ONLINE CONVERSATION MANAGEMENT AND THE ROLE OF THE COMMUNITY MANAGER

The Hydra was reputed to be a many-headed creature killed by Hercules as one of his Twelve Labours. The distributed conversations we are now trying to handle through social media have now also become a many-headed Hydra that we can't kill, but that we have to find ways of managing if we are to have more effective online conversations.

A while back I wrote a blog post called strangers in a community of the likeminded about turning my blog into a community, and I started using tools, like MyBlogLog, Digg, and recently Social Median and Businessweek's Business Exchange. I now have more readers off of my site through RSS, and other distributed content techniques than on my site.

One of my posts, as analyzed by Google Feedburner, has racked up more views through my feed than my blog has had visitors this year. This is partially good news, as it shows the post has gone viral, but it has gone viral through re-publishing, and bookmarking into some anonymous ether.

One of the great advantages of the social media revolution is the ease by which you can distribute content. You can simply Digg content, bookmark it to Delicious, share it to Facebook, Tweet it, and do many more things that takes your content to a wider audience. My feed service, Feedburner argues that published feeds permit publishers to instantly distribute content and give it the ability to make it "subscribable."Sounds good so far.

The flip side to this opportunity is that if you start 'conversations' in many more places, you have to respond in many more places. There are tools like Backtype that help you consolidate all of your comments, but it not the same as having a conversation on a single platform, and plugging yourself into the culture, and spirit of that community. This is important, as these places are not just platforms, they are also communities. And if you want to succeed, you have to become a citizen-participant, and view it as a place with a culture, with ingroups and outgroups, and elites, and ordinary citizens. Before its algorithm change it was been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content. A few sites have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site was being "manipulated", so to speak (According to Wikipedia which has its own oligarchy).

The big catch with this need to join the community, and become a citizen-participant (or even aspire to climb the social ladder and become a member of its elite) is that a distributed conversation splits your attention, and split attention is a tough thing to master - particularly if you have a day job.

Managing these conversations requires the skills of a new type of specialist. These are 'community managers' or 'conversation managers' or 'Online PR specialists' or 'Online Customer Service Executives' . The titles are different and the jobs slightly different, but they are essentially employed to engage in online conversations, and with online content. They also handle relationships with bloggers, and other media owners, but also handle responses for brands, and initiate conversations. These people already exist and the demand is growing, and consequently challenges the existing practices of the public relation business.

Call this online PR, call it customer services, or blogger outreach, but the core rationale for these people is to handle, and manage the rising tide of conversations out there. You can distribute content, but because you can't distribute your attention, we now needs specialists to handle this task.

BEYOND THE BANNER AND INTO THE STREET

Digital is changing and changing fast. One of the key changes is the rush to move beyond the banner, and into reality. And even to change reality. Augmented reality ideas are coming thick and fast, but I'm still struggling to even define it.

One of the big opportunities for me is to put digital onto the street. And I don't mean just kiosks. Check this work out below. To my knowledge it wasn't done using the Internet, but you can so easily see how it could.

555 KUBIK | facade projection | from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Einblick from Daniel Rossa on Vimeo.

CLOUD COMPUTING AND THE DIFFICULTY WITH PAY PER CLICK MODELS

I feel that advertising and marketing are on the sidelines of a huge battle that will impact on their futures. Last week Microsoft announced a full assault against the two current leaders in cloud computing: Google and Amazon. Azure, its cloud operating system is designed to challenge Amazon, and it also plans to launch a free, stripped-down online version of Office to rival the free Google Apps service. More about Azure another time.

Cloud computing is getting very hot, very quickly, and the battle between Microsoft and Google turned from being a cold war to an all-or-nothing nuclear war in the last week or so. And although the consequences of the cloud will have a huge impact on advertising, it feels a little like the tech industry adults are arguing, and when they finish they'll let the advertising and marketing kids know what the conclusion was.

The free version of Office will have an advertising business model - probably a pay-per-click model with some display advertising thrown in as well. PPC models are ideal for search but when people are in task orientated cloud applications, like when they are viewing photos, dong email, using word processing or spreadsheet applications, then they are not in a browsing and consequently PPC interrupt mindset. The lower clickthrough rates in the Google content network, or on social networks is testament to the single-minded mindset that sometimes militates against high clickthrough rates on PPC (even when the targeting is precise).

Our whole lives are going to be stored in the cloud soon, and consumers will visit their cloud applications on a daily basis. New formats might emerge to cater for these valuable eyeballs, but the sheer gravitational pull of PPC will mean that agencies will need to rethink how they plan, brief, and monitor campaigns. Google has reluctantly but successfully used pre-roll advertising, and and other display formats on YouTube, and might use more of these for cloud applications, but the PPC model has been so successful that Google and Microsoft are going to export it as far and wide as possible. Marketers must prepare for this future. It's a transparent future with an emphasis on performance, and return on investment.

CAN SOCIAL MEDIA DESTROY THE POLICEMAN INSIDE ALL OF OUR HEADS?

The cliche about social media is that it gives the consumer power. The consumer transforms through self-expression, and disintermediation from a passive social agent into an activist: a citizen-consumer. The citizen consumer can cut out the traditional media and rely on other citizen-consumers for news and opinion. With this in mind I recently re-watched the excellent TV series, Century of the Self by Adam Curtis (see below for clip).

I asked myself: "How much economic and political power does social media really give to the citizen consumer? And is this a way of getting rid of the supposed policeman inside all of our heads?"



The clip shows how some thinkers saw/see advertising as a corrupting force, where instead of creating an identity for yourself, you simply bought one from the market as a means of self-expression. There is a long held belief in society that advertising manipulates and corrupts, and somehow the practitioners are involved in some kind of mind control, which forces ordinary people to buy things they do not want to buy. If only it was that easy. This is a fanciful belief when you look at how much rubbish advertising there is out there that is irrelevant to the public conversation.

Social media is supposed to be the ultimate force for self-expression, and Generation Y its ultimate purveyor. With social media, and its opportunities for self-expression, what do we search for and write about in this new age of un-mediated self-expression?

On Youtube this month's most popular are Samsung's Extreme Sheep LED viral, and a Pussycat Dolls video, and this month's top searches are American Idol, and Lindsay Lohan. And the top blogs listed on Technorati are generally gossip blogs.

It's also worth remembering this guy on YouTube who has over 1M subscribers



There we go. It seems it wasn't someone else who put the policeman in our heads after all. We put it there ourselves. The policeman is our own desires.

CLOUD COMPUTING AND THE IMPACT ON THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS

If you remember the Sun Microsystems slogan "The Network is the Computer" then you'll know that there have been many attempts to move computing power away from the desktop and onto networks. This time it could work. People unhesitatingly now save photos on Flickr and Facebook, use email on gmail, and hotmail, and use word processing and spreadsheet tools from Google via a browser. All of this is free. The key difference between past efforts to make the network the computer and cloud computing, is that cloud computing is driven by an advertising-based business model. Google's announcement this week to launch Chrome OS, an operating system designed for the cloud to compete with Windows is well timed, and smart.

We already have more advertising inventory than can be sold, so the glut of new cloud computing ventures and their associated advertising inventory promises to destabilise the digital business. More inventory will drive down prices. More inventory will also drive down production costs, but increase demand for better optimisation and reporting across advertising campaigns.

Analytics will be key as new formats and new approaches emerge, die, and in some cases flourish. I also expect those who are overburdened by this inventory to start to look at new ways to raise margin by helping produce the advertising. So expect more cloud computing providers to start up creative units to help their clients produce ads.

Existing creative agencies can face this challenge by investing in teams focused on making cloud-based advertising work. That means more analysts focused on the maths and the optimization. That means more performance based pay that aligns with pay-per-click models. Notions of creativity have to change. Creativity shouldn't just mean arty and edgy, but should also broaden to mean useful and functional.

Equally creative agencies shouldn't just do communication strategy but should also do marketing strategy. Most importantly, it means recognising that the next wave of competitors are not the people you see at advertising awards shows, but are instead the geeks that live in neat streets in Silicon Valley. The music and newspaper industries were looking in the wrong direction when the revolution happened. Advertising needs to look West at California rather than towards Madison Avenue for the next challenge. This is only the beginning.

ADVERTISING AGENCIES VERSUS PR AGENCIES

Last week I did an interview with PR Week about the fact 'PR agencies have been forced to question their role in the marketing mix, after advertising firms scooped a slew of awards with PR-led campaigns at the 2009 Cannes ­Lions Advertising Festival', such as Obama for America, The Great Schlep, and The Best Job in the World.

It's become very clear to me that all agencies are suffering from what I have previously called transition trauma, and this is going to have huge implications for what the agency landscape looks like in five years time. If ad agencies can win using PR techniques, then PR agencies are going to start moving towards ad agency terrain. Fragmentation of media, social media, consumer cynicism, and digital media in general argues for a move towards earned media rather than paid media. The battlefield has moved, and everyone is shooting into the centre ground.

I've been interested in PR ever since I started writing on the social graph as I see the social graph as been centred on PR type strategies. The social graph is about passing on an idea, concept, belief, thought, project etc. that is transmitted digitally. To use the jargon we would call these memes. They propagate themselves and can move through a ‘culture’ in a manner similar to a virus. Virals are memes, as indeed are product recommendations, and chain letters. Nobody has yet fully cracked it. Not even Facebook are 100% clear how this might all work, but the answer is currently more likely to come from an advertising agency than a PR agency.

My explanation for this phenomena caused quite a storm on this blog. Its worth reading the comments and you'll see that I join the debate, as indeed did the journalist who wrote the piece. It seems it's not just the advertising industry in the midst of metaphysical angst.