Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.

Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.

On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.

There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.

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The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

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What’s The Platform’s Sweet Spot?

Does the vendor’s strength play unevenly towards certain elements of social computing. In other words, did they start out as a blog provider and magically reinvent themselves as as a platform play?

Can They Play Inside and Outside the Firewall?

The lines between external and internal communities are becoming increasingly blurred. If your vendor doesn’t have an answer for playing nicely with SharePoint and can’t turn that around and go external, move on.

What Are Their Social Media Credentials?

You can quantify this pretty easily. Do they blog? Are they good at involving customers in the conversation? If they haven’t synchronized their own communications, there’s a good chance they can’t do it for you.

Is The Platform Geared For Particular Verticals?

Did the vendor grow up in a particular industry? If so, you might find the product cluttered with unnecessary or thin layers of specific applications you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much big paychecks from certain clients influence a product roadmap.

A good sign of a platform’s maturity is how many partners have latched on. The key here is to let the solution providers, integrators and digital agencies make the platform hum. While most of the time you can find a good contingency of subject matter experts (SMEs) on the vendor side, the channel is the ecosystem that makes things tick.

Have They Worked With Agencies Before? 

What About 3rd Party Alliances?

This is critical as you expand your online efforts. Whether it’s a CRM integration,or an e-commerce application, the odds are you’ll want to extend your social computing platform as your community grows. Take a close look at who the vendor goes to market with and how they leverage each other.

Send me your questions, I’m putting together a second version now.

First posted on the Telligent blog.

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I’m also presenting tomorrow on "Choosing A White Label Social Network", and will be blogging some of that content here later today.  The CoverItLive Widget below will have my updates over the next few days, so send me some comments or let me know if you have any questions. Hope to meet some of you in Chicago.

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I thought WPP chieftain Martin Sorrell covered all the bases as he described his firm’s motivation:

“Growth is being driven by continuous pressure on clients to raise
their like-for-like revenue growth and to optimise their investment
against a backdrop of changing demographics, decreasing product
differentiation, intensifying global competition, the fragmentation of
the media and the impact of digital development.”

The forces at work here are disruptive to say the least. The big agencies are getting pressure from clients to move away from costly print and TV ads and move to more conversational forms of marketing and advertising. It’s not enough to just deploy a microsite and track page views. Customers want real-time information and they’re demanding it on their terms.

If I were a mid-market or large brand, I’d cut down on the one-off microsites and email-based newsletters and move the conversation to more interactive environments. Many companies have figured out that tapping the collective wisdom of their customer base provides huge value. Evidence of this is the large number of customer-driven communities and B2B networks getting sponsorship deals from consumer brands and software companies. It’s likely these communities are where your customers are lurking anyway or they’re building their own versions. Why not engage with them on their terms and in their environments?

I’m not calling for the death of traditional marketing techniques - unless there’s no infusion of 21st Century smarts.

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It was a hectic June and I’m finally starting to distill some of my conversations and briefings. I was in Boston a few weeks back for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and while I definitely came back energized, the best part was the old-fashioned version of social networking — pressing the flesh as the saying goes.

I was there as media and while I would’ve liked to have blogged more about the show, I did manage to get some microblogging in courtesy of CoverItLive’s service. I realized early that I’d be attending a bunch of sessions with a crappy Wi-Fi connection in the backdrop, so I figured I’d cut my losses and get as much micro content in place as possible.

The widget below is the snapshot of my ad hoc meetings, session tracks, and a few hallway and bar conversations. Some of the latter were definitely the more interesting as I had several instances where I connected with folks I’d blogged with and collaborated with through Twitter and other channels.

I ran the CoveritLive widget on the Content Management Connection and ECM Blog after the show and noticed it had about 500 unique views over the course of a few days. How much of that had to do with the novelty of the service remains to be seen. Janet Lee Johnson thought it was cool enough to blog about it, and I noticed it had enough lift to light up Twitter with a few Tweets.

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“Do you really want Facebook to manage it for you in the outside world, or do you want to do it yourself so you have control?”

Control. It’s a word I hear over and over: How will we maintain control of what’s being said by the community?

I’ve talked to more companies than I can count about social publishing, social media, and setting up communities. The enterprises that typically lead the charge tend to be the ones that want to sell software or services to setup the community. But like communities in the real world, who wants to pay for the roads that others will use? When we talk to the brands in the community cross hairs, well that’s when you see the cold sweat start to break out.

The big brands hire in teams of marketing folk from the best B-schools to manage their content. They pay the most expensive consultants to determine what color has which meaning for their brand; what word has which association in middle America vs. big cities; heck how does this kid think vs. that adult. It’s been done this way for years, decades, and now, that level of tight brand control is showing cracks.

For the last decade or more, people with passion for products are expressing their views over the web - the enterprise fear originates when the views aren’t all that rosy. With all of their collective experience, too many companies still have the fear of shelling out big bucks to develop a social publishing strategy. Do they really want to give the rest of the world a forum to say what they’re really thinking?

The bus has already left the station folks; the negative views are already finding their ways through other sites and locations. I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it’s important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive. 

But for all of those brands who don’t want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers: your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you.

That’s social publishing.

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Here’s some ways content management is changing marketing:

3: Killing direct mail. I learned years ago that a successful direct mail marketing campaign has a 2% response rate. That would mean that 98% of the papers cluttering our mailboxes are meant to be unused. Whether we consider this a junk mail issue, a snail-mail spam issue, or a green issue, does anyone really need to incur the costs associated with stacks of unread fliers anymore? Deliver your content over a more targeted electronic medium, and maybe you’ll have the added benefit of also annoying fewer potential customers.

2: Improving measurement and analytics. People get Ph.D.s studying and trying to generate ROI models for marketing. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tie back exact dollar amounts to individual marketing campaigns. That said, many of the newer ways to deliver content to target markets allow for immediate and measurable responses. If you have the right content analytics in place to track clickstreams and other behaviors, marketing programs can be tracked immediately, something that helps marketers re-tool strategies in almost real time.

1: Marrying IT and marketing. Marketing always has held the creative types, while technology holds the rest of us geeks. If this split is maintained now, though, the best marketing content won’t be delivered over the latest platforms, and entire market segments may be missed. Mobile applications, targeted e-mails that make it through spam filters, optimized Web sites, and ad widgets weren’t part of marketing history, but are taking over the present and the future. Internal company departments need to work together now more than ever. The marketing types don’t always need to understand exactly how to set up a blog or track feedback, but if no one on the team does, well, what a shame to waste good content.

And BTW, if you like stuff like this, you might want to subscribe my blog at InformationWeek.

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John Shinal at vator.tv interviewed Draper at the OnMedia Media conference recently about the changing new media landscape.

..it may be a little like a producing company and a little like a venture capital model..but somehow we’ll pull those two things together and end up with a new model for venture investing that none of us has quite envisioned before.

It just validates how the social web is redefining how content is controlled and monetized. If you’re a marketer and not positioning your company to operate more like a media company, you should beware of being replaced.

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Whether you say “media is the new creative” (like AdWeek) or simply think the marketing landscape has been turned on its head, the message is the same. Adapt or get left behind.

Laurie Petersen, executive editor of MediaPost, had details recently about a new study (”Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010″) from the Association of National Advertisers and management consultants Booz Allen Hamilton that confirmed just that.

And for the record, I really like the “communications integrator” term. Dissect what you do as a marketer and you’ll find a large portion of your time is spent mapping out how to integrate everything. After all that’s marketing nirvana right? Everyone wants an integrated approach.

What do you think about the five trends below?

Marketing as Conversation:

It’s less about sending a message and more about conversing. More than half the marketers say they plan to increase their PR budgets to help in this regard.

Insight into Foresight:

Technology enhances targeting capability and 80% of marketers surveyed place a high importance on behavioral targeting.

Media is the New Creative:

Distribution and context rivals creative execution in importance. A new role of “communications integrator” is emerging that bridges the gap between media, creative and brand strategy. More than 80% of participants say communications planning capabilities will be critical moving forward.

Marketing + Math + Technology:

Data quality, quantity and accessibility mean that math is everywhere. Leaders are more likely to have the metrics and capabilities to judge the effects of new media.

The Network Effect:

Digital media requires a far higher level of collaboration and coordination across all players. Nearly 60% of survey respondents believe creative, strategic and media capabilities should be rebundled–but there is no consensus as to which type of agency should lead.

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Technorati tags: marketing, marketing+2.0, media, social+media, brand, integrated+marketing, PR, communications+integrator

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Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use  use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations.  And conversations build brand.

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Jeff Gundersen, CEO of Executive Connections, offers some help in a recent Ad Age article where he lays out a digital primer for tech-hungry CMOs. He describes the digital dilemma:

They (CMOs) often don’t have the direct marketing, analytic/segmentation and customer-relationship-management-consultative skills to lead integrated media and marketing programs, combining general advertising, branding, direct, promotion, PR and digital elements.

Today’s marketing world is less and less about stand-alone campaigns that use one medium at a time and more about an integrated approach that speaks to your customers when and where they want. The kicker there is just because you find your market, doesn’t mean they’re ready to engage. Gundersen expands a bit further using the increasingly pervasive “micro” term, used to describe everything from the nature of today’s content to the characteristics of markets.

We are moving toward a marketing world that is driven by a direct-marketing opt-in, predictive modeling and tracking approach. Marketing in the future will not be about the masses but about understanding micro-segments of customers and using tools that enable marketing to get more granular and take campaigns to a one-to-one level.

I heard someone describe it recently as “customers are now looking for marketers instead of marketers looking for customers”. That’s earth-shattering, if not exciting.

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Olson, a big brand guy and former VP at Overture, kicked off the discussion with his list of digital trends. One of the things he confirmed was what we’re all seeing happen in front of us — video. As he put it, the web now is in full motion and has a voice. Video is mainstream.

( Jim Olson and David Almacy | Pics taken by Blackberry Pearl)

The second point was the broad notion of “interactivity“, where users are now part of the mix — like it or not. Citing the oft-used citizen journalism term, Olson explained how media companies have had to rethink the way news is produced and delivered.

Individual Addressability was another term Olson used to describe the ability to tailor content to the right constituents. This is a big one in a lot of ways. It brings the Long Tail into the fold and helps all of us get a clearer picture of the impact of our marketing and advertising spend. Olson quoted the old advertising saying, “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half!” Well folks, that’s a changing. And that’s the lure of content with digital DNA.

The last few points dealt with the potential ramifications of a growing global internet community and the proliferation of mobile devices. On the former, Olson pointed to statistics showing how China will soon surpass the U.S. with more than 200M internet users. The numbers aren’t so surprising for a country of more than a billion, but the message was more about preparation. Think about the challenges (cultural, technological) that poses for U.S. marketers. Olson was dead on titling the slide, “The Revolution is not being televised.”

The last digital piece he dissected was the mobile movement, drawing a definitive stake in the sand by proclaiming, “Mobile is the new PC”. He reminded us more than half the planet’s mobile devices are in developing countries. A fitting end to his pitch was a quote from GE’s CEO - “I want my communicators to be role models for creativity and innovation.”

David Almacy took the floor next with a little faster tempo. A well-traveled political advisor and former web guru for the White House, Almacy came across as part geek and part strategist. That’s just what the Doctor ordered for the big PR agencies being called on by the big brands.

His White House 2.0 discussion was fascinating. It’s daunting to even think of developing a Web 2.0 strategy for the leader of the free world. Even more interesting was hearing Almacy talk about the early backlash from the President’s office when he launched the first Presidential podcasts. Once the first distasteful threads started to bubble up, he was asked to remove the content from iTunes. But in true web evangelist form, Almacy stuck to his guns, finally winning out after the comments evened out with an acceptable positive and negative mix.

I told my colleagues, we can’t take the podcast down, we’re on the front page of iTunes!

The other thing Almacy knifed through was the bevy of social media tools and services. He obviously caught me nodding as he rattled off all the newest Web 2.0 kids on the block, everything from Digg to Twitter and Pownce. The takeaway though wasn’t being jargon-capable, it was more about curiosity and exploration. As he put it..

I only have a few Tweets out there but I had to see what it was all about. 

And that’s really the sense I got from yesterday’s event. There was a lot of tire-kicking, a lot of curiosity, and heck of a lot of passion. It was apparent the room was full of communicators trying to keep a foothold on the shifting ground beneath them.

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James Clark of Room 214 astutely points out many of the the reasons why the PR industry is spinning from a Social Media hangover. The thing I liked the most was his description of the “Conversation Analyst”, a person he describes as part web technician and part media-type.

Must have mainstream media experience as a journalist or communications practitioner. Strong social and analytical capabilities. Has experience with and enthusiasm for blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds, tagging, wikis, e-mail publishing, web analytics, cross-campaign management, adserving, affiliate marketing and online news aggregators. Has maintained a personal or corporate blog for at least one year. Has managed pay-per-click search marketing campaigns across Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, and other services. Can read and understand web analytics and tell a client with confidence what market to speak to. Applicants please submit a brief resume with links to your current and past sites or blogs, as well as your del.icio.us bookmarks. HTML skills required.

So the real question is how many of you reading this thought to yourself, damn that’s me. If you’re a PR practitioner, probably not many.

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The venture capital industry funded 167 Web 2.0-related deals in 2006 for a total of $844 million, mostly in Europe and the U.S., according to a March 21 report from the accounting firm Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne. That’s more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as in 2005.

But back to what spawned my initial thought. It was the Clearswift survey that raises the paranoia visibility of social computing’s impact on corporate America. And I love the headline…

Growing popularity of Web 2.0 sites put corporate information at risk and drains productivity

They should’ve just put an 800 number right behind it with a link to the infomercial on where I can buy their product. Ok, I realize they’re pitching their content filtering products to mitigate privacy risks and data leaks but c’mon. Do they really believe you can lock down this stuff? For you IT’ers, yes I know you can

But let’s face it, there’s a lot of gray area here. Where do you draw the line between what’s personal and business-related? If I have business content (define that for starters) on my Google homepage and someone Twitters, Skypes or IM’s me, am I now in no man’s land? 

Whether I’m on the office network or in the home office, social computing many times is seamless. I can easily go from one workspace to another, regardless of time, place, or device. In fact, most of my services and data are in the cloud anyway. The way I access and use them is part of the way I work..my personal IP. Perhaps I should fight my employer for the rights to my intellectual capital?

More importantly, is anyone thinking about how all the things we web tinkerers bring to an organization? We are experimenters, we are early-adopters. Sometimes we’re even bleeding-edge instead of leading edge. Shame on us. Isn’t it more a question of common sense? What you wouldn’t say around the water cooler probably applies in Johnny’s new Ning network.

Personally, I can tell you a lot of what I learned about social media and Web 2.0 was derived from late nights at home, skipping lunch at work, or yes, even on the job in full work mode. That’s reality folks. And you know what else? Some of the Web 2.0 stuff I did at work almost three years ago has been fully adopted by former employers. They just thought I was goofing off.

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  Cadillac’s top ad exec agreed.

..some marketers might be surprised to see the communities that already exist online. Liz Vanzura, global director of advertising for Cadillac, found 300 Cadillac communities in Yahoo Groups and 1,500 YouTube videos tagged Cadillac when she went out to create MyCadillacStory.com. They were already there. We were just providing a unique forum where they could interact using video technology.

Could finding the starting point for social media strategy be as simple as combing through an annual report and a few press releases? You bet. When you’re evangelizing how the new web creates value, you better know your client’s business and be able to identify the folks most likely to champion the cause. Good job Jerry.

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Before you call me a sell out, hear me out on some coffee-shop observations

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1. Competitive Intelligence

This is an easy one. Once you get rid of your paranoia and turn off Google’s competitive ad filter, your competition will be at your blog’s doorstep shortly.

2. Marketing and Advertising insight

Take a quick look at the kind of ads your site serves. Once your content  settles and gets indexed, an aggregate theme begins to develop as you look at the ads. Many times this helps me understand if my content is providing the right context for you, my user.

3. Product discovery and selection

My colleagues and I joke about this one. Anytime we have some downtime and get in an exploratory mode for new webby tools and services, we just take a quick spin through 5 or 10 pages and voila!

4. Business Development

This one’s also terribly apparent. You’re a digital agency and you provide email marketing services. I probably shouldn’t admit this and open source my email marketing strategy, but one of the solutions we’re using for a few of our clients is IntelliContact. How’d we find them? Yep, the ad running on my blog.

5. Brand and Community Building

As you begin to develop consistency in your content, you’ll notice the ads begin to tell your story. WOW Feed has a lot of Web 2.0, social media, and agency-oriented content. If you look around you’ll usually notice some very targeted Ads on at least a few of those topics. Users, in turn, get a quick sense of what the site’s all about..a sense of what conversations are taking place.

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