Love this following post written by http://www.brasstackthinking.com Tamsen McMahon

Why do we do it? We set goals, we make plans. We tell ourselves we will…this time.

But we don’t.

A while back, Julien Smith wisely pointed out (as is his wont) that three of us are present for any decision: there’s who we were, who we are, and who we are going to be. One begets another.

As I said to Julien then, each has a siren song: Past Self dwells in what could have been, Present Self dwells in the lush tactility of now, and Future Self sees all that could yet still be. Each has lessons: Past makes us what we are, Present sets who we’ll be, and Future reveals the paths from which we choose.

Future Self fascinates me. It holds so much promise, and yet we forsake it all the time—we do things today that pretty much screw over the person we’ll be tomorrow.

Why is that?

Perhaps because it’s so easy to dwell in the past. We know Past Self—it’s as old as we are, minus a day. It walks with us in everything we do, chats with us, tells us how this is or isn’t like what came before, how we have or haven’t succeeded by doing this or that. Perhaps it’s because some of us don’t like our Present Selves very much, and we can’t see the possibilities that Future Self provides, or at least, we can’t see anything but a continuation of who we are right now (and that’s more than we can bear).

Or maybe it’s just that the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t.

I mean, Future Self…we don’t even know that guy. He just sits out there, dealing in abstraction, putting pressure on Present Self, waiting to see what we’re going to do to him. Bastard.

As much as I love to ask “why?” (and trust me, I can be worse than a toddler on that front), the answers fall too often into the True But Useless category of information. What good is understanding “why” if it doesn’t actually move us to do something different? (Or worse, actually holds us back?)

Not much.

The problem is our success depends on our relationship with our Future Self—on someone we can’t know, and yet whose life we control absolutely.

So, how do we do that? How do you?

Image credit antonkawasaki

Posted via email from sn0wfl8ke’s Muse

Oneupweb found that not only do people spend time viewing paid ads on social networks, but they often looked at the ads more quickly once they landed on the search results page. For example, 65% of participants engage with sponsored ads within the first 10 seconds of their search. Often times, the path eyes scan the page often does not follow the order of the search results. Contrary to expected behavior, sponsored ads were looked at before the 3rd or 4th result. The Oneupweb study indicates similar behavior was observed throughout the YouTube search. The participants engaged with the sponsored ads in the process of completing the search task. Twitter does not support sponsored ads but the study still observed users’ search habits on Twitter as it has become an essential social marketing channel. About half of survey participants revealed they were satisfied with their brand search on Twitter. Many liked that they could find the most current opinions about a product. If you would like a PDF copy of the study results, access it here!

Okay, we’ve established that there’s not blindness toward ads in social networks, people still look at the ads. But do they click on them? Unlike searching on Google, the interaction with content in social media sites is very different. Many marketers including myself believe that opt-in advertising works best, while behavior-based campaigns and randomly generated ads are far less successful. In my opinion, this notion still holds true although the end users are becoming more acceptable of sponsored ads on social sites. Niche targeting and relevancy are the two areas advertisers need to focus on more when they try to apply their brand campaigns to those new environments. Will targeting based on niche, geographic location, interest, lifestyle & social graph be the future of advertising? Certainly! Will “engagement ads” change the game of online advertising after Google’s creation of “contextual ads” (judge the quality yourself)? Sooner or later. As of now, there is still a lot left to be desired!