It’s awfully easy to profess expertise when you’re playing with someone else’s money. Perhaps that’s part of why we remain skeptical at smashLAB. There are some great new tools out there, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to build a brand. That’s why we take on our own projects: so we have some skin in the game.

You’ve got a problem. Maybe I’m wrong—perhaps you’re perfect. Could be, your company is doing brisk business and you hardly even have to think about marketing. If that’s the case, don’t read any further. No, really, I mean it. Stop reading right now. It’s beautiful outside—might as well go for an espresso instead.

Dat’s rite. We’z all myxed-ups and I’s nots tawkin bouts the tweensz textn. Nope, there’s something increasingly problematic with the language we employ in marketing. If we don’t make some changes soon, no one will listen to any of our messages.

Branding is a funny subject—particularly for small companies. Although it’s commonly discussed, it’s still so vague that most are confused by what exactly it means. I’ll even go a step further: I think that most branding efforts are flawed from the outset because people are simply not asking the most important question.

There are a lot of social media experts out there, and I’m not one of them. I don’t think your business needs a Facebook Page (actually, I say that they’re largely bunk); meanwhile, I feel that a lot of “blogger outreach” is an outright waste of time. In fact, I argue that you should probably ignore a lot of tools and features out there.

As of late, I’ve been doing a little work in social media. I’m not particularly proud of this, but the fact is, we’ve learned a fair bit about it, and some seem to value our input. With that in mind, I’d like to take the next ten minutes to give you some reasons to forget about social media.

From 12 to 30 I utilized the same general approach when it came to trying to get a date. I’d meet someone great, get awfully excited, and then make a bumbling request to get together. It rarely worked out very well, and upon being rejected I would retreat, deciding that it was easier to sit on the sidelines than hear a “no”.

“So, do we just say ‘fuck it’ and change our name?” was the question I started the day with. Over the past year we’d watched pages of accolades and general “good stuff” about our design studio erode into comments like: “smash lab = fail”. (Actually, that was on page one of Google for some time.) Nine years in business and we were contemplating dropping our moniker. How did this happen?

I hate Telus. They are big, unresponsive extortionists. Their advertising adds insult to injury by being patronizing and insincere. I’ve spent many tens of thousands of dollars with them by now, and if they crashed, burned, and were torn into small pieces by rabid dogs I, and many others, would celebrate with a “happy dance”.

Every week I receive a handful of emails from PR firms, wanting me to write about something they’re helping promote. I rarely do so for them, but it’s not that I wouldn’t. It’s just that their tactics suck. They sell their clients on the notion of “blogger relations” but in fact, they’re treating email like a fax machine. They send the same generic message out to a ton of bloggers, piss everyone off in the process, and then bill their client for doing so. (Nice.)