All of this shows that the Internet has become an incredibly important channel for businesses, governments and other organizations.  But my belief that the Internet is now THE marketing channel is perhaps best illustrated by imagining a day where the Internet was shut down.  Just think about how difficult it would be if you could not use the web, email and VOIP?  It would be catastrophic for some businesses to lose the Internet for just a day. Imagine if it went away altogether?  Replacing the role the Internet plays in commerce is hard to imagine.  We now use the Internet to drive so many aspects of our business.  Again, though it shocks me that so many people in marketing are not viewing the Internet as king.  From where I sit, the Internet is THE marketing channel and the sooner people start putting the Internet first in their marketing plans the better.  The disappearance of newspapers would be sad and irritating but we’d survive.  Losing cable or satellite TV would in some cases be desirable.  I for one could live without Judge Judy and Oprah for a very, very long time.  But if you unplug even a portion of the Internet, commerce would grind to a halt and democracy would take a huge blow.  So when you next sit down to write that marketing plan on your computer or tablet, make sure the first thing you work on is how to harness the full potential of the Internet.  It’s a fabulous place that, while not perfect, quite simply rules.

A quick study of top consumer brands show they re all struggling with this challenge.  Whether they are conscious of the challenge is debatable but many are trying to engage more frequently with their customers and partners online to avoid going dark for a few hours.  Think about that.  A decade ago a brand could go dark for days, even weeks and nobody had a problem.  Today we expect our brands to be talking to us, introducing us to their friends, entertaining us and of course keeping us informed every hour of the day.  Big brands, it seems, are being pushed to behave more and more like media outlets.  But constantly creating compelling content is only part of the solution.  Brands need to learn more about how and when their customers want to engage.  They need to plan the engagement cycle rather than the news cycle.  For many this requires a wholesale rethink of how they structure communications and marketing so that they focus less on how to get the news out and more on how to drive engagement on a consistent basis.  That word ‘consistent’ is critical.  Brands that engage around a new campaign and then go dark are the ones that create the largest expectation gap with their customers.  Avoiding going dark requires a rethink of the ‘big idea’ approach to marketing and instead a focus on what the guys at our Bourne agency have termed the ‘long idea’. After all, today’s world needs ideas that drive lasting engagement by creating a series of conversations, not just one.

I challenge you to look at the frequency with which your brand or your clients are creating a reason to engage and then compare that with the competition.  While pace of engagement isn’t everything it is rapidly becoming a key measure of a brand and its value.  So if you are trying to drive brand value, take a long hard look at how frequently you are engaging with customers, stakeholders and partners.  In today’s world, it’s not the only way to drive brand value but it sure is a crucial one.  Oh and while your are at it please make sure to feed my insatiable appetite for updates, insight etc.  In todays’s world can you engage too much?  Let’s leave that topic for another post.

Later.

Warren Buffett – Berhsire Hathaway – @WEBuffett

Michael Dell – Dell Computer – @michaeldell

Brian Dunn – Best Buy – @BBYCEO

Craig Herkert – Supervalu – @herkc

When it companies to the companies themselves it is a very different story. All but 19 of the Fortune 100 companies have Twitter feeds and almost all the CMOs do.  What is interesting is that Apple has no Twitter feed, nor does its CEO while CMO was recently lauded for his use of Twitter.  Jobs also has no presence on Facebook.  The absence of top CEOs on Twitter may seem surprising to some.  These CEOs would likely all attract large followings and could use their accounts to add to the company’s personality through their tweets or Facebook updates.  The challenge seems to be one of time and priorities for many.  What several rightly want to avoid is have a ghosted twitter account.  If they are going to tweet they want to be the ones doing it.  Ghost tweets (tweets written by someone in their team on their behalf) lack authenticity and may in some cases give the impression they have too much time on their hands – not something investors would like to think.

So while I think the number of CEOs who tweet is bound to rise, especially as younger CEOs take over from today’s generation, I suspect it will be a long time before even half the top CEOs are tweeting.  Twitter, Groupon, Zynga and several other companies will likely have gone public by the time we get to anything approaching a high percentage.  Until then, you can continue to follow the fake Steve Jobs tweets like the one shown above.  Who knows, their tweets may prove more interesting, even if they’re not very accurate.

It would be easy to view the low CEO numbers as a sign that all is not well in social marketing.  Quite the contrary.  Indeed it’s great to see the number of businesses that have embraced Facebook and Twitter at other levels.  These social networks are now used to engage with a host of different stakeholders from customer, though investors to analysts.  Indeed the level to which brands are now engaging online communities is staggering and goes a long way to explain why traditional forms of media are fighting for survival.  So while Fortune 100 CEOs may be taking things very slowly, the businesses they oversee are most definitely not.

1. People seem to be abandoning their blogs in favor of tweeting or posting a comment of Facebook.

2. People are using Twitter to get their news and perspective rather than blogs. Twitter gives you a readers digest version of the blog. It cuts to the chase marvelously and makes savage editors out of all of its contributors. In other words people are often simply reading lots of small prices of insight instead of a few longer blog posts.

I’ve heard some people describe Twitter as a micro blogging site. If you agree with that I guess blogging is being replaced by micro blogging.

I have yet to find hard stats on how Twitter has affected the number of blogs out there. I suspect commercial blogs are still on the rise. Whereas personal blogs are disappearing as their writers become tweeters and their readers become Twitter followers. If anyone has robust data on this I’d love to see it. Until then, I’ll just Tweet this blog post.

Before I go any further let me get one thing off my chest.  While there is some traditional media left, the vast majority of media is now social.  Most of our media has social aspects to it.  We can share it, comment on it, create our own versions of it and directly influence it.  Some purists would say that organizations such as the BBC are traditional media businesses.  Yet if you look at almost all their online content it has a social element to it.  The BBC has made real efforts to embrace social media and social network concepts.  I still feel they could go a lot further but they have come a very long way in the last year.  Organizations such as the New York Times have also taken bold steps as have publications such as Forbes.  Again, there is more they could do but you have to applaud their efforts.  We now follow their editors on Twitter, we get their news in real-time, we see comments from other readers.

So does all this mean that social is now the norm?  I’d say that many aspects of social are the norm.  Publications have realized that the value of content is directly linked to the number of people that share that content.  Sharing an old fashioned print story was hard and rarely happened.  Sharing a news story via twitter, Facebook, email etc is all too easy.  So easy in fact that we are now looking for ways to filter all the content.  When social arrived we all loved the idea that we could effectively let our friends filter the content for us.  If our friends thought it was worth re-tweeting it was probably worth a read.  With thousands of tweets landing on our feeds each day that method is a bust.  We now need tools to filter the filter.

So the challenge for the media isn’t to become more social.  The smart ones have already done that and are now struggling with how to break through all the clutter.  Put another way, social media is starting to deal with the very same challenge most companies have been wrestling with since so much commerce went online.  When people started buying products online search optimization took off.  Now of course most social content has some optimization built in.  But I’d argue that most tweets, blogs and YouTube videos are not that optimized (this blog is a great example).  Indeed it would seem that content optimization is still a huge opportunity for the creators of content.  Indeed I’d argue it is THE opportunity.

I’m sure some of the social media gurus out there will say I have this all wrong but IMHO there is still more talk than action on search from comms staff.  Most comms staff don’t discuss search strategies, they talk about content strategies.  They don’t conduct search audits, they conduct messaging audits.  This is not surprising.  Most of the people in communications have grown up with content as king.  We are trained to find ways to craft messages not optimize for real time search engines.  I’d argue that our obsession with content is a good thing BUT that we need an equal obsession on search if we are to win in a digital world.  Content, however great it may be, has no value if nobody can find it.