an alembic ~⚗

This report begins where Gary Goldhammer begins, by stating that all media is social. The struggle today is between this notion of traditional, even quaint, media and convergence culture’s interactive narrative across a transmedia platform built for modular exposure of storytelling elements.  Quaint media then is media that remains tied into a single point of access – when I use the term quaint media, think painting, newspapers, radio, broadcast television, puppetry, theater, and film – although we can go all the way back to telegraph, printing press, cuneiform tablets, herms and other statuary if you’d like.  More important to this report is the juxtaposition between quaint media and transmedia, a much more useful starting point than  ‘new media’ and ‘old media’ that offers little beyond starting debates about where to draw a line between the two.

While I’m primarily concerned with the future of media and the different screens through which we approach digital content, (for more on this, check out Peter Himler’s coverage of a recent industry event on his blog, The Flack) I am also interested in highlighting the social media professionals and what they themselves believe about the future of media. At every step of the way forward to where I’m at now, I’ve arrived by asking ‘why’ or ‘why not’ – then challenging the status quo to become more efficient. I believe efficiency, elegance, and evolution toward greater compatibility and broader accessibility are earmarks of a successful strategy in any field, but are most important in the field of public relations and promotional marketing.

This is part of why I found the post Josh Bernoff wrote at Groundswell so compelling. Entitled ‘Don’t Screw Up Your Mobile Marketing Opportunity’ Josh states:

“Mobile is so close to the customer (in her pocket!) that it’s pretty powerful if you do it right. It’s also dangerous to your brand if you do it wrong, especially since consumers are very aware that they pay for mobile phone and data services. ”

He stresses simplicity, integration, and long-term planning, something often overlooked by clients who are ‘just’ buying a website.

Building a web presence means modularity, focus, and preparation. By focusing on simplicity and compatibility, and building for the user (not the client!) a web designer can take advantage of the existing social networks more efficiently, and can adapt to changing technology more readily. Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed now make up the primary focus of my energy blogging and sharing when using social media to network and spread content. Certainly it’s vital to have something to tether these accounts; with my own work I focus on my online presences and the promotion of the book I co-authored with Edward E. Wilson, which is free to read online at ArtOfMemetics.com Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Company, has posted recent demographics on United States Facebook users to The Social Media Marketing Blog, his personal web site. There he’s broken the figures down to some anecdotal evidence pointing to users relying on Facebook to reconnect with old school buddies, stay in touch with children, and for business networking. When it comes to using Facebook for business networking, this is where personal branding techniques become useful.

A Strong Personal Brand

Dan Schawbel posted 10 rules for having a strong personal brand to the Personal Branding Blog, and I challenge you to review his rules and apply them to your own online presence. Possibly the most important observation his 10 rules provide is this:

“People wait till they’re comfortable with you to reveal their true brand “colors.” I think there’s a massive opportunity in putting yourself out there immediately. Your brand personality is your ultimate differentiator because it can’t be copied and it can filter out your friends from everybody else pretty quickly.”

When I began working within the field of social media networking, I immediately grasped the importance of this specific issue – being oneself comes naturally, while writing for, or in, the voice of a corporate brand identity is exhausting, and more time-consuming. When original content, and lots of it, is called for, handicapping yourself by refraining from honest and direct expression will bring on a burnout, and your work will fade from the view of the search engines and your social network.

Dennis McDonald has posted a number of  social media engagement tips on his web site where he raises the issue of lurkers, especially within a corporate setting.   Personally I believe that most of the online traffic is comprised of people looking for something to read rather than a space to express themselves, and, as a result, reserve interactivity for spaces where they feel comfortable posting. Possibly this has to do with the rhetorical implication of reading at someone’s site – that’s their site, where they write, and comments – while they may be enabled, are not inviting. On the other hand, if the site is a group hub, comments are expected – it’s not ‘their site’ but ‘our site’ – and this may explain why people I barely know are compelled to chat me up on Facebook, but refrain from commenting on my personal web site.

Mitch Joel puts it even more bluntly when he writes  “A company is no longer made up of anonymous people building one brand; rather, it is made up of many personal brands that are telling your one corporate-brand story in their own, personal, ways..” A company that overlooks, restrains, or muffles the ‘many megaphone’ effect their employees would otherwise have online hasn’t thought-out the long term effects of that kind of censorship, and can expect to suffer as a result.

Add this misunderstanding of social media to the recessionary trends that lead companies to slash their advertising budgets, and you can begin to understand where the muddled commentary on social media marketing is coming from… PR companies are struggling to position themselves as online reputation managers, while social media marketers are attempting to bully corporations with promises of SEO trickery that will outperform a properly positioned press release.  Joel Postman, of the blog Socialized, explains how the economy and social media are ruining PR:  within both companies and agencies, staff cuts are forcing PR people to become social media specialists and social media specialists to become PR people.

Instead of cost-cutting and outsourcing, perhaps more companies could be focusing on social media literacy with their own employees, and rather than regulate what is being said by whom, they might contribute to creating an inclusive work environment that translates in a positive way in their employees online presence. Neville Hobson’s additional guidelines for using avatars in business would be a great place to start,  with his proposal of “..some simple how-to tutorials that help employees with the practicalities of avatar creation: the objective here is to help ensure that everyone is able to create their avatars to a high quality and that images look good however they’re sized.” The reality is that people want to present themselves and their relationships in the best possible light, but often design issues stand in their way. A few hours a month exploring internet literacy concerns can dramatically improve team cohesion.  As Nick O’Niell of The Social Times explains, “Curious, passionate, intelligent, and generally interesting people tend to attract to each other. These unique individuals also tend to attract others within their personal social graphs.” Allowing a team to express itself and individuals to explore their interests will naturally create social networks across numerous platforms, and by facilitating that growth rather than attempting to guide it will create a corporate culture that is forward-thinking, viable in the coming globalized economy, and structured around a tribal model.

Francois Gossieaux has yet to release all of his data from the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, but his preliminary results blog post highlights the community aspects of social networking as vital to strategic brand management. “..companies list social reasons rather than commercial reasons for success when asked what community features contribute the most to their communities effectiveness.” Simply put, if you are overlooking community-building in favor of commercial profit, you are overlooking a strategy for long-term financial success.  Stewart Mader of Future Changes has an interesting post on how successful institutions deal with disruptive changes, and he highlights academia as an example of an institution built to adapt to transformative technologies as they occur. As he puts it,

“..there’s a whole class of institutions that have done quite well for over a thousand years: universities… Perhaps it’s because their product is knowledge, produced by research and discovery, and disseminated by teaching? This inherently involves change, because discovery of new knowledge changes commonly held beliefs. Even when that change takes time, and involves controversy among scholars, it still compels changes in theory and practice.”

Social Media in Theory and Practice

Adapting to social media “in theory and practice” might be a long way off for more traditional companies who are still struggling to write a coherent set of social media guidelines to regulate their own employees usage of social networks. Michael Gerrard provides a few examples of these guidelines on his blog here where you can see how even tech leaders, such as IBM and HP, are grappling with social media as something to fear, to guard against, and to approach any interaction through a series of filters. Shel Holtz has written about a major hospital in Boston which has blocked access to all social networks for its employees,  describing it as “..precisely the kind of brain-dead, mindless, knee-jerk reaction that is crippling organizations as they move inevitably into a networked ecosystem.”

Surprisingly, the U.S. State Dept. seems ahead of the curve IBM and HP (and many others) are spending so much intellectual capital attempting to navigate. Angelo Fernando, blogger behind the Hoi Polloi Report, touched on this when he wrote:

“If you look at the social media initiatives the State Dept has rolled out over the past few years, these ‘government employees’ seem to take to new media in a way you’d expect of a marketing organization. Maybe they understand that good marketing is all about good communication… It’s about using social media as an antenna not a bullhorn.”

Of course, this raises a lot of questions in marketing agencies about metrics.  I want you to imagine back in the early days of newspapers and magazines how the effect of coupons could be measured. A store owner put a coupon in a local newspaper, and then counted up the coupons that came back into the store – immediately that store owner had an understanding of the impact the advertising budget had on sales. Now flash-forward to today, and overlay that expectation of an observable metric being applied to social media – Nathan Gilliatt, a.k.a., the Net Savvy Executive, has analyzed some of the methodologies marketing agencies are struggling to wrap around the existing data, and comes to the conclusion that “the golden metric that will answer every question does not exist.” In part, this concern is a post-modern one – our world lacks a coherent narrative, and social media rests upon a sea of ever more modularized and granular expressions of culture.

On the one hand, attempting to measure precisely the impact of any given trans-media event is an exercise in futility – rather we must apprehend trends, and think in terms of clouds and presence rather than sites and indexing traffic.  On the other hand, a small business owner who knows precisely where they’re putting advertising and marketing energy can make a pretty good assessment of any given strategy.  Jacob Morgan has posted two examples of the specific impact social media marketing has had for smaller corporations, and there are plenty more social media marketing success stories out there if you ask around on twitter.

Tracking marketing effectiveness is only a fraction of the data that we can expect to bubble up out of the social networking space.  Another example was highlighted by Matt Rhodes on the FreshNetworks Blog in his post ‘Facebook, Gross National Happiness and the power of buzz tracking.’  “Buzz tracking offers a really valuable source of insight for brands and organisations, especially when it compares what people say (the buzz and sentiment) with other profiling data we have about them.”

Authenticity, Anonymity, Privacy, and Social Media

Certainly there is a kind of panopticon effect going on with Twitter, as Shira Chess explains in her blog post “Twitter: Voluntary Panopticon-as-Leisure”  where she raises the very real question: “how can we even pretend to care about privacy acts and phone tapping, when we are constantly reporting our every movement to the world?” Marketers who do not respect the value of privacy will undervalue the metrics available, and overlook blind spots. Because social media is an opt-in scenario, the market research and data associated with social networking will trend toward existing profile information while overlooking larger demographic data.

Even though a site such as 4chan presents itself as a collective of anonymous individuals, it is still a kind of social network, albeit one based around anonymous contributions toward the group’s collective cultural base. Anonymous, as a group entity, seeks to defend and perpetrate its own agenda, and will lash out to defend itself as such. CNET News reported on how the group fought back when their site was blocked by ISP AT&T. This incident has led David Larochelle to post a blog about using SSL to prove document authenticity, only one example of academic researchers struggling with the complexities of social networking and anonymity. Disentangling the public individuals with the social groups that have formed around anonymity is no small feat, but academic researchers are already tackling the problem of authenticity in a number of different ways. Another social collective with a vested interest in maintaining anonymity amongst its contributors is the fascinating news outlet Wikileaks.  Here the concern is more than pranking mainstream media outlets or trolling youtube with porn. Some contributors to wikileaks would face prison, or even physical harm, if their names were known. Compiling demographic and market research data against this spectrum is problematic at best.  Robert X. Cringley’s post ‘Internet Anonymity: Why It Really Does Matter’ tackles this in greater depth.

Again, in social media, anonymity is a very difficult issue. Tiphereth Gloria of Digital Tip brings this home in her blog post ‘Social Media Accountability is a Two Way Street.”  “..Former Vogue Australia cover model Liskula Cohen was called a “skank” (and disparaged for her age) by a blog in NYC focused entirely on her, and as the blog was hosted on Blogspot, Liskula sued Google to get the identity of blogger. Thanks to the judge agreeing the comments were defamatory, Google has now been ordered to reveal the identity of the blogger to enable Cohen to sue for defamation.” Of course, this presents another issue as well… if that allegedly defamatory blogger had been hosted on a private server, under their own domain name, it would be a much more difficult task for a judge to arbitrarily declare that their privacy be invaded.

This notion of authenticity and transparency has been addressed time and time again, but seldom so precisely as Beth Harte’s post on the matter at her site, The Harte of Marketing. Here she personally tested the notion of authenticity while raising some questions about trust and its role in internet marketing:

“I will always believe in authenticity and transparency and will conduct my own interactions as such. And maybe I was wrong about ghost blogging/tweeting…perhaps it is entirely possible to handle it properly and create a level of trust if done consistently.”

I understand Beth’s reservations. Allowing someone else to control the lynchpin of your online presence by relying on a site like Blogspot.com or Wordpress.com to host your site is a handicap to your potential performance down the line, not just because you might get rolled over on by your provider. Secondly, allowing someone else to ghostblog as you raises ethical concerns as well as the potential for abuse. Thirdly, paying someone to ghostblog quite likely opens you up to legal issues you may not have considered, as Robin Hamman points out at his site, Headshift.

You should be in control of your web presence hub, at the very least.  Social profiles need to be attached to a space you can update, where you can at least edit and modify the content as you see fit, and you should consider that the anchor for the rest of your online presence. These anchor points for tethering a social profile must be on a server you’re able to access and update, and need to be on your own domain name, or you will always be fighting an uphill search engine optimization battle. Luckily most businesses already recognize this, and use third-party sites as an adjunct to their online presence rather than as the primary focus of their branding initiatives. Unfortunately, that’s not true for most individuals, and even most bands or artists. Even more problematic, non-profit organizations, who would benefit immensely from cause-based blogging and social networking as a low-cost entry into community discourse, are finding themselves behind the times as well. Thankfully there are bloggers like Beth Kantor who are focusing on how non-profits can use social media (and whose post on the art of aligning social media strategy with a communications strategy is a good place to start for those of you who are looking for a straight-forward presentation on what is now possible.  )

What is Communicated Trumps How it is Communicated

When I began working online exclusively, one of the rising stars of the internet marketing community was Tellman Knudson, an internet marketer who has seemingly endless energy for creating digital products.  At that time his energy was directed primarily at better and better ways to use email lists to generate revenue. For months I met with him and a select group of other entrepreneurs in a mastermind session, the details of which I outlined in the 2008 book The Art of Memetics. For a while we experimented with lead generation via social networks, and quickly realized that the demographic base in Myspace wasn’t worth the effort as far as internet marketing went, but that it did have its place in terms of reaching fans of music. Edward and I wrote this book for precisely those individual artists, unsigned bands, and unpublished authors who wanted to take charge of their own promotion in an effective and efficient way. While Myspace may not be the right venue for selling products, marketers have since begun to focus on lead generation through social media, and Robert Lesser of the blog Acquiring Minds has highlighted some of the concerns mingling social networking with lead generation on his post ‘Lead Generation through Social Media?”

When we were bringing together information on memetics, marketing, and networking, we did so with the intention that our book could be a starting point for our readers seeking to apply brand strategy to their own online presence. We started the book in 2005, and finished it in early 2008. Since then, there has been a fundamental shift in the way content is approached and consumed online. Email is no longer king. Email was never all that perfect to begin with – sharing files is more of an afterthought, and can make spam filters choke on legitimate correspondence. Now that I’ve had a chance to toy with Wave, Google’s latest beta project, I can see something of where we’re headed. Email is so.. linear. And unwieldy. Google Wave seems like the next logical step in participation, and Google is not the only company seeking to figure out the best new approach to real-time interaction. For example, David Armano has a wonderful presentation on his start-up’s Collaboratory, an experiment in what he describes as ‘Social Business Design.’ or “The intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.”

This is an interesting start to what I believe is a sea-change in the way we communicate, and it started long before Twitter.

In 2007 when I created my first Twitter account, it was during SXSW and I used it primarily to see what interesting links and apps were coming out of that specific event. Since then, Twitter has become bloated, over-hyped, and even rapped about… mainstream news has latched onto Twitter as the ideal feedback lens through which to focus public response. Iran’s national election and resulting internal conflict highlighted Twitter’s usefulness to democratic action, and the US State Dept. intervened in Twitter’s planned site updates, preventing Twitter downtime during the Iranian protests.

All of this has injected Twitter with a massive user base that lacks a certain – shall we say – internet literacy component. Twitter is easy to use, and is also easy to use inappropriately. Most new users of Twitter will abandon Twitter within the first thirty days of acquiring an account.

This does not mean Twitter is a failure – far from it. Sure 60% of their new user base calls it quits after a few weeks, but the remainder represent a growth rate that’s positively stunning. On their own page, Twitter states it is successful precisely because it “solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication.”

No one need read, respond, or even acknowledge any given individual tweet. Email is generally written for someone to read, where as Twitter is a response to a question, one posed to every user, and generally approachable by any other user or non-user of Twitter. Here’s a little more from the twitter.com/about page:

“The result of using Twitter to stay connected with friends, relatives, and coworkers is that you have a sense of what folks are up to but you are not expectations to respond to any updates unless you want to.”

It might be hard to understand how a deceptively little service like Twitter has the power to “Disrupt every function in your company” as Paul Dunay explains. Part of this disruption is the inherent instability to the social network phenomena as an ecological niche in the larger media-sphere. It’s nearly impossible to predict what the next big thing will be next quarter. All of this makes the job of the Chief Marketing Officer much more stressful, especially during a recession. Dana Theus of Magus Consulting, LLC explored this issue all the way back in June, 2009 where she writes that  “the speed of change in this market means that even a social marketing strategy that makes sense in the one quarter may be completely undermined by the end of the next quarter.”

I personally believe the terms ’social media’ and  ‘new media’ will fast become irrelevant once embedding and sharing become transparent, and an evolution in what we think of as email is only the start of this transformation. We are content creators and consumers, and the social networks are merely tools to accomplish this creation and consumption. Trends in efficiency, aesthetics, and valuational migration indicate that eventually content itself will be the concern, while the framing and the form the content takes will become more mercurial.

Marshal Sponder, the WebMetricsGuru blogger, highlights this in his post on RSS where he asks Is RSS on its way out? I feel RSS isn’t so much on its way out, as it was never really all that well understood by the masses to begin with – instead I think RSS is being used in new, and in many cases unexpected, ways to create a continuity of persona across a vast number of sites. I know that I use it in this way, and so does every other person who’s connected their FriendFeed to their Twitter to their Facebook. Instead, I think Marshal is picking up on the same concern Paul Gillin lists as the biggest blunder amongst most bloggers  – the failure to persist. As Paul explains:

“Perhaps I’m unusual, but the first thing I look for when visiting a blog is the date of the most recent entry. This tells me a lot. Knowing whether the essay I’m about to read is one week or three years old can make a huge difference in its relevance to me.”

What Happened to the Blogosphere?

Tac Anderson’s post on New Comm Biz is an excellent look at where to start as a blogger, but even more telling is how Tac has designed his blog. Most obvious is what is missing – dates.

The clearing out of the date stamp is known as ‘evergreening’ and has to do with the rhetorical implications of being ‘out of date’ – by removing the date and time stamp on a blog’s theme, content never seems to age unless the content itself is out of date, thus throwing off readers like Paul Gillin who rely on date-stamps to determine how relevant the content might be in the blog post itself. I’ve used this technique myself to improve the design aesthetic of a blog, and, additionally because I rarely look at publication date on a book when I evaluate its worth so I see no reason to distract a potential reader with insignificant temporal details.

In another blog post Tac highlights what I have also noticed – that people are discovering multiple points of interface and relying on third party profiles to engage and carry out their online journaling. This, combined with the three important concepts for marketers that John Bell of WOMMA outlines on his blog, indicates we may be looking at the end of the first blogosphere bubble. Now that the FTC wants to regulate blogging, at least regarding consumer-generated statements, the impetus will be toward a more diffuse approach to product endorsements, and ’splogging’ may finally fade from view. John Jantsch, over at DuctTapeMarketing, has been running sponsored posts on his blog and does so with a paragraph-long disclaimer highlighting the post as a sponsored piece. We can’t expect all bloggers to be as ethical as John, but we can expect the legitimate ones to behave in a similar fashion.

News bloggers are a different story. Remember the 2004 Presidential election cycle? I believe personally that the real war between the journalist and the blogger hit full bloom during that debate, and ever since we’ve been watching a co-mingling of styles between journalists and bloggers. John Cass’ post on his own blog addressed this issue:

“I believe that journalists have hugely influenced bloggers in their code of ethics and etiquette in writing on the web. If many journalists are becoming bloggers and bloggers journalists, what is the new standard for ethics across all the professions?”

But again, blogging, Twitter, and social networking in general, is about more than self-promotion and sharing pictures of cats. We are seeing social structure moving from an unconscious hegemonic superfluid permeating civics and religion to a conscious, self-selected superstructure which supports our individual ego formation. Brian Solis describes this as the “Verizon Network” theory when he says “..we are creating a new generation of digital extroverts who gain confidence in online interaction reinforced by every new update, follower, retweet, public @ (acknowledgment), and linkback. I then suggested that this may actually have a positive impact on society as, we then carry this new found courage back into the real world, supported by our invisible army of supporters who define our social graph.”

Social aspects aside, what is really important about social networks for marketing is the, somewhat obvious, results that attend brand recognition and discussion on social networks. One of the current ways in which companies are relying on Twitter is as a point of customer service. Jason Falls presented a report entitled “Customer Twervice: Exploring Case Studies & Best Practices In Customer Service Efforts Using Twitter” on Social Media Explorer  where he distills what he sees as some of the best practices from a survey of ten companies. Getting in on brand-relevant conversation is essential to driving inbound, search-based traffic to a company site, and customer service twitter accounts are an excellent place to begin having those conversations online.

Dirk Singer  breaks down a recent Comcast study to show that: “50% of ‘’social media exposed” surfers searched for product terms every day, compared to 33% of “non exposed surfers.” In all, people exposed to “influenced social” and paid search has 223% heavier search behaviour.” This translates directly into an increased online consumer base. That same study indicates that, while print and radio have suffered, television still retains its heavy market penetration and will likely continue to do so for some time to come. However, with the interactivity already afforded by digital cable, and the growing demand for internet-ready gaming platforms, we can also expect television to become another screen into the online world. As I write this report, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 promises to roll out an interface for Facebook, Twitter, and a few other social networking sites to its ‘Gold’ (i.e., membergate) community. And in the same token, Opera for Nintendo’s Wii has allowed Wii owners to surf the net for a while now through an ‘internet channel.’

To put it bluntly, mainstream media still matters, as Dave Fleet points out. It matters because what we are seeing is not so much a old media-new media dichotomy, but rather a world where quaint media is converging with social media to create trans-media narratives about ourselves, our cultures, and our world. Media is not dead, niche media is more alive than ever, but the information glut has devalued the price of access to knowledge and entertainment. Marc Meyer sums the evolutionary trends we’re observing like so: “It started with AIM chat, it evolved to blogging, it’s morphed into Twitter and we now have 20 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute… Our fascination with the human condition continues to evolve along with technology focused solely on expressive capability.”

So Now What?

Rohit Bhargava, writing on Influential Marketing Blog, describes what he sees as the next big social media job – Content Curator. Essentially an archivist roll, curated content has been around since the dawn of media in one form or another, but we are moving to a point of information glut where the roll must exist for content to become valued. Here’s how Rohit describes it:

“In the near future, experts predict that content on the web will double every 72 hours. The detached analysis of an algorithm will no longer be enough to find what we are looking for. To satisfy the people’s hunger for great content on any topic imaginable, there will need to be a new category of individual working online. Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward. The people who choose to take on this role will be known as Content Curators. The future of the social web will be driven by these Content Curators, who take it upon themselves to collect and share the best content online for others to consume and take on the role of citizen editors, publishing highly valuable compilations of content created by others. In time, these curators will bring more utility and order to the social web. In doing so, they will help to add a voice and point of view to organizations and companies that can connect them with customers – creating an entirely new dialogue based on valued content rather than just brand created marketing messages.”

Back to the here-and-now, one of the social media jobs which has existed for a while is that of ‘Community Manager’ – similar to the role of sysadmin back before the browser existed, or the more commonly known title of ‘Forum Moderator’ that patrols message boards and maintains a semblance of order, the role of the Community Manager is to strengthen and challenge membergate communitites into useful discussion based around educational topics. Angela Connor describes her experience as community manager to be somewhere between referee, babysitter, and therapist. While this role is restricted to conversations and member-driven contributions, it is likely that the role of ‘Content Curator’ Rohit envisions will organically arise from this particular social media position.

For those who are already working as a forum moderator or community manager, Debra Murphy of Masterful Marketing provides nine ways to nurture and engage your community.  Having spent years online in one forum or another, I know that her tip (#6 if you’re counting from the top) about asking good questions to initiate discussion is invaluable. People generally want to make their opinions known, and communities, be they open forums or membergate sites, rely on input from their users to grow. Nurturing growth online is very much like gardening – a lot of weeding, a lot of waiting, and eventually there are entirely too many cucumbers. (Okay, it’s not precisely like gardening, but you get the idea.)

Another aspect of future marketing trends which will come to pass is the concept of augmented reality marketing. Niall Cook’s blog piece on Marketing Technology highlights a few possible approaches marketing may take:

“The first question to ask is what the physical objects are. People, products, buildings, headlines, newspapers, etc. all spring immediately to mind. Now let’s think about the associated data. Profiles, reviews, comments, articles, sentiment, etc. all come into play. So augmented reality applications that can tell you whether a headline in a newspaper is positive or negative and what people are saying about it is not beyond the realms of possibility… I’m already imagining a world where every object – animate or inanimate – can be recognised (visually, aurally or otherwise) and given a unique identifier.”

Again, going back to 2004, this is starting to sound a lot like the world Bruce Sterling described when babbling on about blobjects, gizmos, spimes, and spime wranglers. Even then, his vision was less about science fiction and more about design issues, while today the conceptual work is nearly complete and iPhone applications which work as augmented reality interfaces are already available for download from the iPhone Apps store. Augmentation doesn’t necessarily have to remain tied to a mobile device, either. Author Dirk Shaw posted an example of Legos augmented reality sales kiosk on his blog as an example of what is already possible.

Those businesses who are thinking of getting online to open up commerce need to be prepared for mCommerce, not eCommerce. Mobile commerce, not necessarily divorced from the desktop but rather cross-compatible with any given internet capable device is the future. Business owners who are struggling to build an online storefront out of tables are likely to find all their work is for naught when their competitors establish xml-compliant div layouts that adapt to the user’s interface. Marketers who aren’t focused on pull marketing techniques today will be woefully unprepared to adapt to mCommerce tomorrow.

And if you think this is an important concept for American businesses to get right, just consider the impact mobile phones are having around the world. In China, for example, Rand Han, at LittleRedBook.cn, has blogged about the controversy China Mobile’s recent advertising campaign caused. Advertising in the age of social networking creates feedback points for cultural contention that previously would have been unimaginable. Even more to the point, Dina Mehta provides some fascinating examples of the impact mobile access is having in rural India at her blog, Conversations with Dina. Around the world, we are seeing a connectivity revolution across the globe, more than simply a re-imagining of marketing practices at a local or regional level.

Shiv Singh posted this image,  which in turn he acquired from Barcelona’s Chiringuito, that highlights the dramatic transformation the field of marketing has undergone in the last twenty years. In the next decade, we can expect mobile devices to almost entirely replace the desktop computer as the primary internet interface. Do you have a ten year plan in place to make your business and your marketing mCommerce-ready?

If you are in event promotion do you know how to integrate your interactive marketing and your press releases? Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source Media posted about aligning PR and Marketing  and his conclusion sounds a lot like an ARG: “Alignment requires that we place tool building and story telling into a larger engagement strategy. Together they can build stronger relationships. In this way, PR and marketing give clients a better command of what is being said and how we say it. Applications then have context, and story telling has a call to action. The result: The user is more engaged.”

ARGs or Alternate Reality Games, have been around for a while. Probably the first transmedia ARG was the Ong’s Hat narrative but the most recent in the music industry was Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero while the ARG currently capturing eyeballs and driving discussion online today is Marble Hornets.

I don’t want to suggest or imply that the only way to promote online is through this kind of contextual embedding of a narrative. More importantly, I want to emphasize that mobile social networking is not primarily an advertising channel. Augie Ray over at Experience: The Blog, details exactly how value-added marketing to consumers via mobile-enabled social media can become both placeless and essential as mCommerce becomes more prevalent. This is not a solution, it’s a starting point.

As Rachel Happe writes at The Social Organization, there is a technique to creating a long-term successful strategy in social network marketing. She explains, “..find the company your targets keep. Start with the people in your targets circle who are receptive to your message. Surround and envelop that target with company that is supportive of your goals. It’s called triangulation and it works pretty well, especially if you are looking to build long-term, trusted relationships.” This strategy isn’t exactly unique, but it is significantly more do-able in today’s world than it was in decades past. Tom Pick has a link-bait style blog post up at The WebMarketCentral Blog, where he details some of the year’s best articles on Social Media Marketing if you’re looking for further reading on social media marketing strategy here.

Conclusion

Another place to start digging deeper, and something for the more metric-minded marketer, is the work Themos Kalafatis has been doing as a predictive analytics consultant on predicting viral tweets.

From there, take some time to look over the five trends that are reshaping marketing, according to Freddie Laker most of which I’ve touched on above but in convenient cliff-note format.

Take a moment to review the slides from Amanda Lenhart’s slides from her presentation at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Milwaukee entitled The Democratization of Online Social Networks: A look at the change in demographics of social network users over time.

If you liked Amanda’s slides, you might also be interested in following the blog of Ross Mayfield, an advisor to SlideShare, the application on which Amanda’s slides were presented. SlideShare itself is a way to bring business related content to the attention of other decision-makers in a given industry. Another example of this kind of social network application is over on Mark Masterson’s blog Process Perfection, where he’s reblogged Stu Charlton’s presentation on Software Licensing In The Cloud for CloudWorld2009 shared using this SlideShare technology.  Ross explains: “I believe SlideShare for Business represents a new ad format and self-service network that can help Social Media drive direct and measurable business results. And I know Slideshare members will develop creative and compelling ways of using it I can’t predict.”

Another great SlideShare presentation to look at is Valeria Maltoni’s presentation for the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 entitled Conversation Agent – and while you’re there, I recommend reviewing her post 12 Things I Learned at the Inbound Marketing Summit as well.

Finally, review Mike Manuel’s post on On-Domain vs Off-Domain over at the Media Guerrilla site,  and understand what the difference is between the two approaches.

Now here’s your call to action

1. Start by developing a balanced approach to community involvement online.
2. Don’t limit your interactions to Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, or Friendfeed.
3. Don’t rely only on social networks to spread your direct interactions with others.

Begin to develop a commenting strategy for other sites.  Follow the advice of Ari Herzog and set out with the intention of building an online reputation through providing relevant comments to sites in your niche. “Creating content is important, but don’t focus it to your own domain. Be part of the conversation, any conversation, on the world wide web.”

Adam McFarland wrote about this years ago in Pandia Search Engine News in an article entitled ‘Using Google Alerts for Intelligence Gathering” where he points out the benefits of a properly crafted Google Alerts set-up: “Used properly, Google Alerts can be an extremely efficient way to track what’s going on across the web… The alternative would be to search each term every day for new updates. Who has time for that?” Indeed, tracking in real time issues that connect directly to your business and brand might seem like a lot of work, but the real work is all done by the search engines themselves, and the return on investment down the line is immeasurable, at least until a marketing agency finally comes up with an algorithm that can track memes from mind to internet and back to mind again.

Remember, when on-board a ship, or piloting by IFR, the staccato pulses of Morse’s binary language continue even today to blip past at a (socially) subliminal volume.  No media is dead – smoke signals hide lesser signifiers but are still laden with meaning – subtleties may likely should drop away, but the medium never seems to succumb to history once it has been made manifest.

Instead, recognizing the dwindling market of singular, quaint media channels and moving to embrace transmedia convergence prefigures a successful transition across narrative platforms.  Hopefully this article, and the links I’ve scattered through this post, are enough for you to see a way forward to embrace transmedia while acknowledging the cultural importance of the tradition of quaint media in today’s memetic ecology.

-Wes Unruh