Beyond ZIP +4 to Location Intelligence

In the United States, ZIP +4 assists marketers in targeting customers by city, neighborhood, or street, but geospatial location intelligence can help marketers perform much deeper analysis. And “analysis” is where the real value of geospatial lies.

A ZIP + 4 code according to Wikipedia; “uses the basic five-digit code plus four additional digits to identify a geographic segment within the five-digit delivery area, such as a city block, or a group of apartments.” And since the introduction of ZIP + 4 in 1983, this feature has assisted direct marketers (not to mention the USPS) in saving millions of dollars in costs.

While some marketers may decide that ZIP +4 is enough for customer targeting purposes, they’re missing out on a whole level of analysis available from geospatial that can help squeeze more return on investment from scarce marketing dollars.

The term “geospatial” describes a specific type of analytical software combined with geographic data. Going much further than simple ZIP +4 formats, geospatial comes to life via the transformation of a customer address into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). With geospatial, a whole host of marketing analytics is now available to marketers. Examples include:

• Map locations. By overlaying geospatial data types with a mapping tool (such as Google Earth) marketers can pinpoint store or office locations in proximity to customers.
• Calculate distances between locations. Stores, offices or distribution centers can be precisely calculated and then evaluated to examine if they are too close or too far apart. For example, marketers can determine the midpoint between two stores to meet the needs of an under-served customer segment. With geospatial, there’s no guessing, whereas it’s pretty difficult to calculate the distance between locations with ZIP +4.
• Marketing by the mile (or less). Suppose you have a specific store location and you want to market to households 5.1 miles to the north, 2.5 miles to the south, etc; essentially building your own polygon for direct marketing purposes. With geospatial capability, you can do this exercise; ZIP +4—not so much.
• Disaster planning. When an event occurs, let’s say a hurricane is brewing, will you be able to see which stores will be in its path? How about households? How might this event affect your ongoing or future marketing campaigns?
• Risk management. Customer concentration or density analysis (Fig 1) can identify specific areas in which you may be taking on too much risk.

Figure 1. A visual example of density analysis. Source

Some marketers want to know, in comparing ZIP +4 vs. geospatial—which is best? The answer depends on your specific problem, resource constraints, and level of analysis required.

ZIP +4 can help a marketer drill down towards a fairly small area for targeting and the process of converting a mailing list to ZIP +4 is relatively inexpensive. Whereas, adding geo-spatial capabilities usually involves use of an analytical infrastructure (database and hardware), software applications (i.e. data integration and visualization tools), and both technical and business know-how to perform analysis and act upon newly discovered information.

ZIP +4 may work best as an inexpensive way to improve customer targeting. However, as seen from the above marketing examples, geospatial capabilities open a whole host of analytical options for marketers that ZIP +4 just cannot match.

Questions:

• With three billion mobile phone users in the world (and growing) will “location” become an increasingly important component of marketing in the next 3-5 years?
• A business intelligence infrastructure is a necessary pre-cursor to geospatial analysis. What does this say about the skill sets marketers will need in the future to perform such analysis?

Marketing Budgets and Analysis Paralysis

It’s the fourth quarter,  and for most companies with a fiscal year starting in January, it means it’s marketing budget time. To kick things off, here’s a favorite quote of mine, author unknown; “You can’t steer a ship that’s not underway.”

There’s a lot of debate regarding the relevance of strategic planning. Some view strategic planning as a waste of time since most strategic planning is either a futile once a year exercise that is dusted off the following year, or an endless cycle that drags through September of the following year without clear goals and outcomes that are actionable.

The other school of thought is act now, plan later. Plan along as you move along–and keep moving.

There’s something to be said for both.

Overall, the marketing planning process for the next fiscal year should take only about 8 weeks. You need to plan for the following year, get leadership buy-in, establish funding and then start with execution.

Of course, as the business adjusts, so you also tweak your plan—nothing is set in stone. You don’t want to sit in the water going thru endless cycles, but you also need to plan so that you don’t become reactionary to changing market dynamics.

Do your strategic marketing planning, but don’t spend more than two months on it. And then get going. Don’t be a victim of analysis paralysis.

Marketing Lessons Learned From Micro-Finance In India

Besides Wall Street bankers, the poor of the world need access to financial liquidity too. But loaning money to individuals lacking credit history and formal employment can be a dicey proposition. Indeed, pitching financial services to people in the rural hinterlands takes effort, patience, and a tolerance for risk. It also takes marketing—but perhaps not in the way you might think.

In the dusty and dry northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, farmers pray for rain. Ample rain means the difference between a bountiful harvest allowing farmers to sell excess crops and starvation. This year (2009) has been a particularly harsh year for drought, as the monsoon season has been “meager” with roughly 20% less rainfall than usual.

With sporadic rainfall, farmers must find a way to even out their cash flows and this usually means borrowing. However, the Reserve Bank of India cites, “more than half (of farmers) do not access credit from either institutional or non-institutional sources.”

Into the gap come micro-lending institutions; companies or entrepreneurs offering small loans to the poor. Loans traditionally range from $50 to $300 (USD) and sometimes more. While interest rates are usually quite high, the economics of risk management and defaults requires these loans to price in a premium.

Micro-lending can be quite profitable—with an average return on assets of 5%, yet the poor still must be educated as to concepts, value propositions, and contractual terms of these financial services. This is where marketing plays a role.

A WSJ article, “What Works and What Doesn’t Work in Rural Finance,” describes trials and tribulations of an Indian company attempting to set up the infrastructure to make micro-finance possible. Banking in remote regions like Uttar Pradesh isn’t as easy as setting up a branch with tellers and an ATM. In some places, electricity is scarce and dirt roads can be challenging to navigate. So the Indian micro-finance company had to take an alternative approach.

First, the micro finance company decided to build franchisees via a partner network. This was probably a very smart decision, especially since some of the risk of failure (and success) would be born by others.

Second, the micro-finance company had to overcome trust issues as only 59% of the adult population of India utilizes a bank account. Many of India’s poor would likely be very suspicious of anyone offering to loan them money. To counter this, the micro-finance company hired local individuals with the realization they would likely be better received into the community than new settlers to the region.

In so far as mistakes, the micro-finance company set up franchises with new kiosks and slick neon signs to create attention and attract visitors. However the neon signs intimidated the villagers and actually drove traffic away. The micro-finance company learned its lesson, dismantled the neon signs and instead created signage that used “traditional painting techniques used in village homes.”

Another mistake was to bring out slick marketing materials filled with financial jargon that most Western consumers expect. “We realized that (this approach) doesn’t cut ice with villagers,” one of the micro finance entrepreneurs noted. So the company provided the franchises with less flashy marketing materials that simplified the message.

As marketers, we can look at the successes and failures of this micro-lending roll out and chastise the entrepreneurs for not understanding the value of localization. But to be fair, how many of us (in the Western world) would have made similar mistakes?

It seems counter-intuitive, but as our flat world becomes more globalized and inter-connected, localization strategies will actually take on added importance. Marketers, as we push forward into new markets and emerging economies, we should leverage what we can in best practices and processes, but we should also realize one size will not fit all. In most cases, niche marketing—while time consuming and potentially costly (in the short term)—will drive higher returns on marketing spend.

Questions:

• India has 192 official languages, a very diverse geography, strong religious faiths, a caste system and two dominant opposing political parties. Is better segmentation and targeting the recipe for marketing success in India?
• Many of India’s poor don’t have access to credit, insurance, or savings. Do you see a potentially huge opportunity for financial services—not only in India but in other countries?
• Micro-lending has a goal to “improve people’s lives.” What lessons learned can Western Financial companies take away from this mission statement?

Related: 10 Questions for Muhammad Yunus

Making Your “Marketing Marriage” Work!

With daily pressures for instant results, deadlines and executive demands for a six- to nine-month return on investment, most marketing executives are challenged to think strategically. A key question confronting marketers is, “Should marketing and the marketing budget be managed for the long-term or the short term?” Your answer probably depends on whether you view marketing as a wedding or a marriage.

In my experience, marketing is most effective when it is treated more like a marriage than a wedding. Conceptually, here are a few things that make a marriage work:

• Committed to the long haul (hopefully)!
• Focused on planning for the future (allocating resources to fund different priorities)
• Allows for conflict and cooperation (give and take—working towards a win/win situation)
• Constant communication is the norm

Driving the analogy home, marketing is more effective when, like a marriage, it is focused on:

• Building stronger, and long term relationships (with customers, internal customers, partners, sales teams etc…)
• Constant communication (with the parties above)
• Driving a deeper understanding (in this case, of customers and competitors)
• Seeking to influence the “bigger picture”–not boxed into the “day-to-day” minutiae
• A continual process—a journey of improvement, as opposed to marching towards various destinations

I had a wedding many moons ago and it was fun, but anyone who is married knows—the hard work begins after the wedding. Does the same thing hold true for strategic marketing?

Are some marketers avoiding the “hard work”—the process, the long term focus, the constant communication, the deeper understanding, the bigger picture etc because it’s easier and more fun just to open up an excel spreadsheet and move dollar amounts around to the different columns?

When presented with a budget of say, $500K, I’ve seen many marketers quickly approach it this way: A dash of industry associations, a pinch of direct marketing, maybe a tradeshow or two? How about a couple of display ads in the national IT publication?

Where’s the groundwork? The plan to meet business goals? The multi-year plan to expand to new markets? The portfolio review? And how much investment is it going to take to get there?

I propose that marketing should n more like a marriage than a series of weddings. Not to say execution of events and marketing deliverables isn’t important, but marketing should seek to influence the direction of the business, not just plan for the latest display advertising campaign.

Is marketing in your organization, more like a marriage or a series of one-off weddings?

Should marketing be treated more like a marriage? I’d love to hear your opinions…

Customer Service Queues – Fair, Fast or First?

With limited customer service resources, companies are challenged to deliver access to service in an expedient, fair and cost-effective manner. Since customers hate to wait, how can a company balance available resources and service—to effectively meet and/or exceed customer expectations? Queue management can help.

Where customers have to wait in line for service, you can be sure the science of queue management is involved. Queue management is the design of customer flow to and possibly through some function (cashier, customer service, help desk agent etc.). Processes can be documented, calculated and optimized and are sometimes enabled or automated by technology. But not all queues are created equal.

In a WSJ article, “Justice—Wait for it on the Checkout Line”, author Carl Bialik discusses how different industries react and adjust to improving customer wait times. For example, in an effort to speed service and ensure fairness (first come, first served) Wendy’s has long implemented a single line to order food. And most airlines, with the exception of the red carpet treatment for frequent fliers, also have implemented a single line for customer service.

Undoubtedly, most of us have experienced the aggravation of Murphy’s Law of queues—that the line next to you, will finish first. To address this issue, most transactional businesses (with the exception of grocery stores) have implemented a single line (or queue) for service. A single queue helps speed service and more importantly, gives waiting customers a sense of fairness that they will be served in an orderly fashion.

So your customer wants fair, but he/she probably also wants fast. And while you may think you’re delivering speedy service, your customer likely perceives something entirely different.

The above WSJ article cites a study by Richard Larson a professor at MIT which showed that customers waiting in line for a Boston Bank “overestimated their wait times by 23%”! So, customers often think they wait longer than they actually do, and get especially irritated when others get service (unfairly) after arriving later.

Now let’s add something else to the mix – suppose you are a business that has segmented your customer base and identified your most profitable customers. What if you wanted to design processes for them to “jump the queue”—allowing them to go first?

For example, in an effort to reward their most valuable customers, airlines often let passengers with status board an aircraft first. Some airlines employ priority baggage handling where bags in effect “jump the queue” by coming off the conveyor belt first. Passengers without status often look at this special treatment as unfair—at least until they achieve a level of status and start accruing special benefits!

Indeed, it’s a tricky balance to deliver a different level of service to a customer segment –especially when that treatment is visible to your entire customer base.

Technology can and should play a critical role in optimizing customer queues, especially when there is more demand than resources:

• A global grocer based out of the UK uses sensor technology to “count” how many people enter a store location and then “predict how many tills will be needed up to an hour in advance and monitor average waiting times and queue lengths.”
• Disney uses technology to create “virtual queues” such as FastPass to “track guest activity and smooth out demand by scheduling a future time slot for guests to return to an attraction.” This practice helps reduce wait times and allows guests to enjoy more attractions in the park instead of waiting in long lines.
• Automated call distribution systems allow for the intelligent routing of priority customers to agents with the right skills to assist them.

When it comes to customer service, every business must consider its capacity, and required service levels based on customer expectations and then balance these variables with available resources, costs and fixed architectural constraints.

However, a word of warning; getting the service queue wrong could be a prime reason why your customers aren’t coming back. Richard Larson, the afore mentioned MIT professor, says he remembers a time—23 years ago, when he wasn’t served on a first come first serve basis at a local department store. He hasn’t been back since.

Questions:

• The WSJ article notes that at grocery stores there seems little time to exchange pleasantries with cashiers as management systems track the speed of each transaction. In the name of optimization are we sacrificing a “better” customer experience?
• Is self-checkout the savior for long wait times?
• When it comes to waiting in line—would you take fairness over fast? What about “valuable” customers that get to go first—any resentment?

Thin Slicing Your Way to Lower Profits

A hotel manager looks out in the lobby and notices a guest with a Hermes tie. Another is carrying a Prada handbag. In an instant and through “the power of the glance,” the hotelier decides these folks “look right” and are worth giving special attention. Unfortunately, this hotelier has probably just thin-sliced his or her way to lower profits.

No surprise to anyone, some upscale retailers and hotels are looking for visual cues to determine the service level they should provide to customers. According to a somewhat dated 2007 WSJ article, “The Gatekeeper: How Posh Hotel Sizes Up Guests”, some hotels are sizing up guests based on what car they park in valet, or what they’re wearing when they walk in the door.

In addition to keeping a record of the spending of hotel guests, the staff of the Peninsula Beverly Hills looks for signs of wealth and sophistication in guests. The article notes,

“The hotel’s managing director, Ali Kasikci, is something of an anthropologist of status signals. He is highly aware of the delicate hierarchy of fashion and symbols of influence, and he looks for small details to tell him what a pair of jeans and a T-shirt can’t.”

In the article, Mr. Kasicki spots a Hermes tie and a Charvet shirt among his wealthy guests and says, “It’s like a skunk. There’s enough scent being sprayed around that you can connect the dots.”

And while as of last year, Mr. Kasicki has recently moved on from the Peninsula Hotel to the Montage Beverly Hills, undoubtedly he’s still thin-slicing; segmenting and treating customer’s differently based on his seasoned observations and intuition.

It’s also a dangerous strategy.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his best seller, Blink, defines the concept of thin-slicing as, “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.” Essentially, it’s the ability to see patterns based on extensive experience in a particular field or discipline. In the case of Mr. Kasicki, his years of hotel experience at the Peninsula and Four Seasons give him visual cues and “distinctive signatures” of which guests can afford his services.

Here’s the problem with intuition however. Solely relying on “at a glance” decision making, or decision making based on gut instinct can be very costly to our business and careers. For Mr. Kasicki to make better decisions on which guests should receive special attention, both observational data (visual cues) and hard numerical data are necessary.

It’s probably challenging in a service business like high-end hoteling, to not consciously or unconsciously segment and then treat customers differently based on how they dress or what they drive. However, even Mr. Kasicki admits that sometimes he gets it wrong when it comes to sizing up his guests. For example, the article notes a poorly dressed retired pharmaceutical executive is one of Mr. Kasicki’s wealthy guests!

It often makes sense to build loyalty programs, marketing campaigns and service/product offers to keep valuable customers spending money with your company. A good segmentation strategy, based on quantitative data, can help a company determine what customers to keep and which ones to let go to the competition.

For example, a data-driven customer profitability and life time value (LTV) analysis could show that while an individual is a frequent guest to a high end hotel, they also tend to bargain for the lowest rates, berate the service staff, tip poorly, steal towels and swipe hotel fixtures.

In an era of fierce competition, taking care of your most profitable and valuable customers has never been more important. Just don’t base your definition of a valuable customer on criteria such as he or she “looks the part.” Even Gladwell admits, “We are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition.”

Can you judge a book by its cover? Providing better levels of service to your top customers is a good strategy, but close your eyes for a moment and let your data speak to you for a comprehensive picture of who is “valuable.”

Beating The Placebo Effect: Red Pill or Blue?

Placebo pills routinely beat Big Pharma medications in clinical trials. As more drugs fail to make the cut due to increased “placebo effects,” what does this say about the inner workings of the human brain and what does any of this have to do with marketing?

Since 1962, double blind testing with placebos has been the norm for medications wishing to pass muster from the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA). However, over the years the placebo effect has been more pronounced with fewer drugs passing clinical trials. To be sure, unusually high responses to placebos have been blamed on ineffective compounds, but there might be other causes at work.

A Wired Magazine titled, “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Desperate to Know Why” cites some of the challenges facing Big Pharma. Over the years, drug makers have diligently worked to uncover why—for some patients—the act of taking a placebo works as good (or sometimes better) than a promising compound. In fact, according to the article, researchers are discovering, “the body’s response to certain types of medications is in constant flux, affected by expectations of treatment, conditioning, beliefs and social cues.”

For example, for some patients the simple act of watching another person gain relief from a medication sets “expectations” that the medication will indeed provide relief. And since consumers have been bombarded with billions of dollars in drug advertising over the years, Big Pharma has also increased expectations that simply taking a pill will solve a patient’s ills. In addition, a kind and empathetic doctor can also boost the placebo effect.

To help remove the noise from the above variables, drug makers have taken to testing medications in countries across the globe. However clinical researchers are discovering that even this isn’t a perfect solution as doctors are “paid to fill up trial rosters quickly which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of an illness.”

Part of the challenge for drug makers is defining the illness in question. The Wired article notes that many new drugs today target “higher cortical centers that generate beliefs and expectations, interpret social cues and anticipate rewards.” Defining “depression” in a patient is often difficult enough, but then try and see if that same definition holds for patients in different countries and communities! It’s tough stuff.

In a sign that the white surrender flag has been waved, drug makers have now all but acknowledged the benefits of placebos. What they’re looking for now is, “the best placebo response plus the best drug response.”

A key lesson from this article is that the human brain is very powerful and scientists don’t quite yet understand exactly how it works. Why or how does the human body improve its condition from the simple act of taking a medication (placebo or not)? Why do patients improve their conditions of depression when a doctor—knowingly—prescribes them a dose of medication that’s too low to be effective?

Another interesting discussion avenue is how customer expectations can be defined and created. For example, the Wired article mentions that drug makers have long known that simply coloring pills can help create expectations of efficacy. Yellow pills may create “doses of sunshine”; red pills let patients know they have potency, and green pills help reduce anxiety. Pills stamped with a brand name also offer a patient assurance and comfort.

Helping our companies understand, create and manage customer expectations is where the marketing function can add significant business value. But as Stan Lee of Marvel Comics fame reminds us, “With great power comes great responsibility!” Marketers must be willing to resist the urge to manipulate customer expectations in an unethical and immoral manner—especially if our products and services are no better than a comparable “do nothing” placebo.

Questions:

• In recent tests, durable warhorse drugs like Prozac have been beat by placebos. If you worked for Big Pharma, how might you suggest that your company “test out” consumer expectations—to see if your drugs actually worked?
• It would be difficult to argue that consumer expectations haven’t increased over the past ten to twenty years. What is a good strategy to manage expectations – keep them low and over deliver?
• Does experimentation with control groups have a place in your marketing function? If so, how? What are you learning?

Craigslist: One Place CRM Isn’t Welcome

With no recommendation engine, graphical improvements, or image search, Craigslist is a website stuck in the past. And while business best practices often include heavy investment in sales, marketing, and customer service, Craigslist eschews these functions–yet continues to grow its revenues. What makes Craigslist a “classifieds killer” and how is it able grow its business with little attention to the customer experience?

Craigslist seems to defy the odds. As an online classifieds website, it doesn’t accept payment for most advertising (with the exception of some job posts, and apartment listings in large cities). And recently the site begrudgingly charged for listings in categories frequented by prostitution services–and only then in order to assist law enforcement. Yet estimated revenues for the website top out at $100 million per year!

How can a company that cares little about maximizing profit, stay in business much less be termed wildly successful? A Wired magazine article, “The Tragedy of Craigslist” (September 2009), may provide some answers.

Gary Wolf, author of the article, noticed that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster break just about every rule in business.

First, customer service is almost nonexistent. While founder Craig Newmark makes a diligent effort to respond to customer service requests and complaints about spam, there are many queries that never receive a response. Also, if you happen to do something on Craigslist that the community considers a “no-no,” such as starting too many conversations in user forums, your posts might be met with a haiku similar to:

Frogs croak and gulls cry
Silently a river floods
A red leaf floats by

Moreover, users complain that posts sometimes don’t show up, or are deleted by Craigslist staff without notification. And if your posts are too often “flagged” for inappropriateness by the Craigslist user community, you may find yourself completely locked out of future listings.

The Wired article notes that Craigslist has no marketing staff or sales teams. Business development is unnecessary because at Craigslist, postings are–for the most part–no cost.

And that’s exactly how Craig Newmark would have it. Newmark believes that the best way to run a business is to provide customers a basic foundation/infrastructure to interact and transact and then step aside.

Could Craigslist improve its user interface, design a recommendation engine, or allow third-party advertising on the site? Sure, but so far Newmark and Buckmaster have shown little interest in innovation. And with 47 million unique users every month, Craigslist figures, Why tinker with success?

Newmark has long believed that Craigslist is a community service, much to the dismay of its for profit competitors–those dying periodicals formerly known as daily newspapers. In fact, according to the article, revenue from newspaper classifieds is off nearly 50 percent in the past decade.

It’s hard enough to compete in today’s challenging economic environment, much less compete with free, as newspapers such as The New York Times, or San Francisco Chronicle have discovered.

However, where there is indifference and customer dissatisfaction, perhaps there’s also opportunity for competition. And while market momentum is currently with Craigslist, technological innovation coupled with a focus on customer value may leave a crack in the door–and a fighting chance for someone to dethrone the giant.

Why Does “The Gut” Get All the Glory?

Despite the logic of using data to complement or drive decision making, the business and mainstream press glorify intuition and “gut” decision making by managers of all stripes. Where does this leave “data-driven” approaches?

An article in Fast Company titled, “Going for the Gut,” details how even though we like our “heroes to crunch the numbers, we (also) like them to play their hunches.” Author Rob Walker laments that books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, Jack Welch’s Straight from the Gut and others, give gut decision making first billing over a “careful, rational, empirical” approach.

Walker asks, “Are the narratives of popular culture dominated by super rational heroes triumphing over seat of the pants, gut-trusting bad guys? Actually, it’s the opposite: from Captain Kirk to Indiana Jones to Rambo to Tony Soprano…we’re drawn to the character who follows the hunch and wins.”

And business press and mainstream media largely agree. After all, wouldn’t you rather read about the business executive who had the right hunch and made millions, as opposed to the quant-jock who crunched the numbers and came up with the winning combination?

Gut decision making is “in” and for lack of a better word—cool. Some senior executives have alluded there’s a mystique to gut decision making—those who have it have it, and those who don’t will never ascend the ivory tower of business success.

Case in point, Ralph Larsen, former CEO of a large consumer product goods company, states in a Harvard Business Review article, “When to Trust Your Gut,” that “Very often people will do a brilliant job up through the middle of management levels, where it’s very heavy quantitative in terms of decision making. But then they reach senior management, where the problems get more complex and ambiguous, and we discover that their judgment or intuition is not what it should be.”

I do agree with Mr. Larsen that data driven decision making works best when there is in fact “data” to analyze. Sometimes, senior level decisions can be challenging because situations might be in uncharted territory—and there’s no past data, or too small a data set for analysis or prediction. That said, I’m not convinced that good judgment and intuition is the sole purview of senior management.

There is hope, however, that a data-driven approach can work just as good as gut thinking, and in most instances—compliment it.  Running a company and making decisions based on hard facts and numbers is something that I believe will never go out of style.

The Simple Minded Effects of Social Media

Neuroscientists have shown in study after study, that multi-tasking isn’t helping us be more productive, but in fact, is making us dumber. Are social media tools, with their promise of instant connectivity, notification, and collaboration adding fuel to the fire?

There is a lot of excitement about staying up-to-date and making personal connections with new media tools and applications (think: Facebook, Twitter etc). However, in our attempt to multi-task and keep up to speed on everything we deem relevant, there’s a potential dark side—the dumbing down of our brains.

The Atlantic, features an article titled, “The Autumn of the Multi-Taskers”. In the article, author Walter Kirn, discusses the stress we place on our minds and bodies when we attempt too much multi-tasking with social media tools, Blackberry’s, IM and more.

For example, Kirn notes that through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists have discovered:

“Multi-tasking messes with our brains in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.”

We like to pride ourselves on the ability to keep up with it all. We ask ourselves, “Why can’t I be on Outlook, have my IM application open, pick up the phone, read a business magazine, and have Linked In and Facebook running all at the same time?”

We’re taught that multi-tasking is the wave of the future. Do more with less. Keep up on everyone and everything. We tell ourselves we can do it all.

Neuroscientists, however, would disagree.

Kirn’s article mentions a study where two groups were asked to sort index cards. One trial group sorted in silence, the other had the same task but also was required to listen for specific tones from a grouping of sounds. At the end of the experiment, both groups sorted the cards properly, but the multi-tasking group couldn’t remember what “exactly” they were sorting.

As social media technologies (i.e. RSS, social networking and web applications, micro-blogging etc), become more prevalent and adoption rates climb, it seems we’re staying more connected with our communities and world, but forgetting half the stuff (perhaps purposefully) pushed to us via these technologies.

Our brains are out-tasked and overloaded—and yet we often look for more opportunities to cram additional information into our heads.

Sometimes, this pursuit of an “always-on” world translates into ill effects for our bodies. The article continues;

“Certain studies find that multi-tasking boosts the level of stress related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction—prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term they cause (our brain) to atrophy.”

Despite the provocative title of this post, it is not my intention to indict social media technologies, or the use of any other technology such as cellular phone, PDA, instant messaging and the like. The real issue of concern is lost focus and effectiveness when we use too many of these technologies at the same time.

I believe the best course of action is a careful balance of the use of these value adding technologies with our innate ability to capture, process and store information.

We’re not a machine, but I wonder sometimes if we think we are.