The Digital Marketing Doctor's Script for 2007 – Social Media, Long Tail, Agency 2.0 & Identity

Wow. It’s quite a mouthful. Take the big gulp and indulge in all the fascinating buzzwords. For those of you that read blogs, subscribe to RSS feeds, have a Netvibes personalized homepage or just don’t get these theories; the doctor is here to help you digest all of these theories and notions you may stumble upon in 2007. As more people are introduced to the web with faster computers and broadband connections, things will approach that scene from Minority Report where Tom Cruise is dragging, dropping, expanding and editing, let’s call them “bio-clips.” Well, just watch this Youtube clip

So after you’re done watching the clip, keep reading to learn more about all of these buzzwords for 2007.

Social Media – I was reading Dion’s blog today and I thought that the following thought hit the nail on the head for the upcoming year. “And our tools and techniques finally started to adapt to these models this year and the rise of simplicity and optimization for Web-oriented systems as exemplified by the new applications stacks like Ruby on Rails, the growing adoption of lightweight protocols like RSS, ATOM, JSON, and REST, and network effect-powered business models including building hard-to-recreate sources of data and fully leveraging The Long Tail will become the norm.” He goes on to say that the early adopters are going to come out on top. So what is social media? How do we come up with phrases like social media optimization (SMO) and social media marketing (SMM)? It’s the consultants, thought leaders, visionary marketers who are creating these terms and introducing them to their core audience, then another blog picks it up, introduces their own tips/tactics, then it gets listed in Wikipedia.org and you have services created by agencies, integrated into a client’s overall strategy. I’m going out on a limb here and feeling like we’re seeing the second coming of how SEO and SEM were cultivated by the search marketing community and given bullet points then used in 1,000 different ways, mixing and matching, sometimes being misused. As search marketing includes various tactics like SEO, PPC, Link Development (here it does) and Paid Inclusion; social media may find itself lumped into SMM (social media marketing)SMO (social media optimization), Pay Per Tag (PPT), Bookmark Development (BD) and so on. The essence of these it that companies are still going to create great content whether it’s video, white papers or RSS and there inherently is going to be a viral nature to this content. Think about all of the great viral content out there, it’s user generated (UGC) and companies like BMW are using it as part of their media strategy. Why? Because it’s good content and at the end of the day that’s all people care about. Great Content! Now what we have with SMO and SMM, are additional communication channels for consumers. Now the “people” can take the content, share it, remix it, repackage it and redistribute it for us. It’s like having a traditional street team for a radio station, but with millions of members online, all over the world, helping to spread this great piece of content by submitting it, tagging it, bookmarking it; it’s the semantic web, an organic cataloging of information on the web and we’re all taking part.with tactics like

The Long Tail – Well, this word pops up everytime we meet somebody new. It’s one of those words that search marketers have been using since keyword research was born and now it finds itself being applied to the new age of web 2.0 and all of these social networking sites that are popping up. Just like the broad keywords, the big websites are seeing more and more smaller, focused websites popping up, trying to improve upon their temperamental aspects. Small startups are being born everyday, great ideas are thriving on the web today and it’s about first to market and garnering that initial buzz to get the coverage to carry you into the first 6 months of development. so if you’ve got an idea see if it exists in the long tail and do some research online, there are some great directories and resources for finding new ventures in the web 2.0 space.

Agency 2.0 – So not only does the web turn 2, but the evolution of the agency is seeing a second coming of age. Creative ideas are becoming a viable asset for creating these highly effective viral components of digital marketing campaigns. No longer are the think tanks sitting in silos. These smaller, 6, 8, 12 person teams are being gobbled up by the larger ad agencies just for this reason. I can speak for us here and say that were are constantly evolving and introducing new tactics and best practices to the benefit of our clients. The way we work is very dynamic and we need to be ahead of the quickly moving web. I was perusing the Organic blog and found a post discussing just that. They mentioned the unconventional agency of Crispin Porter who handled the VW campaign. They go onto showing a diagram of the breakdown of agency 1.0 and agency 2.0, who is shown to be very agile and adaptive.
Identity – Big and scary, it haunts the visionary marketers and dazzles the developers. While this is still a new phrase for most people, it should excite you to think that you no longer need to memorize 50 usernames and passwords. If you read out blog frequently I just wrote a post about Sxipper, a new identity web app. Check into this identity website to see what is new. If this topic interests you and you are wondering where you can learn more, visit some of these websites:

www.claimid.com
www.sxip.com
blogs.zdnet.com/digitalID/?p=31

Well at the end of the day we’re seeing that great content still wins over everything else. Users are learning what they can do with content and serving as ambassadors for companies, sometimes not even knowing it. And finally the content will become portable outside the web, on our smartphones, PDAs’, iPods and maybe the LCD screen in your car someday.