Okay, so you wake up in the morning and log on to your RSS reader. You promote some content on your social properties and feel pretty good about yourself.

Then, you check your Klout score. You’ve dropped one point. One point?! The mental breakdown begins. 

Am I a loser? What are my friends’ scores? Did I update Facebook enough yesterday? How’s my pinboard looking? Did I tweet, or just retweet? Do I have a POV? What social networks am I missing? 

At this point, you’ve lost your grip on the fun and engagement of social media and descended into social’s daily drudgery — staying ahead of the competition. There’s never enough time to keep up. It’s all just so friggin’ overwhelming.

Panic only breeds panic. So take a deep breath, have a coffee, think and contribute. The answers are surprisingly simple.

Make friends with your RSS reader.Sounds like old news? It’s not. Continually edit and add to the sources you follow to keep things fresh. Ask your friends and family to share their favourite sources. Look for automated “if you like this, you’ll love that” recos and get them working for you.

Remember frequency. Make a point of sharing your commentary at least three to five stories each day. This will help you get into a daily groove, and it will build a following of people who will count on seeing your content.

Develop a point of view (POV). Don’t make the mistake of only retweeting. Let go of your fear of judgment and assert a POV. Ask yourself: Why do I want to share this content? What’s one valuable point I can focus on from this article? Is there a larger issue that I can use to drive broader engagement? Should I target a segment of my followers? What do I think of the author’s POV? If you’re still not inspired, seize the opportunity to respectfully counter with a witty short statement. 

Participate only in the social networks you find valuable. The competition breathing down your neck isn’t worried about “belonging.” Make a resolution to stop being part of the 99%. Yes, you want to be responsive to what people are saying, but forget the quantity and focus on quality.

Crazy simple, right? In no time, you’ll gain followers, increase your influence and restore your mental health.

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Julie Geller (@juliegeller)

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There is something moving and shaking in the digital space, requiring a little investigation and some deep thought. You’ve probably already become seduced by what the marketing industry is desperately trying to get their heads around and properly leverage. Yup, I’m talking about my favourite new media channel: Mobile. 

The mobile scene within the marketing realm is exploding with the white hot intensity of a million suns. I’m talking Death Star explosion after Luke Skywalker took out Darth Vader’s summer home with that that masterful shot. Smartphone sales are going through the roof and marketers are sitting up and taking notice. What they are noticing is the extreme change in consumer behaviour brought on by the mobile revolution. The proverbial tail is dropping off consumers and they are noticing that their opposable thumb is growing in nicely. That thumb is now pounding out Facebook updates and Foursquare check-ins. The change in 

mindset is dramatic and moving at an electrifying pace. Essentially, mobile has spawned the consumer brat. Their attitude is that everything is on their terms. They want it their way and they want it now. It’s simply a product of what the mobile phone can bring to a consumer’s life—immediacy. Combine that with the sociability of the online consumer. If you’re going to define social media with one word, it has to be sharing. This is what we do these days. We share. We share inane details. We share embarrassing pictures. We share funny videos. What mobile has done is allow us to share it faster. By faster I mean immediately, because the brat consumer isn’t going to wait.

Before a recent trip to Chicago, I purchased a digital camera to take some pictures of the Bears football game I was attending. Normally, I would have taken some pictures, brought the camera home, hooked it up to my computer, downloaded the pictures, and then emailed them out to friends. My handy Blackberry changed all that. I didn’t even bring my shiny new camera to the game. I took pictures with my mobile phone and shared them on Facebook. Why? Because I couldn’t wait. I needed my social validation right there and right then. Not only did I have to share my experiences right away, I couldn’t wait for the immediate comments back from my network of friends.

The result of the convergence of mobile and social is actions that involve sharing and immediacy. If brands don’t understand this shift in consumer behaviour, they are going to be missing out on a lot of opportunities, including location-based services like Foursquare. Foursquare is a social network that lets users check into places using their GPS-enabled smartphones. So what’s a check-in worth? It could be anything. Some savvy businesses are creating incentives where if you are the person that checks in the most times at a certain location, you become the Mayor. Sometimes Mayors get free stuff like coupons. The weird thing is the behaviour of people who are involved in this—they have changed, behaviour is modified. We call it the Schacher Effect (let’s see if this theory nets me a Nobel Prize). The Schacher Effect is the overwhelming compulsion for people to embrace and celebrate their mobile/social activities at almost sociopathic levels.

What drives this? The irresistible appeal of right here, right now. 

I walk through the hallways of my agency and the check-in chatter is overwhelming. The competition for Foursquare Mayoralties is fierce. There are fights over being the Mayor of our local Tim Hortons’ location. Upon ousting a co-worker, a colleague of mine purchased a crown and a box of doughnuts to celebrate his victory. He paraded around the office and mocked his vanquished competition. Do I need to mention that most of this was captured Facebook for all to see…immediately? Ebola wished it had this much viral potential.

Mobile presents opportunities for brands to really engage with consumers. The Schacher Effect (please feel free to spread that term around) shows me consumers can have a real enthusiasm for using the mobile/social technology to interact with brands. Imagine if brands starting taking advantage of this though a little two-way dialogue, maybe in the form of a compelling targeted offer for consumers when in the proximity of purchase. And if someone’s taking the time to continually check-in, why not serve up some branded messaging, maybe a coupon for a trial. The world’s our oyster when it comes to possibilities for brands to connect with this new consumer.

Just make sure you do it immediately because they definitely won’t wait for you to catch up.

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Les Tapolczai (@lestapolczai) and Jason Chesebrough (@j_chesebrough)

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Mobile is a battered and abused channel in North America – one with widely  recognized potential, yet it has never been given the love it so justly deserves. We need to stop blathering on about QR codes, text 

entry and mobile sites that mimic desktop experiences, and focus on why people are using mobile devices, and for what purpose. Traditional folk take heed – this isn’t another place to duplicate the print ad or TV spot. Digital brothers and sisters, leave your website at the door. We have the opportunity, nay, the duty to engage our consumers.

This isn’t a channel that is limited to a cellular phone. Mobile means just that, a device that you can walk around with. From PDA’s to smart phones to tablets – people are engaging with data in an entirely new fashion. When looking at mobile devices and the way consumers use them, one stumbles upon the realization that what’s old is new again. I’m not referring to Gordon Gekko (I’d love to have his “Greed is Good” speech as my ringtone though). I’m talking about what I like to call The-Little-House-on-thePrairie syndrome.  It’s a simple cause and effect where the nostalgia we think we abandoned for the promise of hi-fi and hover boards actually places us back where we once were. Granted, running through the high fields of hay towards Ma and Pa brings us to a less rustic home, complete with low-flow indoor plumbing, HE laundry machines and streaming media from the handheld to the flat screen – hell, even Mary’s been sorted out thanks to Lasik surgery, but the technology we feared would separate us from the real world, has not. If computers have made a gap, mobile has made the bridge.

I find it fascinating the amount of interaction I have with the ‘outside world’ through my mobile device. I consume media, buy items, services, learn, explore and share – without ever needing to interact with another carbon-based unit. I don’t go to music stores, rarely set foot in my bank and can’t remember the last time I was in a travel agency, however I buy music, get movie tickets, manage money, plan trips and order food wherever and whenever I want, and can do it 24 hours a day. But where the community aspect of these seemingly independent experiences lives, is in the state of always being aware of who’s around me. No, we’re not going into Mr. Olson’s store for a chat and a pound of butter, but if he’s posted a comment (with like minded people) on a spot where we buy our butter, heralding one whipped and salted delight over others, we listen. You’ve heard the expression five friends tell five friends… add a few dozen zeros to the five, and you can see the ultimate power available.

Just the other night Jason was having dinner with his lady in an out-of-the-way roadhouse, and going to the movies came up in conversation amongst other things. Here’s Jason’s version: Over pints of red beer and long island iced teas we chatted about this and that while I launched my Flixster app as a secondary thought – and we continued to chat. With the skill of a ninja, I balanced the conversation at the table with quick glances and bursts of finger swiping to my iPhone. In less than five minutes, without skipping a beat discussing the silliness of our days, we’d found a cinema nearby, picked a movie, watched a trailer, gathered the impressions from professional critics, regular folks and our own friends – and placed the proverbial cherry on top by buying tickets to the show, then picked up our evening without breaking stride. The point of this tale? An amazing experience with technology – fully integrated into our date, where we accessed what we wanted, and at our pace. As a marketer however, take note: we were completely receptive as consumers and if a brand had managed to seamlessly integrate themselves into our experience we would have been putty in their hands.

Let’s face it, how much attention have we been paying the consumer? A billboard here, a banner there, and our work towards immersive experiences is often preceded by a flash loader, spinning its wares like a third-rate carnie. As marketers, we’ve been guilty of neglect. What happened to the love? We’re not listening online, we’re not bringing home flowers and I can’t remember the last time we danced ‘just because.’ 

A mobile experience is one of pure power from the consumers’ point of view. We need to be ready for them, and it needs to be genuine. When someone’s checking GPS to see the traffic on their drive in – pulled over on the side of the road with the vehicle in park of course – we can’t just place a banner on the app and consider our job done. Rather, this is a perfect touch point to personally integrate a brand into the task at hand. We can’t push here – as consumers are pulling, it’s a time to be gentle. We need to go along for the ride, in whatever form that takes. I feel the new world is one of predictive behaviour. 

We need to ask ourselves ‘where is the consumer now?’ and ‘where do we need to be?’  

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Les Tapolczai (@lestapolczai) and Jason Chesebrough (@j_chesebrough)