The gents over at Native Digital ditched their iPhones. And I thought I'd do the same, so for the month of May I'll be iPhoneless, instead using this Samsung "burner" I picked up for $20. For 31 days I'll be without reliance on a permanent connection, satisfying my digital communication and technology needs through only a desktop. It could be a long month. I'll post the results here, but in the mean time you can follow my progress on Twitter through the #iphoneless hashtag. Although I'm not too sure how tweeting will go without my phone. ...

Here's some fun statistics for you that I promise I didn't make up. 71% of peeps are becoming more selective regarding the pages they Like on Facebook The two main reasons people leave pages are because updates aren't relevant or are posted too often. When this happens 19% of peeps do nothing, 38% block the posts from their News Feed and 43% unlike the page. As more and more brands jump on the Facebook bandwagon, the market gets to a point of saturation and fans start to get choosey. There's only so many times you can click the Like button. The first-mover advantage was a win if you got there, but you probably didn't which means you really need to be doing something of value on your page. Most brands think the solution is to launch with a campaign and a media buy to build a foundation audience. Which usually works. But once that's over, they spend the rest of the year when their budget runs out pumping out pointless status updates. There's only so many times you can ask someone to Like a status or fill in the blank. I know I'm guilty of it, where you write bait posts to crack a good level of engagement. But at some point people are going to start seeing past these shitty pointless status updates that don't mean anything. Instead, you need to be entertaining or useful. There's enough brands trying the former (most of them failing), but not enough for the latter. And I reckon one really useful post does better things for your brand and page than 20 pointless ones....

Nearly everyone likes to think they're creative (even if they're not). I'm certainly one of those people. We like to flex our creative muscles where we can, but never really go out of our way to do so. We express this in the everyday things like updating our Facebook status with something witty. Or writing a funny product review on Amazon. In fact, here are my recent feedback posts on eBay...

Yesterday I arrived home from a trip around the world in 21 days. For the final unit of my degree, we traveled to Hong Kong, London, Milan, Madrid, Paris, New York & Los Angeles. Over the three weeks we visited brands and agencies such as Google, Ogilvy & Mather, DDB, L'Oreal, Citroen, Arsenal and Zara. Good times.And tomorrow I start my full time career at George Patts.I think I just hit a new stage in the life cycle....

I'm going to call it the popularity paradox, where something becomes too popular and peeps turn away from the lack of individualism. It's in every aspect of our lives from avoiding mass fashion and art to paying out on mainstream music to not buying an iPhone even though you secretly want one but everyone else has one therefore you can't. Here's some interesting examples from Facebook...