Issue 003 - The Motorcycle of Experience

"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal.?" - Robert Pirsig

Okay, let's just say it out loud. It's weird right now.

First of all - It's the first week of March! Already! I mean wasn't yesterday January? Further, I haven't felt this much uncertainty, disruption, but overall positivity since the very early days of the Internet. Artificial Intelligence and Generative Content is all anyone in our business can talk about right now - and that's okay, because it feels like 1998 when all we could talk about was "are you on the Internet?yet?"?

March 1st is always a weird reminder for me. My entree into full-time "internet stuff" was when I got a job at a (then small) consultancy called USWeb. After it pulled?a Pacman, and gobbled up every power cookie?consultancy around it, little USWeb became the bigger Reinvent Communications (that's a fun bar bet for ya because there are scant few who will remember the 10 minutes that Reinvent actually existed). But then on March 1st, 2000, it became the behemoth .com web consultancy marchFIRST (it was reaaaaaal important to get that capitalization right). Clever, right??See, in the .com era we didn't remove vowels from company names, we just capitalized weird letters.

That was an.... erm... interesting year... It was the first time I learned what the wrong end of a margin call sounded like,?and it was my first ever experience with?losing half a company's value overnight. But it was also just ripe with new opportunity.

It feels a little like that right now. So much opportunity, hiding among the tall grass of fear, uncertainty and doubt. But how are you?

One of my favorite books in the whole wide world is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In that book, Robert Pirsig talks about how a quality life isn't just one thing. It's not the romantic appeal of the moment, wind in our hair as we fly along the highway. That keeps things popular but that romantic ride doesn't exist in a vacuum. You've also got to have the motorcycle in great shape - greased and oiled and other unromantic things that require knowledge and consistency - else the romantic ride never exists.

I think we can feel both things at the same time... Welcome to March, 2023.... Let's get to it...

Don't Blow This Bubble

It can be useful to go back to?the original .com bubble?and see what failed and what survived. You'll see interesting patterns. One is?mostly an overestimation of just how fast consumers will evolve out of old habits. For example,?Webvan was a grocery store delivery service?(cough Instacart). At their peak they had a market cap of $1.2 billion. But alas, nobody was ready to have people pick out their apples and eggs and deliver it. As this new bubble starts to inflate, and?you're thinking about the experiences you're developing for yourself or others - just remember a piece of advice i learned a long time ago: "Market where you're going, not where you are." Meaning - present yourself as?the future, but operate so you can pay the bills in the present."??

Social Media is Exhausted(ing)

We 100% agree with our friend @JayBaer that the?social media herd is about to be thinned inexorably. Though comparing it to a grilled sausage about burst its casing is a little TMI. But moving on, it's clear that we're in a?disruptive period for Social Media platforms. LinkedIn seems to be the only channel that seems to be thriving from both a sentiment, brand, and business model level. The rise of TikTok and Reels et al. feels a bit like we're all just finally exhausted and leaning back on the couch and saying "okay, entertain me". The race to become a "social media infuencer" is over. And we lost. So - now what? Well,?maybe it's time for community and "small media".??

I have a bunch more thoughts on this for research I'm doing for a book - if you're interested in more, hit me up on our EA Discord

Experience the Experiences

As a Superman fanatic (e.g. nerd), I still maintain that the first hour of Snyder's?Man of Steel is the best Superman origin story ever filmed. But, I can tell you the EXACT moment it goes off the rails. No spoilers, but it's at exactly the point of the movie that Lois says "yes" go going up in Zod's spaceship. From that point forward it becomes just "meh"... So much opportunity - so much wasted opportunity.??

But speaking of superheroes (see what I did there) - there's a whole lot going on in the coming fortnight from our wonderful Experience Advisor Community

Here's What's Going On With Experience Advisors??

• This week Catalina Margulis continues her series - The Future of Content Marketing?- interviewing a number of awesome people. Robert will be appearing on one of the upcoming events over the next week or so.?Register here!?And Get the full schedule.?

• Experience Advisor @AnnieSchiffman will be hosting an AMAZING webinar on how to optimize and (most importantly)?simplify your Social Media approach. This is a must attend.

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• Experience Advisor @BrianPiper is?celebrating the launch of the amazing new book Content Inc.?that he wrote with other Experience Advisor Joe Pulizzi.??If you haven't picked up your copy get on it!!

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• And over in the Experience Advisor Community we'll be hosting an online Navigation Session (virtual meetup) on the topic of "what's really going on in the world of B2B Marketing" on the 17th of March!!?If you're not a member of our little Discord Community -?come on over and see what's what.

If you got this far, thank you!!?Our mission for The Experience Advisors is to be a community?of strategists, storytellers, and students who believe there is magic in the telling. If you're getting this it's because we consider you a?part of The Experience.

If you're only getting this LinkedIn Email, why not apply to jump into our little community? We're having alot of fun and learning from each other.

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Issue Number 3 of The Experience and The Experience Advisors community is brought to you by the letter Y, the number 7, and?The Content Advisory.?