I was at a social media seminar last week. The speaker was some hotshot Canadian and one of her big insights was that we all want to be treated like "special snowflakes". The idea is that your customers expect to have an individual experience at your store or your website. Everyone seemed to agree with this idea, but I don't.

Oh sure, sometimes (i.e. when something breaks) I want to be treated like a queen. But only sometimes. Most of the time I want brands to let me be anonymous. Hell, if coffee shop employees start to get too familiar, I generally find a new coffee shop. I don't want relationships with stores and brands. They're stores, not people!

I think marketing rules & best practices are too often determined by the extroverts of the world. But there are just as many introverts and I suspect there is money to be had in catering to our very different wants and needs. Or hell, at least in giving us the option to opt out of all of the special snowflake nonsense if we want to.

It's like politics. For every unbearable person who posts election crap as their Facebook status for months there are people who shut the hell up. Their votes count just as much as the loudmouths' votes.

It's a stupid marketer who takes the pulse of the consumer based on the comments of the squeakiest wheels. Likewise, it's a stupid politician who caters to the fringes. Most of us like the anonymous middle. When we say "change" we don't really mean it. I actually think James said it well in his comments to an earlier post:

We all have more important things going on in our lives. Why should I care about cap-and-trade when I could be relaxing on my couch, staring at my big screen TV watching Dexter? Why care about so-and-so's latest comments on off shore drilling when I could be spending time with my family? Because honestly, whichever party wins an election, my life will be relatively unchanged. And I like it that way.