What if our willingness to view those messages was based not on the brand presenting them but on the social capital of the messenger (sorry, dog, I know you ran 26 miles to tell me the results, but you’re my oppenent’s hound so what do I do with your message)?

What if the messages really mattered?

What if you didn’t have a website at all

Instead devote all of the man-hours (sorry ladies, I just can’t bring myself to write person-hours yet) you might spend developing it, dealing with the developers etc and just spent that time on social media sites being a good citizen.

You know, answering questions and asking questions and leaving good comments and all that. Just skip the website altogether and devote all the resources (design time/money, development time/money, strategery time/money, hosting time/money all of it) towards being present in social media: networking sites like Facebook/LinkedIn/Beebo/whatever, blogosphere commenting, Twitter and so forth.

This might be a good time to mention that this strategy might be best employed by lead-generation kinds of businesses (i.e. someone emails you and you make a sale from there). If you have a product to sell you’ll definitely need the “advanced stuff” (see below and give yourself a free pass but skip to the distributed-marketing part).

Breaking down your workout

So you weigh ongoing costs (your time to manage these items and your money to pay for them) for the drag of operating a website:

• hosting
• maintenance
• support
• design tweaks
• design changes
• content generation
• advertising creative development
• advertising spends that generate traffic
• advertising development

And instead put that momentum towards the following ongoing activities:

• identifying blogs/social-networks/traditional-media-sites/etc that your audience frequent
• reading relevant blogs
• providing insightful comments
• participating in relevant social networks
• instigating great discussions
• reading relevant “traditional” media websites
• providing insightful comments

The problem of measurement

And here is the rub for poor-me the analyst. How the fuck do we measure the return on investment on this sort of thing. Luckily, most clients rarely listen beyond the sound of the cash-register ringing so we end up tieing it directly to the sound of the wonderful multi-keyed piano.

But:

• How do we work with the funnel?
• How do we value the pipeline?
• How do we take action to make our pipeline more efficient?

Want answers? I don’t have them… yet. I’ll find them by: participating in communities devoted to traffic analysis or else working directly with analysis vendors because we all know that web 3.0 is about measuring (web 2.0 was about socializing).

Advanced stuff

Alright you’re rocking the social media. You’re acting like a live-wire connected individual. But you want more. Here’s more crazy-wild-eyed speculative hooh-hah.

If you don’t have a LinkedIn, Beebo, Facebook, Myspace, [Industry-specific-social-networking-site] account then you are not ready to act on anything in this section. Please try harder and come back. I also assume you understand some basic data-driven marketing concepts for the webified world.

If you want to get-rich-quick and don’t want to spend time comprehending or understanding then… sorry. Here’s a ball, perhaps you’d like to bounce it.

Distributed presence

Every social media site in which you participate grants you a profile. Every profile you have is a landing page. Google your bad-self (or your company’s bad-self) and see how that looks. Do you have a conversion tool? Do you represent yourself in the best light? Do you have a call-to-action?

Distributed marketing

Here’s where it gets thick and where the e-commerce folks who want to employ this strategy should join us. We have, within our first scenario (”What if you didn’t have a website”?), another scenario (”We want to convert online without a website.”).

So a few caveats up front:

• I don’t know how we track ROI on this… yet.
• Outside of actual sales we can’t track any part of the AIDA pipeline.
• Upfront costs for creative exits.
• Upfront time or cost for code development exists.
• Ongoing costs for ad spends exists.
• I hope you can help me identify solutions to the above issues.

Ignoring those white skeleton/elephants:

• What if all your advertising is conversion-centric?
• What if you could generate conversions directly from your ads?
• What if people viewing your ad on a website could convert without leaving the page containing the content they actually want to consume?

I’m talking about Rich Internet Advertising where “rich” doesn’t refer to video or some other media-specific technology but instead to appropriate-media/technology plus conversion tools (where conversion tools=rich).

You might use the following technologies to achieve this:

• Sprout Builder
• Flash
• Ajax
• Whatevs

It really doesn’t matter. Just use the tech that meshes with your business capability or your vendor capability or your own time to design/develop/implement.

Some Examples:

Thanks much to Dave Winslow for turning me on to Modernista. They are already doing this to some degree: completely operating using existing online tools.

“Stepping into traffic” is maybe more about actively marketing. Modernista is operating and using good passive tools (print portfolio on Flickr, television reel on YouTube, web portfolio on de.licio.us).

They don’t appear to be starting many conversations using the comment tools available nor participating significantly in the chatter. This could be because the sites they are using aren’t necessarily the sites their own clients use (brand managers are large companies). It is clever though that Modernista is present in the places where their clients’ customers might be present.

Also, Modernista the product Modernista is delivering (branded websites) is not entirely “stepping into traffic” either. However, these are all minor quibbles (and their stuff looks pretty damn sharp as well). And I should note that I haven’t done extensive research on Modernista and may well have my facts wrong. Please correct me if I got anything wrong here.

Conclusion

Focus ruthlessly on moving your business goals (i.e. something you can measure) forward by being a participant in the communities that your audience frequents. Sounds like old school don’t it? Hmmm…

Call to action

Please help me refine this concept by posting a comment. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me about tools we could deploy, identify methods of identifying markets. Tell me about others who are doing this already. Thanks!

Today was my first walk to work in which I didn’t wish I had crampons handy.

I should probably note that maybe two weeks ago I heard my first flock of geese.

First-of-the-season will probably be coming fast now. Almost made the first day with no ice on my walk today.

Powerful computational devices (Lower Gear)

Powerful computational devices are, at the time I write this post, desktop machines, clusters and servers. Damn physics is holding us to CPUs that generate heat (and thus require vents/fans/cooling blocks that take up physical space) and consume power (which decrease battery life). Moreover many of these computationally intensive tasks still take time. I’m talking about video cross-encoding and so forth. Serious heavy lifting and shmushing digital assets against one another (yes, shmushing is a technical term and defining it is outside the scope of this post).

Portable Computational Devices (Higher Gear)

Then there’s the stuff we need to do everyday. Multiple times a day even. Like check our email. Fire up OpenOffice. Surf a little web. These tasks don’t require much shmushing or heavy lifting. As a result, no need for cooling blocks and the power consumption is lower. This is pretty frickin’ handy because we send email a lot more often than we render video or composite HDR panoramas (at least I do).

The Problem, in a nutshell

When to shift between low and high gear? What if you’re in high gear and need to shift back? What if shifting back means travelling a few hundred miles? In a car it’s easy enough to shift gears. For computers maybe not. You need to shift into the lower gear as your need for computational power increases. And you need to shift into a higher gear as your desire to be mobile increases. But sometimes you gotta move fast and haul a heavy load.

21st Century Split Shift

What if we had a place where we stored the assets (the gigandor video files or whatever) and the instructions for what to do with those assets were light-weight (like a video edit-decision list or settings for node-based compositing or whatever–something text based that a machine can use as instructions). What if we had something portable that could control, remotely, the heavy lifting (iPod Touch, MacBook Air, Kindl, Nintendo, whatever is capable of messing with an XML file I suppose). Probably, we’re going to need some sort of low-bandwidth prep-work preview VNC voodoo to get at least a glimpse of what we’re doing on our NinKindle Air, but if the heavy lifting is done by the low-gear machine maybe it’s all going to be fine. Oh yeah, we’re going to need bandwidth too.

Here’s the shopping list:

• Heavy lifting machine
• Portable machine
• Software that can do EDL-style communication between the portable machine and the heavy lifter
• Hardware that can make previews quickly
• Bandwidth to transfer the EDL from the portable machine and previews from the heavy lifter.

I’m guessing we’re damn close on this sort of thing. Aside from the software part anyway (when is Pshop going to ship with a client/server version where the client is a NinKindle and the server is an Xserve in your basement?). It’s already easy enough to use VNC on an iPod Touch to get back to a main rig. And audio server-on-the go has done a lot for pushing data back and forth.

Anyway… what do you think?