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.

Everybody wants to know the ROI. It’s the first question every marketer is asking when evaluating an idea. We’ve been trained to think of ROI as the output of an input. For example, if you spend $1,000,000 on paid search, how many “widget” sales will you generate? If each widget yields a profit of $1.00, you’ll need to generate 1,000,001 sales to from that paid search campaign to be ROI positive.

I realize that’s a very simple and linear example. But, it works for the purposes of this argument; and here’s why. If I told you the paid search campaign would only generate 500,000 widget sales, there by generating $500,000 in profit, you’d call the $1,000,000 investment unwise since it’s an ROI negative program. On the surface, you’d be 100% correct. But, what if I also told you that if you didn’t do the program, your competition would generate 750,000 incremental widget sales at your expense. In other words, you’d lose 750,000 widget sales to your competition if you didn’t spend the $1,000,000 on the paid search program.

Sure, the paid search program was ROI negative, but not doing to the program was even more ROI negative. Rarely do we consider what happens if we did nothing. From the very simple example above you can see why not doing anything could be the most ROI negative decision you could make.

Chew on that.

I’m out on blogger vacation this week. The keys to TheKmiecs.com have been turned over to a few, select, awesome guest writers. The following has not been edited by me and is the work and effort of the original author. I appreciate the time and thinking that went into this post and hope you will too. Enjoy!

During my internship this past summer, a terrible thing happened– I became a cookie snob. I learned to taste subtle differences in cookies that I never knew existed. I could distinguish between brands, levels of margarine and even suppliers of vanilla. I vowed to never again eat a competitor’s cookie because they used cheap ingredients and less chocolate chips. I figured that I should spread my cookie gospel and made it my goal for that summer to educate the masses. I assumed that if people could be convinced that backwards robes were a new product category, I could easily convert the world to be my friends, followers and brand ambassadors.

Months later, I was back at school and found myself up late studying for a final. I was hungry so I went to the cupboard and found some stale Chips Ahoy that my wife had bought months before. I shoved a few down and was satisfied. I wasn’t thinking of the times I stood in front of 15 plates of various cookies with crackers (to cleanse my pallet), water and spit cups. Why would I ever spit out cookies?! I wasn’t concerned with margarine levels or the % pure cacao of the chips. I realized at this moment that when it comes to cookies, for most people, it just doesn’t matter. A cookie is a cookie and cookies are good.

As marketers, we often fall into this trap. We become hyper sensitive to everything in a category, an industry, or even technology in general. We read blogs, industry rags, and hang out with like minded people. Then we sit back and wonder why consumers make the decisions they make. We can’t understand why we don’t have millions followers on twitter and 85% market share. Usually the answer is pretty simple– To consumers, it just doesn’t matter. No one follows you because you sell a packaged meat product, you don’t give away free pastrami, and name dropping your brand doesn’t impress anyone. You don’t have 85% market share because more than 15% of the market doesn’t even know what 3g is and picked their service provider because of the sparkly bedazzled cases they sold at the same mall kiosk.

If you have ever followed me on twitter you have undoubtedly heard me complaining about some variety of stupid product or service and how much of a moron you would have to be to buy the product involved. Rather than have an aneurysm while screaming at the TV, I have been trying to take a different, more consumer focused approach. I sit back and ask myself two questions:

1. Who is this commercial talking to?
2. What is the most efficient way to eliminate them from the face of the earth? Why does this matter to that consumer?

While sometimes frustrating, I think this struggle is part of the beauty of marketing. It is all about finding out what does matter to our consumers and delivering to them a value equation that makes sense. Sometimes this means we can dumb down and cut costs from our products yet still maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. Sometimes it means we have to just walk away from groups of consumers because we are not in the business of being everything to everyone. It forces us to purge inefficiency from our communications and demands that we’re realistic about our products and their potential.

And if all else fails, just kick up your feet, eat some cookies and take in one of the many life lessons Bill Murray has provided us with over the years.

Byline- Aaron Torchio is currently an MBA student at The University of Indiana, Kelley School of Business. As of May, you can find him in your local bread line. Chat with him on twitter: @torchio