iPlot

Social Media Predictions for 2009

Alright, now we're in 2009 so this may come a little late. But anyway, the year is still young, so here are the social media predictions for 2009 from the collective expertise of the Junta42 bloggers.

Excerpts: Marketers will get cheap - Twitter will be officially mainstream - Twitter will suffer a backlash - marketers will lack control over content - combining traditional media with electronic media will increase - distributed eventing - news articles with images and video syndicated in RSS feeds - content will be more focused around conversation than messaging - innovative brands will start to provide engaging content that allows them to intertwine the brand rather than push it as the primary selling point - employees across the company will be content creators - more brands will develop a personality or a persona to represent the core values of the company - laid-off journalists will find a home as "content producers" and "content managers" on the corporate side - small business comes out to play - execution is the new strategy! - more "ombudsmen," fewer PR flacks - webinars & live or pre-recorded video events - the big challenge for brands is going to be reaching consumers without appearing to be selling anything - marketing messages will follow a less-advertising, more journalistic approach that offers relevant stories that show impact, offer counsel and demonstrate fairness.

The full list: http://blog.junta42.com/content_marketing_blog/2008/12/42-social-media-and-content-marketing-predictions-for-2009.html

In a nutshell: All are valid, none are too surprising. Brands will increasingly act like media companies. Content is king (again), if it's social, relevant, micro, meaningful, and fast.

Amen.

Monocle Launches Monocle Weekly: Small Talk, Big Issues

Yes, we live (again) in the "age of conversations." There is something reassuring about listening to smart people having cultured conversations. When I was young, I would listen for hours to music-free radio programming that sounded like black-and-white movies.

Today, Monocle Magazine brought some of that magic back by launching Monocle Weekly, a 30-minute audio podcast. Hosted by editor in chief Tyler Brûlé, the short-form show extends the publication's monthly print content by offering fresh angles on stories in current and past issues, discussions, previews, field reports, and interviews. The light conversations on serious issues are entertaining and informative, and the old-fashioned stereo split of voices evokes the coziness of good old vintage radio.

Highlights of the first issue include FT markets correspondent Rachel Morarjee revealing why 'under the mattress' has become a favorite place to keep your savings (at least in the UK), and philosopher Alain de Botton explaining why happiness will be more important than watching your salary in 2009: "There is no wealth but life, so concentrate on your portfolio of life, and not your portfolio of cash."

Well said. Although this may not be the most effective response to someone who just lost his or her job, the longing for new meaning in private and public life ("why exactly do we work?") will likely be an overarching theme in the forthcoming year. This presents a huge opportunity for brands of all kinds and industries: they are the arbiters of meaning.

Listen yourself: http://monocle.com/The-Monocle-Weekly/ (also available on iTunes)

50 Ways to Shrink Your Brand

I really enjoyed speaking at the eM8 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. Not so much in keeping with the title of my presentation -- "The Shrinking Brand" -- my deck included 88 slides, and I think I used the word "micro" at least 50 times in my 45 minute long session. Fortunately, the audience was willing to stick with me, and I had a lot of good conversations following my presentation.

The main proposition was: The world is small. Life is short. But brands still want to be big and have a long life. Hence my advice for them: Shrink!

Here's how....

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SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

On the Eve of OnMedia NYC: Media and Advertising Industries Still Optimistic About 2008

I'm off to New York for the OnMedia conference from January 28-30. The two-and-a-half day event features technology CEOs from Silicon Valley leading presentations and debates with their counterparts in global advertising and media. It will be a dynamic crowd that's coming together to discuss emerging user trends and new opportunities in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries.

The list of speakers includes web 2.0 entrepreneurs such as Steve Rosenbaum (CEO, Magnify.net), Ami Kassar (Chief Innovation Officer, ideablob), and Matt Colebourne, (CEO, coComment); established content players such as Jim Spanfeller (President, Forbes.com) and Adam Berrey (SVP Marketing and Strategy, Brightcove); and investors such as Joshua Tanzer (Managing Director, Revolution Partners), and Andrew Cleland (Executive Director, Investments, Time Warner). The concluding panel on Wednesday, "Big Media Online. Now Comes the Hard Part: Sustaining Growth," promises to be particularly interesting as it brings together such different figures as A-list blogger Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine) and Gordon McLeod, President of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network.

The media industry has always been a fertile ground for innovation, but with a growing number of technology plays and social media sites entering the space, the past couple of years have been especially lively. And this year, pundits say, we're likely to see more disruptive business models and subsequent M&As -- despite the looming recession.

The annual AdMedia survey of ad and marketing executives and private-equity investors claims that "respondents are surprisingly optimistic about the environment for M&A deals and M&A valuations in 2008." Eighty percent of the executives surveyed expect their organizations will be involved in media mergers and acquisitions in 2008 despite widespread concerns about the prospects for the U.S. economy. According to the survey, M&A activity is likely to focus on sectors such as search marketing, mobile marketing, and viral marketing.

This view is supported by an article in The Economist, which offers a differentiated but not overly gloomy perspective on the prospects of the advertising industry this year. According to the magazine, a possible recession will hit TV and print advertising sectors much harder than online advertising:

"In rich countries the internet is claiming a growing share of advertising -- at the expense of traditional media, such as TV and print. There is still a gap between the time people spend online as a fraction of their media consumption (about a fifth) and the fraction of marketing budgets spent on the internet (about 7.5%). Many companies are trying to narrow the gap, which will sustain internet advertising during a downturn. Search advertising, the most effective kind of all, should be safest."

Robert Scoble to Launch FastCompany.TV

Everyone knew it, now it's official:

Fast Company yesterday announced the launch of FastCompany.TV, "a new online video network featuring coverage of bleeding edge technology trends, interviews with leading executives and business people, reviews of the latest technology products, and lifestyle programming." Robert Scoble, who has left Podtech, will serve as Managing Director of the site, slated to launch in March. FastCompany.TV will debut several programs over the course of 2008 featuring Scoble and other well known personalities.

Scoble about why's he joining Fast Company: http://scobleizer.com/2008/01/16/why-were-going-to-fastcompanytv/

The Fast Company blog: "When Scoble talks about our innovation in the social media space, he's referring to how we plan to integrate viewer participation into FastCompany.TV, as well as Mansueto Digital's open-source build in Drupal of IncBizNet, an online business networking community and database created exclusively for private companies. He's also talking about the Company of Friends, one of the first online business networks that debuted in November of 1997. Unlike other social networks, where it's about showcasing your resume and playing games, the Company of Friends has always been about bringing people together to share ideas -- both online and offline -- about the core themes central to our magazine, such as innovation and social responsibility. We'll announce more news about how we plan to grow our social media efforts later this month. And don't forget to look out for FastCompany.TV in March."

Smart move for Fast Company, which is really having a second spring these days and will significantly expand its content distribution platform with the addition of this proprietary (IP)TV channel.

Charlie Rose and Robert Scoble Will Give Keynote At Bulldog Reporter's Media Relations Summit

Bulldog Reporter has put together a great program fo the Media Relations Summit, April 6-8, in San Francisco, Corresponding with the summit's theme "The Power of Story: New Media, New Technologies, a New Narrative for PR," Robert Scoble and Charlie Rose will deliver the keynotes. Rose will be talking about "The Art of the Story: Finding the Heart of Drama," and Scoble will be speaking on "The Future of Social and Consumer-Generated Media."

Other sessions will address:

• How to establish your CEO and top execs as industry thought leaders
• Using new technologies to communicate directly with consumers
• Harnessing the power of search marketing for PR campaigns
• Secrets of placing your corporate video on social media sites
• Master class on the latest innovations in guerrilla PR
• How to increase traffic to your corporate website
• Increasing media pick up with ingenious storytelling techniques
• How to make news when there's no news
• New techniques for measuring the ROI of online PR
• How to craft a cost-effective social media strategy

To see descriptions of all 52 sessions, see this 14-page brochure.

Speakers will include:

• Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist
• Alan Elias, VP, Corporate Communications, Washington Mutual
• Bruce Ertmann, Manager, Consumer-Generated Media, Toyota
• Joe Carberry, SVP, Global Public Affairs, Visa, Inc
• Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus
• Karen Kahn, VP, Worldwide PR, Sun Microsystems
• Stacie Bright, Senior Communications Director, Unilever
• Tac Anderson, Web 2.0 Strategic Lead, Hewlett-Packard
• Michael Smart, News Director, Brigham Young University
• Alison Wertheim, VP, Corporate Relations, Charles Schwab
• Lee Aase, Manager, Media Relations & New Media, Mayo Clinic
• Dave Samson, General Manager, Public Affairs, Chevron
• Corrine Kovalsky, Director, Public Relations, Raytheon
• Akilah Monifa, Producer, CBS-TV
• Paula Berg, Manager, Public Relations, Southwest Airlines

"Customer Service is the New Marketing" - Really?

The doomsdays for marketers continue. Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of The Geek Squad, contends that "Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable." If he's right, then maybe "Customer Service is the New Marketing" indeed. This is also, not too coincidentally, the title of an upcoming summit in San Francisco, hosted by Satisfaction, which seeks to (let others) prove that "smart companies are turning customer service from a cost center into an engine for creating evangelists." Confirmed speakers include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos; Marc Hedlund, Chief Product Officer of Wesabe; Brian Oberkirch, Principal at Like it Matters, Tara Hunt, Principal of Citizen Agency; and Michael Murphy, Group Brand Manager for Customer Service at Virgin; and others. You can see the full line-up of speakers and the schedule on the summit website.

The folks from Satisfaction have already presented their thesis at some conferences, and now they set out to acquire more thought leadership credentials by hosting their own summit, demonstrating that they are leading an entire movement. However, if you look more closely at speakers and topics (i.e. Deb Schultz from MMI Consulting: "Stop Yelling & Start Weaving: Marketing in a Relationship Economy," Chris Heuer from the recently launched Conversation Group), you realize that the summit's theme is just another riff on the same dominant trend: conversational marketing, social (media) marketing, user-centered marketing, participatory marketing, citizen marketing, or whichever label you may prefer to describe the fact that consumers have become a more powerful part in the marketing equation (and want to be talked to and not yelled at).

Customer service is of course not the new marketing; it has been an important part of marketing ever since David Ogilvy's famous "the customer is your wife," if not long before that. What, then, is the new marketing? Well, conferences like this are the right forum to find out. I will attend -- and I hope that they will invite some real customers, too.

Change as a Feature: Designing for Consumers in a State of Permanent Crisis

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they are increasingly good at it.

Around the same time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced an exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," which will open in February, 2008. While the Avenue A | Razorfish study provides actionable advice for marketers, the MOMA exhibit examines the philosophical implications for designers:

"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change."

And lastly, in a similar vein, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management and father of the concept of "integrative thinking," elaborates on "The Opposable Mind" in a book published earlier this year. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that one sign of a "first-rate intelligence" is the ability "to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Accordingly, Martin argues, a sure sign of first-rate business intelligence is the ability to recognize two diametrically opposing ideas and meld them into a new model that is superior to either. Martin says that designers often engage in abductive reasoning: they imagine what might be and act on that insight -- even though they can't prove it.

The "adaptive," the "elastic mind," or the "opposable mind" -- business or consumer, and whatever the name, the concept is the same: the rise of new digital technologies has turned us into skilled micro-managers of constant change, in all aspects of our lives. Uncertainty has become our routine as we live in a state of permanent crisis, in a multi-task, muti-tab, multi-media, multi-window world where each new online event requires a new and different reaction. Sometimes we flee but mostly we adapt, bridge, and synthesize. We have become adept at adapting. We switch back and forth from from macro to micro, zoom in and zoom out, face-to-face and space-to-space, at the same time but at different paces, shifting time and shifting places. We possess what drummers show when they perform two distinct rhythms in their hands and feet -- excellent coordination. Seamless is our modus operandi.

As micro-managers of constant change, we stretch our minds' boundaries and sometimes over-reach; we combine the long and the short form, the philosophical and the mundane, the narrative and the 140-word Tweet. We understand that the "map is outgrowing the territory," as Bruce Sterling puts it. We can think meta while in beta, and we understand that every idea immediately transcends itself into something bigger, something universal that it is meta-tagged before it is even final.

What does all that mean for product designers, not only in the digital realm? Acknowledge that consumers are smarter than you. Hence, design for input, and do not just satisfy the user preferences. Understand change as a feature. Design a highly modifiable and personalizable experience that is adaptive to change, but build in enough flexibility for the users to adapt the experience itself to changing conditions. Make your products adapt, bridge, and synthesize, as your users do. Give them features that literally scale. Equip them with "peripheral vision" -- the ability to see things outside of the usual spectrum, not front and center but right, left, and in the back. And if all that isn't enough: Allow the user to customize, mash up, and ultimately re-design the product or service beyond its original purpose.

Examples? Netscape, Flash, JavaScript, TCP/IP, IM, and a host of other products in the digital realm have all moved far beyond what they started out as. The iPod enabled podcasts, Google Earth triggered hundreds of mash-ups, Google's Open Social and Open Mobile inititiaves will further spur third-party innovation resulting in myriad new applications that will change the orignal services. And then there is of course Facebook, which from a social network evolved into an operating sytem, a content distribution platform, a whole new micro-economy -- or all of that together. The product is the system and the system is change.

Podcast: From OpenSocial to Open Data Sharing for All

Ashley Angell, Chris Saad (Faraday Media), and Jon Cianciullo (Cluztr) discuss APML, OpenAuth, OpenSocial and how we are moving towards open data sharing.

http://onthepod.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/11/09/on-the-pod-12-ashley-angell-chris-saad-and-jon-cianciullo/

via http://www.apml.org/