Though I haven’t played that much with Path and haven’t added any friends (because none of my closer friends are on Path yet), the early buzz does warrant the question: Can Path unseat Facebook?

If you think it’s too early to pose that question, you’re right — but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at what Path is doing now and to consider the potential. I personally never really felt that Google+ had much of a chance of unseating Facebook, but I think Path is doing some things very well, beginning with its homepage. I like the fact that the term “social network” doesn’t appear anywhere. Sure, everyone is calling it a social network, but I like how they’re attempting to position themselves as “a smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love.” I also like the way it’s been built for a mobile experience, supporting mobile platforms. That differentiation should help it compete with Facebook (if that’s even their objective). Many of the reviews I have read have praised Path for the simplicity and usability of its design, though I personally haven’t used it enough yet to comment.

Another feature that is appealing to me is the 150-friend limit. Personally, I never felt Facebook was the place for lengthy and intimate conversations. The friend limit will force people to be more selective, which will make Path more intimate by design. That said, there are lots of people with thousands of friends who will be challenged by the friend limitation on Path.

At present, Path is not running advertising, which definitely makes sense, given the kind of business it’s trying to build. Without advertising or commerce, it shouldn’t have the kind of privacy concerns that seemed to follow Facebook in its early years (and beyond).

So to return to my initial question: Can Path unseat Facebook? In my opinion, the answer is no.

I don’t think they’re trying to unseat Facebook, because they’re trying to build a totally different experience. And despite the growth of Facebook, there are plenty of users suffering from Facebook fatigue. For many of them, Path will be exactly what they’re looking for — a social non-network.

Editor’s note: Path’s leadership has been adamant that it won’t sell advertising. Instead, it offers up-sells to users. What do you think of this business model?  Is a company like Path sustainable without advertising? Leave a message in the comments section.

I was reminded of that feeling when I read Charlie White’s insightful piece on Mashable about social media, featuring Louis C.K.’s clip from Conan about hating social media. In the video, C.K. claims that we can’t experience anything unless it’s via a small screen (and a social platform). And White comments that at spectacular events, people are busy photographing the event on their smartphones instead of experiencing it.

Are the very platforms designed to make us more social actually making us less social? As a publicist working in online advertising, I have to stay abreast of all the new social platforms, but on a personal level, I have definitely cut my use of social media. When a friend with whom I had lost contact reached out to me via Facebook, I moved the exchange to email because I wanted more depth than is customary on the social network.

So how should online marketers take this information to improve their use of social media?

1. Provide real value – I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to be friends with any of the products I buy. I’m happy to support a cause and “friend” a product that’s tied to a cause, but that’s not the case with 99 percent of the products and services I buy. There are ways, though, for marketers to provide value through social media. In in-game advertising on social networks, companies like SupersonicAds (disclosure: a client) enable marketers to provide players with virtual currency, which helps them progress in the game in exchange for viewing a video ad. That’s an example of advertising providing real utility. As an industry, we need to find more ways to provide consumers with value.
2. Don’t interrupt – So much advertising is disruptive. But social media advertising doesn’t have to be disruptive. How can it steer away from that tendency? By being more relevant. Most social networks have amassed a treasure trove of information about our likes and interests. How hard is it to serve ads that are tied to one of our areas of interest, instead of the weight loss ads I see all too often when I log into a social network?

Advertising on social media is definitely the future. As a publicist, most of my agency’s growth in 2011 came from Facebook-related client activities, and I’m excited by the potential. But as marketers, we need to learn the language of social networks and find new, more effective ways to engage with prospects in social media.

Personally, I can’t think of many brands with whom I’d like to be friends. Friendship is something I reserve for physical people.

Rather than “Friending” or “Liking,” what I would like from brands is to create value/utility for me. And to do that, they don’t have to be “Liked” by me or be my “Friend.”

To create value/utility, a brand most offer me something. That something can be a new and better experience using the product, it can be a better than expected repair experience when I least expect it, or great content which enriches my experience of using the brand. And it’s that value/utility which prompts me to recommend the brand to friends and family, whether through social media or a one-on-one conversation.

Research from PageLever shows that relatively few people re-visit a Facebook brand page after “Friending” the brand. This makes sense when considering that mostly people initially friended the brand in the first place in order to get a discount on something. Once receiving the discount, users don’t really have a need for their friendship with the brand. And that’s not really friending.

If there were ever a popularity contest among brands, the most “Liked” and “Friended” brand must be Apple. Yet Apple as a brand is barely engaged in social media (if it all). And they don’t have to, because they create products which bring real value/utility to users.

The reality is that 99% of companies aren’t Apple. And most product categories can’t elicit the kind of passion that users feel towards Apple. I can’t imagine many people being so passionate about their deodorant, laundry detergent or tooth paste as they are about Apple products.

The real innovation brought on by social media is that it made participating in the feedback loop easy. Anyone could post in a matter of seconds their feelings towards a brand in a place where anyone could see it.

But social media didn’t create the feedback, it just made it easier and more public. Marketers have known for years that “word of mouth” is the most effective form of marketing.

Unfortunately, too many marketers have jumped on the social media bandwagon and have pushed “Liking” and “Friending” as a way to improve the feedback loop to improve their relationship with their users. But merely liking a brand (just as merely liking a person) isn’t enough. That’s why research from Exact Target is warning of a potential backlash of ‘unliking’ brands (registration required — link thanks to Brian Solis).

Social media can provide value/utility if marketers use it in a meaningful way. Before every post, comment and tweet, marketers need to ask themselves if this post, comment or tweet is providing users with value/utility. It’s really that simple.

We have a small lawn and no place to store a lawn mower and therefore contract out gardening / lawn mowing to a local gardener. Where we live, we need to mow the lawn about 6 or 7 times a year, so I didn’t want to commit to a monthly contract with a gardener when I don’t need that much gardening / mowing.

 For a while, the gardener I used would come within 2-3 weeks of my call. But in the last year I worked with him, it would take 2+ months for him to come. And there was also a problem that he sometimes would blow my leaves onto my neighbor’s lawn, and then my neighbor would have to chase him to clean her lawn.

This February, lightening finally struck.

I simply asked my neighbor’s gardener if he could come on contract, but every other month. He was happy, and now comes by the 3rd of the month, every other month.

I spent months thinking of how I could solve my gardening conundrum, but didn’t even consider an every other month arrangement until I saw my neighbor’s gardener that day in February (in fact, my neighbor’s gardener was our original gardener, but when he wouldn’t come (without a regular commitment), we dropped him.

So how does all this relate to online advertising? Well, sometimes we spend days coming up with elaborate and rock solid rationales to convince prospective clients to try our new technology, when a simple answer might help us accomplish the task.

Online advertising has brought about so many changes on marketers and their agencies in the last 15 years. And change is hard. So as it is August, and we’re all operating in summer mode, maybe it’s time to shelve our complicated graphs and charts, and instead speak in simpler terms.

Enjoy August.

This was the vision of the direct marketing industry when I studied marketing in the 1980s, and this vision moved closer to reality with the arrival of the Internet and the increase of easily accessible targeting data.

In May, I wrote my monthly bylined commentary suggesting that The New York Times should take a look at The Economist (based in part on an article Matt Pressmen had written for Vanity Fair about why Time and Newsweek won’t be like The Economist).

Well guess what happened? Both The New York Times and The Economist reached out to me.

My first thought? Why didn’t I write about Natalie Portman instead (OK, so that wasn’t really my first thought). To be honest, sales people (and not the editors-in-chief) from both publications reached out to me, one to offer me a trial of their new interactive interface, and the other to inform me about a new feature.

But this experience got me thinking about direct marketing opportunities made possible through today’s more social and easily trackable media.

If companies are going to monitor what I say, wouldn’t be easier if I simply told them what I wanted?

What if there was a place online – a ‘ThisIsWhatIWant’ widget – where I could write the things I wanted, and a marketer could reach out to me and make me a relevant offer?

Forrester Research analyst Emily Riley touched on this very subject in her address at OMMA Behavioral in February, correctly claiming that Gen Y-ers post pictures of themselves doing illegal things on Facebook and then go for job interviews not thinking it’s a big deal. Do you really think they’d mind if companies used public, behaviorally targeted information in order to provide them with more relevant offers for the products and services they want?

Think about it. If you were in the market for a hybrid car, wouldn’t you rather receive detailed offers from a few local dealers than see general car ads wherever you surf the web because you spent 23 minutes on Cars.com last week?

Buying a hybrid car is an easier choice to make because there aren’t that many options. If I were in the market for a 32” TV with delivery and installation to Poughkeepsie by next Friday, I’m sure several retailers would be interested in servicing me, and maybe even trying to upsell me with a new DVD player.

If search campaigns provide among the best ROI for marketers, imagine the ROI for a widget which enabled marketers to target users who want the very products they sell? And if users could rate marketers, throwing out those that try and sell products unrelated to a user’s wants, we would have a great solution that would offer users products and services that they truly wanted.

Now that is something that I’d want. What about you?

For the record, I don’t work for or with Microsoft. In fact, though I use Microsoft Office, that’s only because my clients use Microsoft Word, and I was concerned with compatibility issues if I used Open Office.

So why am I pushing Bing?

1. Competition is good – I’m simply a big believer in competition, something that’s been absent from Search for too long. Everyone wins from competition – even Google, who will have a better search engine if forced by competition to improve. And users will definitely benefit from a better search engine.

2. It’s fun to root for the underdog – I know it’s funny to call a company that has a near monopoly in desktop applications an ‘underdog’, but in search, they are. Considering how hard they’ve tried at search, I can’t help but root for them. And there would be something exciting about Microsoft pulling a Nintendo Wii-like comeback to challenge Google for dominance in search.

3. Monopolies are bad (or near monopolies, even if they were legally created) – As I wrote above, the only reason I don’t use Open Office is due to issues of compatibility with my clients when we jointly edit press releases. Monopolies stifle progress, and as a result, we are stuck with the status quo instead of upgrading to something better. If there was only one airline, do you really think we’d get in-seat monitors on long haul flights? Think of the options offered by cell phone companies vs. cable companies. Whenever there are multiple players in a market, they tend to offer better products and better service.

4. The industry needs something new to get excited about – Sometimes, change is good. After years of optimizing campaigns for Google, the search engine marketing industry would benefit from focusing on optimization for a new search solution. If Bing is successful in their market penetration efforts, new companies will rise on the claim that they’re experts in optimizing campaigns for Bing.

5. Google has access to too much information – The reason I didn’t even try Google Chrome, despite the fact that my system administrator recommended it, is because I feel that Google already has access to too much personal information through my searches. Though I am a big believer in online advertising and am not concerned with privacy (my credit card company has access to much more sensitive information than any online advertising company has), I’d rather spread my information across more companies. As I use Gmail (and not Hotmail) as a back-up email provider, I’d personally rather reduce the amount of personal information Google has access to.

The launch of Bing takes me back to 2003, when I was working with a company that was challenging AdSense. In the sub-head of the best press release I have ever written, I noted that my client offered a real challenge to Google. Though the reference to challenging Google was stricken from the press release for political reasons, the concept of challenging Google was a driving force that resulted in a sweet exit for that client four years later.

I can’t wait to change my Internet homepage to Bing.com. Anyone joining me?

Vote in our poll, to the right, “Is Bing better than Google?”

So as you can well imagine, I have been following the well-documented financial struggles of The Times. I even wrote a piece in Adotas a few months ago entitled, “New York Times, people will pay for what they once got free”.

Well a few weeks ago, I was reading a piece in Vanity Fair by Matt Pressman about why Time and Newsweek will never be like The Economist, when I had a Eureka moment. Obviously Time and Newsweek will never be like The Economist, but why not The New York Times?

What makes editors want to copy The Economist is the fact that the publication doubled circulation and steadily increased advertising rates and news stand prices.

So why should The New York Times be checking out The Economist? Here I’m going to borrow from Mr. Pressman and his very reasons for why Time and Newsweek aren’t like The Economist:

1. Editorial Quality – Mr. Pressmen claims that The Economist “gives you the essential facts and a meaningful takeaway”. Though The New York Times reporters do include opinion in their pieces, there is always a meaningful takeaway which isn’t present in the leading American news magazines.

2. Appealing to Finance Types – Though I’m not sure how many people on Wall Street read The New York Times, they should be. The paper provides a holistic view of the news of the world which helps framing today’s financial stories. So even for analysts who are getting their financial news from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times is still a ‘must read’ to put the financial stories into a proper global perspective.

3. There are limited readers up for grabs – Here, the claim is that only a small sampling of readers are interested in a publication like The Economist, hence its small market potential. I personally believe that there are more people who could be convinced to read The New York Times, though I don’t think most would buy the paper at a newsstand. The Times must create technology-friendly offerings which will enable readers to engage with the paper in a manner that best fits their specific needs. This will include smart phone applications, voice applications, country or feature-specific applications – whatever will meet each individual’s needs.

4. Snob Appeal – Anyone who has ever read the wedding section in The Sunday New York Times or movie reviews on Fridays knows that The Times has snob appeal. The challenge for The New York Times is to find more snobs to appeal to without becoming mass market. I doubt that The New York Times will ever become mass market, but whether they kind find enough snobs to appeal to, only time will tell.

Despite the financial status of newspaper, they serve an important part of our history and culture. Whether delivered in print with thud on the door matt or digitally, newspapers are an institution that should be saved, andThe Times is one of the best papers out there. I just hope they figure out how to turn the ship around in time.

But in the last few months, two leading social media pundits have caught themselves in social media of hot water.

In the first example, from a few months ago, a PR executive criticized the corporate home town of one of his major clients on Twitter, and then was called out by someone from that company. In the second example from the last two weeks, a leading social media analyst strongly recommended that his readers ‘stall any additional movement’ regarding the company.

The first example, covered extensively in the media, highlights the openness of information in social media tools like Twitter and the fact that you have to be on your best behavior all the time because you never know when someone is listening. The second example, which is more critical, highlights the abuse of position / power.

With all of us spending more time on Twitter and Facebook and using additional social media tools, how can we avoid gaffs that will hurt out reputation?

1. Put yourself in ‘the other person’s shoes’ – We’ve all been in situations like this. We read a post / message / tweet that is just so dumb or off-message or annoying that we have to say something. STOP. Put yourself in that person’s shoes for a few minutes to try and figure out why they said or did what they did.

I’m a publicist and I recently had a reporter write a story about one of my clients which Ieft me puzzled. After the reporter interviewed my client for 20 minutes, I didn’t understand how the article turned out the way it did (basically, she included nothing from the interview). But then I rehashed some of the conversations I had had with that reporter leading up to the interview and realized that she had been looking for a different angle and that she probably wanted to drop the story all together. It didn’t make me happier about the story, but it was still a positive story about my client.

2. Invoke the 10 second rule (or ‘don’t post / message / tweet when you’re still angry’) – An extension of the first point, this rule has saved me countless times. One of the interesting things about social media is that it gives people the courage / balls / stupidity to say things they wouldn’t say face-to-face. That said, social media also enables taking a breather before responding to someone’s courageous / ballsy / downright stupid post / message / tweet.

When I’m writing a response to someone when I’m angry about something, I either write it in MS Word first, and then copy it, OR if the response is via email (usually a less social media), I’ll save the email in drafts first.

3. Social Networks are glass houses, and you know what they say to people who live in glass houses – Before commenting on something, ask yourself if you really want that comment out there for all to see for eternity. The immediacy of social media can be misleading. It might have taken 10 seconds to write and distribute, but it can last a life time.

I know you’re waiting for some big conclusion, and truth be told, the conclusion is old and boring – be nice and treat others like you’d want them to treat you. I know these lessons are as old as the Bible, but in our 24/7 world of instant online communications, never have these sayings been more true or relevant.

Truth be told, I applaud the Skittles team for having the guts and openness to launch such an open website. I think it was a very smart move.

But it only takes a paragraph to report it. My problem was in the subsequent 1000 words of pontification in many of the articles about the new Skittles website, which included more Monday morning quarterbacking then the Monday after the Super Bowl.

1. Wasn’t there anything else happening newsworthy that day?
I read a lot of online marketing newsletters and websites, and I couldn’t escape the Skittles story. It was everywhere I looked. Maybe it’s unfair to expect some publications not to cover Skittles, but reading online, I get the feeling that fewer and fewer stories are getting covered. And too many of them seem to be about anything Facebook or Yahoo!’s new CEO. I guess that’s better than nearly a year of stories of Yahoo!’s old CEO.

2. Why was everyone dissin’ Skittles and Agency.com?
I might be tired of reading about Skittles, but I applaud what they did. It’s always easy to criticize campaigns, particularly new concepts like this. Quite a few articles highlighted the fact that on day 2, Skittles was exposed to negative tweets on the Twitter. Come on guys (and gals), don’t you think they knew that was probably going to happen? I give them extra points for not shying away from the controversy and keeping the page live. Most of the other criticism I read, though relevant, was probably vetted in their decision making process.

3. Who cares?
Despite my support for their efforts, it’s only Skittles. Had one of the presidential candidates done something like this, I would have been impressed, but a candy? Who cares? Yes, I know that Skittles has 600,000 more friends on Facebook than I do (and Skittles isn’t even alive).So what?

As I have already pontificated on the over pontification of Skittles enough, let me leave you with this one thought: Social Media is an enabler that can help facilitate change. Let’s use to impact the important things in our lives – the ones that really matter.

It’s one of the more surprising results discovered by the eXelate Optimization Lab.  eXelate launched the lab in beta over the summer to qualify, analyze and optimize targeting data gathered from publisher partners. Its role has recently expanded to include providing performance analysis and recommendations for Ad Networks that use eXchange data.

“This goes well beyond the standard level of behavioral targeting data that we provide,” said Mark Zagorski, chief revenue officer. “That is, the classic notion of targeting an auto campaign to qualified auto buyers — and into the realm of Behavioral Optimization, where the result is as important as the desired audience, but may not sync with expectations.”

As part of its newly launched Insight program, the Lab runs campaigns across all of its segments (which include Auto Buyers, Travel, Shopping and Demo pools among others) from ad networks that are seeking behavioral targeting guidance for campaigns that may not make a precise fit in any one targeting category. The result is a behavioral targeting optimization plan that has resulted in lifts from 50 percent – 200 percent vs. run of network delivery or segment based targeting, according to the company.

“This goes well beyond the standard level of behavioral targeting data that we provide – that is, the classic notion of targeting an auto campaign to qualified auto buyers — and into the realm of Behavioral Optimization, where the result is as important as the desired audience, but may not sync with expectations,” said eXelate Chief Revenue Officer Mark Zagorski.

Now that the Lab is beginning to publish its Insight Reports, it also pinpoints specific dayparts and market segments which can improve campaign performance, and the results haven’t always been what would have been expected.

“What we’re seeing is that conventional marketing wisdom is being challenged on a regular basis when we analyze the results of our Insight program in the Lab,” Zagorski said.