Micro Persuasion

The Next Twitter or Facebook is the Open Web

Photo Credit: Open on Flickr by Mag3737 

The following is also my column in this week's issue of Advertising Age.

As Edelman's crystal ball guy I can't go to a meeting without being asked what will succeed Twitter or Facebook as the future king of community. It's unfortunate, but it's just how history has conditioned us to think.

Remember, however, that Second Life was digital marketing's Vietnam.

Communities come and go. Hubs seem to lose their innovation edge just as consumers grow more fickle, new venues emerge and viable monetization options remain scarce. If history repeats itself, Facebook and Twitter will one day be replaced by something else. However, this time it will be the open web.

A group of standardized technologies are emerging that will evolve social networking from destinations we visit into something bigger - a federated address book that makes every single web site that chooses to adopt them entirely social.

Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester Research has been thinking about this deeply. This week Forrester is releasing a paper that outlines a five year vision for how the open web, thanks to connective technologies like OpenID, will become one giant social network. This global brain will follow us everywhere and influence every purchasing decision.

While Forrester doesn't get this tangible, here's a fictional scenario to consider.

Today online shopping means visiting Amazon.com, reading reviews from strangers and conducing a transaction.

Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without ever having to visit the site. What's more, Amazon will show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly said about a product and/or its category in any one of thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your friends' friends opinions in a way that protects their identity.

So how should marketers prepare? Owyang advises to focus on advocates, evolve models from push to pull and adapt internal cultures. I think, however, it starts with something more fundamental.

Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it's peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways.

The Future of Advertising: Just Ask "What Would Google Do?"

Photo credit: WWGD & Jeff Jarvis at the Frankfurt Buchmesse

Jeff Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do?, is a must-read and a real eye opener. Here is a Q&A that Jeff graciously participated in for my column in Advertising Age...

How Google is Changing Advertising Agencies

Jeff Jarvis Suggests Asking "What Would Google Do?"

In just a little over 10 years, Google has built a business that is impossible not to admire. In fact, its success begs the question -- what would Google do (WWGD)?

Media pundit and thinker Jeff Jarvis tackles this question head on with a new book by the same title. In "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis breaks down Google's practices into 12 distinct rules and then applies them to aging industries like media and advertising.

I interviewed Jeff by email on Google's model to get his thoughts.

Steve Rubel: Since you titled the book with a provocative question, I will start the same way. If Google were an ad agency, What Would Google Do? How would they run it?

Jeff Jarvis: I'd say we already know: Google is a new form of agency-as-platform.

As Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out in my book, Google served an entirely new population of advertisers who didn't have agencies and that enabled it to set new rules. Google sells performance instead of scarcity (a lesson the rest of media must learn in this post-scarcity economy). Because it rewards relevance, it encourages better, more effective advertising.

Through search, Google enables any brand to speak with customers without advertising. Google still does business with the agencies, of course, because they hold the checkbook -- and that is delaying the tectonic change that will come to advertising as it has to music, newspapers, TV, and radio. It's coming.

Mr. Rubel: A book, however, is very un-Google, as you noted in several places throughout. It's ranking well on Amazon. How did you apply the lessons in WWGD to the way you wrote/marketed the book and what can digital marketers learn from your experience?

Mr. Jarvis: As I write this, the book is up in the 500 range (on Amazon) and, of course, I hope this Ad Age coverage gets it back up to at least 100!

I do confess that in seeking this old-media attention and in publishing an old-media book -- instead of just putting it all online, where it would be searchable, linkable, correctable -- I am a hypocrite. I did not eat my own dog food. Why? Because the book industry still works well enough to pay me an advance. Dog's gotta eat, you know.

My publisher, HarperCollins, is trying many new things. They had me produce a 23-minute, sitcom-length video version of the book. We put full text of the book online (in a widget that that Google can't search). I shared 30 days worth of excerpts on my blog. Most important, the book began on my blog a few years before it was published -- as I explored ideas there and got help, even an entire chapter, from my readers -- and the discussion continues there and in Twitter now (I love seeing readers tweet their reviews and quotes).

Where this should go: Readers should be able to buy access to an author's ideas in all media at once. I'm impressed that O'Reilly books offers a lifetime subscription to updates of its digital titles. By the way, I asked in my hardback edition whether the paperback should be ad supported; this wasn't met with a resounding yes.

Mr. Rubel: In the book you stress Google's relentless focus on the consumer. And you wonder whether focusing on the consumer over the client makes more sense. Isn't this what ad agencies already do? And if not, what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: In the book, I quote an Australian ad exec saying that agencies should pay attention to clients instead of consumers. Then I quote the ever-quotable Toboccawala saying that agencies should focus instead on their customers' customers. I'd vote for the latter. The real question is whether agencies -- ad or PR -- can truly act as consumers' advocates. If a company has great customer service, do customers need advocates?

Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?

Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise.

OK, that's going too far. There is still a need to advertise -- because customers don't know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.

In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you're Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason -- and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

Mr. Rubel: You also talk a lot about transparency. Google, however, isn't the most transparent company. What does the ad industry need to change here?

Mr. Jarvis: Google is not perfect. It expects us all to be transparent -- so we can be found in search, so we can benefit from our Googlejuice. But Google is not sufficiently transparent about its ad splits or its Google News sources. So, as our parents would say, this may be a case of doing what Google says more than what it does.

Online, it only makes sense to be as open as possible, to have answers to every possible customer question online, to join in conversations with customers as people rather than institutions. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is just good business.

Mr. Rubel: How does WWGD apply to b-to-b marketing?

Mr. Jarvis: Customers are customers, communities are communities. In the mass of niches, there's nothing to stop every community -- moms or plumbers or chemical engineers -- from joining together online and sharing their knowledge and interests. See the success of blogs such as TechCrunch and PaidContent with targeted B-to-B content, advertising, job boards, and events. In the highly specialized world of online media, B-to-B represents a big opportunity.

Mr. Rubel: If Google were a Super Bowl ad, what would it look like?

Mr. Jarvis: It wouldn't. Google does not treat us as a mass. And it has better ways to spend its money.

Mr. Rubel: Can advertising become a platform?

Mr. Jarvis: In a sense, Google is that. It provides the means for anyone to reach anyone, whether through ads or through their own sites and conversation. This, I believe, is Google's greatest lesson for media, advertising, marketers, as well as government: provide a platform for your customers and communities to succeed and you, too, will succeed.

Is that advertising? Well, if we redefine advertising, it might be. Most every company and brand can become platforms for their customers and except for the means to accomplish that, there's nothing new in this. A great company always helps its customers do what they want to do. That's a platform.

Mr. Rubel: What parts of the advertising assembly line (e.g. research, creative, media buying, PR, direct, digital, etc.) has the greatest risk of getting Googled or the greatest opportunity to become Googled -- and why?

Mr. Jarvis: Everything is changed by the Internet, and not just by Google, of course: We have more means to learn more about customers today than focus groups or certainly panels, ratings, and samples ever told us.

Customers make the best creative when and if they recommend and talk about products. Media buying, I believe, will morph into network creation; in a mass of niches, there's opportunity in curating those niches to create critical mass and that work is being done today not so much by agencies but by technology, media, and network companies. PR becomes everyone's business in a company, which must have direct relationships with the public, person-to-person. Direct? The Internet is direct and we're still not done with the argument over whether it is anything more.

Everything in marketing is changed.

Mr. Rubel: Finally, in the book you wrote that "The agency and the advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between customers and companies." This seems like it's an endorsement for public relations -- if it's done in such a manner. Yet, you are sour on PR and lump its future as questionable with the legal profession. Why? And what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: Though they can and certainly do use the Internet to improve their businesses, PR and law can't take on all the attributes of the open age because they serve clients and thus can't be transparent or consistent. The true test of a firm's willingness to prove me wrong would be firing a client that doesn't act Googley. I don't see that happening often.

Having said that, I know what you're fishing for here: If -- in my radical oversimplification -- advertising is failure and relationships are everything, is PR in a better position strategically than advertising?

Well, maybe, but there is this: A company and its employees must cultivate direct relationships with customers and communities without middlemen. So what is the role of the PR agency? It can advise and goad a company to build those relationships. But then, like a good consultant, it needs to get out of the way, to leave. I doubt we'll see that, either. The economics of agencies are built on getting clients to spend more, of course. So the real question is whether new economic models can support both agencies and Googlethink.

Five Digital Trends to Watch for 2009

This has also been cross-posted on the Edelman Digital blog.

In my role as Director of Insights for Edelman Digital I am writing monthly white papers for clients on key trends. Sometimes we will release these broadly. For the first one, I drew on members of the Edelman team, as well as third party research, to highlight five digital trends to watch for 2009. Each includes specific recommended actions.

Even though the economy is slowing, all signs show that audiences are still spending a lot more time on the web. Marketers need to invest to meet them there. However, what's changed today they are smarter about where they focus their time, dollars and energy. Experimentation is giving way to tactics that deliver ROI. These include public engagement, search and social networking — three themes that connect the major macro trends.

There are five trends covered in this white paper...

Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

Media Reforestation -  The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

Less is the New More - Overload takes its toll. Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

Corporate All-Stars - Workers flock to social media to build their personal brands, yet offer employers an effective and credible way to market in the downturn

The Power of Pull -  Where push once ruled, it’s now equally important to create digital content that people discover through search

You can download the full paper here(PDF) or simply browse or read it below. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research Business & Legal marketing media

WhosTalkin Launches Social Media Search Aggregator

One of my hopes for 2009 is that we'll see greater innovation in the social media search space - both free and premium. I have a bunch that I am trying out now: SM2, Zuula, Blogscope.net and Wikio and others. What follows is a first look at a new site called WhosTalkin that launched its public beta yesterday after seven months of development. (Hat tip to adthinktank.com)

WhosTalking is a metasearch engine that in one place aggregates results from the major free tools for scanning blogs and blog comments, news sites, social networks, video hubs, image, forum and tag sites. It rolls up results from over 60 sites, such as BackType, Technorati, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Twitter, Board Reader and many more.

The site has a nice interface that displays results using frames. Just click on the navigational links on the left hand side and they show up on the right. The quality of the results, I find, is hit or miss depending on the source. For example, Bloglines and Backtype results feel very fresh. However, Twitter search results are lacking compared to what you get from search.twitter.com.

In addition, there are two other major limitations. First, you can't view all results in a single view, even by channel (e.g. blogs, social networks, etc.). The other is that you can't save searches or generate RSS feeds - at least yet. These and other services are forthcoming for paid subscribers. There is also a URL API for developers.

At first glance, I am excited about WhosTalkin. There was a ton of innovation in the social media search space in the middle part of the decade. Then it seems like a lot of people talk their eye off the ball once Google Blog Search launched and when Twitter bought Summize.

Given that WhosTalking is pulling results from other sites, I expect they can improve the quality of results rather quickly. Although you have to wonder how the other sites will feel about having their data scraped.

Still, given the way the landscape continues to expand, I think an aggregated approach like this one is the right way to go. And this is a good first effort. If WhosTalkin can improve the timeliness and relevance across all the engines they crawl, then it could become a serious player since they leverage everyone else's databases.

Living without Email - One Man's Story. Are you Next?

One of my fondest memories of 2008 was meeting Luis Suarez from IBM. We both spoke at the Next08 conference together in Hamburg. (I will be returning to Germany in 2009 for the Next09 event.)

Luis' story is amazing. First, he lives in the Canary Islands and he's a social computing evangelist/knowledge management specialist for IBM. Until recently, he reported to managers in the Netherlands and the US. Now he is reporting locally to folks at IBM in Spain, but he still works at home.

What's notable here is that Luis during the year has been on a quest to eliminate all business email. According to his latest status report, he's down to about 20-40 a day. He wrote about his experience in the New York Times earlier this year. I also interviewed Luis on the subject last month via Skype as part of an Edelman Change event that we held for clients, which you can view below or here.

So how is Luis doing it? By pushing more of his communication into social networks and wikis - both internal and external and relying more on IM. Luis is an inspiration. So do you think this is part of a broader trend? Is your email down this year? I think mine is down slightly and I am wondering if we're all starting to live like Luis and what the broader ramifications might be for internal communications.

Obama's Lessons for PR Professionals and Marketers

These days, it invariably comes up in virtually every client or prospect conversation. I call it TQ - short for "the question." A lot of people want to know: "How can we be like Barack?"

Companies and NGOs are eager for insights into the President Elect's magical marketing formula. They're hungry to study the campaign and apply his methods for building connections through social networks and a broader groundswell of support.

A new book coming out next month breaks the incoming President's approach down into an easy to read format. The book, entitled Barack, Inc.: Winning Business Lessons of the Obama Campaign, is available for pre-order on Amazon. However, if you have a Safari Online account, you can already read online it there, which is what I did today. Snippets are available on Google Book Search. It's overall a quick read.

Barack, Inc. breaks down Obama's strategy to three simple phrases: Be Cool. Be Social. Be the Change. I loved these simple Haiku-like expressions so much that I clipped the graphic off their web site and saved it on my computer. I have it here so you can do the same.

Be Cool means zeroing in problems, developing practical solutions, all while remaining unflappable and undistracted. It explains how the Obama team always focused on its core goal.

Be Social is the part that will interest many of you. It covers how Team Obama cultivated a grassroots following, built MyBarackObama.com into a powerhouse, created outposts in every major social network, leveraged mobile marketing and turned CRM into what they call CMR (customer managed relationships).

Be the Change was easy for Obama. That was his entire platform. But the book explains what this means for businesses - creating a vision and taking on tough issues, both your own challenges and the globe's, in a forthright, authentic way. It also means creating an internal environment that supports multiple points of view, which Obama does well.

Whether you're an Obama fan or not, I recommend the book. It offers a great roadmap for how 21st Century organizations should be run, particularly in these challenging times.

Popurls is My Pick for the Best Web Site of 2008

There were a lot of web sites I really used actively this year - the entire Google network, Techmeme, Friendfeed, Facebook and, of course, Twitter. There's one though that stood out: Popurls. It's a site that people don't talk about enough and that's a shame because there's so much to tout here. Popurls rocked this year and it's my pick for the the best web site of 2008. (Disclaimer: the Popurls page features a link to my most recent blog post but I am not compensated by them in any way nor does Edelman, my employer, represent or currently work with them.)

Popurls calls itself "the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet." The site was created by Thomas Marban. What it basiscally does is aggregate web sites all in one place - digg, delicious, news sites, Techmeme, key blogs, media sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and much more. The great thing about it is that you can easily personalize it to your tastes. As you use it, the site gets smarter and shows you recommendations. You can view stats for the web site here.

So why am I nuts about Popurls? There are many reasons...

• It's a digital curator that helps mitigate the Attention Crash


• It underscores that the world is flat (Thomas is from Austria)


• Popurls added a ton of features this year: you can sign in with Open ID or your Google Account, sharing, a live view and a cluster view, a deep archive, a zeitgeist and much more. He seems to be adding features as fast as Gmail and Friendfeed.


• They're also on Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, mobile devices, the iPhone and even the Wii.


• Popurls Live - track it in real-time like Twittervision.


• And finally, killer search - complete with search feeds.

However, there's an even bigger story here that everyone is missing. Thomas Marban is making money.

Popurls has sponsors. More importantly, the site is represented by Federated Media. Together they have come up with some very clever, deep brand integrations. For example, Populrs and Intel created Popurls Blue for IT managers. It also debuted a partnership with Epson.

It's too bad that Popurls doesn't get the props it deserves from the tech blogging community. It's an important site. They had a banner year and it's easily one of my favorites overall. Congrats to Thomas on a great 2008 and I look forward to seeing more innovation from him in 2009. A next logical step for them would be an API.

How I Tweet Plus Thoughts on Twitter's Future

If you haven't seen it, Darren Rowse has a great new blog about Twitter called TwiTip. This week he and his followers interviewed me about how I started using the service, how I Tweet today and what companies who want to engage on Twitter should do. I won't steal his thunder, but want to share an excerpt here on a potential business model and where Twitter will be in five years time ...

If you were on the management of Twitter how would you monetize Twitter? (or would you) - question from @sachendra

It seems to me that Twitter is sitting on cash. It just needs to unlock the value. One way is through insights. I bet marketers would pay for advanced insights on what people are saying/doing. The other is through contextual search. Twitter should do a deal with Google or Yahoo to put pay-per-click ads on all the permalink tweet pages and then share the revs with users. The other idea is to monetize search.twitter.com, also with contextual ads. I think the only reason they’re delaying this is to make sure they don’t alienate their community. That’s the biggest risk they face.

Is Twitter just a passing fad or will it still exist in 5 years? How do you see Twitter evolving? - question from @AnitaBruzzese and @justcreative

I have been a participant and observer of online communities since 1988 - that’s 20 years. There’s no community where I am spending time today that was not born in the last five years. If I think back to what I used over the years it spans from Compuserve to AOL to GeoCities to Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed today. No community has ever had staying power. TIme will tell if Twitter can break the trend. I don’t see a moat there yet.

Further, they’re at risk at becoming just infrastructure as people interface with the site through all of the other ports, most notably, apps, Facebook and Friendfeed. I hope I am wrong. Five years may not be a timeframe long enoughf for change.

Join Us In the Pepsi Cooler on Friendfeed

The web is a magnificent communication platform. It's efficient, effective and scalable. However, now that the social web is here, it's become even more. The web is now a platform for global collaboration between brands and their stakeholders.

Over the last several months I have been working closely with a great team of folks at PepsiCo. You might know PepsiCo as just Pepsi, but they're so much more. Their businesses include megabrands like Gatorade, Frito Lay, Quaker Oats, Tropicana and of course all of the refreshments that fall under the iconic Pepsi umbrella.

Pepsi is eager and ready to change. They rolled out a whole new brand identity recently and now are eager to engage in online communities. (The changes are the first part of a multi-year transformation to reconnect with consumers/youth/pop culture.)

However, in the spirit of collaboration, they recognize it's not solely up to them on how best to engage. With this in mind, the Pepsi team I am working with has opened up a room on Friendfeed - their first embassy inside a major social network designed from the ground up for two-way dialogue and collaboration. I have to admit that I was not planning to participate "on stage." However, my clients felt that in the spirit of openness I should be there and that agency partners increasingly need to come out from behind the scenes when it comes to programs like these.

It is our hope that you will join the conversation and help Pepsi learn how you want them to participate as they venture forward at full speed. I will be there to help facilitate as a representative of the Edelman Digital team that is working closely with PepsiCo. I have embedded a real-time view of the room below (note this might not show up if you are viewing this in an RSS reader). We look forward to your feedback.

I've Seen the Future of News, It's the Newsfeed

In the last week or so I talked about three trends: 1) social media is speeding up, 2) that the attention crash (and not just the financial crash) is being felt by more of us and 3) that the newsfeed - more so than RSS - is the future of syndicated content.

This last emerging trend is important and it's connected to the other two. Newsfeeds can solve the attention crash. Further, they are built for speed.

My post on Forrester's RSS study generated quite a bit of commentary. I believe in the data. RSS has peaked. Yes, there are lots of people who use iGoogle who don't need to know what RSS is and start pages are growing. However, I believe that social network newsfeeds will become more a more prominent delivery channel over time.

Newsfeeds elegantly combine peers and pros, algorithms and networks. They know no bounaries. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb agrees. This is why social networks will become the primary theater for PR in five years time.

Here's a great example of where this is going. If you haven't seen it, BreakingNewsOn is a great resource on Twitter. It's always the first to break big stories. It was useful on Twitter, but now it's even better because they're on Friendfeed and I can see what other people think through likes and comments.

As I write this, minutes ago a campus shooting has unfolded at Western Kentucky University. Note how the commentary is aggregating around the post and in the screen grab below. That's the future of news. It's real-time, collaborative and in this case it's in my Friendfeed stream.

What's interesting here is that the freshest story isn't always at the top. In fact, it's often the one that generated the most recent activity from the community (comments/likes in this case). That's an entirely different model than one that any news site uses. They organize around importance. Blogs, on the other hand, go in reverse chronological order. This is different.

The newsfeed metaphor synergizes commentary, activity, relevance and timleiness and that's why it's the beginning of a new era in news.

Social Web Speeds Ahead Despite Slowing Economy

The following is my column in next week's AdAge...

As if you didn't have enough to worry about with the slowing economy, just wait. The social web is actually heading in the opposite direction - it's getting a lot faster. This will throw digital marketers another major curve to contend with.

Here's an example. Last week, just before the final Presidential debate, Friendfeed added a small feature that bloggers and fans went nuts for. The social network aggregator turned on real-time updating.

With the change, if you leave Friendfeed running in a browser window your friends comments, posts, statuses, photos and videos are automatically pushed to you without having to hit re-load. Watching my friend's social stream during the debate was like riding the Maid of the Mist to the base of Niagara Falls.

Friendfeed isn't alone. In August Facebook added a similar feature to its home page called the Live Feed. Hardcore Twitter addicts have long adored a number of applications that bring live micro-blogged conversations to the desktop. These include Tweetdeck and Twhirl for Windows and Twitterific for Macs. Google's RSS reader has live updating and blog aggregators like Techmeme will surely follow suit.

As it speeds, the social web is transforming into a giant, 24/7 global chat room distributed across hundreds of sites. Unlike the chat rooms of old, these are a lot more influential. In this era there are more people engaged and everything is being indexed in Google - also in real-time.

Journalists are already adapting by embracing the live web. Many reporters are active on Friendfeed and Twitter. Last month CNN launched a new show with Rick Sanchez that features the anchor interacting with Twitter users live on the air. Sanchez has since added 10,000 followers and is now the fourteenth most followed personality on the site.

But what about brands? How will they fare in this new, faster age? That will depend on how they adapt.

Digital marketers who continue to plan campaigns months in advance and then unleash them will lose relevance. The more successful programs going forward must feature real human beings. They will need to be dynamic, adaptable and able to turn on a dime depending on where the live conversation goes. That's no easy feat and it will require brands and agencies to rewire themselves for speed. Get ready to race.

Page Rank is the Ultimate Measure of Online Influence

Friends, Romans, countrymen, followers, page views, in-bound links, share of voice, unique visitors and subscribers. These are just some of the more common ways serious content creators (and those who hope to reach them) measure online influence. However there are big flaws in all of these metrics.

Followers and/or RSS subscribers are nice to count. But given the Attention Crash, it's a good bet that many of these people aren't as engaged with your content as you might hope. For example, I follow several hundred people on Friendfeed but I only see a fraction of their stuff because I don't have time to actively read or even scan.

Unique visitors and page views - which I said was dying back in 2006 and is dead as far as I am concerned - are also largely empty numbers. Lots of people visit my blog. However, many of them arrive via Google, the web's version of Ellis Island. And then they're gone.

After thinking about this a lot I have reached the conclusion that Google Page Rank is the ultimate way to measure online influence. It's far from perfect. However, several other metric candidates I addressed in February 2007 haven't panned out. There are three reasons why Google Page Rank rules.

1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to - or what John Bell describes as socially connected

2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet's biggest stage - Google - and just as people are searching for the topics you are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because the press start at search engines when researching stories

3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It eschews the echo chamber

PageRank takes time to earn. There are no shortcuts. Google is democratic and rewards professionals and amateurs equally if they do their job well. Create high quality content that earns links from other quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does your influence and responsibility.

(Yes, I did say responsibility. My blog has a Page Rank of 7. If I were to actively blog about Edelman's clients, it could alter Google results and thus their reputation. That wouldn't be ethical now would it?)

Many bloggers monitor their Google Page Rank. The AdAge Power 150 and the Healthcare 100 lists allow you to sort bloggers this way. But Page Rank influence is not limited to blogs.

Did you know that individual identities on social networks like Friendfeed and Twitter have Page Ranks that are independent of the main site itself? Its; true. Someone new on Twitter has a Page Rank of zero. While those who have been on the site longer have a higher rank. The same goes for Friendfeed where I have a Page Rank of 4 but Robert Scoble has a 6.

It would be interesting to take lists like the Twitterholic 100 or the FFHolic 100, both of which rank influencers based on followers, and run them through a Page Rank checker. While followers and Page Rank are probably linked I wonder if some interesting anomalies might pop up in the process. (If you want to check the Page Rank for any site you can use this bookmarket. However, note that results can vary based on the tool you use to check.)

Until someone comes up with a better metric, Page Rank to me is the ultimate measure of online influence. Do you agree?

Trends That Will Help Define the Future of PR and Marketing

In June Edelman, my employer, and PRWeek held a two-day summit on the changing media landscape and its affect on business and education. More than 90 people participated. Recently we published a paper chock full of with actionable insights for businesses. You can download it here (PDF). Here's the conclusion I wrote.

Trends That Will Help Define the Future

The best way to think about new media, I have learned, is to look at the recent past and at the trends that are here now and seemingly have staying power. Apple CEO Steve Jobs once famously said "you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." He’s right. With that in mind, there are three trends that are likely to shape things over the next four years.

The Attention Crash

Though the current global financial crisis grabs all the headlines, there's another storm quietly brewing - a crisis of attention scarcity. The inputs we have into our lives - that which we allow and those that are forced upon us - are exceeding what we are capable of managing.

The Attention Crash is here and it will only get worse. There will always be more content vying for consideration. In fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "By the year 2019, it's going to be possible to have an iPod-like device that will have 85 years of video on it. So you will be dead before you watch the whole [thing]."

Generation Y seems to be able to better manage this new environment, having grown up with a mouse in hand. But marketers who are a little more gray will need to adapt by creating and earning media that can break through the clutter and “stick.” This requires they keep things short, simple and visual.

Brands, media and individuals will have a role in mitigating the Attention Crash. Every high–interest niche will be met by digital curators who can separate art from junk online and present it in a very digestible form.

Already, some are jumping in. Intel partnered with PopURLs.com to create a news tracker for IT professionals. The site also features Intel white papers and blogs. The New York Times too is transforming into a digital curator. On the newspaper’s technology site reporters cull through blog conversations that have bubbled up during the day and highlight and link to the most notable posts.

Social Networks Become “Like Air”

Social networking is here to stay - but it’s changing. As my fellow panelist Charlene Li says, it’s becoming “like air” on the Web. In essence, social networking is nothing new, really. It’s simply a digital, global and scalable manifestation of our desire to communicate with other humans. The technology makes it easy for like-minded individuals to connect and collaborate around the topics they care about. This can range from personal to professional interests. A lot of it revolves around social causes.

Today we have three big social network hubs - LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace (an Edelman client). In addition, we have an expanding constellation of smaller social networks such as Beebo, Twitter, YouTube and the hundreds of thousands of vertical communities that comprise Ning - a do-it-yourself platform. There will be room for all of them to thrive, but consumers soon won’t need to visit these destinations to connect with their network.

Social circles are becoming portable so they can follow the consumer to any site they want to visit. Facebook and Google, for example, each have competing technology platforms that Web site owners can integrate to allow consumers and their social circle to connect in new experiences without having to sign up for another network.

Brand marketers that may be tempted to build their own social networks need to consider that there may not be room in people’s lives for more than one or two. They will need to plug into the social “air” supply that the large networks are building across the Web so that consumers can stay connected to their existing networks.

Google: The Reputation Engine

The third trend that also will continue its current trajectory is the rising influence of search, particularly Google. The search engine, as of this writing, has 70 percent market share in the U.S. and is even higher in other countries - but not all.

Google is much more than a search engine. It’s media.

Every day people make purchasing and life decisions based on what they find on the Web. Patients visit their doctor’s office armed with reams of information they found on Google, some of it right, some wrong. Consumers are accessing Google from their cell phones to compare prices when shopping. And Wikipedia, a site that no one controls, tends to dominate many high–profile search results.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are increasingly tweaking their algorithms to stop spammers and other “black-hat” types. Today most search engine result pages tend to favor high–quality content produced by media, brands and individuals.

Communicators will need to know how to create and earn content that is not only findable, but worthy of discussion so that it earns and maintains visibility in Google - which often makes judgments based on quality.

What the future looks like in four years know one knows. However, if businesses follow these trends, at least directionally, they will be prepared to navigate the new environment.

MarketingAge Profile

Marketing Age magazine, which is published in Ireland, ran a profile of me in their July/August issue where I talk about my role within Edelman Digital, how I use RSS to keep in the know and trends in social networking - including Friendfeed. The article is not online. However, If you're interested, they have graciously given me permission to share it here. The full PDF is here or you can simply click through each of the images below, which are up on Flickr.

Should You Rent or Buy Social Real Estate?

Photo: Abandoned farm shed by serendipitypeace2007, modified under a Creative Commons license.

Anyone looking for a place to live invariably needs to first answer this question: "should I rent or buy?" Each has pros and cons.

If you rent a house or an apartment, you control your own destiny. It's easy to get out if you want to move. Then again, you're limited in what you can do to remodel.

On the other side, owning real estate has advantages too - a tax break, flexibility and potentially a lot income if you flip it later on. The downsides? Lots. You can't easily sell in a down market and you're on your own when it comes to repairs.

The same can be said about choosing where to participate online. I had this discussion recently with a colleague who asked me why I am investing all this time in building Twitter's "equity" rather than doing so on my own blog, which I have been writing for four years now. It was a rather thought-provoking question.

Running a blog on your own domain (even if you use a hosted provider like TypePad, as I do) carries with it lots of perks. I can remodel pretty much any way I want as long as I follow proper blog protocols. I can track my returns - Google Juice, subscribers, comments, traffic, leads, press quotes, etc. TypePad really doesn't realize the same kind of benefits that I do personally by writing this blog. Then again, it has downsides too. Namely, Twitter has community built right in.

Investing time on Twitter, on the other hand, truly is starting to feel like renting. When the landlord is doing a good job, everyone is happy. When the landlord is negligent, the tenants get testy and threaten to move. I now view Twitter like a summer rental that you hope doesn't get hit by a hurricane while my blog is casa de Steve. I may be alone here.

It seems to me like "renting" online equity is now what's in vogue. Long-form blogging is less prevalent because the competition for attention from pro-bloggers is steep. That's why I love the Friendfeed model. It's like a co-op. I can invest in my blog and realize benefits not only here but also on Frienfeed. Or, I can invest in Twitter and see the same return on Friendfeed, though certain provisions apply. You're still beholden to the landlord.

I remain a fan of all of these services. However, the big question on my mind of late is this: where should we invest our time and sweat equity online? Will people continue to build equity in sites like Twitter that have community today, but most likely will be gone one day? Or should we look for hybrids like Friendfeed where we can take control?

If the marketplace for online equity is as cyclical as the real estate biz, then change is a given.

The Promise and Peril of Ubiquitous Community

The following is also my column in next week's AdAge.

Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: "Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.

Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."

She writes on her blog:

"I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social.'

"Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."

This represents a significant shift. For the past 15 years, online communities have primarily existed as stand-alone destinations rather than the web's equivalent of running water or electricity.

The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.

Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.

Now, however, connective tissue is emerging to bring these individual points of lights together as virtual constellations. Google and Facebook have each launched systems that allow sites to plug into their architectures to turn them social. The tools equip site owners to enable visitors to tap their existing networks and connections in a way that adds value to the total experience. So imagine a Facebook user who can easily see on Digg.com which stories his or her friends voted up. Or a non-technical site developer who, with a few small lines of code, can add utilities such as reviews, members' galleries and message boards to their sites or applications.

As exciting as this is, the transition of community from a handful of big reach sites to a ubiquitous platform is incredibly disruptive for marketers. It essentially makes social network advertising, which according to anecdotal evidence is already a mixed bag, even more difficult. (And thus monetizing social networks.)

The end result is that marketers will need to shift the way they approach communities. Static advertising is no longer viable. The solution is collaboration. Marketers will need to tap these emerging social operating systems to build meaningful connections through their sites and others before competitors do.

Participation is no longer optional and the fist movers who dedicate resources will win.

Friendfeed's Business Model Will Look Like Google's

I love Friendfeed. However, I am far more enthusiastic about the platform's robust RSS and search capabilities than its current value proposition as a universal social aggregator. I find it generates too much noise at times, but when you tap its search/RSS tools you have a killer app.

As I recently noted Friendfeed's imaginary friend feature is incredibly powerful. In addition, so are its advanced search capabilities. Combine them and this is where things get interesting.

Here's an example. I haven't tried this yet. But my gut is that you can actually use Friendfeed to create a Google Coop-like scoped search tool just for Twitter.

Simply take the Twitter public timeline feed and add it as an imaginary friend. Now you can scan the full text of every tweet - even if Summize should go belly up one day. In addition, you can generate RSS feeds against this new imaginary friend for any term you want to track. The public timeline too much for you? No problem. Just take your personalized Twitter friendstream feed and now you can data mine just your peeps.

This is just the beginning. Friendfeed benefits immensely from the network effect. The more individuals that aggregate their social streams with the service, the more it can be data mined and thus monetized - and its power grows.

So, for argument's sake, let's say in a year that even 50% of people who actively publish online aggregate their streams with Friendfeed. Suddenly you have a competitor that in utility could eclipse most of the vertical social search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search and Summize. Friendfeed doesn't index the full text of blog feeds yet but I suspect one day they will give publishers the ability to opt-in.

Now, what if Friendfeed were to wrap Google Adsense contextual ads around keyword searches just as it becomes the de-facto source for searching the social web. Think that's big? I do. And that fact that Friendfeed's founders come from Google probably bodes well for such a model. Stay tuned.

An All Too Convenient Truth: Many Marketers Pollute the Web

Photo credit: Copenhagen Industry Pollution #1 by Miguel A. Lopes "Migufu"

Earth Day is around the corner and a lot of marketers are thinking about the sustainability of our planet. Some are recognizing that doing good also helps business. Edelman's Good Purpose study found that 73% of consumers are prepared to pay more for environmentally friendly products.

However, it's not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it's very easy for advertisers to pollute the web with their garbage. Most often, that's not their intent. But it's the end result and it's reaching an epidemic proportion. Now business needs to take the same approach online as it has done offline through corporate social responsibility (Jason Calacanis echoed a similar theme recently.)

First let's look at the the obvious ways marketers poison the web. These all intend to game the system ...

• Spam: 94% of all email is spam (Postini)
• Splogs: 53% of all blog pings is spam, including 64% of those in English (UMBC)
• Click Fraud: Increased last year by 15% (Click Forensis)

Still, there's more. In subtle ways marketers are contaminating the Internet without even knowing it by spewing millions of meaningless messages across thousands of sites. This may be contributing to the slow down. They're not adding value to your experience or working to help you meet your goals in a very meaningful way.

Consider these popular techniques ...

• Banner Ads: A lot of money is going here but click-through rates remain abysmal and their overall branding value is being questioned. Many of them just litter the web and get in the way of what you want to do. Eye-tracking studies in the past have revealed "banner blindness."
• Social Network Advertising: eMarketer predicts advertising on social networks will reach $2.2 billion this year. However, traditional display approaches to date have not performed. As Ian Schaffer from from Deep Focus noted, marketers need to dig in and figure out how to make the experience better. This means what does work is creating authentic content, widgets/applications and more that people pull because they add value to the community. (Note: MySpace, a major social network, is an Edelman client.)
• Social Media Optimization: This needs to be watched like a hawk. As I have said before, if you participate and add value you are rewarded with Google Juice - and so much more. If you just set up sites and spam social nets to get links, then I am sorry, you're bad.

Despite all the money that's flowing online, most marketers completely miss the boat on what the web really can do for them. As I have talked about before, the Internet isn't just a communications medium. It works best when it's used as a platform for open collaboration. This means taking a PR-centric approach.

This means companies and consumers need to partner toward shared outcomes. This can be as simple as "we want to be entertained" to "we want to find the best world-changing idea." The latter is what American Express will unleash again later this year with its Members Project.

The web is facing it's own global warming crisis as marketers continue to pollute it. Consumers are voting with their clicks and eyeballs by engaging with authentic content that adds value, while ignoring the rest. That's good news that shows maybe we'll solve this crisis, even as business continues to tackle the larger issues that impact our planet.

Later:: Bryan Person asks if clueless PR pitches are part of the problem. Heck ya.

Historically, Most Online Communities Haven't Stuck

The following is cross-posted on a new blog I am contributing to called Authenticities. It's the official blog of my employer, Edelman Digital, which we officially unveiled yesterday.

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We're barely into the second decade of the the Net's development. Unlike the first ten years when corporations built the web, over the next decade the Internet will largely be created by the people for the people via online communities.

This means that the phrase "public relations" is (finally) taking on a literal meaning. It is our industry's charter to help clients navigate online communities and build authentic, meaningful relationships with their stakeholders. However, the challenge is if you blink, the entire vista will change.

Most marketers prefer to gravitate to the big hubs. These include Edelman clients like MSN Spaces and MySpace, as well as Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and a host of others that have lots of eyeballs. Any of these sites can serve as strong venues for marketing programs.

What we take for granted, however, is that they will be around in the long term. On the Internet, churn is constant.

Historically, online communities have perpetually come and go. The Internet Archive amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated, much the way the T-Rex roamed during the Mesozoic era. These include former stalwarts such as Angelfire, The Well, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities, Tripod and Friendster.

Only a handful of community sites over the last dozen years have had staying power. If you study them you'll find moats to protect them from competitors and fickle users. These barriers to entry include peer-to-peer commerce (in the case of Edelman client eBay), robust user reviews (Amazon.com) and deep entrenchment in vertical markets (BlackPlanet.com).

The online universe is about to grow even more complex, making it harder for some sites to maintain their dominance. Over the next several years social networking and community will become less about specific venues and more of a river that runs through the entire web. As Cisco's Dan Scheinman says, community will define not only how content is created, but also how it is consumed.

This means that although it will get harder for marketers to achieve scale, community engagement will become a much more efficient and effective way to engage an audience. This requires a shift in thinking though as community becomes like running water. The takeaway here is never bet against change - it's constant on the web.

Comparing SMM SEO and PR Tactics is Pure Poppycock

Last week I wrote about how some in the search engine optimization profession (not all) are openly espousing how to basically turn social media sites into heat seeking missiles for Google Juice - and not much else. Apparently there is a whole cottage industry called "Social Media Marketing" (SMM) that analyzes how to use social media for SEO purposes. That should give anyone pause.

Given my accusations, immediately and understandably many commenters jumped on the public relations industry for also trying to use social media to pull the wool over people's eyes. That's complete poppycock. There is no comparison. The reason is that over the last several years the PR industry has largely learned its lessons - often the hard way.

Call me an optimist, but in 2008 most in the PR business take a clean approach to social media. A key reason is that when our clients engage, their participation needs to be transparent for it to be credible. If they fail at following the common law of the community, which has happened in the past, you'll be the first to know about it. You can't always say the same so-called SMM SEO types. Their work is sometimes far harder to sleuth.

I want to discuss this a bit more by addressing some of the comments about PR that came back in response to my post...

Danny Sullivan: "the next time you're dealing with some client asking for visibility, just tell them that hey, if they have a great brand, good PR will be a byproduct."

Positive PR is definitely an outcome of good products, but not always. Public relations professionals play a key role in helping brands identify their core genius and to tell that story. The ultimate arbiter here is the public - either directly or through the media.

We always need to convince people of a product or service's worth, no matter how good it is. If we're encouraging brands to participate in social networks, blogs and social bookmark sharing sites then the bar is even higher. They must add their value before anyone will care.

Social Media Marketing through SEO, on the other hand, often aims to game the system for Google's sake. It can be difficult for someone to discern the role it played in generating Google Juice.

Aaron Wall: "Since when is a PR guy concerned about how wrong it is to game media? I mean...I spoke at a PR agency once, and their walls were plastered with framed media articles that favored their clients. How is that any different then a blogger linking to my content because they like it?"

Public relations professionals - the ones who do their job well at least - never game the media. In fact, every journalist would take issue with that statement. In the social web, the bar is even higher. If good content attracts legit blog links, then that's a completely valid approach.

Chris Kieff: I think the PR industry is just as dirty as the SEO industry. For every 8 of us good ones in both PR and SEO there are 2 lousy ones who give us all a bad name.

Every profession has people who are white hats and black hats. However, my contention is that it's very hard to uncover the nefarious SEO types while it's pretty easy to do so in PR. Fear of humiliation is acting as a deterrent in PR.

Andy Beal: "What about the multitude of PR firms that flood social media with company profiles of their clients–all with the sole intent of building their brand recognition. They want to 'appear' as if they’re engaging their customers, but really they’re just jumping in so they can figure out how to push their brand on users."

I believe these people will all be exposed if they are not adding value - period. We (the community and the industry) need to police these egregious programs, no matter where they come from. And that's happening.