Current theories of SEO keywording go two ways.

#1 First come the words – “The Cat in the Hat”:

Some call it shady, others call it effective but this keyword methodology starts with the words and works backwards.  It starts with the question, “what are your potential consumers doing?”  If your web page has to do with comics, for instance, what are the big key words users out there are searching on?  Superhero names?  ”Marvel” or “DC”?  or even the word “comics” itself.  Want to be popular and step up your traffic, here’s the words you need to use, alter your brand to fit the paradigm.

#2 Brand leads they way – “Listerine”:

So much as the previous strategy is a pull, this strategy is a push.  Where the previous benefits from fishing where the fish are, this strategy digs its own pond.  It solves for the problem of too many fisherman by taking a new approach all together.  It’s not an easy task, but the potential payoff is high if you can own a niche of keywords.

In the late 1800′s a powerful new surgical antiseptic, cure for gonorrhea, and floor cleaner slinked onto the market destined for obscurity.  And for nearly 20 years it that’s how it remained.  But around the 1920′s something interesting happened; it was pitched as a cure for bad breath.  What makes it interesting is no one really had a problem with bad breath.  Listerine dug its own pond.

So where’s the balance?

More recently I’ve been hearing about a 3rd option.  One which puts the brand first, but utilizes SEO keywords for what they are – information.  Good information.  Information on what your consumers are doing and how they see your brand.  Instead of taking offline messaging and adapting it for online, aka “the big idea”, analyze behavior online to influence your messaging.

Often as marketers we become blind to our knowledge.  Just last week I attended a conference on user engagement.  The short story is I wasn’t engaged.  As I walked through the isles of brightly colored animated logos I couldn’t help but ask myself, “what do they do”?  And worse yet, “what do they want me to do?”  In this case I became the consumer and I didn’t understand what I was seeing.  I saw the brand colors but they were meaningless.  I saw the logo but it had not yet formed a reference in my mind.  I saw examples of the work but I couldn’t tell you if they were selling the creative, the execution, some backend package or, in some cases, the monitors displaying the content themselves.  All these questions spawned the question, “how do consumers see my brand?”

Enter SEO keywords.  These keywords are the vernacular dictionary of the world in which your brand resides, and they can change how your brand views itself.  While I’ve experienced this several times the most close to home case came in my own identity.  Where I view my primarily differentiating traits as “tall” and “blonde” what I found out the other day is this is not how I’m observed at work.  If I were to be described to a stranger those words may be included, but they also might say “blazer” and “cowboy boots”, with the boots becoming a primary descriptor.

At this point, if I were savvy, I would pick up on that and use it much like Listerine ran with bad breath.

Interactive marketing is a balancing act. Balancing what’s next with what’s current. Being new and cutting edge but still being relevant and compatible to the end user. Investing time and energy into learning and experience but choosing the right technology to invest in. Growing and leveraging international resources while maintaining the agile flexibility of a quickly and consistently changing market. And doing all of this while keeping up with the Joneses.

Today’s mobile industry is reminiscent of the Browser Wars of the 1990′s when Netscape failed to fight off Internet Explorer which later lost ground to Mozilla, Safari, and Chrome all the while altering, revising, and inventing new standards, pluggins, and supported technologies.

So which technology do you back? Apple’s iPhone is strong with iOS 5 having a lot of great features but Android is still slated to take a heavy lead by 2015. But Android is an OS, not a device, leaving features, functions, and performance out of Google’s hands and making support very difficult. And, being a user of both, iOS is much better and more intuitive. RIM released Blackberry OS 6 in an effort to leverage the corporate market to grow the private and Microsoft has big plans for Windows Mobile. Thinking globally? Nokia’s Symbian is dominating but in a steady decline.

Where Android may rule the smartphone market, iPad is dominating the tablet market with strong contenders coming out every month in the form of Xoom and Playbook. Fortunately these devices share OSs with their smartphone counterparts. HP recently fire saled their touchpad throwing the market for a loop. What’s next?

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We do have choices. Enterprising initiatives have come up with solutions. PhoneGap and Appcelerator have come up with solid HTML 5 based solutions to applications paving the way for shared features with mobile web. And despite the lack of flash support Adobe isn’t giving up with out a fight. The latest rendition of their Creative Suite not only exports flash applications, but also allows simple animations to be exported to HTML 5. And for those purists we’ll always have native development.

So which do we choose? Where are the Joneses going? The answer is: It Doesn’t Matter. Trying to keep up with the Joneses has never been a good idea. Do what’s right for your consumer audience. With all these options comes data and with data comes information. Leverage that information to know your audience and give them what they want.

The new world.

Social media most commonly refers to specific social-based applications like twitter and facebook but the new paradigm says different.  The new paradigm says that all technology is by nature interactive and that interactivity has fundamentally changed the world in which we live.  Slowly but surely the world is going digital — there’s an app for that.  Combined with more portable, more powerful technology solutions and there is no longer a such thing as “offline” — we’re all connected, always.

In health care, for instance, patients are play more of a role in the direction of their care (like it or not).  Some may argue its the lawyers, but I contend its the information.  Yesterday we had one option, today we have many.  It’s a health care buffet where patients chose the cure that’s right for them.  HCPs provide the choices, the relevant data/information, and the procedures but today’s empowered consumer goes further — this is not your grandmother’s second opinion, this is WebMD, google, and IBM’s Smarter Planet.  This is secure mobile integrated systems of HCPs, payers, pharmacies, care givers, studies, trials, and reviews/opinions — real access to real information in real time, where you are and when you are.

Recognition of the investment.

People invest time, money, and confidence/trust in technology.  Take the health care industry who produce pharmaceutical compliance tools and applications.  The Pharma industry as a whole leading the charge with the tablet takeover.  One company, AliveCor, turned the iPhone 4 into a portable ECG machine for under $100.  Patients rely on these technologies.  They rely on the reminder to take their medication, analyze blood samples and take blood pressure.  Technology facilitates record keeping and payer simplification, supply critical information like warnings and new treatments, enable secure communication to those who need it, and much more.  In some cases these applications are the critical piece of information people use to make real life decisions.  Decisions which affect their real life — not their Second Life, their real life.  They are heavily invested in the product and thus the organization.

On the flip side, the organization also relies on the customer.  Without customers they are nothing.  Social media has added a new dimension of social listening — the responsibility.  If I tweet about you, blog about you, or leave you feedback I assume you were listening.  If you were not, you should be.  This responsibility to listen gives new meaning to terms like prosumer as consumers expect a strong role in the shaping of the applications they use.  In his 2005 whitepaper “what is web 2.0″, O’Rielly coined the term perpetual beta citing the frequent release cycle of  applications as developers began to listen to users and accept their input as co-developers harnessing their collective intelligence.

Fail to partner with your users, fail to grow your product, create a hole for someone else.  The survival and betterment of each depends on the other.

Providing value.

To the organization the customer pledges their support and that they will continue to use the application so long as it remains valuable.  And in addition to their loyalty they pledge to voice opinions on what they like and what they don’t.  They will demand upgrades and features and report bugs and poor user experiences.  And when a better technology is delivered they pledge to use that better technology so be forewarned, and be the better technology.  In some cases they pledge their money, in others their data.  Whatever the arrangement they pledge to create value for the production organization.

Consumers of technology allow organizations into their lives.  They keep their bank accounts on-line, they utilize adherence applications for medications which make their life livable.  In short, they trust technology.  In exchange for the value they provide and the trust they give the organization pledges to deliver on the promise of utility.

We directly affect their lives and they directly impact our survival.  We’re partners, technology partners, for life.

A Good Technical Lead == A Good Engineer.  A Good Engineer != A Good Technical Lead

Two distinct areas of conflict arise when utilizing a Senior Engineer as a Technical Lead.  First and foremost, a good engineer does not necessarily have the ability to manage and interact.  Second, the wide breadth of client problems requires a broad domain or expertise as opposed to a deep understanding of any single technology area.

The Peter Principle posits that, within any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. There is no place this rings more true than in technology management.  What many people do not realize is engineering, as with an artist or writer, is a creative discipline.  An excellent metaphor for the numerous distinct ways to solve even the simplest of problems with technology is “Hello, World”, the first and most basic program engineers write when learning a programming language which simply outputs the text “Hello, World”.  To date there are thousands of ways an engineer can output the text “Hello, World” to your screen all of which can be considered the right way.  As a result, the most senior engineers have refined their craft throughout years of participation in disparate physical environments with diverging requirements culminating in multiple “right ways” to accomplish any given task.  Consequently, any two engineers may disagree as to the “right way” to accomplish a given task, especially when comparing the solution of a junior engineer to that of a senior.  Does experience make the senior engineer correct, or does currentness give the junior engineer and edge?  The result of this interaction is a responsibility/accountability curve on which engineers ride as their professional career progresses from coder to manager.  As a coder the engineer is directly responsible for making their piece of the solution work but not accountable for the overall success of the entire project.  As a manager they are accountable for the overall success of the project but do not physically code and, therefore, are not responsible for making a solution work.  This conflict between what the engineer believes to be the “right way” and what is actually executed by coder may become an obstacle to delegation thus rendering the Technical Lead not scalable and often times requiring a scaled down project load.

Within the rest of the organization the Senior Engineer is not a Business Analyst or Strategist.  Their primary role is executionary, not organizational or strategic.  They are paid to succeed, not to question.  A good metaphor for this is the amusing but true statement I give to non-technical persons, “never ask an engineer if something is possible; the answer is most surely ‘yes’”.  This simple statement can therefore be extrapolated out to several addendum:

1. Do not use the solution in the question.  For example, “how long would it take you to build this site in wordpress”, where wordpress may not be the appropriate solution to the business need.  This practice limits the scope of answers and, more often than not, the question does not contain either the best practice or the most direct solution to the business need.  In problem analysis we’re taught The Five Whys method to getting to the root of a problem.  In engineering we’re much more literal.
2. Do not ask an engineer for an estimate — it will be accurate, but it will not contain external influences.  “If I were to sit down at a keyboard today, how long would it take me to execute the request?” is not the same as “given the dependencies of other team members and the client, assuming I’ll be interrupted and requirements will be changed, with a limited budget, hitting these milestones, and still doing your other work, how long will it take?”
3. The right way to do something is not always what’s best for the project.  Engineers are driven by what’s interesting, new, and cutting edge.  This is why we like them; they are an excellent source of information.  Combined with Technology’s tendency to change over time and the associated learning curve, there’s always a better way.  This often leads to work done which is either not required or not in scope.  This is also why the new paradigm of software is called the perpetual beta.
4. Engineers recommend what they know because they have a commitment and attachment to it based on years of disciplined learning.  They also push for what they don’t know because they want to learn it.  Technical Leads, on the other hand, must understand technology at a higher level and will therefore push for the most appropriate, potentially uncomfortable solution resulting in higher quality, more innovative products.  An engineer’s drive is to succeed, a leader’s job is to lead.

While overarching coding principles and architectures, like frameworks, can be cross-domain the specific knowledge base of an engineer often runs deep in one particular area — .Net vs. Java vs. LAMP vs. mobile vs. flash vs. data modeling vs. social, etc.  To operate effectively the Technical Lead must also possess a wide — analytics-based closed loop integrated on & off-line marketing solutions with a mobile component and corresponding media buys — not necessarily deep, breadth of technical knowledge.  The degree to which their knowledge must go deep is the ability to compare the strengths, weaknesses, and interactions of each as well as best practices and channel appropriateness.

Roles & Responsibilities

Within the agency the Technical Lead is primarily utilized for their technical knowledge and wherewithal – not their specific implementation knowledge.  Beyond technology the Technical Lead must posses several non-technical domains of knowledge including: project management, the software development life cycle, and the appropriateness of agile, RUP, waterfall or other methodologies; user experience; information architecture; and strategy.  They are  accountable for the technical management of all projects with a technology component from inception to delivery and on through maintenance and updates.  This renders the Technical Lead responsible for the overall successful execution of the project.  In short, the Technical Lead extends — not replaces — the Project Manager’s accountability into the complex technology environment.

As the representative of the Technology department within the agency and to the client, the Technical Lead is responsible for the following in each phase of innovation:

Strategy & Planning:  The ability to listen first, ask appropriate and directed questions, and understand business requirements is the primary differentiators of a Technical Lead vs. other agency resource.  To manage risk the Technical Lead must assess numerous possible solutions and key assumptions to prevent issues before, during, and after the project has been initiated. This requires a granular understanding of existing in-agency talent and solutions, how projects relate to the broader agency scope, a keen understanding of technology execution, and the ability to communicate this knowledge to the cross-domain project team. The Technical Lead must play an active role in helping project managers build project plans, estimate and set expectations within the team.  Understanding both the business requirements and environmental constraints — being time, money, resources, or technology limitations — then proposing the appropriate technology solution.

• Business/problem analysis
• Technical feasibility analysis of possible solutions
• Discovery analysis architecture and scoping
• Communication/translation of any technical constraints or best practices
• Technical resource allocation
• Vendor identification
• Cross-channel campaign architecture
• High-level work estimation

Solution Design:  Historically solution design has been left to the creative mind but the marketing world has changed.  Today’s Technologist is a disciplined Creative mind.  Technology is fundamentally oscillating toward art from science.  Within the solutions design stage the Technical Lead is responsible for merging the previously desperate worlds of Art and Technology.

• Communication and technical translation of complex technologies
• Assist with and feasibility analysis of functional requirements
• Discovery and/or technical audit and findings presentation
• Technical requirements
• Assist with work estimation, schedule, and project plan
• Concepting and prototyping
• Vendor research and evaluation
• Concept revision
• Infrastructure design and implementation
• Information Architecture and systems integration modeling
• Scope management

Development:  This is the most traditional of Technical Lead roles with a twist.  Historically the Technical Lead would be the smartest and brightest coder but this is no longer the case.  Today’s technology solutions change according to business need, which implies the project team changes according to that same need.  Technical Leads rely heavily on their pool of resources for in-depth expertise in the wide breadth of expertise required to execute the ever more complex and integrated solutions.  They rely on experts in the field resulting for the project in a broad scope of solution ideation but a specialist in implementation.

• Development oversight
• Quality Assurance test cases
• Tracking, analytics, and SEO implementation
• Revisions
• Documentation
• Vendor management and communication
• Scope management

Verify & Deploy:  Because the Technical Lead is involved in more total projects over a given period than an engineer they gain more experience more quickly.  This experience helps significantly when it comes to risk mitigation and deployment.  Pharmaceuticals, for instance, have a distinct process from not for profits, which is different from retail, and so on.  If the Technical Lead has managed the rest of the project well verification and deployment should be straight forward because the Technical Lead has done it many times before.  Continuous integration, a result of the perpetual beta, emphasizes this.  During this phase they are responsible for:

• Quality Assurance oversight
• Deployment oversight
• Backups and disaster recovery
• Code review

Measure, Optimize, & Maintain:  After the project has launched there is still work to do.  Systems need to be monitored, patched, updated, and generally maintained.  Technology changes, Facebook updates it’s usage rules, software releases versions and patches, new channels enter the market.  These things are important but often do not come through the agency from the front door.  In these cases the Technical Lead is responsible for aggregating the knowledge of the technology team then communicating and escalating issues of importance to the project team along with recommendations, estimations, and and through to execution beginning the cycle anew.

• Bug fixing and risk management
• Maintenance & updates
• Assist with reporting
• Documentation
• Ideating the next solution

Conclusion:

While the root of a Technical Lead must be based in technology implementation, the discipline must be that of someone more interested in technology as a whole.  Moore’s Law loosely describes the tendency of technology to double in capability every two years.  At the granular implementation level there are few people, if any, who can keep up with it.  Combined with the non-technical disciplines of strategy, design, and project management the role of the Technical Lead is more important than ever and will continue to double every two years.

When most people think of a technologist they picture an anti-social literalist.  A = A.  They’re assumed to be hard to communicate with.  It appears to be difficult for them to make leaps of logic or use inference and assumption to get to an answer.  What’s it take, can you give me an estimate, can’t you guess?  They’re geeks.  They know technology, not creativity.

Increasingly, however, these are the people we go to when we have business problems, not just computer problems.  More and more they’re responsible for the strategic business solution, the creative solution, and on through execution.  They know what’s possible rendering their reality more amazing than our dreams and their dreams more feasible than you might think.  These are not the technologists (read geeks) of yesteryear who remain locked in the deepest darkest crypt in the far corner of a remote building with mainframes, cables, and blinking lights.  These are savvy folk both dedicated to their craft and in touch with with society rendering them uniquely able to ideate on the cutting edge of feasibility pushing technology-driven solutions to the absolute limit.  They may wear jeans and t-shirts you don’t understand, but these are the people you want on your team.

This innate love and understanding of technology combined with Moore’s law of the exponentially increasing channels of technical communication we have come to rely on the creative technologist to solve to our business problems.  We demand of them integrated cross-channel CRM campaigns complete with tracking and algorithmic based granular segmentation, channel and device appropriate messaging, and smart messaging — and they deliver.  They deliver because they know the latest rules, technologies, integration points, and general usage of Facebook, twitter, email, banners, mobile usage, ipads, mobile web, web technologies, mobile application, social applications, platforms, inheritance, scale, and more.  There’s groupon, QR codes, POS integration, cookies, and silo’d databases with tons of data just waiting to be useful, and they make it so.

Where others see the confusion of 1′s and 0′s, mash-ups, and integrations they see art akin to The Royal Ballet unfolding into an elegant set of  requirements and solutions.  Ask if it can be done; the answer is yes.  Ask what can be done; the answer is limitless.  Convey the business problem, and stand back — the art is in the solution.

The future of marketing is an elegant technology-driven solution,  not a pretty picture and a catchy phrase.  Already today the customer needs more — they need value.  They need to be catered to and customized for.  They want timely, relevant, device appropriate messaging delivered in either a channel-agnostic or channel appropriate way which is convenient for them.  Give them what they want, when they want it delivering a message of utility how they are ready to receive it.  That’s value.

Pure technologists and pure designers are yesterdays marketers.  Today’s complex world of Marketing 2.0 requires intimate knowledge of both.  That’s Technology as a Creative discipline.

Just as this happened I was coming to the end of a book, The Numerati, a fascinating walk through the world of behavioral modeling through statistical probabilities.  What physics does to model our physical world and the quants to do model the stock market, the numerati do to model our behavioral world.  I had just read about smart shopping carts being designed for use in supermarkets and had found it promising; but something didn’t sit right.  This was it.

Picture this:  you’re walking through the isles of the local grocery store loading up your smart cart.  There’s a screen customized to your behavior based on a swipe of your loyalty card and the computers behind the scenes know everything about your shopping history.  Marketers would have us believe this is a perfect model to deliver enticing offers to our customers and, until today, I would have believed them.  But now the world looks different to me.

To put this in perspective, friend on Facebook shared the following status: “standing behind a guy in line with $640 worth of groceries.  After a pile of coupons he got it down to $24.50!”  You or I wouldn’t clip so many coupons — that takes dedication — but you would click the button to view sale items only.  Can the enticing models of recommended fully priced splurges with high margins win out over the convenience of “show me all the sale items”.  I’m not so sure.

As my wife puts it, “It’s nice to know that when I walk in to a store I can buy something at full price without feeling like a chump.”  Swarovski learned this lesson with their annual Christmas tree ornaments.  Sales for the ornament were down, but they sold all remaining stock at the outlets the following year.  People wanted the ornament, no demand problem, but they didn’t want to pay full price so they were okay with staying one year behind at the sale price.  Imagine what sales would look if you walked into a Swarovski store and the associate told you where and when to get it cheaper.  This is what smart carts do.  Not good.

Another fundamental flaw with this kind of behavioral modeling akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states, in plain language, you cannot observe one variable without affecting another.  This is what happened with my egg sandwich.  The associate identified me as a bagel and butter person after just a few visits and began offering me a bagel and butter.  Convenient, yes.  What I want, no.  Revenue lost and utility lowered, affirmative.

This is what we, as marketers, do to our customers: use history to predict the future.  Accurate models help us live within the expectations we set for ourselves by resetting them for us next time with a margin of error.  Last week’s budget is this week’s budget range.  This isn’t modeling, this is reiteration.  Can the computer know that today I feel like I deserve the extra calories and cost of an egg sandwich?  Probably not, so it won’t recommend it.

Does the “door buster” sale really work anymore?  Maybe a little, but not like it used to.  The whole point of the door buster is for retailers to get people in the door.  Once there, the retailer attempts to ride the shoppers’ purchase-anticipation high through to purchasing something they didn’t intend.  But consumers aren’t as dumb [read free with their cash] as they used to be.  Far from it.

We’ve officially been in a recession since 2007 but it feels to me like a whole lot longer and, I think, a lot of other Americans are feeling the same way.  I can’t remember the last time I felt comfortable enough with either my job or savings account to just let loose and spend frivolously.  And, more importantly, I’m used to living that way.  I’ve got budget maximization down to a science and I’ve got self-control down to an art.

I know what I want, and I know about what I want to pay for it.  I won’t be tricked easily by flashing lights and shining signs.  Today I need real value.  Sure, a door buster purchase would be nice but let’s face it, someone out there wants it more.  Someone out there is just a little crazier and is willing to wake up a little earlier and brave the elements just a little longer.  I’m not going to get up at 3am just to be disappointed and, besides, I’ve gotten used to asking myself, “do I really need that?”

The result is panic in the retail domain.

This year I’m seeing two trends in the retail market.  First, retailers who are battling each other so hard they forget about the customer, and second intelligent consumers who are able to exercise restraint no matter how crazy the retailers get.

Trend #1:
What it’s come down to is a battle of intelligence and control.  Retailers are using “door buster” sales on made up holidays to get people in the door.  And then they hope.  Great plan  – give the day a name they will buy on that day.  Who ever heard of Cyber-Monday?  What is that?  Just another invented holiday retailers use as an excuse to lower prices.  But it’s not just about lowering prices anymore; it’s about value, which is very different than price.

This leads to Trend #2:
Consumers are working hard to 1. figure out exactly what they want and the price they want to pay, and 2. ignore marketers.  So while we’re working harder than ever to get their attention, they’re working harder than ever to ignore us.  They’re more intelligent and better informed than ever before, and with the recession and jobless rate looming they’ve got more drive than ever to spend every dollar intelligently.  Gone are the days of a pretty picture and a catchy slogan being all you need to sell a product.  Okay, so the Old Spice Man is an exception, but have fragrance ads ever made sense?

Today’s consumer requires a real connection, and retailers need to generate real utility.  Build that, and they will come.

The other day I drove up to an ATM at my local Bank of America.  They have this cool feature where the machines no longer use envelopes.  At first I loved it, but after five minutes of depositing checks I started to miss my pen and paper.  Touch deposit check, put the check in, machine could not read the amount — please enter it manually, confirm the amount, display current balance of deposited checks, would you like to deposit another?  Repeat.  Line building up behind me.  Repeat.  Leave.  Next time I’ll just go to a teller.

My ATM experience is not unlike many of my online experiences.  How often do we come upon a website, club, or group we have an interest in or a product we’d like more information about but get stifled by the sign-up page?  It’s like fishing with a protective filter around the bait.  Sorry Mr. Fish, please answer the following questions:  What type of fish are you?  How long are you mouth to tail?  How much do you weigh?  What other bait do you like?  I know you’re here now, but tell me other ways to contact you.  Please check here if we can send other fisherman your way.  Hello?  Damn.  Lost another one.  Better try different bait.

“Please listen carefully as our menu’s have changed”.  Really, I don’t believe you.  I think they’re exactly the same as last time I called.  You want me to segment my self.  I once sent a customer complain email via the website for every 60 seconds I was on hold for 1.5 hours (and I hope their customer care numbers tanked for the month).  In their defense the automated voice did come on every minute or two to remind me the company values my call but, again, I did not believe.

Why do we do this?  Technology has made us lazy.  We ask perfectly good prospects to segment and sell themselves when we have perfectly good sales people who should do it for them.  The result: better information and fewer customers.  It’s called drop-off, and it can be avoided.

Wouldn’t it be a better experience to have a level 1 operator simply ask, “how may I direct your call?” or “I’m sorry sir, there’s a 1.5 hour wait.  Would you mind if one of our representatives called you back?”  How novel!  20 seconds later they’re off the line, I’m not on hold, and I feel like someone cares.

Take the Best Buy Corporate Gift Cards Order Form.  There are 15 required fields on this form but when you submit all you’ll get is a phone call from a representative confirming your information and asking for your credit card (which the form does not accept).  Let’s assume the site is not PCI compliant, so they cannot accept credit cards.  Why require all the rest of the information just to have a rep call and ask for the last bit?  Why not give the option to submit as much or as little information as you like with one singularly required field: a method of contact.  Let the professionals take it from there.

Don’t drive potential customers away under the guise of better serving them, innovation, or new technology when in reality you could have collected the information, made a sale, pleased your customer, and built your client base better without it.

Post World War II musicians, to assure the objectiveness of the judges, auditioned behind a screen.  In the 1970′s and ’80s, as a tool to overcome sexual and racial biases, this practice became more commonplace.  Today the Internet is our screen and it bridges thousands, hundreds, or maybe just a few miles to connect  us in a non-judgmental way.  Yesterday I didn’t know you; today I do.  I write this blog post – you read it and comment.  We have a conversation without bias – and social media makes it happen because by nature it is multi-cultural.

This week One Young World physically assembled a thousand young people from one hundred countries all over the globe to discuss the important issues of today.  They came together to discuss global health, political leadership, global business, interfaith dialog, and the environment — the things we have in common.  They did this, and I was there.  Well, I wasn’t there, but I participated.  I was there on twitter as thousands of tweets tagged with #OYW kept me updated in real time.  I was there on flickr as photos were uploaded.  I friended OneYoungWorld on facebook and I watched Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, John Kerry, and other delegates speak on youtube .  I read blog posts of peoples experiences from their own point of view and shared in the experience with comments.  I was there and I took part in this event along with millions of people from around the world.  I don’t know anything else about them, but we came together to discuss what we have in common — without bias — and social media made it happen.

It doesn’t matter if you are a global, political, or organizational leader or a college student in a dorm room.  You could be a professional from The Philippines, a hobbyist from Mexico, or me at my desk.  Automatic translations, like google translate , mean you could speak any language and screen readers, like JAWS , mean you might not read at all.  The color of your skin does not matter, nor does your physical location, or your views of any topic but the ones we share.  You could be in a bed, a wheel chair, or taking part in the 2010 Olympics.  I’m sure we have our differences elsewhere but by nature social media is multi-cultural; we don’t know or care who is on the other end.

Columbus made the world round; technology and the Internet (along with Thomas Friedman) made it flat again; and now social media has made it color blind and united us in our interests.

Accept and embrace

As we enter 2010 I look around at budgetary predictions and the first thing I see is something awesome — social media has real money behind it.  In 2010 eMarketer.com estimates a 35% growth in conversational marketing spending over 2009 leading it to break the $1 billion dollar mark for the first time.  As if that were not enough, they go on to estimate 60% growth in 2011 and another 85% in 2012 brining the predicted budget to just over $3 billion aggregating to $5 billion over the next three years.  That’s real money.  For years we’ve run pilot programs, in 2010 we’ll accept the proof of concept and move on to real projects.

Not just another media

Historically social media has been used and abused as a one-way soap box and megaphone media like traditional television or email.  It’s not.  What we’ve discovered is that social media is, well, social in nature.  Sure the majority of us still think in terms of getting our message out, but that point is starting to tip the other way.  Pre-2010 we’ve created twitter and facebook accounts, dabbled around with linking them to existing campaigns, and tried to grow our fan base.  Our goals have been to drive consumers away from the dynamic engaging social into our controlled environment.  Post-2010 we’ll realize the social media world doesn’t revolve around us.

There’s a conversation going on and, as mashable.com puts it, “we’re finding our voice and sense of purpose…. By not only listening, but hearing and observing the responses and mannerisms of those who define our markets, we can surface pain points, source ideas, foster innovation, earn inspiration, learn, and feel a little empathy in order to integrate a sense of purpose into our socialize media programs … aimless broadcasting is not as effective [or economical] as strategic communications and engagement.”  The website eMarketer.com compared advertising spending in social media (banners, etc…) to communication and marketing spending.  What they found is that while ad spending is still growing, the pace at which it is doing so is not.  With the pace of marketing budget growth skyrocketing, it’s expected to take the lead in 2011 and not look back.  Historically we’ve had plenty of practice speaking — in 2010 we start listening.

Information is exponential

According to Justin Smith, founder of Inside Network, about 33% of the US population is singed up for facebook with over 350 million members world wide.  That’s a lot of data — and that’s just Facebook.  I call it data because disparate 1′s and 0′s don’t become information until it’s refined and, even then, it has to be accessible.  As marketers, data is the most important part of social media.  Everything our customers do generates data.  In 2010 and beyond the most critical task we’ll have is to take social data and turn it into actionable, insightful information.  And we must do it in a useful, organized, and scalable way.

This is not an easy task for several reasons, not the least of which is that knowledge begets knowledge.  The more we learn and innovate, the more we realize how much there is to learn and the possibilities of innovation.  We first learn this lesson as children when we progress through the “never-ending why?” stage.  Somewhere along the line, perhaps our teens or maybe in college, we begin know it all.  Social media changes all that by opening portals to understanding consumers at a level never before feasible — as individuals.

Social media is information, and knowledge is power.  The key to social media is organization of information and, through that, personalized engagement.  If we can understand social media, we can focus it’s power into a new marketing paradigm where consumers are actually interested in the products and services we market to them as friends and collaborators, and SPAM is a thing of the past.

Redefining our role

The first decade of the 2000′s was the age of information, the second promises to be the age of communication and choice.  Today we have Google’s Nexus One, a carrier independent mobile device with both an open sourced OS and applications.  We have broadcaster independent digital and Internet television through services like hulu and hardware like boxee which are paving the way for buffet style channel, program, and even episode selection.  The future of marketing is accepting our role with respect to our customers has changed.  We haven’t been in charge for a while, but in 2010 and beyond we’ll have to accept it.

Social media on a brand level is a delicate balance of large scale and honest personalization (not variable-based form letters) which must result in brand recognition without sacrificing brand loyalty.  Our job, as technical marketers, going forward is to facilitate and cultivate relationships with and among our customers.  As a friend of mine puts it, “I’d rather pay $100 for something I think is worth $100 then $10 for something I think is worth $5.”  2010 is the year of finding the $100 customers worth cultivating and being an organization who is worth their time.

The prosumer

To stay relevant in today’s information rich marketplace organizations must intimately know, understand, and communicate with their customers in an increasingly competitive digital world.  Prosumers, so named for their role as both producer and consumer, are the intermediary between organizations and customers.  They’ve been empowered by social media and through it they invite us into their existing community.  We are just guests at the party.  Marketing in 2010 and beyond must understand and apply the information prosumers willingly and actively provide through this medium in such a way that we become both a participant in the conversation and part of the solution — essentially assuming the role of  prosumer ourselves.

Upon assuming this role, do not be so presumptuous as to think our part in the conversation is greater then the sum of it’s parts.  Though our voice may be louder than any single participant, in the democratized social we are still just a single voice.  As we affect the prosumer, so do they affect our organizations.  In 2010 and beyond we must prepare for this.  To take full advantage of social media we must be open to change and able to affect it within.  Change can be a difficult thing as we can’t know where the conversation may lead.  As Jim Collins says in his book Good to Great, we must confront the brutal facts yet never lose faith.  Once in the conversation we may not like everything we hear, but we must accept and embrace it anyway.  Organizational change is slow, and prosumers are not employees — they will tell you how it is.

Summary

Social Media as a marketing tool has arrived and is quickly coming into it’s own as we work tirelessly to organize massive amounts of data into useful information and allow it to affect our organizations as we affect it.  To accomplish this we must redefine our role and that of our organization with respect to our consumers and simultaneously accept social networks as mainstream media within our marketing.  If we can do this — if we can accept, organize, listen, and heed — it’s going to be a great decade to be a  social media marketer.

I look forward to the challenges of social media and am exhilarated by the prospect of what we will accomplish through it in 2010 and beyond.