Alas, we have another dimension of changing consumer behavior throwing a wrench at yet another (time-tested) dimension of consumer behavior.  Lately I've taken fancy in watching certain TV shows in conjunction with my Twitter and Facebook activity.  Ups the entertainment value.  If a plot twist grabs you, you put your thoughts out there -- however risky!   And others, of course, do likewise...often in huge quantities.  My colleague and CEO, John Burbank, wrote about this in a recent post entitled "Could Social Networking Bolster the 30-Second spot", the logic being that so called "telecommunities" (powered of late by microblogging) are heightening consumer attention around real-time TV programming and advertising. Writes Burbank:

While there is still a lot to learn about the interaction of social networking and TV, it’s clear that there is opportunity for programmers and advertisers to leverage telecommunities to drive audience participation with both the programs and the advertising.  And it doesn’t have to be just live programming such as awards shows and sporting events.  Any show with a deeply loyal fan base could drive live viewing and deeper engagement through these telecommunities

Big idea -- and much needed conversation -- but with every opportunity comes new complexity.  Late last night, after Tweeting a key takeaway about key lessons from Dennis Rodman's failure to deliver on even basic customer service principles on the Apprentice (a comment that immediately got sucked into my Facebook page), I noticed a Facebook comment from my Nielsen colleague, Charlie Buchwalter, who piled on to my comment  "Hey...I'm on the west coast.  Don't give it away!"  

Are you serious?  Are you asking half the world to contain its "impulse to engage" to save the West Coast time slot?  I'm just not sure that's going to work.  Half the fun with TV these days might just be posting Tweets and status updates in real time. We're all going to have to take a step back and figure this one out.  This is especially problematic for programming targeted to increasingly "wired" and "conversational" younger segments.  Will we need to move "Prime time" to an early starting point on the west coast to keep up with what we might dub "Talk Time." 

Every once and a while I'll stumble into an amazing piece of CGM that took me months to discover.  Earlier today I received an email from my sister Julie passing on this amazing video entitled "Where the Hell is Matt."  Apparently, it's sponsored by Stride Gum.  Just a wonderful example of the creative power of human expression. 
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Such is the title of my recent column in Advertising Age, and boy has this topic been on my mind for quite some time.  If you take a close look under the hood on so many of these word-of-mouth, viral, buzz building, and social media campaigns, the folks with marketing pedigree and credentials are everywhere. 

In the blogosphere, there are thousands of bloggers who source directly from the marketing and public relations ranks. Double that for Twitter, which seem to matriculate another hundred "social-media experts" every couple hours. Conduct even the most basic Twitter search on user profiles and you'll find nearly 30,000 Twitter users self-identified as marketers. Nearly 8,500 use the term "PR," and another 8,000 use the term "social media."

Look no further than last week's Skittles brouhaha. Or the Super Bowl advertising buzz that I tracked for Nielsen. Or the Motrin Moms controversy many months earlier. Upward of half of the overall buzz came from the folks with marketing industry pedigree or credentials -- and the percentage conspicuously peaked even higher in the early waves of buzz. Put another way, marketers are complicit in pushing the snowball into a "buzzball."

Is this a bad thing?  Well, I hold off a bit on that particular question, but at minimum we at least need to recognize and acknowledge the disproportionate voice of marketers in the conversational stream. Even I'm a bit guilty of over-romanticizing the "consumer voice" when in fact the earliest buzz-building megaphones are being sounded by the folks I regularly rub shoulder to shoulder with at industry conferences.  Not to suggest we don't wear both consumer and marketer hats; I'm 100% aligned on what Dan Schwabel's suggesting about Personal Branding or Rohit Bhargava is putting out there about "authenticity" in Personality Not Included and I'm a proud participant in that tango.

That all this moves the needle is beyond question. Just consider the impact of search. In the pre-search world, marketers could critique one another into submission and no one outside our hermetically sealed silo would have a clue what we are saying. In the post-search world, all the marketer talk, fortified by heavy doses of link love, pushes straight to the top of organic Google-search results, meaning consumers are as likely to see our informed, often critical spin before they see the first billboard, display ad or TV spot. That's big.

At minimum, we also need to acknowledge that this curious trend blurs lines, and muddies the water.  I call this out not to be righteous but only because I truly believe we marketers need to consistently go the extra distance to keep things transparent, clear, well-disclosed, and of course "open."  When the commentators and analysts are becoming de facto media channels (which is clearly happening), we need to dial up the "clarity" levers.

Then again, maybe that's the bargain we've all struck in this Byzantine conversational bazaar we've buzzed up. Social media both softens silos and mucks up the lines. Web 2.0 marketing is de facto research, and feedback-powered research is the highest form of loyalty marketing, right? Lines naturally get blurry, even confusing, when we're both observer and participant. Inevitably, we end up interpreting the very buzz we created or fueled ourselves.

If you buy into this theory, you really have to think hardder about how to build the likes of David Armano, Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, BL Ochman, Peter Kim, Charlene Li, Chris Brogan and Susan Bratton into your buzz building or launch strategies, or at least have a strategy for "viral sandbagging" their potential negatives or venom.

This is no cake walk. While there's shortage of easy high-fives from the social-media set on anything that smacks of progressive marketing, let's not forget that these folks know all the tricks of the trade, and can smell an imposter, fraud or half-baked campaign a mile away. Indeed, if you look at the digital trail of road kill (especially in search results) from stupid or unethical marketing practice, the marketing experts -- not Joe Consumer -- were the first to throw the fatal daggers. "Et tu, Brute?" indeed!

I toss in a few final tips on the outreach side, but let me close with this observation.  However this nets out -- even if the net percentage of marketer-initiated buzz increases -- we must keep the space credible and trusted.  Social media is a wonderful thing -- enabling, empowering, rule-breaking -- but at times it blinds us to certain realities. We're a much bigger part of the conversation than we readily concede.  As long as we're open and transparent (and maybe even a bit self-critica) about this point, the odds of preserving trust will go up. 

Some additional comments/observations about this piece.

• Ad Age Column Comments 
• Forrester Blog: Who's Really Watching the Watchmen (David Card)
   

Lately I've been so busy that I haven't even had time to recap in this blog important, conversation-triggering articles I've penned in my Advertising Age column.  I'm hoping to change that, even if I have to backtrack a bit.  Below are excerpts from perhaps my most read and "shared" (according to Ad Age metrics) article to date, and my core premise is this: the bigger idea in social media might be as much about business process innovation than next-gen communication.  Here's excerpts, and I also encourage folks to skim the comments and blog posts that either build upon or challenge the argument.

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What's the bigger idea: social media as marketing stimulus or social media as a way to innovate business processes?

Every brand manager or CMO should recognize that it's both -- and in a disruptive economy, you need to take advantage of both outcomes. And when the potential dividends of a marketing effort include changes to a company's process, we need to rethink the entire notion of ROI.

This isn't an easy task, as marketers typically leave things such as organizational strategy and technology implementation to other stakeholders -- keeping lines cleaner and allowing marketers to focus on, well, their areas of focus. You let technology folks do technology, quality folks do quality and service folks do service.

But social media softens the silos. It's hard to turn over a rock in social media, dip your toe into Twitter or comment on someone's blog without rethinking the fundamentals of a firm's organization, product development and even listening infrastructure. Such firsthand experience begets inspiration. Inspiration powers change. And change is needed more than ever before as we're asked to contract our resources.

Social media and communication
Social media, at the end of the day, is about reinventing communication. Executed wisely, it's a new covenant of interaction between consumer and consumers, and, more recently, consumers and business. You could even argue that it's the long-overdue realization of one-to-one marketing that we over-romanticized back in the 1990s and inexcusably put on the "direct marketing" shelf.

But "organizational" communication, across thousands of companies and brands, is an area so bankrupt with inefficiency and scared of change that it's hard not to wonder whether your latest Twitter "aha moment" is better shared with the chief information officer or human resources than with the marketing team

Driving innovation
Then there's innovation -- the engine of value creation and company growth. Social media is one massive feedback loop. It's chaotic on the surface, but unmistakably efficient if you consider the life cycle of vetting a good idea or absorbing the ideas of others. If you really peel the onion on what's happening across blogs, Twitter and other online communities, brands are setting up de facto listening labs that rewrite the rules of gathering and managing feedback. We're getting more ideas faster. The funnel is broadening. The filters are sharper, more immediate and grounded in deeper levels of intimacy with the product or proposition.

The end outcome, whether intentional or incidental, is a disintermediation of existing, and potentially more expensive, processes. That alone should be reason enough for the CEO to personally initiate "Social Media Day" or "CGM [consumer-generated media] Day."

Procter & Gamble's Kim Dedeker, speaking to the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Listening Summit, suggested that brands need to reinvent "how to listen" not merely to figure out how to turn on online strategy or social media, but far more importantly, to reinvent and "inspire" the entire market research department. Put another way, listening is about reinvention.

The irony here is that a free tool known as Twitter was being used in real time by many of the attendees, the resulting data streams inspiring new ideas and playback throughout the conference.

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the ARF, called it "an amazing record of our research transformation conference, definitely more insightful than my old-school note taking. The big idea was that listening creates a fast-learning organization, which is the only way marketing can catch up to the consumer."

Driving margins, saving money
Let's end by hitting the sweet spot of practicality. At the end of the day, our foray into social media is teaching us how to save money. Consumer-generated media and social-media-enabling tools allow us to create websites and blogs for extremely low prices -- a far cry from the multimillion-dollar websites we built when I was co-leading interactive marketing at P&G back in the 1990s. Brands including Ford, Comcast, Toyota, Southwest, Sony, Denny's and others are testing new models of customer service on platforms such as Twitter that, under the old "enterprise" rules, would have cost millions to launch or even test. It's not that everything's cheap, but the barriers to low-cost earning have plummeted.

Whether we as marketers admit it or not, our dips into the collective social-media learning lab are making it really hard to justify $5,000-a-pop conference trips where we listen, learn, interact and collect leads. One could easily argue that the collective, real-time wisdom of social media, thoughtfully absorbed, easily substitutes for attending a "live" conference. And online video makes the substitution all the more tolerable. Video is a process innovation that is rewriting all the rules of efficiency.

Across the social-media airways there's no shortage of inspired thinking about what's possible. At a time when organizations are under intense pressure to reinvent themselves -- to take lemons and make lemonade -- it might be the right time to focus our efforts, even for a moment, on the overall "business process" equation. That's probably the easiest and most obvious way to demonstrate ROI around all of these efforts.

YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.

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Dear Blog,

I owe you an apology.  I've been blowing you off.  I've barely paid attention to you this year, and I've allowed you to be stood up by this new, sexier, and arguably more addictive kid on the block known as Twitter.

Yes, I've been sucked in.  I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing -- no, to be clear, I'm pretty much clueless -- but I've somehow found myself following the Twittering herds of 140-character tipsters and mundane-glorifying prognosticators of anything that, well, beats others to the punch.  I'm twittering in idle moments, retweeting (er, backscratching) other folks tweets, and now starting to think in 140 characters. 

With Twitter I find myself twitting anything that might, if I'm lucky (or if someone feels charitable or sorry for me), hook a follower or two.  And what a random lot at that I'm lured to follow-me.  Who are these guys?

With you, things we're simpler.  Folks would just RSS the content, often under the radar. Now's the popularity contest is so blatant.  Every time I see @jowyang, @armano, @cbrogan, or even @prsarahevans add another 1000 followers, I start to sweat! It's harder than pushing the Rock of Sisyphus.

Bad habits have only intensified.  My vanity ritual has now shifted from Technorati and BlogPulse to Twitter Search.  It's like I no longer care about what people say about you.  What's up with that?  What's up with me?

Well, that's not entirely fair.   Twitter is cool, and there's real utility, and I'm pretty darn hooked on it.  I'm so obsessed with it I started a new site to analyze its behavior called TwitterbyMachiavelli.com. 

And let's not forget, I do tweet about you here and there, especially if I think it might boost my follower list.  So you are not exactly irrelevant!  And many of the folks I'm trying to catch up with Chris Brogan also do a very nice job cross promoting blog and twitter commentary.

So maybe we can all tango together?  Yes?

But seriously, here's the rub.  Dude, I miss you.  I miss the long form.  I miss the planning process, and the drafts, and the periodic pre-publishing send-offs to friends for feedback. I miss fine-tuning the categories, and tagging the content.  I miss looking a you and seeing a comprehensive, logical, well-tagged body of work around a common theme. 

You make me feel whole, and certainly a more substantive.  

You held me to a higher standard of writing.  You served as a seeding ground for my articles in ClickZ and Ad Age, and I pretty much wrote my first book, Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, on the basis of what we cultivated together here in these pages.

I'm a bit embarrassed that it's come to this.

So here I pledge to you, two months into this new year, that I won't give up on you.  No way, Jose!   I'm going to do everything I can to claw back in; to trade a few extra tweets for more thoughtful time in your beautiful blog backyard. 

I'm not promising to be another Steve Rubel, but I do pledge to emulate more of his blog (not Twitter) behavior. 

I'm serious.  Don't give up on me. We all go through phases. 

Keep the door open.