While my life continues to get busier and busier each day, I am faced with the challenge of how to manage the increasing activity. Each day, I juggle work, healthy living, and my personal life with varying degrees of success. Work/life balance has always been important to me but it is amazing how fast one or the other can take over if you aren’t careful.

Not helping this situation at all is the constant lure of new social media websites and iPhone applications that seem to launch each week. For example, a few months ago I started to see posts from friends that were done through FourSquare. I pride myself on being an early adopter of new technology and have been the first in line to buy a new device or sign up for a new service more than once. In this case, I was a bit conflicted - I already spend a ton of time on Facebook and Twitter, both online and on my iPhone, so how would I be able to add another application into my life without upsetting my current balance?

With some hesitation, I jumped in and signed up for a FourSquare account after asking a friend of mine what he thought of the application. In no time at all, I was checking in here and there several times a day and sharing the updates with friends. I was primarily able to do this because FourSquare allowed me to sign up using Facebook Connect. so I didn’t have to create a whole separate account. I was then able to Tweet and post my status to Facebook, reducing my need to sign into those two services separately to do customized updates. So while I am now accessing a 3rd application on a regular basis, it feels like I am netting out with the same level of diversion.

But wait, there is more.

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How we interact with our customers has changed a great deal over the last century and a half and is morphing even more rapidly than ever before.

Once upon a time, if your customers had an issue with your products or services, they would hop on their horse and gallop to the local store and speak to someone face to face. This very personal interaction would encourage the business to work closely with the customer to resolve the issue or face the possibility of that person telling the whole town how bad the store is.

Then along came the telephone and businesses had to establish call centers to stay connected to their patrons. The customers now had a choice - visit a physical location for help or just pick up the phone from the comfort of their own home. While this new era of options was a positive development overall, it gave some companies the option to hide from their customers behind a menu system and switchboard. They no longer had to look a customer in the eye and tell them that they couldn’t help them with their issue. However, the customer still had the option to tell their friends about their bad experience so the risk to the business of not assisting their customers was still relatively high. The only difference is that those conversations would happen one-to-one in person or during a phone chat so the risk of a lot of people finding out about poor service was relatively low.

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I believe that the best stories out there are ones that are from personal experience, filled with the joys and anguish we get ourselves into.  This is one of those.

Since I got my 73 year-old father to join Facebook and Twitter, he has had a ton of questions on how to use it.

“What is the difference between my Homepage and my Profile?”

“If I write on your wall, does everyone see it?”

“How do I tell just you that you are an amazing son?”

OK, I stretched the truth a bit oh that one but you get the idea.  Answering these questions for him took a lot of patience and some revisiting of previous lessons but I think I got him to good place on how to communicate appropriately on these platforms.  Luckily, my dad does not have a smartphone so would not need additional lessons on how to not embarrass oneself while out and about.

So, you might think that since I am such an active user and have the ability to teach others, I would be a master of all the nuances of the websites, as well as their slick iPhone applications.

Not so fast.

While I was on the iPhone app recently, I received a Facebook email, that I thought was just for my eyes only.  It was not a very complex email, and actually contained an invite to a nice party on the weekend.  Sweet – I’ll have something to do this weekend instead of catching up on episodes of 30 Rock.  I hit reply and went into detail about my week, what was going on this weekend, and some little quips that only my friend would have been able to understand.  I believed that my friend would respond with a smartass reply and all would be well in the world once I got back to my computer.

OOPS.

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I was thinking today about how we used to communicate before computers and email and blogs and cell phones and text messages and social networks.  In general, we had 3 big options:

Option 1: Walk up to a person and open our traps.  That person would then open theirs and so on, and so on. Presto. An in-person conversation. If you were lucky, you would avoid an argument and end with a nice hand shake or a warm hug.

Option 2: Write a letter on a piece of paper – most appropriate when traveling or after receiving that “great” gift from Grandma (Dear Nana – Thank you so much for the peach polyester sweater with the pink elephants on it.  I will wear it to high school every day.  Love you!).  You actually had to sit down, think about your thoughts and either write them exactly as they appeared in your head or utilize a pencil with an eraser to correct bad spelling and grammar on the fly.  Address the envelope, stamp it, fold your letter, insert, seal and drop it in the mailbox.

Option 3: That  involved the telephone – not the one that travels with us no matter where we go. This one might have had a rotary dial and could have been the Princess model, with hopefully a nice long twisted cord so you could stretch it across the room and behind the door to the basement in order to chat with the boy that drove you absolutely crazy at school.  You couldn’t even leave a message on a machine – if no one answered, you tried again a little later hoping they would have arrived back home.  But you would keep trying and eventually, you would have an actual conversation with the person you wanted to talk to.

Now, while all of these options are still available, we have become a very different society, where people can be reached pretty much any place they are and if they are not there, we can leave them a message to force them to get back to us ASAP.

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Recently, the US Senate voted to end funding for the F-22 Raptor stealth fighters based on recommendations from the Defense Department.  This jet is the world’s costliest weapon and was designed in the 1980’s to combat a similar set of sneaky war planes the Soviet Union had in its arsenal.

At the time, it was clear that we needed to go head to head with our Soviet counterparts to ensure that our country stayed safe. They had planes, we had planes. They wore uniforms, we wore uniforms.  All was safe and secure in the world of high profile and high cost defense.

However, the world has changed drastically since then.  The Soviet Union no longer exists and while there are still well-gunned challengers in the world, the biggest threat to our national security comes from people without uniforms or weapons commonplace in the battlefields of the past. These new enemies are crafty and covert, utilizing methods that require a more surgical approach than our F-22 bombers can deliver.

So, how does this apply to the current state of marketing?

Well, before social media took off in the US, marketers used traditional advertising vehicles to get the word out.  Many of these options, like TV, radio and print, provided great reach and enabled an advertiser to increase brand awareness at a fairly significant cost.

The ability to connect with a single customer in a meaningful way outside the store, a call center, or direct mail was just not possible.  This would be the F-22 phase of advertising, as we all used pretty big guns to hit a target we might not know that much about.

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