbit hole known as people’s photo albums has me jumping for joy.

Time, is the one thing we don’t get back.  It’s the one currency that doesn’t appreciate.  Nope, it’s finite.  There’s only 24 hours in a day.  Put in 10 for work.  Another 6 for sleep. 1 hour for my getting ready and going to bed routine.  With those 3 buckets alone you’re left with only 7 hours that are yours to enjoy.  But, let’s back out another hour for miscellaneous things and another hour for your commute.  So really you get 5 hours in a day to just “be.” 80% of your day is consumed by those 5 buckets of activities.  Well I refuse to spend the 20% of the remaining 20% in front of Facebook.

What it all comes down to, is Facebook simply lost it’s value to me.  I had a self-imposed friend limit of 150 that aligned with Dunbar’s number.  Even, with that limitation, which was designed to make sure I was only investing time with people who mattered instead of simply collecting “friends,” Facebook offered no real value.   The people, who’s wedding they were planning, recent trip they just got back from, engagement, party they were throwing, etc., that I was REALLY friends with, knew how to reach me to share their news.  It’s simple.  When I get engaged again, I won’t be letting my mom know about it via Facebook.  I’ll be picking up the phone and calling her.  If I move from Chicago to another city, I’ll be sending an email to casual friends, texting others and picking up the phone to share the news the people who matter most.

Facebook is a tool, similar to a shotgun, that simply let’s you aim, fire and spread your information with everyone.  It isn’t laser focused at all.  I’m over the concept of simply broadcasting my life to everyone.  I’d much rather be selective and invest my time into the people who really matter.  The other day I received some great information from my manager.  You know what I did?  I picked up the phone and I called the people who matter to share what happened.  Sure, it took more time than updating my Facebook status, but it was quality time.

Growing up, my mom always said I’d be lucky if I could count the number of friends I had one hand.  I can. And that’s why I quit Facebook.  I’ve outgrown Facebook.  I’m looking for less, not more.

I’m not delusional, I’ll be back.  There will be some business need that necessitates coming back.  There always is.  It’s part of the job.  It’s part of what keeps me ahead.  I’ll dread that day.  But, for now, I’m going to enjoy the 55 minutes I just got back in my day.

I’m a big fan of Data Visualization and Infographics.  I colleague of mine shared this great post titled Amazing Facts About Facebook And Breakups.  It’s simply fascinating.  This chart comes from the overall Ted Presentation given by David McCandless:

I love the correlation between Spring Break and breakups.  I guess people want to be guilt free when they hook up on Spring break.

If you’ve been around long enough you’ve heard the idiom, “well, that’s like comparing apples and oranges.”  The idea of course is that you can’t compare an apple against an orange, because they are inherently different things.  Some example of how this would play out are:

• Sports car vs. SUV: you can’t compare a car designed for speed that holds 2 people against one that’s designed for holding 6 people and hauling stuff.
• Baseball vs. Hockey: you can’t compare two completely different sports; especially when one is played on ice and the other on a field.
• The Beatles vs. The Killers: you can’t compare music from the 60s with music from the 2000s.
• Babe Ruth vs. Alex Rodriguez: you can’t compare two different eras of baseball because the equipment, technology, travel, etc. were too different.
• The Shining vs. The Catcher In The Rye: you can’t compare Stephen King’s horror work against the great american novel; the genres are too different.
• Your First Crush/Love In Middle School vs. Your Wife: you can’t compare your emotional maturity at 14 against your emotional maturity at 20-something.

On the surface, you’d believe that the logic for why you can’t compare apples against oranges, or as listed above, The Beatles against the Killers.  For years, I abided by that same concept.  My dad and I would try to debate if Michael Jordan was a better player than Wilt Chamberlin or some other player.  And, inevitably we’d end up agreeing to disagree because you can’t compare guards against centers, different eras, different rules they played under, etc.

But, I’m here to tell you today, that I think it’s a cop out when people say you can’t compre apples against oranges.  Granted it’s not easy, but it can be done.  Often the problem is people don’t want to put in the effort to define the criteria to use for comparing the apple against the orange.  For example, I’ve been in meetings where someone will say, “you can’t compare Facebook against TV, they’re simply too different.  It’s like comparing apples and oranges.”  Really?  You’re trying to tell me that we couldn’t develop criteria to compare those two options?

I can give you 5 different ways to compare:

1. Straight up cost
2. Reach
3. Ability/ease to target
4. Steps to convert (whatever the conversion is)
5. Speed to launch

Now, granted you may not like comparing Facebook against TV, using that criteria, but the fact is, we can do it.  Too often we fall into the habit of relying on what we know and our comfort level with things…not to mention, we also try to avoid conflict.

Conflict, you say?  Well, my favorite example of this is when your current significant other asks you how they stack up against previous ones.  Of course, the “correct” answer is, “well you can’t really compare, you’re all unique, with different features, pros, cons, but the fact of the matter is I’m with you right now.”  In a work scenario, this situation comes up when you’re asked to evaluate your staff (or as it was known at ConAgra Foods, “force rank”).  How do you compare a designer against a strategist?  What about a business analyst against a quality assurance manager?  Clearly, you can’t because they are apples and oranges.

Folks, the reality is, you can compare anything, so long as you establish the evaluative criteria.  Rarely, is this done, which leads us to supporting the cop out of “you can’t compare apples and oranges.”  Make the time and effort up front to develop truly meaningful criteria for evaluating options, people, decisions, platforms, etc. If you do, not only will your decisions be smarter and more well informed, but you’ll also be in a position to better determine if your decisions were the right ones.

Unique Visitors.  Time Spent On Site.  Repeat Visitors.  Bounce Rates.  These metrics and so many more and quickly becoming less a means of determining how well your site is performing.  Unique Visitors was supposed to tell us about the reach we were generating, while things like Time Spent on Site and Repeat Visitors was all about “engagement.”  And of course, the Bounce Rate told us how appealing our site was; if you will it spoke of “interest” to the visitor.

So the formula and approach for measuring success was simple.  We run a bunch of TV, print and outdoor that has a URL in it.  Of course that URL is written in minuscule font and only up for 1/2 a second during the spot, but I digress.  All these people see this URL and of course say, hey, I’ve been itching to visit a site about erectile dysfunction, so they type it in and come to the site.  After all this is a sequential process, right?  I mean we’ve only seen the path to purchase funnel a billion times over our careers.  And then after you visit the site, you’re of course going to spend gobs and gobs of time getting all the information you need.  Then, even though you have all this information you’ll of course want to come back multiple times to read all this information again and again.

Perhaps, my favorite misconception is that more time spent on site is better than less.  I’ve seen situation after situation where the reason time spent on site is so high is because the site is to difficult to navigate that you can’t find what you’re looking for.  I think you’re starting to see the lunacy of this model.

Today, though, the means for how we evaluate the performance of a site are even less relevant because simply put, people just don’t want to spend on your website.  They’d rather hang out on youTube, Facebook, etc.  This is why brands are rushing to build real estate on those sites.  So great, you’ve built a Facebook Business/Fan page.  You have 100s of thousands of followers who spending time “engaging” with your brand on Facebook.  Well, doesn’t it reason that if they’re spending time with you there, it’s coming at the expense of spending time on your website?  So, why is it so difficult to wrap our heads around the idea that previously key metrics, like Unique Visitors, should be decreasing?

Despite the obvious reasons why these data points are less important, we still rely on them to tell a story.  Why?  Simple, because those are the numbers being used internally by brand managers (and the like) to indicate their success to their superiors.  The same KPI report being used today, is the one that was used last year, the year before that and 5 years ago.  Internally, people have been conditioned to evaluate performance a certain way and it’s too difficult, daunting, challenging, time consuming, etc. to get them to change.

However, change, they must.  And it’s our duty to help them change.  If you don’t take it upon yourself to help guide the conversation and evolve how performance is being measured, you just might find yourself getting fired for not meeting a goal that’s impossible to meet.