Technology changes so rapidly that if you don’t focus on the message, you’re behind before you start.

The December issue of Esquire features the latest digital technology to dazzle advertisers and consumers alike, “augmented reality.” Its cover displays a code designed to interact with PC-connected video cameras. The “augmented reality” offering features video clips, a music track and even an interactive marketing section. You can visit www.esquire.com/the-side/augmented-reality and experience the fusing of print and interactive and judge for yourself whether this will save print as we know it.

I love this technology. It’s new and fun and geeky–and like the upcoming James Cameron film, “Avatar”, which purportedly will change the way films are made–it’s amazing. However, for some reason it makes me think of 19th Century author Victor Hugo who probably never used the word “technology” in his life. He wrote his massive tomes, such as “Les Miserables”, longhand, many times before publication. But somehow he communicated with such insight and power and relevance that when he died more than two million people took to the streets of Paris in a spontaneous show of respect.

Technology and communication are different. A message that cuts through the digital noise must have exceptional strategy, it must be pertinent, it must be smarter than just anyone can do. And above all else, it must be human. Marketing communications has always been a social media that’s why a brand can generate loyalty–it creates a relationship. Technology cannot do that without our help.

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Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a sometimes undefined marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. You can use the Forrester’s Social Technographics® tool on this page to get started.

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The marketing communication landscape has changed more in the past few years than in the past fifty.

Old world >> Type “www.blaircomm.us” for our website.

New world >>  Scan a mobile tag and go to our website.

Just aim your cell phone camera at the tag and be taken to the BLAIRCOMM website–for internet connected phones. The cool thing is you can scan it right off the screen, but it works in print as well. To get the free Microsoft app for your phone go to “www.gettag.com”.

Companies, agencies and the media are all scrambling to find relevancy and sense in the chaos of the digital ecosystem. Some approach it like Dell who developed a 50-person team dedicated to social media in response to one lone blogger. Others desperately try every new venue helping Google to post record profits without a viable return on their investment. Missteps in the digital ecosystem can be very expensive. Clearly many of the old rules don’t apply in the evolving Web 2.x world with shifting reference points, or do they?

In this self-publishing era everyone is essentially a brand–so what then distinguishes professional communicators from everyone else? Brands keep trying to join and be part of a conversation when they should be creating something unique that the conversation is about. Brands create the economy not the other way around. In the new world an old rule still applies and is more vital than ever. You have to stand out with a unique voice to distinguish yourself from your competitors. It takes extraordinary commitment to creative development.

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: 4 Nov 09 – While web target marketing has been around a long time, marketers until recently have had a hard time buying on enough Web sites to make the targeting truly effective.

Data mining firms are striking deals with thousands of Web sites to collect and sell data on their visitors that will be used for consumer research or to target advertising to highly specific user groups. Marketers, in turn, are using the information they buy to make better choices when buying ad space. It is a process that’s proving especially useful when buying through ad exchanges, which are new systems that allow advertisers to bid directly on the ad space available on a large group of Web sites.

EBay says in its privacy policy that it works with a data mining company, but doesn’t allow them to collect any personal information about consumers. Travel sites Expedia and Kayak say they both sell consumer data in a data mining company’s auction, noting that the information is anonymous and not tied to the specific Web site.

Some lawmakers, concerned about Internet privacy, are preparing legislation to make more transparent Web sites’ tactics for collecting information on their users. In an effort to fend off legislation, data brokers say, they abide by industry standards and do not collect any personally identifiable information and sensitive data, such as health information. They also tout efforts to make their business practices more transparent to consumers. Read more…

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LA TIMES – October 29, 2009: The significance of the change in the way people communicate has been clarified with some astonishing numbers in a report from the Los Angeles Times.

U2’s live broadcast Sunday night, October 25th, of the Pasadena stop on its 360 Tour generated 10 million streams across seven continents, according to a YouTube spokesman. What’s more, since being archived on YouTube on Monday, the concert has tallied more than 1 million streams.

It’s probably a safe bet that the latter number was a few million fewer than 10 million, considering the U2 channel on YouTube has generated about 8.4 million views, as of Wednesday evening.

Nevertheless, there’s no doubting U2’s live draw, both online and in the flesh. The Rose Bowl concert had a crowd of more than 100,000 people, including Rose Bowl staff. The stream was also the largest event in YouTube’s history, according to a statement from the company. Read more.

You can check out U2’s concert here:

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – 28 Oct 09: This is the age of the “amafessional”, when amateurs are rivaling professionals in opportunity, talent and the ability to produce quality work. It’s happening in virtually every field. In areas ranging from communications to medicine to simply making things with your hands, amafessionals are gaining in numbers and the ability to market their services.

Industry sources point to 452,000 bloggers who received primary pay for their services. But those sources also indicated that there was a universe of 20 million total bloggers – most doing it totally for the joy of it, with no compensation at all. But blogging is just the tip of the “amafessional” iceberg. Etsy – a site where people sell what they make – has registered nearly 200,000 sellers, and sales more than doubled in a year, all from people making arts and crafts. Five million artists, bands and record labels have registered with MySpace. On-demand and e-book publishing has fueled the growth of books. In 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States.

Advertising faces some of the same pressures from the amafessionals, as low-cost programs give consumers an increasing ability to turn out professional-looking material at costs a fraction of what they were. Vice President Al Gore, in his 2000 presidential race, was perhaps the first to send video cameras to people to make their own ads on his behalf. Not much was usable then, but that is changing, as companies hold broader contests for content.

Amafessionalism is no small movement. In marketplace after marketplace, these people are providing trained and working professionals with competition. They are upending traditional business models in everything from fashion to advertising. Read the full article “On the Web, Amateurs Rivaling Professionals.”

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BRANDWEEK – Oct 22, 2009: The army of Twitterers is growing quickly, per the Pew Internet Project report released today. The report found that 19 percent of all U.S. Internet users now use either Twitter or smaller services, such as Yammer, to share social updates. This was up 8 percent from the 11 percent who used such services in April 2009.

The majority of the growth can be attributed to three main consumer groups: young Internet users 18-44, mobile users and those who already utilize social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. Data was comprised of 2,253 phone responses from U.S. consumers 18 and older between Aug. 18 and Sept. 14.

Twitter and other status services were most popular among those 18-24. In fact, usage nearly doubled from 19 percent in December 2008 to 37 percent. Those 25-35 also rapidly joined the fray — up 20 points to 31 percent. Usage among 35-44s jumped 10 points to 19 percent.

Older demographics were slower to adopt Twitter use, with the 45-54 and 55-64 age brackets totaling 10 percent each and the 65-plus crowd tallying only 4 percent. Yet these groups increased by 5 percent, 6 percent and 2 percent, respectively, since December.

“People are increasingly using the Internet to contribute to the conversation and to listen to the conversation, to monitor what’s going on,” said Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project and co-author of the report. “It’s a pretty interesting finding, if someone is building an audience online, to know that there are people who maybe never respond but are lurking and learning by subscribing to the feed.”

Not surprisingly, wireless users and social networkers are among the most active. A quarter of the 54 percent of respondents who have wireless access via a laptop, mobile phone or other console said they post status updates. Users of social networks (35 percent) were far more likely to be tweeting compared to their non-social-networking peers (6 percent).

The surge in Twitter’s popularity during the last nine months follows a natural progression for social media, said Joel Comm, co-author of Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. “It simplifies what we are trying to accomplish — and that is connecting with people,” he said. “There is so much immediacy. And there’s no sign that Twitter is going to slow down anytime soon.”

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BBC – 22 Oct 09: In separate, non-exclusive deals, Twitter updates will appear in search results on Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s search engine. Additionally, Microsoft will soon incorporate Facebook status updates into its search, as part of Bing’s “Wave 2″ of development, announced at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

The deals will see messages, or tweets, show up in Bing and Google search results almost as soon as they show up on Twitter. Microsoft has moved quickly to set up a stand-alone Twitter search page accessible via its Bing site. Google said its Twitter search service would debut within the next few months.

Both deals will take a feed of all public Twitter streams to make them searchable almost as soon as they are sent. The deals underscore the growing importance of real-time search and intensify the rivalry between Microsoft and Google.

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ADWEEK – 21 Oct 09: Rather than thinking of social-media as a platform, brands might view networks such as Twitter and Facebook as “the newest place our audience goes to talk about us when we do something worth talking about.”

Social-media was not made for brands. Lots of other stuff on the Internet was, but not Facebook and not Twitter. It evolved from conversations. It’s the digital version of a bunch of people talking and being friends, and actually poking someone in the shoulder with a finger when they want to get someone’s attention. The precedent is not an old form of media, it’s a form of behavior. So where does a brand really fit in?

What if a brand can’t figure out how to be a great friend to its customers? Well, if it’s a successful brand, it needs to look at what it did before social media. Maybe it didn’t always dive in to other people’s culture — it made its own. Maybe it had a big voice on television and/or on the radio that nobody else had access to, and it shouted loudly.

Maybe what some marketers should be doing is stimulating other people to have a conversation about them. All the new social media tools are not about brands, but are about empowering communication among regular people.

The great thing is this means potentially everyone a brand wants to talk to is now easily able to micro-broadcast back their opinions. The value of doing something noteworthy should be going up because the reach is greater.

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BRANDWEEK – Oct 19, 2009: This week, Google plans to roll out a new tool, Campaign Insights, for large advertisers to gauge the success of their display buys beyond the most common metrics of impressions and clicks. The tool crunches data from thousands of users to figure out how many searches a campaign caused post-viewing, as well as how many visits to the marketer’s Web site. It then compares this with a control set of users not exposed to the display ads. By comparing the two samples, Google believes it can isolate how much of search and site traffic increases can be directly attributed to banner ads as opposed to other marketing efforts.

Studies have shown that display ads greatly impact search behavior. Google rival Microsoft last year released Engagement Mapping, a tool that assigns different value for search clicks, giving more weight to advertising a user saw before clicking a search ad rather than attributing all the value to the last click.

Campaign Insights is available to large advertising clients in the U.S. and U.K.

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