Since we last chatted, the Niagara Falls uprooted itself and relocated inside my nasal cavity. As a result I have been coughing, blowing, and sneezing my little rear end off. In between being sick and trying to manage my clients, I haven’t had time to write a proper editorial this week. So I figured I would have the little guy above stand in for me. Because sometimes when you feel your worst you need to be reminded to believe in yourself and to just keep rocking on.

Tune in next week where I will talk in length about how stupid we are all becoming! (seriously, its gonna be a doozie!)

I hate wearing collared shirts. They feel so unnatural, like my neck grew wings or something. I also hate shaving. I mean. seriously, when was the last time you thought “dragging a razor blade across my face sounds like fun!” I also don’t wear socks. I just don’t like the way they make my toes feel. I guess it’s a good thing I own my own business, given that most of the time I look like a homeless person. (If you are a homeless person, I am sorry, it was just a joke. And where did you get a computer? That’s awesome!)

When I was a kid I used to have this little red telescope that I got for Christmas one year. I remember setting it up on the roof of our storage shed and looking up at the moon with my dad. It wasn’t much of a telescope, but it was good enough too see some craters, and for an 8 year old kid that was pretty cool. Since then I have always liked the moon. Even to this day I find myself staring up at the night sky tracing its edge.

Ok, first watch this video:

Next watch this one:

Question: What do these two videos have in common?

If you said something about innovation, you’d be right but that’s not what I am looking for. What I am looking for is more about the way the folks in these videos talk about their projects. In both cases they called their work an experiment. Not a product or a service, just an experiment.

This is important.

Repeat after me:

Social media marketing is not advertising.
Social media marketing is not advertising.
Social media marketing is not advertising.

I can already hear some of you getting warmed up for the comments, so let me say this. Yes, in social media you can buy advertising. But social media in itself is not advertising. If we can all agree on that, then why are some of us still talking about social media ROI???

You can’t measure relationships. You can’t put on paper the depth and complexity of the human experience with a brand. Sure you can track web traffic, click through rates, and even your follower/following ratio. But none of that explains real influence.

So this week I am going to toot my own horn a tiny bit, but please bear with me because it’s a bit rusty.

A few weeks ago I created a post on one of my old blogs. Soon after, I submitted it to one of my favorite social sharing sites StumbleUpon. The next day something strange happened. Traffic on the site shot up to over 1,500. The next day traffic hovered at around 1,000 and then the following day shot back up to around 1,500. I was happy at this point for what seemed like a modest increase in traffic for a blog that generally gets around 75 to a 100 visitors a day.

And then the floodgates opened.

The video above is YouTube user, iTr3vor. iTr3vor has as an odd obsession with filming himself dancing like a maniac in various Apple stores. Quite honestly I don’t get it. But, let’s face it, when the last time you had as much fun as iTr3vor apparently has in each video? It appears that many viewers and other YouTube users agree. Trevor has amassed a subscriber count close to 20,000 and a Twitter following over 3000. That is pretty good for a kid that probably doesn’t even have a driver’s license. What I’d like to know is what is Apple going to do about it? If anything at all?