I figured as someone who claims to know a thing or two about social media, I should use it in my quest to find employment. My latest effort is You Need Doug Winfield, a Facebook campaign to build awareness about me at companies that I'm interested in working at. It's a Fanpage that includes video and information about me. I'm also running a targeted ad campaign on Facebook to drive traffic to the page. Still early days, right now it looks like Edelman and Hill Holliday folks are clickers. MWW & Barbarian Group aren't bothering. I guess they have better things to do. ;-)

Nokia's doing lot's of interetsing things to turn mobile devices into really transformational communication systems and marketing platforms. The fact that you can tell where a phone is and who's using it is the holy grail of advertising. Truly personalized systems to provide information, entertainment, news and location based services could be a win for companies, agencies and consumers. My question is will wireless providers ever give up enough control to allow this to happen. Perhaps I shouldn't judge the world's potential by the situation in North America; but here, unless they are getting a piece of the action, carriers mostly thwart any innovation that isn't under there total control. I look forward to this brave new mobile ad world, but not holding my breathe.

Piece by piece, I’m starting to get all of my ideas together for my social media manifesto. Much of it is floating about in the form of blog comments, tweets and retweets. Mullen’s Chief Creative Officer, Edward Boches, wrote a great post on his creativity_unbound blog about the various ways ad agencies are clueless about social and emerging media. I posted a comment that could be another piece of the manifesto.

Ad agencies are clueless? I definitely think some are, but I wonder if the real issue is a mar/comm identity crisis? When you’ve spent an entire career mastering market data, producing killer creative and placing media; seeking, listening and participating in social media conversations is fundamentally foreign and more than a little disruptive. Moving from brand monologue to dialogue requires a committed relationship that may (and probably should) extend beyond a given campaign, another potential disruption. Finally, fragmented audience and the need for microcustomization is a real challenge for creatives accustomed to marketing to the masses. How do you solve this? First of all, stop being an Ad agency, a PR agency or a Direct Marketing agency. The future depends upon the successful merging of all of those disciplines, plus a smattering of CRM. Understanding an audience and providing them with content that provides context and drives conversations is the win here. Some of that content will be creative some informational. All of it should accrue to a comprehensive sense of brand identity and experience. An agency that truly masters this transformation will have a role with their clients that is truly revolutionary, and some clients may decide to take on the core functions themselves. Ultimately, successfully mastering the new world of social media influence is a true partnership between clients, agencies and audiences.

Adweek had an article this week about how the ad agency TBWA has hire a number of new digital experts and has 261 "Digital Artist" in the agency. Good stuff, but I figured I should interject some of my thoughts.

I don’t want to get caught up in semantics here, but is “Digital” the answer to advertisings woes? Digital ends up being a catch all for a whole collection of widgets, ‘casts, social networks, microsite, etc. That’s fine. I have earned a living creating those things, but I think this is the time to be a radical. I don’t think that the scatter shot deployment of digital tactics is effective without a philosophy of audience engagement, conversations and relationship building. Creating pretty digital art is OK. Producing content that people will share and discuss is better. Listening to and learning from customers in need (or in pain) and offering them informative or entertaining solutions will drive them to try a new product or reinforce their positive perceptions of a familiar one. I guess this is my long-winded way of saying that advertising, marketing and PR don’t need more digital art. They need more and better digital and social solutions. They need to be platform agnostic and ready to move to new, emerging platforms as they prove viable. Most of all, we all need to place the audience and their needs at the center of any campaign.

I hope I'm not being too snarky, but so much of what is going on today is just window dressing. I am open to diverging opinions though. Also check out David Armano's presentation on the future of advertising.

Robert McNamara is not exactly universally loved, but Errol Morris' The fog of war reveals a complicated, brilliant man who we could all learn lessons from. In fact, the film is a collection of lessons. The first one is, empathize with your enemy, and the key takeaway from this lesson is:

We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.

Robert McNamara, The fog of war

If we replace war with campaign and enemy with customer or audience, we have an approach that places their needs, desires and pain at the center of all marketing efforts. What do they think of you? Why should they care? What's in it for them? If you can't honestly answer those questions, then your social media campaign will be flawed from the start.

I’m always fascinated by Wordle, the great text vizualiztion program created by IBM researcher, Jonathan Feinberg . It does an amazing job of extracting meaning out of large amounts of text. I recently downloaded all of my Twitter updates (over 2,000 of them), then used Worldle to layout the top 1,000 world that I’ve used (eliminating the common ones). The more often a word is used, the larger the word appears. I can look at this graphic and remember the folks I connect to and the events in my life. I can see that I share other people’s updates via the very large RT. Hope, Love, Think and Media are often on my mind. Yes, you’ll find Pain, Evil, and Bad; but none of those are as large as Just and Good. It’s a nice story to tell and a great way to tell it.

I recently saw discussion on Twitter originating from the recent PRSA Digital Impact event about social media being a tribal experience. While I understand that thought, I think there’s something at play that is more important, swarms. A tribe is traditionally a collection of people organized around ethnic, familial, linguistic and cultural interests. In social media and modern life, that concept has expended to include political groupings, lifestyle association, entertainment fanatics, etc. etc. etc. Swarms on the other hand, are collective organisms comprised of autonomous individuals. Common examples of swarms are ant farms, bee hive and fish schools. Swarms behave intelligently even when their members at entirely instinctively. What does this have to do with social media? I think there is great opportunity to learn from the swarm of ideas and information that flows throw communities and messaging platforms. Many people use Twitter to communicate with a small number of followers whom they know well. In this case Twitter is like a PA system; you’re connected to and share information with a contained group of people (your tribe?). But, when you begin to follow hundreds or thousands of people, you begin to see how ideas propagate in ways that are no longer constrained by traditional geographic or social boundaries. Ideas become a swarm that moves through and between groups until it dissipates or takes hold in pockets of safety. To remain for good or swarm again when the opportunity arises. I’m going to keep thinking about harnessing swarms for a while and report back soon. Until then check out Peter Miller’s National Geographic article, The Genius of Swarms. Then take a look at Alan Smith’s brilliant animated video, Hive.