"the new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN."

We overestimate people all the time. Not their intelligence necessarily, or their common sense, but their familiarity with what some of us consider to be basic rules and tools for living.

We expect that they won't simultaneously eat, brush their hair and talk on the phone while driving a car, and yet, every few weeks, someone gets pulled over by the cops for doing something pretty much like that.

I know a marketing person who, when first confronted with a mouse for her computer, pointed it at her screen, expecting it to do something. (This was well after the introduction of Windows 3 in our office.)

The Internet is no different, as we all know. People still respond to emails from Nigerian princes looking for a little help moving their riches. Reasonably intelligent people – people who hold down steady jobs, who have post-secondary degrees and who vote – are at this moment typing URLs into Google instead of into the convenient address bar at the top of their browser window.

In marketing we have to remember that these people are usually a big chunk of our target audience. Even when they're sitting at a shiny new Macbook Pro, working in the latest version of Firefox or Safari, they don't necessarily know what we exepct them to know. And I believe as marketers that it's just smart for us to recognize that.

But this is unbelievable.

And yet, it happened.

People will not pay attention to even the most obvious signs that they are not on the site they think they've clicked on. They will try to enter their log-in and password in fields that look nothing like log-ins, in order to make a site that is not Facebook become Facebook and work like Facebook.

Um, let's not make assumptions about things being "obvious" in our work.