What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Nuno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

A few weeks ago I posted about a clever campaign launched by Ikea using fans and a competition. Now I hear that the rules have been changed to prevent this. I post in full a status report from “Inside Facebook”. Sorry about being late on this. Hats off to @jmorris106 for the tip

Three weeks ago, Facebook announcedsignificant updates to its promo/sweepstakes policies for Facebook Pages that have very practical impact for marketers on Facebook. For a deeper dive on the rule changes, see our analysis. But essentially, the new rules:

1. Require all marketers to get explicit permission from Facebook at least 7 days before administering any promotion inside Facebook.
2. Prohibit running any contests or promotions that require users to become a fan, interact with a feed story, or do anything else outside an application tab or canvas page in order to enter.

This means that “become a fan” contests, “status update” contests, “photo upload” contests, and any other kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed are no longer allowed. Rather, Pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. This is good news for companies building Facebook Page tools for marketers.

Now, agencies and marketers are trying to understand whether these policies are being actively enforced, as many businesses and organizations have been experimenting with different types of contests to drive traffic and engagement on their Facebook Page over recent months, and several promotions that seem to violate the policies have continued to appear lately.

For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes.  A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.

And last week, Gillette, one of the biggest brands in the US, announced a promotion on its Facebook Page, saying, “Become a fan today and you’ll be entered to win a free Fusion MVP,” a clear violation of the new policies. Gilette is also redirecting members from a sweepstakes tab to a signup form on Gillette.com to enter the contest, but the status update still exists on its Page, and is confusing to multiple marketers we’ve heard from. A Facebook spokesperson said he was not able to comment on individual campaigns beyond the Ikea case when we asked earlier today.

The Dominos “YouTube Adventure” last week  – when a couple made a disgusting video of what they did in making a Dominos Sub – is I think a “Rubicon” moment.  Not just for Dominos, who had already put their toe into the river of Social Media but for every enterprise. (Excellent revue here  by Frederic Lardinois from Read Write Web on what happened + Stats + Dominos response + an analysis)

All your customers, voters, members, suppliers – the public are now linked. Newsworthy events that are good and bad will spread like wildfire. Look at the “Good” event of Susan Boyle – as of this date 20 million views in less than a week!

The Rubicon is that – whether you like it or not – the public are now linked so well, that anything said about you will now spread everywhere and very quickly. This linkage, and hence the speed and immediacy of the spread, can only get wider and faster. Maybe, in a few months, events that affect you will spread instantly to everyone. What will spread the fastest of course will be the bad things.

So the new reality is that it is what others say that will matter not what you say. So your reputation – your brand – the trust you have – is now not longer easily or directly controlled by you.

You have to be swimming in this river to have any chance of protecting your name.

As with Dominos – using the new social media tools is not enough. You will have to understand and become a master of how to live and do well in thus new world.

Compared to many today, Dominos were somewhat ready. But even then – I think because they had only installed the tools but not the culture – they were awkward. They were late in catching their problem. Late in a their response. Stilted in their response – they did not understand that a scripted response is not going to help much.

They were still operating the new tools with the old culture.

They gave their CEO a script. He read from the prompter and did not make emotional contact with the audience. But Dominos still did well compared maybe to you! For do you even have the tools?

But of course it is not just about the tools. The issue is that you can no longer control. So their new plan is of course the old plan – “let’s control the store”. Their key response is to ban video cameras from their stores! This means a ban on cell phones really and how practical can that be?

The only effective response will be to get into the river with everyone else and get really good at how to behave in this new river. It will be to become so engaged that the conversation can be affected or shaped. You have to be a trusted part of the conversation to do this. You cannot just barge in.

Dominos and you will have to unlearn and put away all of what made old PR work. For all of PR up to now has used “Message” – a tightly controlled and scripted response where the text is key. Now you have to use “Presence” – an emotional message where the authenticity of the humanity of the “speaker” carries the point. Volts versus Amps.

This River will soon operate at the speed of light. To protect your name, you have to be a major presence in the river now. You have to merge with the river so that your nervous system is acutely attuned to the slightest hint of trouble. The leverage is Trust. Only a trusted player in the river will have any chance of settling down the ripples.

To have the Trust, you need to be known. To be known, you have to be a person and not an institution.The people that represent you in this river have to be free people who can be trusted. They have to have won the trust of the river. If trouble occurs, they have to respond immediately without a script. They have to be empathic and not controlled.

This role is foreign to institutions who are all about control. The answer are not the tools but the culture.

The error is to see your participation in Social Media as having the right Tools. “We use Twitter!” is a meaningless statement. Hey you can give me all the tools I would need to fix a car and I still will not be able to fix a car. Worse you can give me an airplane to fly and I will crash every time. The people who work for you in this field have to be the real deal. You would not hire a CFO who did not know her stuff?

Why simply tell your existing PR folks who know nothing about this – in fact who hate it – to take over? All of how PR, Research and Marketing has been done until now will have to be unlearned. Traditional PR, Research and Marketing folks will feel very uncomfortable and will do what all prior paradigm leaders do when confronted with the real future. They will undermine and fight it. They have to. For this is their nemesis.

The context for this decision is that the old world is dying. Here is how Coke is responding:

ATLANTA: Coca-Cola has created a new office of digital communications and social media within its public affairs and communications department. Clyde Tuggle, SVP of corporate affairs and productivity at Coke, noted “mass media is declining in importance,” when introducing the new department in a memo to staff, which the beverage manufacturer shared with PRWeek.

“Our future success depends on our continued ability to connect people to our brands and our Company all around the world, one person at a time,” Tuggle wrote. “Our new office of digital communications and social media will help us become even more comfortable and effective in these new spaces.”

The new unit will work in collaboration with global interactive marketing, IT, and consumer affairs, as well as legal and strategic security.

Adam Brown, digital communications director, and Anne Carelli, digital communications manager, will have oversight of corporate digital and social media communications efforts. Both Brown and Carelli will continue ongoing training programs, such as “Training Byte” online videos, in addition to “more robust” programs through its new PAC Institute.

The ideas in the new world that will have to be learned anew include these:

• Listen before you Speak – The New Tools allow you to hear the slightest tremor. Last week I Tweeted that I had done my taxes and that I had used QuickTax. Within minutes QuickTax had responded with a thank you. A week earlier I Tweeted that I had had a problem with accessing Ning. Within minutes a customer service person from Ning contacted me and worked over the weekend to solve my problem. If you cannot do this – you are not in the game. In future, most of your research will operate in real time without you having to ask any questions. Your new job will be to listen minute by minute and to have tools and people that can make sense of the stream. Not only to make sense of what you hear but also to shape the stream. QuickTax is responding to every mention good or bad. An early and a personal response, can settle a problem that could become a crisis. Such a strategy dramatically reduces your costs in research and brand management. Such a strategy dramatically increases your effectiveness and reduces your risks. More for less.

• Participate not Pontificate – To be heard, you have to participate. To speak, you have to lose your corporate voice. You have to lose the official tone of voice. You have to regain a human voice. This can only be done if you allow your social media staff to be themselves. They cannot be the highly controlled drones that are the standard in the corporate or bureaucratic world – many people in your organization will not be able to lose this voice. They even use it at home. Simply training old staff will not be enough. For how can you have trained people in the Shetl to be Americans?  You have to live in the New World to become a citizen. To have the new voice is to be a native of the new culture that is the very opposite of the norms of the old country. As with immigrants, it will be the kids who will get it first and they will train the others. But the Bubbies will never get it. This aspect of having the new strategy work or not is the most challenging part of all of this. In the end it means, that the old culture has to die too. Maybe in the interim, you set your unit up apart from the rest and have it report to the CEO for protection. Clayton Christenson has a lot to say about this problem. For to respond to this new reality demands that you disrupt your culture. The most difficult of all acts for a leader.

• Importance – Life or Death: This is not an add on or a side show as Newspapers found – This is all about whether you are going to live or die – As the Coke folks say but more gently than I – Mass Media is dying. So then is the entire Mass Media approach to PR and Broadcast – the God-like Voice and Moses with the Text of God from on high does not work. So how important is your reputation? How important is your business or enterprise? Adopting this new way is one of the most important decisions you will make. So also having the RIGHT PEOPLE to do this for you is the second decision you will make after deciding to cross the River. Ideally you have to have them report to the CEO. Ideally the CEO needs to become immersed as well. If I can do this, aged 59 and having spent most of my working life in institutions. Then so can you. The only issue is will. Do you have the will as a CEO to move into the future?

Caesar made the call by crossing the Rubicon to end the Republic and to begin the Empire. He had the will to stake it all. There was then no going back.

Actually it is society that has crossed the Rubicon. The new interactive and participative world is now here.

Will you cross too? This is a life or death decision for you. It’s also a winning choice. Many will not be able to make this choice. Their own culture will be too powerful. If you can, you have the advantage. The earlier you move, the better you will get at this.

Talk about a unique use of social connections. I’ve reported elsewhere how Twitter is being leveraged by various entities (e.g. mining conversations) to tap the power of social connections. But a spur of the moment event occurred today where the power of connections surged in another direction. Like the strong weather that decended suddenly the past few days in Texas and elsewhere, I hardly had time to recognize what was happening.

The Zappos CEO has a Twitter account — @zappos. Somehow I was following his account (not something all that random for me — I check out the value-add of each ‘voice’ before I connect with them). Earlier today he tweets:

I will be randomly selecting someone to get a free pair of shoes from all @zappos followers later tonight. Thanks @pokai for the suggestion!

I remember reading the note earlier wondering if I had to fill out a form or something. I briefly checked out the Zappos site…and then just went on about my business.

Tonight I was tweeting a number of ‘rants’ as I was reading the fabulous book Power Healing, by Leo Galland (e.g. “74 percent of patients seen…for various common symptoms…no…diagnosis to explain the cause of their problems.” 74% failure rate!!!), when suddenly the following series of messages pass by.

And the free shoes winner is… @rotkapchen – congrats! @rotkapchen has 61 followers but only 3 were also following @zappos (cont..)

@marobella @paulisakson @karllong were @rokapchen ’s 3 friends! Congrats to all, thanks for playing! I will direct msg each of the winners!

I’m thinking @rotkapchen — that’s me! I’m shooting an email to my kids and a few friends when private tweets hit my phone as text messages, with instructions to provide my email address to claim my prize. I jump into the Twitter interface to send a private message back directly to the Zappos account, and minutes later I get an email with a code to go online and shop at Zappos.

I was still reeling trying to figure out exactly what I’d done when I read the tweet:

Winner was randomly selected from all @zappos followers, and up to 10 of winner’s friends also win if they also followed @zappos

This was shortly followed by:

Thanks all for playing, it was fun! Let’s do this again soon! @zappos any suggestions for making it more fun/exciting in the future!

This is not a small thing. Free pair of shoes? It’s not too often that I spend $150 on a pair of shoes! But I’ll sure have fun trying.

What was interesting was the email that I received from Zappos. In the interest of time, an existing process was obviously engaged. The fact that this process is already in place is what intrigues me the most. Check out the wording of the message, its implications and how many ways I’m given direct access to continue the conversation if I was to desire to do so (after having a horrific week trying to engage in conversations with other vendors causing me real grief):

We apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused. Let us assure
you this is not indicative of the high quality of service and products we
strive to provide our customers.

As a token of goodwill, Zappos is issuing a coupon in the amount of $xxx
for your next purchase at Zappos.

Below is the coupon code you will need to place the order.

csxxxxxxxxxx

You can use this coupon with your next order at Zappos.com anytime
within the next 90 days. To use this coupon, place the code in the space
provided at the bottom of the shopping cart page.

Please accept this as an apology for any inconvenience, and do not hesitate
to contact us if there is anything we can do to be of further assistance.
Please note, this coupon code is associated with your account and is only
valid when used with the email address attached to your account. This coupon
is not redeemable for cash and cannot be duplicated, altered or auctioned on
any web site. This coupon is non-transferable.

Sincerely,

Customer Loyalty Team

Zappos.com
Powered by Service
1-800-ZAPPOS-1 (1-800-927-7671) or
702-943-7677
e-mail: cs@zappos.com
http://www.zappos.com

Pretty much says to me, their byline “Powered by Service” is not just marketease.

Can you imagine what would happen to the GDP if this same commitment to customers and unique, direct involvement in new forms of interaction were to be embraced for ALL relationships (internal and external) by all companies? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, like with Zappos, we didn’t have to imagine it at all but could live it? Why, there probably would no longer BE a justification for a revolution at all.

And what about the others who also get to experience all of this because, simply by association, they too are winners? That’s pretty good payout for social networking. There’s already a lot of goodwill being spread around.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some shopping to do.

Postscript:
Industry colleague David Armano also wrote about this Zappos scenario and pointed out how it’s not about the tools, but about the unique ways in which they get used. Capitalizing (as is Forrester) on the crossover to Marketing audiences, he points out, it’s all about the ‘buzz’!

Sam Walton’s wife’s deal with Sam when they got married was that he could do whatever he wanted – he wanted to be a retailer – but she would never live in a community that had more than 10,000 people. So his constraint was to build an epochal retail system but in the boonies. Look at what he accomplished with this as a restraint! He also found on his path that being in the boonies also gave him a defence against the huge competitors such as Kmart and Sears. No one took someone who worked in the boonies seriously. That is until it was too late!

My point is that, no matter what you think of WalMart now, that we are predjudiced about the boonies. Smart people in all fields – not the least in Social Media – tend to have a big city bias. We too often over look the boonies and those that live and work there – how could they affect us? We all know that you have to be in the big city to know what is really going on. Of course that is why Warren Buffett is the richest man in the world!

My story today is about a man that you likely have never heard of – who lives and works in a small town that you also may never have heard of. We can never know today if he may become the Sam Walton or the Warren Buffett of media, but my bet is that if he does not then someone like him will be.

My bet is that at the heart of the real social media revolution is that if we do indeed move to a networked world then small communities will be able to stand toe to toe with the big cities.

Meet Brian Hurlburt who lives in Yarmouth Nova Scotia a small port on the southern tip of the province where the high speed ferry comes in from Portland. Brian owns a runs a Web “Something” (Yarmouthcounty.com) that tells the aggregated story of everything that happens in Yarmouth. I call it a web “something” because it is more than a web site – it is closer to the old style of really local newspaper that you might see in a western.

Until Brian, everyone had ignored Yarmouth. The fact that the domain was available told Brian that no one cared. The Province did not care – Yarmouth is off the radar in Halifax. Tourists from the US got off the ferry and drive through town and onto other more exotic places that were better known. (Nothing is really exotic in Atlantic Canada but you know what I mean) The B & B’s were all separated and isolated and could not get their message out.  So were all the social groups such as Church groups. Small business struggled to get noticed and worried about maybe a WalMart coming to town. The social capital of Yarmouth was draining away. At some point, it would no longer be a community at all.

So who is Brian Hulrburt? Is he some flash young techhie? No Brian is a regular guy who knew next to nothing about the web. Everything he now knows about how the web works he has learned by trial and error. All the fears that a church or a B & B may have about the web – he has experienced himself.

Fear is the great barrier that we all have of the new. So how Brian learned and how he is – an open and vulnerable man – is an important key to his success in bringing so many parts of his community together online. He can describe what has to be done in language and in a tone that does not judge or appear mysterious.

He also did not try and monetize the site until it was ready. He had faith that if he was able to reach a critical mass that the money would come. So he also did not carry a lot of costs himself. He could not afford to have costs involved that would force him to force the economics before the time was right.

Is this not the Craigslist model?

What he has been able to do is to aggregate the life of Yarmouth online. Aggregation in a safe and trusted place is going to be one of the key value creation processes in a world of infinite content. By not pushing the economics he has built the trust and now “owns” the space.

The underlying metrics are also emerging that will drive an economic model that benefits not just Brian but all those who inhabit the site.

In 2007 the site had 100,000 visits. Not hits, over 1 1/2 million of those, but real visits. Because of the power of aggregation, all those that live on the site have now access to al this traffic that they could never have reached on their own. The local paper reaches about 20-30,000. So Brian is reaching more and at a fraction of the cost of the paper. He also enables a growing interaction between all parties which is not possible in a paper.

This is more than Google Local or Craigslist – this is a personal aggregation that includes a filtering that is part Brian and part the client. It can therefore be trusted more than a simple mechanical aggregation. It will over time therefore have more value than a simple algorithm.

A growing part of what Brian can now offer his family of clients is the kind of measurement that conventional advertising cannot. Brian is becoming expert in analytics.

Here I think is part of the core of the new economic model. Mass Marketing needed a mass market as there was so much leakage. With no precision possible, as in WWII, only area bombing was possible. So what could a small place do like Yarmouth. Their feeble sums of money wouldn’t even be noise in the larger scheme of trying to get noticed. What Brian can offer is precision – the Long Tail in action. A B & B can see exactly who it is reaching online and can adjust to get a better focus and hence result.

This will kill the mass media alternatives. Niche + precision = high return.

For me the lessons that  I have gained from looking at Brian are these:

• Niche is where the energy is – the Value will be on the right hand side of the Long Tail
• Aggregation around niche is where the value is – the more personal the better
• Precision about what happens in the aggregated niche is what drives the economics and the return
• Power will shift from the large and diffused to the small and concentrated

I asked Brian “where is it going?” He replied by saying that “The web is changing the world. It is helping us help each other again. We can take charge of our own lives again. I want to be part of this.”

The other day I was driving with my 16-year-old at a certain speed down the highway. We needed to get her to her new job at the pizza parlor on time, and were making the usual desultory conversation along the way. She had opened her Macbook and started editing photos taken earlier that day. She was also surfing six or seven radio stations looking for songs she liked, and texting three or four friends.

Suddenly her dispersed attention sort of gathered itself into a rising column of interest. Her neck craned, her body turned, her eyes peered intently as we passed what seemed to me to be a perfectly nondescript van.

“Did you see that?” she said excitedly, adding that the vanity plate said something about Elvis — I’d not noticed. She was peering intently into the van. I tried for a quick look, but entirely missed seeing the driver — a woman, according to my daughter, encumbered by one of those giant hairdos of yore, brilliantly blond, genus fanatica, species elvisia, ca. 1958.

All I saw was the van. All my kid saw was the Elvis attributes — Elvis happens to be one of her longest running crushes — on the license plate and inside. The thing is, given the way her attention had been deployed moments before, I have no idea how it pulled that particular bit of data from the parallel lines of traffic we were passing at 84 mph.

This jogged my memory of a theme surfacing at FASTForward08: How JP Rangaswami, Don Tapscott and others had talked about how multi-tasked kids are, how their synapses seem to have been rewired to do things we can’t do.

We — ok, I – am of the generation of the single node receptor, the seemingly receptive eye/I, waiting idly to be served up something whole to look at, to take in. I turned off my TV off in 2000 and have not looked at it for more than 210 minutes in toto since; nevertheless, I remain a sort of virtual reclined potato, lying in wait for something to actively consume my vacancy.

My daughter and her peers are not like this. They seem constantly pre-occupied, moving between ongoing processes — mySpace, texting, photoshopping, searching — and yet, somehow, they catch more. Not “more” as in all that is going on, and perhaps more worryingly, not more as in the big picture. More within that ambiance that is vital and relevant to their current and ongoing passions and curiosity.

One other thing that seems worth noting: we Boomers are voice-oriented — we listen to voices, discourses, “messages,” till we grow utterly sick of them. Kids excel in tuning voices — and not just those of their parents — out, and in. They instead have selected conversations, not via the paths of the larynx, tongue and ear — exchanges proceeding against a silent, or music-filled, background. The “openness” of the couch potato is not their openness, but they aren’t closed, either. Just differently available.

To address this sort of optative “user,” a mode of address that attempts to fill up all the space with its active, grandstanding, vocal presence is probably not going to get far.

Something moving sidelong and not so showy — less big, less direct, less controlling — might be more suitable. Something decentered, linked to or associated indirectly to what is already moving them.

The battle-cry of this mode of address could be, “It’s the metonymy, stupid!”

Where are these links to be found? In the messiness of what David Weinberger calls the “unowned order” — the unpredictable realm of data and metadata, or, in his metaphor, amid the wild hedgerows before the topiarists arrive — the realm of advanced search.

[photopress:topiary.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

I should mention that my five-year-old, who has not yet begun to surf, twit, or google, demonstrates thinking and attentional processes that are linear, Aristotelian, and complete. We have great old-fashioned conversations, as humans once did, in the wayback days. It’s pretty cool.

One key axiom of 2.0 thinking is “Shortening the Distance”. Advertising does not support this thinking. It is inefficient. A free-market economy will continuously adjust itself to eliminate inefficiencies. The advertising model will eventually be eliminated or minimized into some other predominant form.

I read models – I’m not prophetic. I don’t know what advertising will be replaced by, nor do I know how soon, but I do know what is more efficient: direct brokering or agents. On the internet today, the model that makes the likes of Google so successful with advertising relies heavily on bots (internet or web robots). This, at least adds some relevancy to the advertising. Bots were purported to be the kind of technology that could better serve our personal needs by delivering more relevant content – instant delivery, replacing the need to ‘find’. But we’re bombarded with these instant deliveries when we’re not ‘looking’ for them. [BTW, to avoid ads during search, I recommend using Clusty -- it was the first engine that helped me understand the power of FAST technology, almost a decade ago.]

In discussing this issue with the lawyer sitting next to me on the plane yesterday, he reminded me of the typical buying scenario: we’re looking to make a purchase, we tap into our net. We either talk to friends or we literally get online and leverage the ‘advisory’ model. On Amazon and other ecommerce sites, we read the ratings/reviews of others. We put those reviews into our own context, and draw our own conclusions. In that way, the collective of reviews serves as a brokering mechanism.

Advertising may incite awareness or interest, but it is no longer the ‘buying’ factor it was during an era of consumption most influenced by a ‘need to belong, fit in’. How many advertisements do you not act on in a day? Whether you acted or not, someone paid for the fact that you ’saw’ the ad — even if you really didn’t ’see’ it. How often are you in a buying/need state? When you are, how often is that act influenced by advertising (either past or current)? Where it may be influenced at all, did advertising cause the act or reinforce it? For all the millions of advertising dollars spent on SuperBowl XLII, how relevant were any of the products to you and did you act on any of the ads?

The only reason advertising continues to survive is that it is ‘familiar’ and it is monetized. Amazon, however, understands the value of brokering. They continue to add more and more infrastructure and facilities/services to provide incentives to those who can facilitate buying directly through their Associates model, or direct brokering. Far more efficient, their model only pays for results.

Even Forrester has been suggesting that marketing is ‘broken’ and that marketers should reinvent themselves. As part of that advice, Forrester suggests that marketing needs to take back control of their investment from agencies:

On average, agencies will influence nearly 60% of the marketing budget in 2007. The combination of anticipated spending on agency fees and measured media cover the bulk of marketing communications activities.

Marketers reported allocating an average of 17% of their budget to ad agency fees and 41% of their budget to measured media.

Advertisers spent a total of $271 billion on domestic US ads across all measured and unmeasured media channels in 2005, a 2.8% increase over 2004.

Marketers aren’t convinced that their agencies can formulate new media strategies, and agencies aren’t fully convinced themselves. Huge gaps exist between marketer and agency perceptions of ability to deal with changes in TV, Internet, and consumer-generated media

Almost all agencies (93%) believe their contributions drive their clients’ marketing success, while only 63% of marketers feel the same.

Despite the fact that agencies wield influence over a majority of the marketing budget, 76% of marketers do not measure the return on investment of their lead agency relationship.

So the majority of marketing dollars are spent on ‘outsourced’ services for which there are limited measures of success? That all sounds pretty inefficient to me.

Amazon even has a book that addresses this subject: Marketing Without Advertising, Inspire Customers to Rave About Your Business to Create Lasting Success. Ah, but if you read the reviews, one individual suggests other guerilla marketing titles.

Guerilla marketing? Described as “an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets”, the term itself seems to be well positioned for the likes of a Consumer Revolution.

P.S. Monetization was a hot topic during table discussions at last year’s FASTforward. I’m looking forward to some of the deepest conversations, with some of the smartest people I’ll get to have all year…see you there. Or, stay tuned on this Bat channel for updates and conversational relics.

There is a shift in Marketing toward behavioral marketing that shuns classic marketing approaches and embraces ‘newer’ forms of research (all fundamental to the practices of Experience Design).  A great newsletter/blog that deeply covers this phenomenon is Behavioral Insider.

Today’s post was particularly relevant in that it:

• Calls out specific shifts in marketing, many of which have very 2.0 implications
• Highlights a business model that taps into the behaviors/preferences of a very specific youth market.
• Tells a more compelling story by comparing and contrasting ‘differences’

Supporting quotes — pay particular attention to the last two:

Behavioral targeting has widely succeeded in changing the rhetoric and terminology of marketers. Rare indeed is the self-respecting behavioral advertiser who doesn’t speak in terms of having a one-to-one dialogue with customers. Yet, as Ryan Okum, president of StreetWise Concepts and Culture, explains below, moving beyond the habits of the older impressions-based marketing paradigm requires more than talk. It demands the cultivation of a new skill set.

Okum: Our focus is on online conversations and community building. We’re working with clients who are moving away from, or at least re-thinking, the ideas that behavioral targeting is strictly about serving advertising….The goal is to build a two-way environment where consumers actually go to participate.

Okum: The difference between our behavioral approach and more conventional approaches is, there’s a much more transparent execution in what we do. It’s not, as behaviorally targeting impressions is, a ‘two-way mirror’ where the marketer just looks in and eavesdrops on where consumers go online. We use analytics tools, yes, but to focus in on not just where they go, but what they do.

Okum: What marketers are shifting toward is that promotion is fundamentally more about creating conversations than reaching impressions.

Okum: [The digital channel] takes [a] philosophical as well as tactical shift. There’s a huge difference between accepting and living inside the paradigm where audiences and consumers are passive impressions to be reached with your message, and the new, conversational paradigm. The new philosophy is, you listen to the target market and give them what they want rather than making guesses about their interests and serving them up impression-based ads.