Yazhou was in Hong Kong.

Maybe you grew up with this technology, but for those of us who grew up in the twentieth century, it’s positively amazing. It’s kind of like asking my mother what it was like before television, I couldn’t fathom it. And now I’ve lived through a revolution myself, a technical revolution, the internet. It’s commonplace. Even the government has you fill out forms online. Twenty years ago people were afraid to enter their credit card number, now we live on our phones and…

My phone said Portland, OR. I don’t know about you, but this past week I’ve been inundated with calls talking about taxes and social security. I’m savvy enough to know they’re scams, but the worst thing is if only a few people bite, they make their numbers. So they keep dialing, and I keep blocking. But then they call on other numbers. It’s a cat and mouse game I tell you.

Usually my junk calls come from Gardena, CA. Have you been to Gardena? The odds of me knowing someone from there are…nil.

So I don’t pick those up anymore.

And to tell you the truth, I don’t get many phone calls to begin with. I rarely talk on the phone. So if someone is dialing me, is it important?

You know, you wait all day for a call and then a number comes up that’s not in your address book and you decide to let it go to voice mail and then you can’t call back, you can’t connect, it drives you nuts.

But this call from Portland, OR… No message was left, but there was a text, it was Deborah from CNNi. Now I know if they’re looking for me they want me to come on, but I’m out of town, I can’t go to the studio. So we’re texting back and forth and we agree we’ll Skype and dial in the time and…

This is for real business. Oftentimes I deal with companies that are untogether. But they’re gonna test the connection a half hour before and that’s when I get the text from Yazhou.

Now at this point in time, unique names are not uncommon, you don’t think much about it. And a young woman comes on the Skype screen and she has me adjust the angle of my laptop and close the door behind me and we discuss some technical stuff, and then she asks me what I thought about BTS on SNL.

Now I start to wax rhapsodic, telling her I loved the first number, but not the second, where they rapped. And I figure Yazhou was gonna give me the inside spin, being from the demo, and that’s when she tells me she’s in Hong Kong, and that SNL is blocked there.

Now Yazhou goes on to testify about BTS. Smiling as she says that America finally gets it. And I start to kvell. I’m sitting in a condo on a laptop using hotel wifi talking to a young woman in Hong Kong, who’s just doing the technical work, the actual show is gonna be done in Atlanta.

And she speaks English perfectly. I figure she’s doing time over there, paying her dues. But she says she’s Chinese! I can’t believe it, I ask her if she was born in the U.S.A. Nope. But she did spend a few years in school over here, but only a few.

And I’m intersecting with the Chinese miracle on my laptop. Here’s this educated young woman confident in her skills and… Forget all the xenophobic Americans, I can’t fathom it. How did this happen? We feel we can contact anybody in the world whenever we want to. And thirty years ago we thought fax was a breakthrough!

And then I’m connected to Atlanta and we have fun talking about BTS. The anchor asks me if I really think BTS on SNL was better than Gary Clark Jr on the same show, and I say DEFINITELY! Because Gary Clark, Jr. can’t write a song to save his life. He’s an excellent guitar player, but they don’t let the Korean boy/girl bands out in the world until the songs are perfected.

And I’m going on how New Kids On The Block was the progenitor. Oh, don’t e-mail me about some act from the sixties, I get it, you’re a muso and I must be wrong. And then Lou Pearlman perfected the formula, with the dance moves and better songs/production, i.e. Max Martin. And then came One Direction, from a TV show, but they famously didn’t dance. But their career was driven not by radio hits, but online mania. And now BTS has the songs, the dance moves, the meaning, yes, there are messages in their music, just ask their fans, and once again, it all happened online, the traditional music business was caught flat-footed. Yes, the album’s coming out on Columbia, but they’re at the end of the food chain, this was built by people who’d been doing it a long time who were confident in their endeavors and knew it was just a matter of time until the U.S. caught on.

And then John asked me about Blackpink, and I said it was a veritable movement. And it’s so exciting, these Korean acts breaking the hip-hop/pop hegemony. They could have been created in the U.S., but NO!

This shows you what the internet can do.

And I’m still amazed.

Nothing catches fire anymore.

Unless it’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Or to put it another way, we haven’t had that spirit here since 2012, with “Gangnam Style.”

Of course there are exceptions, most notably with Mayor Pete. But that was based on substance, and the truth is politics/Washington D.C. is the internet of the era. As for entertainment?

And high school kids. They’re in a pressure cooker, so their stuff spreads and we’re told it’s dominant but it’s not. That’s the failure of streaming charts. They bury all but the popular. Non hip-hop/pop acts percolate in the marketplace over time. They’re sold one by one. Therefore, they don’t shoot up the chart immediately and get no publicity, but they’re real.

You just can’t reach anybody anymore. There’s no place everybody is. A teenager wouldn’t be caught dead on Facebook, and a lot of boomers dropped out years ago. As for Twitter…forget the bots, most people signed up for an account, found the service too difficult, and never went back. So it’s a small population tweeting and reading. Furthermore, check out the number of followers of the mega-tweeters. Unless they’re household names, their numbers never break five digits, and are oftentimes much less. And most followers who are actually on Twitter don’t see the tweet, so why do it? It’s a small population tweeting on a regular basis, and most people don’t need to follow the news in real time, so…you can tweet and have no effect.

Or post a YouTube video. If you’re going for subscribers now, good luck. The influencer race peaked a couple of years ago, and those not superstars have moved on to Instagram, which is Twitter with pictures, with about an equal effect. Instagram is about documenting your life, which after the newness wears off, other people are uninterested in. It’s vapidity on parade. So expect posting to decline.

But the truth is if you’re trying to gain a fanbase from scratch, good luck. Be thankful anybody is paying attention at all.

You can post it, but that does not mean people will read it, never mind share it. We’re all overburdened with info, so we only forward the most fascinating, the most important, which is very little. And the dirty little secret is nobody reads it anyway. Bump into them and ask them, they’ll try to fake it, but the truth will be revealed.

Kind of like those e-mail newsletters with articles to read. You sign up and click through a couple of times, but then you stop, the information is not vital. God, think of how many articles have been forwarded to you that you haven’t read.

We all watch different TV shows and read different books and listen to different music. So nothing catches fire and blows up, because no one’s got the time for what they’re already interested in.

So marketers furiously look for publicity in newspapers, blogs, believing it will start a fire. But it won’t unless it’s truly eye or ear-popping. It has to be equivalent to the Beatles, or at least Adele, to get traction.

Otherwise, you’ve got to convert people one by one. Which sellers hate. Because it’s slow and difficult and you win or lose on your merits. It’s hard to fake people out, and they’re certainly not going to tell anybody else.

So, it’s about train-wreck or quality. And even then, word is gonna spread slowly. Just look at all the clickbait on legitimate websites. You know the drill, lurid headline and when you click through you’re inundated with ads, so you don’t.

Marketers have brought this upon themselves. We’re overloaded, we’re not paying attention. We have to hear it from a trusted source before we’ll click.

So nothing lights a fire on the internet overnight.

Which means that big publicity campaigns fall flat. And if you can see the sell beneath the supposed event, people are turned off. That’s what killed viral music videos.

So there is no overnight success. No instant adoption. And that’s what the system was built for, to create a towering edifice overnight.
There’s no sure-fire way to the top.

Own it.

Tune in tomorrow, Tuesday April 16th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

First everybody was gonna have a website, then they were gonna have a blog, then a page on Facebook and now pictures on Instagram. What do all these endeavors have in common? They’re passing fads. Because it was too much work and too few people were paying attention.

America is evolving into niches. I’m not talking entertainment, I’m talking people themselves. Zuckerberg has it right that we want private groups, because these are the only people who care about us.

It was all about garnering attention. But after you connected on Facebook with all the people you went to school with and distanced yourself from for good reason, what was your next move?

It’s kind of like the seventies. After the tumultuous sixties, we had the back to the land movement. And the personal development movement, i.e. EST, and Tom Wolfe labeled the era the “Me Decade.”

We are on the verge of another Me Decade. History repeats, but always with a twist. People are overwhelmed with information. They can’t make sense of it. They’re trying to figure out how to tune it out.

Yes, you have the coastal baby boomers with their anti-smartphone campaigns, but ignore them, they just want to jet back to a past that will never come back. Your smartphone opens your life, makes it easier, and it’s all personalized to you. This is the personalization that will become prominent in the twenties.

I’m not talking about tech personalization, robot personalization, algorithm personalization, this personalization will come from the users themselves. They’ll choose the info they want and the people they want to connect with. And it will be relatively few.

The internet allows us to reach everybody, but everybody is not listening. We had the Vine people, and now the social media “influencers.” They’re a fad. Because the truth is most people don’t care about them. Sure, there’s room for a few big ones, but…

I’ll give you an example. Wipe out your Twitter account and start over. Good luck getting the same number of followers. Or start a new Facebook page and see how many friends you can garner. That’s something people did years ago that they’re no longer into, they delete the invites. As for Instagram, fine if you’re posting the photos for your friends, for your circle, but if you think you can reach more, you’re deluded.

That’s right, putting on your best face, curating your image, that will be passe. We’re evolving into a more honest era, where it’s all about what your friends think of you. And the truth is they’ll forgive flaws, that’s what makes you human. And all those makeup tutorials on YouTube, the purveyors are going to give up and not be replaced.

This is a complete reset. A disassembling of the twentieth century model of gatekeepers and number ones. And the early internet model of virality. Virality is almost dead. No one has the time for it. If your friend recommends something, you’ll check it out, otherwise you’ll ignore it.

Friends have points of reference. There will be a switch to real life as opposed to internet life. Of course friends will utilize the internet and the smartphone to ease their existence, but they’ll mostly use these tools to gain information and communicate with their friends.

So marketing will become ever more difficult.

But also the aspirational culture we live in will decline. Everybody wanted to be rich and famous. Turns out very few people can be rich and famous. So why try? Everybody was gonna write an app, nobody does that anymore. Apps are something you get for free, they’re not a way to get rich.

As for getting rich… The millennials and Gen-Z are far different from their forebears. It’s not enough just to have money, how did you earn it, do you give back? Forget the disinformation paraded in the media, about influencers frolicking and flying on private jets. Everybody’s resetting their aspirations. They want fulfillment, not fame. And no one can be as famous as the stars of yesteryear.

It’s like America will become a nation of small towns. Because you don’t want to feel like a number.

Amazon is becoming the king of advertisers, because that’s where you go to shop, you only see ads for what you’re interested in. Google is losing. As for the ads you get in websites, where Facebook and Google triumph? Turns out algorithms don’t work, because they’re not personal. We’re looking for the personal touch in the machine age. Start with honesty and credibility and work from there. Everybody hates spam.

And you can be on TV and unknown.

Have an article about you in the paper and get no traction.

You’ve got to infect group by group. And the process is much slower, even though the internet is instantaneous.

We’re overloaded, we’re fatigued with what’s going on. We don’t want to hear about new, new, new, we just want to have relationships with a few enterprises and call it a day.

The internet barons are out of touch because they think tech solves all problems.

But that is untrue. And the public knows it.

So everybody will have a story and only their close friends will know it.

And everyone will be happier.