I attended the memorial last Saturday of a former employee, a young woman named Maya Machnicova. Memorials are always a reminder of basic truths we tend to ignore, or simply forget, and Maya’s passing in particular has made me think a lot about the subtle ways people impact my life. The push and pull of primary relationships is obvious—parents, spouses, children, business partners—they’re like heavy planets that shift our trajectory whenever they come into orbit. But what about the coworkers we spend a few hours with each day? There are hundreds of people in my life that come and go over the years, and maybe they leave a lasting impression because of some big drama, or maybe they just fade away. Maya reminded me of the subtle impact some people have that isn’t obvious until you have perspective to think about it, and then you realize they shifted your outlook in some important way. Maya was like that.

Maya was remarkable in a lot of ways. Her family escaped communist Czechoslovakia in the early eighties when Maya was 10 and eventually fled to the US. When she walked into our studio to apply for a job as an Account Executive, maybe 15 years later, Maya was thoroughly American. She didn’t have a lot of experience, but she was smart, enthusiastic and confident, and we didn’t hesitate to hire her. Over the years she worked at Cymbic, Maya was an incredible asset. She was ambitious, self-directed and determined. She went after big accounts, she thought creatively and strategically about how to run them, and she never hesitated to put in the long hours required to deliver to the highest standard.

I remember one project she wanted to reel in from a big software company called Manugistics. It was an assignment to produce some online product marketing materials that she thought would be a perfect use for Flash, which wasn’t in wide use at the time for much more than web site splash pages. The budgets were tight, and there were only a couple of days before the proposals were due. Maya came up with the idea of delivering the proposal in Flash, and scripted a “build-your-own-project” proposal, where you could drag and drop components of the project and the price and timeline would automatically adjust. She assembled a team and worked through the weekend to get it built and delivered. It was an all-or-nothing risk—not only in terms of delivering something so far out of the box to a large client, but just getting it built in such a short time. What impressed me when she pulled it off wasn’t just that she delivered, but that it was such a substantive way to address the opportunity—it wasn’t creative for the sake of show, but demonstrated directly to the client what was possible.

I don’t remember how many years I worked with Maya, two or three years I think, right at the end of the dotcom bubble and into a recession that devastated our industry. I was a very green agency principal trying to figure out how to survive and manage through a challenging market. There was a lot of stress and some drama as we went through layoffs and lost a lot of business. At some point, Maya moved on—I remember she took me out to lunch some months after she left to tell me what she had learned at Cymbic—and eventually we wound down our agency.

Thinking back on it now, I realize that Maya modeled many of the qualities I now look for in new employees. She was a true entrepreneur, combining incredible ambition with the creativity and determination to achieve whatever she set out to do. Often that comes with a big ego that can cause conflict on a team, but Maya was adept at keeping the focus on the project more than her own agenda. She was incredibly smart, articulate and creative, and she never failed to find a way to get up when she was knocked down. Many of these qualities are celebrated in management books, but Maya lived them naturally, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, she helped set the bar in my mind of what the best colleagues, co-workers and employees are like.

Something else I remember about Maya that never made sense at the time, but now seems symbolic. Maya liked to wear this big, masculine watch that always looked a little out of place to me. Maya was slight and pretty, and the watch just looked incongruous, swimming on her small wrist. I imagine there was some story behind the watch that I didn’t know. But it’s funny. When I think about all the qualities Maya embodied, her strength, ambition and determination stand out. And now the watch seems really to fit after all.

Thank you, Maya, for everything I learned from you.

Originally posted at SocialRep
One of the core imperatives of social marketing is engaging your customers in conversation—instead of just blanketing the market with offers and collecting conversions, social marketing focuses on active market dialog to better understand and meet the needs of customers. Your customers are already talking, the theory goes, so join the conversation. There are a lot of companies that provide the tools and technologies to support engagement, from listening tools to identify the right conversations, to community tools that help cultivate and amplify voices that add value to the dialog. To some, however, this just isn’t efficient enough. If people saying good things about your company helps sales, then why not just go out and generate good conversations?

One business model I’m seeing promoted today is the opportunity to turn your best customers into free sales reps. If you have happy customers, why not give them a rooftop to sing your praises to the world? It’s simple: just poll your customers with the Net Promoter survey. Anyone who scores high on their likelihood to recommend your product to friends gets an offer to do just that: join a system where they get points for each review they write, each email offer they send to a friend. Win prizes and cash.:

On the surface, it sounds like the perfect marriage of social media and commerce. It’s social, it’s measureable and it drives leads. What could be wrong with that? Unfortunately, everything—in fact, deploying this kind of marketing program could completely undermine your efforts to build a community by turning customers motivated to recommend you because they love your product—the most valuable customers you have—into customers motivated to recommend you for financial gain. Research consistently shows that once you cross that line, you can’t go back—and once you take the rewards away, the behavior you were rewarding stops. Dan Ariely talks about this concept in Predictably Irrational, and Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards has become a classic in the literature on the unintended consequences of incentives.

When customers are willing to say great things about you because they love your product, by all means, give them every opportunity to do so. And if reward programs move your products off the shelf, that’s great. But the ability to merge those concepts into a coin-operated “community” where happy customers are turned into free shills is not a brilliant social media business model. It’s a recipe for cashing in all your brand equity for a short boost in sales revenue.

I’ll be moderating a panel on Sustainable Social Media at the Bioneers Conference in San Rafael. We’ll be streaming the session live, tying in more than 20 remote conference locations. If you have questions during the panel, feel free to post them on Twitter, tagged as “#bioneers” and I’ll pick them up and weave them into the Q&A.

As a blogger, I receive a fair amount of PR spam–5-10 emails every day pitching crap I would never write about. And 9 times out of 10 this spam is illegal. It’s unsolicited commercial email in blatant violation of numerous provisions of the CAN-SPAM act. Day after day, week after week, the crap just rolls in, and frankly it pisses me off. Most of the time I just delete it and forget it. Recently, however, I started receiving spam at an email address I created specifically to keep “clean”, meaning I’ve never registered it anywhere or opted in for any list, though I have it posted as an “at dot com” address on my personal blog About page. So I started responding to the spam by asking where my name was sourced so I can get off the list. No one has ever responded to my request. Until today. Today, one spammer apologized and told me my clean email address was sourced from Cision and a product they call the Media Map. Interesting.

After Tweeting about this discovery, I connected with a Vice President at Cision by email. I’m not going to publish her name or emails without permission, because I didn’t open the communication with the intent of entrapping her. But I will publish the gist of the email, because she’s a senior executive with Cision and a communications professional. I’m sure she can take care of herself, and I told her I would let her know when I posted this. My intent in writing this post is not to throw a bomb at Cision, but to open a public dialog about the practice of social media relations, and the behavior of Cision specifically. The executive assured me her intent was to be open and accountable and I take her at her word.

Cision bills itself as “the leading global provider of media relations software services and solutions for public relations professionals.” Their homepage is full of social media products and services, and they offer a steady stream of webinars and whitepapers helping PR professionals navigate the brave new world of social media. So. To cut to the chase. Why is Cision harvesting my email from the web without permission, and providing it to PR agencies as part of a paid service to allow them to spam me with social media pitches? Call me crazy, but that doesn’t exactly jive with any notion of responsible social media marketing I’m familiar with. In fact, it sounds like Mercenary Marketing 1.0 cynically repackaged with a shiny Web 2.0 wrapper.

When I asked these questions of Cision, the very polite response was, yes, they did “recruit” my email address from the web “prior to opt-in”, but they just hadn’t “gotten to the point” of asking me to opt in. They were, however, able to sell my address to PR agencies for the purpose of pitching me. At this point, by my reading of the CAN-SPAM act, this is illegal spam, although it’s a bit of a grey area. Cision is not emailing me, so they’re not sending spam. The PR agency is indeed spamming me–sending an unsolicited commercial email–but in all likelihood since they’re buying a professional service they’re under the impression it’s legit. One question I neglected to ask is whether Cision is representing the list I’m on as opt-in. I’ll let them answer for themselves.

The Cision exec was also very polite in saying she’d be happy to note the names of any repeat offenders, but I told her that was unacceptable. Part of my annoyance with Cision is that it took me this long to figure out where my name had been sourced–which, if I were less charitable, I’d suggest was by design. The spam laws are clear that commercial emails must contain contact information and a way for recipients to unsubscribe. In none of the PR spam that I’ve received has there ever been an unsubcribe link or any mention of Cision. The only contact is the PR flack who wants to book an interview. This is not a transparent or accountable business practice on Cision’s part–and frankly, the responsibility cannot be pawned off on the poor naive agencies. Cision bills itself as “Helping Communications Professionals Navigate the Evolving Media Landscape”, and they are proud of the numerous webinars and whitepapers through which they educate PR professionals about the practical requirements of social media. But not one of their clients is following the most basic guidelines of responsible email marketing, not to mention the law? What does that say about Cision’s effectiveness as a social media leader?

Fundamentally, I have no problem with Cision’s professed vision. There is a legitimate opportunity for someone to help agencies navigate the shifting media landscape. But in my experience, Cision’s practice doesn’t measure up. Whether they call it harvesting or recruitment, they collected my contact information and sold it to agencies, no matter how deeply it may have been embedded in a product or a service. They did not seek my permission, and they had no means of holding their clients accountable for the most basic legal and ethical marketing practices, whether or not they’re educating those clients through their webinars and whitepapers. However laudable their messaging may be on the subject of social media, they’ve treated me, the blogger, without respect. And in enabling PR agencies to continue the practice of unaccountable spamming, they have done no favors for their own market. I am far less likely today to pay attention to any email from a PR agency, which is a direct result of this experience.

I have no doubt Cision will respond ably to this post. But it’s a commitment to action I want to see. Specifically:

1. End the practice of “recruiting” emails and including them on any list before permission is explicitly granted.
2. Require every agency using one of your lists to include a footer, or a post script, that includes an unsubscribe link with a Cision contact. You can not claim to be accountable if the bloggers you “recruit” cannot close the loop with you about the communications we receive.
3. Create a clear set of marketing guidelines for which you hold your clients responsible, including adhering to provisions of the CAN-SPAM act, and provide a transparent place for your “recruited” bloggers to register complaints.

If you’re truly the social media leader you position yourself to be, this shouldn’t be any issue at all.

Update: I’ve gotten a few emails, and a few comments below, directing me to other posts and comments online about similar experiences with Cision–and, frankly, similar platitudes from Cision about accountability and desire for “dialog”. There’s a pattern emerging, which you can clearly see here, here and here. Someone calls Cision out for enabling spam, Mea Culpas ensue with perfectly played “openness and accountability” and yet Cision doesn’t change its behavior. The post you see here, including Cision’s careful self-defense wrapped in a “willingness to listen” are played out again and again, month after month making idiots of us all. So Heidi. C’mon back. Let’s have a real discussion about the game Cision is playing.

I‘m thrilled to have been invited to moderate a panel on Social Media at the upcoming Bioneers Conference, October 16-18th at the Marin Civic Center, just north of San Francisco. The conference is a 20-year old forum featuring many of the world’s leading social and scientific innovators on issues of the environment and social justice–artists and authors, physicists and physicians, all gathered to explore real-world solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity.

This year’s presenters include Michael Pollan, author of The Ominvore’s Dilemma, and Dr. Andrew Weil, the world’s leading proponent of integrative medicine, along with dozens of experts in everything from economics to activism. More than 3000 are expected to attend the conference, and sessions will be webcast live, joining 20 sites from Alaska to Maine.

The panel I’ll be moderating will focus on the impact of social media on corporate responsibility and accountability. Among a long list of social media veterans, panelists will include Blogher co-founder Elisa Camahort Page, Get Satisfaction founder Lane Becker, and PopRule CEO Rob Kramer. It’s a phenomenal opportunity to connect the dots between the media that’s reshaping our lives every day, and the real-world impact on society and business–and as I’ve said, I’m thrilled at the opportunity to participate.

If you’re interested in attending the Bioneers conference, I’ve been extended a discount to pass on to my network, and additional discounts are available to educators who’d like to attend. Higher education students and faculty can attend for only $35/day with lunch included (code: action), and first timers can get a special tent pass for $50 (code: tentspecial).

If you want a taste of what Bioneers is all about, check out this video about one of the many groups associated with Bioneers. Real-world solutions for real-world problems. Cool stuff.

Last week I wrote a short analysis of Kodak’s surprising move with the Zi8 pocket camera, explaining how Kodak had obviously been listening intently to consumer discussions about pocket video cameras, and rather than making the usual incremental upgrade to one or two features for their next release, they threw down the gauntlet and upgraded just about every feature mentioned on user wish lists. This was an unusual move in consumer electronics, where the industry pace for upgrades is typically much slower–a move all the more interesting because it was so obviously enabled by social media monitoring. (How do I know? Because our sister company SocialRep was tracking the same space for Creative Labs, and tracked the same user wish lists in relation to the Vado.)

Jeff Hayzlett, Kodak’s CMO, has been praised and criticized in equal measure for his approach to marketing, which not incidentally includes a big dose of social media. Jeff is an avid user of Twitter and Facebook, and in general a great advocate for social marketing. The fact that he was listening closely to the market is a good thing. The question is, what do you do with what you learn? How does it effect your market strategy?

Last week, I hinted that maybe Kodak has something up its sleeve. Why would a company dramatically accelerate the pace of the product lifecycle? Sure, in the short run, you grab a lead over your competitors and force them to play catch up while you… run ahead. But for that strategy to pay off, you better have some idea of where you plan to run. I had visions in my head of new innovations Kodak might have on deck, from on-device editing tools to face-recognition tagging, or maybe optical zoom and interchangeable lenses. Sure, all in a $200 camera, right? Hey, who would have thought we’d have so much technology in smart phones these days. Well, it turns out I got too far ahead of myself. And maybe Kodak did too.

This week, one of the first hands-on reviews came out from a very influential source. Macworld reviewed the new Zi8, and the verdict was not kind.

Browse through the many pocket camcorder reviews we’ve published and you learn that these camcorders are limited in significant ways—no image stabilization, no exposure or white balance controls, no optical zoom, no support for using external microphones, and no support for 1080p high-definition video. Kodak hasn’t addressed all these limitations with the Zi8, but it does take a shot at some of the most significant—specifically, image stabilization, 1080p shooting, and support for external microphones. Regrettably, none works in stellar fashion or makes up for a camera that’s a fairly average performer.

The review goes on to deconstruct all the areas where the Zi8 falls down, which is a 1-1 list of all the areas the Zi8 was supposed to be jumping ahead of the competition. The best the review could say about the Zi8 is that it “isn’t a terrible pocket camcorder.”

It’s just that in the areas where it differentiates itself from other cameras in this class—1080p video, external audio input, and image stabilization—it doesn’t perform well.

That pretty much throws cold water on the notion that Kodak can run ahead while the competition plays catch up. It also deflates the entire premise of the word-of-mouth excitement Kodak generated when they announced the camera, immediately dubbed by drooling analysts as the “Flip Killer”. The question now is whether or not the bullet-points on the camera box will be enough to sway a large number of customers who don’t know how to Google product reviews.

I don’t know what happened at Kodak, but I can’t help wondering if they let marketing run ahead while production couldn’t keep up. The circumstantial evidence seems to suggest that marketing listened to customer dialog–as well they should–but instead of prioritizing a list of functions they could wrap into the next release at a reasonable level of quality, they got excited by the notion of baking everything into the camera so they could kill the competition. Unfortunately, they didn’t hit the mark, and the result is arguably worse than if they had kept with the strategy of incremental upgrades. The criticism from Macworld is doubly painful because Creative used their production cycle for the next version of the Vado, in part, to vastly improve their support and integration with Macs. Kodak has inadvertently handed Creative a really nice story to tell Mac users when the new Vado is released September 20th.

Not to jump all over Kodak, but there’s another big social media question with regard to Kodak and the Zi8. Kodak made big fanfare of a consumer contest to rename the camera. They got a lot of buzz on Twitter and in the media for the contest–including this breathless review in the Boston Globe. That was weeks ago–an internet eternity. No name has been announced, and the Zi8 is being marketed and sold under the old name they had obviously decided was in need of a change. What’s the deal?

I’ll keep updating on this as the story unfolds. I applaud Kodak for the way they’re pushing traditional boundaries with social media, but there’s obviously still a lot for us all to learn about how social media interacts with market strategy.

I’ve been working with companies on building effective consumer and B2B brands for many years. It’s always interesting to view organizations through the “brand lens”. The church is a particularly interesting subject since it’s so easy to point out inconsistencies in behavior – actions that sit in complete or more often apparent contradiction to the organization’s purpose. Last week Oklahoma Channel 5 News ran a story about Windsor Hills Baptist Church in Oklahoma City who had decided to give away an assault rifle to a lucky youth participating in a week-long revival. I know, Christians have as much right to protect themselves as pagans but I grew up in church. I went to church camp and confirmation. I just can’t imagine Pastor Wally at my church passing out automatic weapons during youth night.

Transportation and communication technology has been “shrinking” the world for hundreds of years. Social media dramatically accelerates this process through the intimacy of the information, the size of the audience reached and judgment that inevitably follows. It’s impossible to say what the long-term effects of the assault rifle give-away will be for the Windsor Hills Baptist Church. But I guarantee the Windsor Hills board will be asking that question from now until the end of the internet — that alone will change their brand.

Cross posted at Marketonomy.

Another social media trend I’m following:

I mentioned in my last post that certain conversational trends emerge in the first few days of tracking any particular market, but that deeper and often more significant trends only appear when you follow a market over many different channels over a longer period of time. The deeper trend I discussed last time was the globalization of market conversations, and how that’s impacting consumer awareness and preference. There’s another closely related trend that is also having a big impact on consumers, and that’s the broadening of participation in openly accessible discussions, which I believe will make the market increasingly smarter.

Off the Internet, there are a lot of dividing lines between different groups of people that might converse about a given product or market. Market insiders have their associations and professional networks where they talk shop; enthusiasts have their clubs and conferences; general consumers have their friends and family, and sales associates. As these conversations have moved online, the biggest change has been in the consumer category, where people can vastly extend their research beyond friends, family and sales associates to talk with like-minded consumers who have experience with every conceivable product. Market insiders and enthusiasts have mostly just recreated their existing networks online.

When you track market conversations over many channels and over a sufficient amount of time, it becomes apparent that these previously well segmented groups are beginning to blur in places, aided primarily by the power of search. It often isn’t obvious at first–you simply notice that there are many people engaged in the broader dialog with different levels of knowledge and understanding about a given product or market. You find people who are obviously new to the dialog, people who are informed, people who are know-it-alls.

It’s often difficult when you first start tracking the conversation to distinguish between people who are really well-informed and people who just like to spout what they think they know. But if you follow the dialog over time, you realize that right alongside the newbies and know-it-alls, there are often people weighing in with substantial insights, including industry executives, market analysts, economists and engineers. I’m not talking here about the vaunted blogs of industry experts–but about insiders who join the fray, hobnobing right alongside consumers on some of the broader discussions without trumpeting their status.

Most often you find this broad mix of participants in discussions that focus on industry news and trends, while technical product discussions tend to segment into the traditionally stratified groups. But the impact of this mixing in the broader dialog is an obvious increase in the sophistication of conversation. When a consumer Googles a product they want to purchase, along with the focused discussions on features and benefits they’ll also find discussions about the latest product and market news. And when they tap into those discussions they start reading dialog in which experts often drop substantial insights about what’s shaping the market–from technological advances to impending regulation.

For some consumers that might just be noise, but the more complex or expensive the purchase decision, the more likely that added information will be influential. I first saw this play out in the automotive market, where I found automotive engineers engaged in conversation right alongside consumers about the implications of the next generation of hybrid vehicles and when they might be expected to roll out. For a consumer considering a $25-30k purchase, knowing that an improved hybrid technology might be only a few months away can make a huge impact on when and what they buy. But it turns out you’ll find similar conversations happening all the way down the line to a $300 cell phone/PDA.

Why, exactly, apparently high level market insiders are sometimes anonymously engaging in dialog on broad discussion boards is an interesting question–you often can’t even tell they’re insiders until you follow the dialog long enough to pick up on something that gives them away. It may be they find the broad dialog about market trends compelling to engage in but don’t want to be known, it may be they want to demonstrate their expertise, it may be they are motivated to be a knowledge provider, it may be they want to engage with a broader swath of the market beyond their professional echo chambers, it may even be they want to seed the market with information beneficial to their business interests.

Whatever the reason, you can find them if you look, and they’re often quietly adding information far beyond product features and benefits that can shape consumer attitudes and purchasing behavior. The result is a greater likelihood that your customers and prospects are going to have access to more information about the market than ever before. It’s hard to imagine that kind of trend leveling off any time soon, as social media continues to grow and as indexing of content penetrates more types of social content.

The obvious counterpoint to the notion that consumers are becoming more informed is the increasing noise factor of superfluous dialog, misinformation and shilling, which some say will even dampen participation in social media. That’s a long post on it’s own, but I’ll say that from what I’ve seen I think the evolution of online dialog is quite Darwinian. Consumers are learning quickly from direct experience what level of trust to put into what they read online, and they’re developing skills to read more effectively between the lines. Again, I think this points to the long-term development of a more sophisticated and more informed consumer.

What do you think? Will a smarter breed of consumer affect your market?

Cross-posted on Marketonomy
Continuing on the theme of social media trends and implications.

One of the major themes that social media experts talk about incessantly is the shift in control over the message. In the world of mainstream media where content is created by a few and broadcast to the many, whoever controls publication controls the message. In a world of social media where anyone with access to a computer can put a message into play among millions of readers, the most compelling messages win the day.

There are a lot of fascinating implications in this shift–enough to fill an entire year of blog posts. But the trend I want to talk about right now is the changing role of PR and marketing in the influence of market dialog. Many people say PR and marketing are effectively dead, while others try to recast social media as just another new vehicle for revitalizing PR and marketing. Marketing 2.0.

Let me first say where I come down in this discussion about marketing and PR in the age of social media. The rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. There will always be a need for companies to advocate on their own behalf–to develop and communicate a compelling market position. How that message is developed and communicated has changed forever. Unfortunately, many marketers haven’t figured this out yet, and until they do marketing will continue to decline until a new generation takes over.

The problem for marketers is that they’ve grown up in a bubble–just like the Internet Bubble that gave rise to irrational exuberance and a general belief that business fundamentals were no longer relevant. Let’s call it the Marketing Bubble. Before the Marketing Bubble, we had more than 5000 years of social media–a world in which word-of-mouth was the dominant form of commercial dialog. As the means of mass communication emerged, marketers naturally adopted new tactics for communicating with a larger market. Print. Radio. Television. Computer. Internet. Mobile.

These continuously evolving forms of communication weren’t cheap. In fact, getting a message out over any of these channels was enormously expensive, which kept control over the message sharply limited to those who could afford it. The Marketing and PR we know today grew up in this world, and evolved around the power structure of a highly controlled media. PR was never about developing relationships with customers–it was about developing relationships with publishers and reporters in order to influence customers. Marketing may have a slightly more robust claim to customer intimacy, but not much. How many marketing organizations do you know that actually own customer service? The vast amount of marketing dollars go to advertising–another practice focused on the power brokers rather than the consumers. If you can’t shape the message through PR, then buy a message to piggy-back on the stream of media the market consumes.

This is–or was–the bubble. It emerged with the tools of mass media, but was not a fundamental shift in the thousand-years trajectory of commercial dialog. Just as we had thousands of years of history of consumers discussing products among their peers before mass media, we are returning to that natural state for one very compelling, even Darwinian, reason: consumers will always seek out information from their peers because it provides an economic survival advantage. The Internet has simply provided the means for consumers to elevate their conversation to the same volume as mass media.

Now that the bubble is bursting, Marketing and PR are mostly blind to the historical trendline; they are inclined to see social media as just another new technology like Web sites, or SMS. This is a huge problem. The Marketing and PR organizations we know today are organized not to listen and engage, but to listen just enough to craft messages and find effective channels to influence the market. Success is measured in the tiny percentage of people who took the bait on your latest campaign, rather than the development of an engaged community of customers–customers who become partners in the development and distribution of more successful products and services.

There’s a lot to drill into on this concept, which I’ll continue to do. But there’s one important concept I want to leave off on today. Companies that are trying to figure out social media are going to their PR and Marketing agencies by default–those are the people, after all, who are supposed to understand how to communicate with customers. But a facility for social media is not an inherent strand of DNA for any marketing, advertising or PR agency–despite the cool case studies and hip 2.0 language. Communicating at customers is not the same as communicating with customers, and if you have any hope of success in social media, you need to understand how to tell the difference.

Cross Posted at Marketonomy

I’m still deep in the self-imposed exile of stealth startup mode. But there are some fascinating market and business trends in Social Media that I’m closely tracking and happy to discuss in the abstract, especially as they start to intersect with other discussions in the public sphere.

One of the trends that I’ve been analyzing in some depth over the past few months is the dynamic of social media conversations that span traditional market boundaries–geographic, demographic and psychographic boundaries, as well as other boundaries that are not neatly defined, in part because no one has had to really classify them before. But the Internet is a vast melting pot where conversations involve people that never would have connected in the physical world. The way that influences and transforms the discussion is remarkable. And from a market standpoint, it’s game changing.

If you track the social media conversations in any of the hot consumer markets, a lot of the market driving memes emerge in the first couple of weeks. You learn quickly what kinds of questions consumers are asking, what they complain about, what they hope to see in the future. But when you follow those conversations across many different channels over a few months, some deeper trends emerge that are a clear sign of the future. I’ll give just one example now, but I’ll explore some additional examples over the next few weeks.

One of the clearest market changing trends is the globalization of market conversations. Back in the day when people talked about the Information Superhighway, the reduction of geographic boundaries was one of the most popular tropes that marketers used to signify the new world we were creating. You’d see commercials with a New York executive chatting on a cell phone with a Buddhist monk in Asia, or with a tribal leader in Africa. The exotic contrasts of business suits juxtaposed with colorful costumes made for great marketing imagery. But now that global dialog is a mundane reality, it’s less the mixing of sharply different groups of people online that is changing the market than the reduction of smaller boundaries–the blending of parallel market segments into a larger homogenized whole.

One of the most obvious and striking examples is visible in the automotive market, where hundreds of conversations take place daily on every conceivable channel of social media across the globe. If you follow these conversations for any length of time, you begin to realize just how anachronistic our current marketing landscape is today. Our markets evolved in a world where large markets like Europe, North America and Asia were entirely distinct. As an American abroad, it was somewhat surprising to see entirely different and unrecognizable Fords being sold overseas, or seeing diesel sports cars that you can’t buy in the US. In fact, the cultural and regulatory landscape that evolved in these isolated consumer megaspheres created entirely different but parallel markets. For example,both Europe and North America have evolved environmentally conscious automotive consumers, but in the US we’ve embraced hybrid vehicles while in Europe they’ve embraced clean diesels.

But social media is making these differences seem rather quaint. If you follow the dialog on blogs and forums, you’ll find Europeans talking to Americans, who are talking to Asians, who are talking to Africans, and on it goes. And they’re all asking why we have one thing and you have another, which inevitably leads to why can’t I have what you have. Europeans increasingly want hybrids, and Americans increasingly want clean diesels. Honda recently announced a diesel hybrid for the European market, and within weeks thousands of consumers in North America had signed onto a petition demanding Honda offer the same car in America.

You don’t have to be an ivory-tower marketing guru to see what will happen in the next five years. Automakers will start offering similar vehicles in what used to be sharply defined and isolated market segments, which will have enormous economic benefits for the automakers, and maybe for consumers as the cost of more standardized production and marketing falls. But the longer term future is a little less clear. While the initial impact of global social media seems to lead toward a large-scale homogenization of global consumer tastes, this is in striking contrast to the phenomena of long tail economics. There is plenty of evidence that mainstream tastes often spur a backlash against consumer conformity, and the ability for smaller consumer segments to congeal online does create demand for more highly differentiated products.

It may be that Social Media’s long-term impact is a fundamental shift of scale that defined these large and small market segments. Social media seems to be accelerating the merging of isolated global markets in megamarkets, while what we now now as micromarkets will also grow in a similar scale under the influence of global consumer conversations. In any case, it’s clear that Social Media is creating an enormous transforming influence on consumer markets, and the implications for marketing are just as significant. If you’re not actively following the conversations that are changing your market–beyond just what your customers are saying about your product–you really should be. The future is being written right before our eyes.