Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to establish New York as the nation’s leading digital city. That makes him different from almost any mayor in the world.

Bloomberg is a technovore, and because of this he is centering the City of New York’s focus on establishing it as a digital communications leader. He’s personally in the mix on this. Just last month he kicked off “Foursquare Day” in New York , not as a novice, but as a guy who gets it, and who is cheerleading a local start-up.

Yesterday the City of New York announced its Road Map for The Digital City, a 60-page plan to “achieve New York City’s digital future.” To put momentum behind the plan, the Mayor inked deals with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr to leverage the services in forty departments and make the digital channel key to city customer services and communication. And this is planned to be operational by the end of summer…THIS summer.

Fueling New York’s Digital Economy
Besides working on network access, open government and citizen engagement, New York’s plan sets a course to encourage its digital economy in the following ways:

1. Establish a new engineering institution
2. Expand workforce development programs to support growth and diversity in the digital sector
3. Support technology startup infrastructure needs
4. Continue to recruit more engineering talent and teams to New York City
5. Promote and celebrate NYC’s digital sector through events and awards
6. Pursue a new .nyc top-level domain, led by the city’s IT department.

Will Boston Compete to Be the Most Digital City in the World?
Part of the plan also includes establishing an index for digital achievement in partnership with other major international cities. Will Boston be one?

The challenge is now before us: lead, follow, or abdicate?
Hello, Mayor Menino? Hello, MITX? Hello, Mass Technology Leadership Council? Hello, Senator Spilka of the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies? Hello, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative? Hello, Acting State Chief Information Officer John Letchford? What say you? Are we in together, or just freelancing in the same direction?

Tonight, a few of us here in Massachusetts are having a discussion about what industry and government groups can do to Fuel Massachusetts’ Digital Economy. I believe that New York’s road map gives this meeting in a new perspective. It should be a wake-up call. Too often Boston is the business incubator, and its breakthrough firms are acquired or move as they grow.

I’m excited by how the Boston Police Department has grabbed on to real-time messaging, such as Twitter. And I’m proud to have been part of the group that established Mass.gov. But now we need to get beyond point solutions to find ways to enrich the whole digital ecosystem.

So What Makes New York Different?
For one thing, Mayor Bloomberg is a technovore. Digital communications technology is part of his diet. It’s how he thrives.

In the world of elected politics, that’s still quite unusual. Leaving an electronic trail of what you say, in email, on Twitter, or IM is exactly what experienced political operatives avoid. Phones are good; email and Twitter create more risk than reward. While .gov projects carry their own special governance and funding complexities, being connected to a culture that avoids “on-record” utterances is a challenge. It’s hard to centralize anything in Massachusetts, and Boston can be impenetrable to those elsewhere in the state.

But still, of tonight’s panel, how many of the public sector leaders have tweeted or posted in the last week? My quick search on their Twitter feeds shows little to no real engagement, or in some cases weeks of non-use. We have some building to do.

In Massachuetts, Jane Swift was the first governor who kept and used a computer in her office. That doesn’t make her good or bad, but it did create conceptual possibilities for her and the governors who followed her. Real energy and inspiration come from the top of the ticket.

I know advisers and consultants to both Mayor Bloomberg and Menino; both are smart guys. Both know that digital communications is a pivot in government and the creative economy.  But at this moment, Bloomberg and New York are the team with a plan, and my Boston favorites are approaching this competitive season with hope, and a great set of civic and business supporters who need focal leadership.

It’s time to take our achievements and goodwill and formalize them into a shared vision. For a pretty good starting point, we might look a couple hundred miles to our south.

I’m writing this is a moving cab, but want to put this in front of you quickly, even if it is a bit raw.  Please read, and let me know what you think.

There was a buzz around the Internet yesterday as Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. blamed the iPad for joblessness.

“A few short weeks ago I came to the House floor after having purchased an iPad and said that I happened to believe, Mr. Speaker, that at some point in time this new device, which is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Now Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.

Chicago State University, in my congressional district, in freshman class, they are not being given textbooks any longer. They are all being given iPads as they enter school. President Wayne Watson hopes to have a textbook-less campus in four years, where at this state university they will no longer have textbooks.

Well, what becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs? And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist. Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He’s created the iPad. Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China. It is not produced here in the United States. So, the Chinese get to take advantage of our First Amendment value — that is to provide freedom of speech through the iPad to the American people. But there is no protection for jobs here in America to ensure that the American people are being put to work.”

I’d love your thoughts on this idea of managing innovation to maximize employment in “old economy jobs.”

Here’s the Gigantic Hypocrisy
Just a few weeks ago, the very same Jesse Jackson Jr. proposed amending the US Constitution to make sure that every student gets an iPod and a laptop (see the video of this — 50 seconds in — at the end of this post). Can anyone explain why iPad’s cause unemployment, yet iPods should be a constitutional right?

This is a Preview of Who Will Regulate Digital Marketing
I’ve worked in government close to telecom regulators, and built firms in regulated industsires. Congressman Jackson is exactly this kind of politician who is eager to decide what analytics and data of visits on your site you can retain.

Digital media is powerful and lucrative, and that makes it magnetic to politicians. Once regulated, there will be a new lobby. The more robust the regulation, the richer the contributions of that lobby will be.

There are many approaches to regulation, but one I’ve highlighted is the shift from considering your website or blog a press…and instead regulating it as a public accommodation.

We could avoid having our industry restructured by leaders like Representative Jackson with lobbying based on .001 percent of our current PPC budgets. I promise you regulation will decrease conversion rates and increase compliance costs.

It’s time for a far more robust response to this threat than what the DMA or AMA has mustered. They’ve not lobbied at the level that’s required to win this before it starts.  Expect more on this — but for now, please just read both of Representative’s Jackson statements and realize this: no matter how such leaders regulate, you lose.

His pro-iPod and anti-iPads stance are both cotton-headed.  The only way to win at regulation is to keep it out of the hands of elected officials. If you think design by committee stinks, just wait until your industry is structured by it.

Google +1  is the critical priority of the year for our friends at Google. Accordingly, they’ve invested their most prized asset in this effort: space on every single paid and organic search result.

(To get a quick explanation of +1, see the video below.)

Why So Much Urgency?
I see two large drivers for the urgency behind this launch, which makes this akin to Apple launching a new iPad.

Google is Desperate to Be a Social Platform
Google has tried a series of social initiatives: starring results, blocking results, side-wiki and Google Buzz, but none have achieved mass success. Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and others have cracked the code on the social Web 2.0 networked world. Google is still the hub of Web 1.0 webpages. But the social graph lives on platforms that others control, and that’s a threat to Google.

Google Seeks to Restore Integrity to its Search Results via Social Markers
As I noted a few weeks ago, crappy organic search results are a threat to the value position of Google’s paid results. That’s the lion’s share of their revenue.

Google has been off inventing cars that drive themselves and devices that could replace television networks, but along the way they let SEO gamers lower the integrity of their organic search results. Adding social signals to the search formula is a step away from factors that SEO gamers control, such as link farms and exact match domains.

This Beta Is Still Half-baked, But It Deserves Your Attention Now
The rush to release the beta is evident, as all the elements in +1 which take place off the search engine results pages (SERPs) aren’t yet ready.  That’s too bad, because without them, +1 fails; that’s why its a beta.  After all, the purpose of a search page is to get people to content, not to survey them to see if they like what’s described in the search result.

The place where +1 will fly or fail is on the websites of potentially millions of users who will install the +1 button. Yet, just like the iPad2, if you’d like to add a +1 button to your website, “there’s a line for that.”

The other missing element is the special tab in your Google profile that shows people what you’ve +1’ed.  This may be soon to come, but until it does, this beta isn’t very social. Once people can Tweet and link to their list of +1s, and promote the program on their own sites, it will be legitimately social. For the time being, this is just a design shift on SERP pages, and a glimpse of what’s ahead.

In the Long Term, Google +1 Is Promising to Marketers
This promises social proof to validate firms’ search results. Further, there’s the potential of future influence on natural search engine rankings or the quality score of ads (SEO agencies, start your engines).  And if profile pages become social hubs, marketers can gain additional awareness and traffic through social sharing on these.

+1 Is Also Promising to Google’s Future
1. It gives searchers a reason to use Google when they’re signed in, rather than anonymously. This means Google can build richer records of individuals’ use of search and better target ads.
2. It expands the public use for the Google profile page, which can be built into a future social networking play.
3. It is an answer to Facebook’s Like button, which is already on about 2 million websites.
4. It is an innovation that moves the public spotlight off Google’s struggle with link farms and SEO gamesmanship.

Unanswered Questions and Unintended Consequences

Will This Initially Decrease Conversion Rates?
If you follow the UsefulArts Twitter feed,  SEO pro Andy Komack @akomack raised the question of the unintended conversion distraction that Google+1 introduces.  Currently the +1 box is a distraction from the core purpose of search pages: channeling traffic to content.  If a social opportunity interrupts the search experience, click-throughs could in fact decline. This might change over time, but I agree with his concern.

How Will Participation Change Search Engine Results?
Will sites with the +1 box on their pages gain an advantage in SERP rankings? Will sites with more +1s move up in rankings, or end up paying less for PPC placement?

Bold Prediction: This is the start of Google the Social Network
I see this as a move in a more expansive social play, in which Google will combine its Profile Pages, the +1 Button, Google Buzz, Google Chat, Google Phone, Gmail and its RSS Reader into an integrated social network. I suspect we will see these point services substantially repackaged into an aggregated offering. What do you think?

That’s my take on this now day-old initiative.
I’d love to hear your view, so please comment away here or email me your take.

Post update: April 1, 2011, 9pm: after an instance of the +1 button was found “in the wild” running on a non-google website, Google announced it would withdraw the public test of the button. All information in this post continues to be accurate – and this illustrates again Google’s urgency to accelerate this launch while attempting to manage marketers interest in this initiative. (details)

This post by Dave Wieneke was recently published on the Econsultancy blog, where there’s a conversation already spinning. (Come by and have a look!)
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In a recent post, Is This the End of the Digital World as We Know It?, I offered some solid research to support the end of PC dominance and the dawn of a new era—the tablet era. One of the things that make this emerging market so exciting is that tablets offer a new user experience that expands the digital canvas. This breaks out of the web page metaphor, and significantly expands the ecosystem for online communication.

It’s About Time
For fifteen years we’ve poured billions of dollars into making an always-on, ubiquitous network, and though my recent skiing excursions remind me that coverage isn’t perfect, it’s close. But having ubiquitous access begs for a ubiquitous interface. One that activates instantly without the “boot and wait” experience of the PC, and that is great at grabbing connections and switching applications on-the-go.

In my previous post I noted three things that, in my opinion, make the tablet a bona fide new user experience rather than a scaled-down laptop: The combination of ease-of-use of the device itself, its awareness of location, and its ability to serve rich content anywhere makes it a ubiquitous access point to the always-on network. This montage is having a profound effect on user behavior.

To paraphrase one of my daughter’s beloved authors, “I would use it in a car, on a train and in a tree; it is so very convenient you see.” If Dr. Seuss were alive today he would be a tablet user and would find himself using it in places he would never consider taking his laptop. I know I’m now introducing 1960’s Addams Family reruns and science animations to my kids’ bedtime. This wouldn’t have happened with my laptop, which gets so hot it could be used as an electric blanket.

Everyone’s All about the Apps – and Apps Are about Usefulness
In our new app-driven world, a.k.a. Web 3.0, users are thirsty for usefulness, time-savings, and truly interactive user experiences. The tablet’s whenever/wherever capability puts apps at our fingertips at any given time, without the limitations found with other small-screen devices. No one wants more invitations to be a “friend”; we want technology that can help us get specific things done, and we don’t mind paying for it. In 2010, app sales topped $5.2bn. Gartner Research Director Stephanie Baghdassarian estimates sales to explode to $15.1bn in 2011 and reach $150bn by 2014. (That’s the combined revenue of Apple and Microsoft springing up in the midst of a disaggregated market. Translation: Gold Rush.)

This is a true revolution.  Just as the browser made AOL’s walled garden of content obsolete, the application experience is replacing the web page.
Developers have heard the call. Today, 350,000 active apps are already out there (source: 148Apps.biz). Users can Tweet, check the weather, book a trip, check the snow report, report a pot hole, mark where they parked and follow a GPS path back….ah, to never lose your car in a parking lot again! Where there is a need, there probably is an app (or there will be).

This is Just the Beginning…
If you’re struggling with how to integrate Web 3.0 into your own business and brand, you’re certainly not alone. In future posts I plan to address what marketers can do and provide some cutting edge examples of how different industries are making inroads. In the interim, feel free to get in touch with me directly for one-on-one consultation on this subject.

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So, don’t you agree that this post’s photo deserves a funny caption? Honestly, its begging for it! I’ll add the best non-lurid suggestion from comments, so have at it!  Thanks, Dave

You’re going to miss 2010.

In five years we’ll look back and realize that this was a simpler day. A lack of established business models and rules gave some the belief that a free Hootsuite account, a mantra of “Just do it” and being “open and authentic” would make them a social media ninja.

By 2015, people will already look back at 2010 as a “digital love-in” with the nostalgia that aging hippies harbor for the ’60s. So much was just about to change, and nobody imagined the digital horizon was about to be turned upside down.

In 2015, being socially unlisted will be a status symbol
At first social media looked like a pathway to “hyper-empowered” consumers.  That’s because consumers were first movers in social media. As they connected to each other and shared knowledge, they found  a new source of power

But once firms started to connect and share their views of the social grid, their superior analytic horsepower began to turn the tables on consumers. Phone companies use network analysis of who you speak to, as social networks turn into data maps of association, and location-aware phones tell advertisers which displays slowed you in their stores. Suddenly, automation, analytics and lots of available personal data produced “hyper-empowered” marketers.

Once firms can map who really brings friends with them when they change accounts or promote causes, a new set of social media scores will became  as important and formalized as credit scores. Chris Selland describes this in his post on how Klout Score is the start of corporate profiling of customers, just as FICO credit scores are used to understand credit history. Chris says there’s a business opportunity, but its not what today’s social zealots think it is.

It may have once been liberating to think of “brand YOU”. But once firms can calculate the exact value of your brand to them, they can judge consumers, and to some degree make being their promoter part of your relationship to them. The self-objectifying scoring of social media is training a generation to buy and sell their own bodies by the pound. The game is fun, until everyone’s in on it.

In 2015 Social Media Will Hardly Be Personal
As social media is professionalized, it will also become depersonalized.  By 2015 everyone will know that digital lives are performances. By then, it will seem ludicrous that real athletic or entertainment performers would be personally using social media to connect with fans, any more than they connect with fans call-in programs.

Sure you can “talk with Shaq” on Twitter.  But to work at scale, everyone will know this is a digital characterization, same as when we “talk” online with the Cookie Monster or the King from Burger King.

Naturally, as social media becomes less personal, corporations will be more at home with it. Social media was once the way that geeks could bypass customer service and get to “a person.”  Far before 2015, social media will be just one more incoming line of contact, and you’ll get the same staff that you’d reach through the 800 line. Just as VPs don’t answer many service lines today, they won’t be picking up on social media mentions. There will be a team for that, and what management needs to know will roll-up to a dashboard.

Yep, tie dyes, leisure suits, and button-downs each had their day. The same is true of technology trends. The dot.com smugfest gave way to a crop of “social media ninjas.” But 2010 is when corporations started to operationalize social meda, and use this new channel with skill. That’s a good thing, but its a sign of a maturing space where experts will increasingly have real experience, and hiring managers won’t look to social media gasbags to tell them about openness or to think like publishers.

In fact, it’s 2011 and these old saws already seem kind of quaint. Do you think social media is starting to show its age? Though media never dies, neither does new media stay new indefinitely.

I’m active in a pretty wide range of discussions about the future of digital marketing.  It’s astonishing how often these conversations start, and then stay on technology. This I think, is a disastrous error.

Let’s consider a nice tangible example of a group that gets things done: the United States Marines.

It’s not gear that makes the Marines a great fighting force – though I have no doubt they have awesome firepower. But one well-placed warrior could probably do more damage with a screwdriver then I could with a whole crate of explosives.  And the judgment of knowing when to wait for the shot is as much a skill as aim.

Build People before Systems
The same is true in marketing. People and strategy are prerequisites for even picking tools.  Two years ago, my team set the goal to be the best digital marketer in the legal industry at both paid and organic search.  This drove hiring, and  brought a stream of people with this expertise in to the firm. They identified creative tactics to help win at search, and then we built out systems to support that.

The people came first. This makes sense, because you need them to specify exactly what needs to happen, and to help build out new systems.  Consider our content team, which has migrated over 5,000 web pages to our new publishing system over the last two months.  They figured out how to get this done, and along the way have become experts on our publishing system.

According to ZDNet, 70 percent of IT projects fail.  Most are doomed from the start because they fail to really nail the business goals of the project.   The rush for results leads to systems that can’t deliver what the business needs.   Our recent web publishing project took six months to plan. That helped us make sure that what we built worked, was on time, and even hit budget numbers.

Getting the “People Layer” Right Drives Technical Success
Rushed shots that miss targets can be worst than shots not taken. Why? Missed shots burn through opportunity and resources. And failure degrades culture. There’s a reason the Marines are proud.  Their shots hit the target with alarming regularity.

The next-most frequent reason a project fails is a lack of communication and team skills.  See the pattern?  Technical success is determined far more by people than technology.  When a technology is fairly mature, getting the “people layer” right is the key success factor.

The difference between heaven and hell is personnel.
If your goal is to be a world class organization, then a huge part of that victory is building people and culture inside a strategy.  As important as systems are, they’re just instruments for skill and strategy. Its your people who will pick up projects and carry them across the finish line.  And its your people who will use the systems you build. Your success is in their heads and hands.

When we get away from the vanity of social media and its self-worshiping communities – we find what we have missed. There are experiences drowned out by the chatter, just as stars are drowned out by the green light spilled by streetlamps. Those experiences – away from the online world, perhaps that’s what you should really be dwelling on, recording, and sharing. All the noise in the echo chamber of social media makes it harder to know that – but it is what we most need to hear.

My friend Constantine von Hoffman was out walking with his wife and son, when his wife stopped, took a picture of a tree and then announced she had uploaded it to Facebook. His son – his teen-aged son, said, “Remember when we just looked at leaves?” Has your archiving and curating gotten in the way of communing?

While traveling to Death Valley it occurred to me that the origin of the great religions are disproportionately in deserts. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed all began their preaching after long stays surrounded by nothing except endless sand and endless sky. In the desert it is starkly clear if one is alone, or with another – and sometime that other isn’t in the mere physical realm. The environment forces a fundamental question: Am I isolated on the world or part of a larger interaction?

This year there’s been a broad discussion on whether social media makes us stupid, or ADHD. I pay no attention to it. Hasn’t this, or something similar, has been said of every emerging media? Some of the ancient Greeks complained that the written word would destroy people’s ability to remember things. TV was a “vast commercial wasteland.” Actually each new media changes us, how we think and how we see. I’d argue that social media can make us creators and greater agents in the world. Living in the city I took to carrying a camera and nailing one fantastic shot a day. It changed how I saw my urban world, perhaps social media does too.

This much I can say for certain about social media: It certainly makes it hard to be alone for an extended time. One morning at 3 AM I posted, “For the record this is when I write UsefulArts.” Moments later the response came from my friend Louis, “For the record this is when I read it”

As a parent I struggle with when to share this connection to the digital world, and when to buffer it so my kids can grow in other ways. And I wonder how my behavior has shaped them. They’ve rarely, if ever, been ignored in favor of a signal from the hive. However, as I write this, I know they’ve waited while I signaled and interacted with friends here.

The wired, global city has banished the night and abolished the dusk. We are free of so much uncertainty and isolation. Mobile media dispels silence. You can find out things almost immediately if you want to and you never have to be alone if you don’t. But have we also banished the poetry of revelation? How do you go on a quest for something when it seems everything can be found?

Through mobile technology social media is now the omni present other, a perpetual connection to machinations of the digital hive. But as we look at it, our eyes grow comfortable with the view, and the heavens are obscured by pixels. Didn’t our eyes look up in to the sky or across the vast ocean and find more than just data?

To grasp again the moral sense of our being, we need to step away from the crowd and recover the gift of the night. Solitude. When we stop speaking we begin to hear; in the darkness we can be immersed by the life beyond the digital media monad.

This season, solitude – something freely available to everyone – seems rarer than all our hand-held technical marvels made of the rarest, most exotic materials on earth. A contrarian voice inside me, maybe a gift from my Cherokee ancestors, says it is best to live in a world of connected dusk, balanced between the individuated light of technology and artifice (techne), and the healing poetry of darkness and mysteries (poiesis).

This solstice, my friend, walk away from the light, and remember the world beyond it.

All the best,
Dave Wieneke

In my mind, for three days a year Indianapolis is the Email Marketing Capital of the World.  That’s due to of the hometown extravaganza that is the ExactTarget Connections Conference.  The creative efforts of Jeffrey Rohrs, Joel Book, and really the whole firm behind Scott Dorsey supercharges Indy for those days.  Douglas Karr and Chris Baggott have even started an initiative to brand Indy as the Measured Marketing Capital of the World.

Now I wouldn’t dispute Indy’s claim for three days a year.  But the arrival of BtoB Magazine‘s email edition suggested to me that for the rest of the year, the capital just might be Boston.  Consider the array of Boston-area Email Service Providers featured in B2B’s list:

• Bluestreak (Watertown, MA)
• ClickSquared (Waltham, MA)
• Constant Contact (Waltham, MA)
• EchoMail (Cambridge, MA)
• e-Dialog (Burlington, MA)
• IMN also known as I Make News (Waltham, MA)
• Net Atlantic (Salem, MA)
• Prospectiv (Wakefield, MA)
• SmartSource (Burlington, MA)
• Unica (Waltham, MA)

Yes, nearly 15 percent of this influential list are services based in Boston’s suburbs. That’s tied with all of California, and just ahead of the state of New York.

The number of email service providers in the Boston area could be driven higher if one counted the emailing services bundled into Boston-based marketing platforms such as HubSpot, IONInteractive, and Eloqua. Each has a Boston presence, even if operations are distributed in some cases.

Making MITX Mightier: FutureM Squared
This year, Boston stepped out with the FutureM conference, which spotlighted the area as leader in marketing innovation.  But for the most part, these services and platforms I just mentioned were absent or eclipsed by the area’s strong agency and corporate leadership. HubSpot was the curve breaker, hosting their annual customer event during FutureM.

With a year to prepare and the participation of the marketing platform providers, next year could be FutureM².

Bringing these industry services together with the areas brand and academic horsepower could create an event that simply can’t be convened anywhere else.

Is Boston the World’s Digital Marketing Leader? Let’s find out.

This Saturday at 10AM Scott Brinker and I are hosting a discussion at Podcamp Boston on Web 3.0: The Wave that Follows Social.

Scott hosts the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, and is founder and CTO of ION Interactive. His firm provides a suite of services that helps optimize search and Web experiences, which benefits both marketers and their audiences. He’s a legitimate tech and marketing visionary, and he runs a firm I’ve admired since they introduced me to the phrase “post-click segmentation.”

Saturday’s discussion is just the start of a dialog, and if you’re interested in this topic it would be great to hear from you or have you join us in person.

For those unfamiliar with Podcamp, it’s a sort of social media un-conference. You can get a better feel from this take on Podcamp4 in 2009, and Podcamp3 in 2008. It’s an enjoyable time to connect with the local social media community and to spot new ideas while they’re, well, new.  Here’s the weekend’s schedule(pdf).

And to get a better feel for what this Web 3.0 stuff is about, take a look at the description below, and the links and video that follow.

First There Was Web 1.0: It Was Documents
Originally, websites were collections of documents written in HTML, which when we were lucky referred to images.  The phrase “Web page” made sense, because these documents contained copy and images like books.

Then Came Web 2.0: Pages Generated by Applications
Things like blogs, podcasts, video, and social networks seemed to arise separately. But together, they created a more social Web.  Unlike the relatively static documents of Web 1.0, blogs, social networks and the like leveraged applications to generate “pages” from data held offline in databases.  These applications (such as WordPress and Facebook) made it easy for people to publish or contribute content without coding pages themselves.

Web 3.0 Puts the Application and the Data in Your Hands.
Whether we’re using Salesforce, watching movies online, or using iPad applications, the concept of the Web page is falling away.  This will dramatically change how users get interactive information and how marketers construct their presence on a siteless, pageless Web. The iPad, desktop applications, and mobile applications are pushing this idea forward.

What Will This Mean? Five Questions to Get Us Started:

• How will Web 3.0 change the tempo of marketing?
• How does it shift the skill set of marketing?
• What would that shift do to the organization of marketing?
• What about the value network of marketing, agencies, and outside providers?
• What remains the same about marketing?

During my years at Reuters, this more integrated experience was often framed in terms of data. And certainly Web 3.0′s data integration will be driven by XML and the conventions of the semantic web. However, Web 3.0 is happening today, and innovative companies aren’t waiting for a utopian vision of structured data to be achieved.

Here are some of my earlier posts on Web 3.0, and an excellent video of how some of the founders of the Web are thinking about it.

Related Posts
Web 3.0 – Envisioning the Web’s Next Big Change
The Siteless Web and the End of Brand Website Rule: Web 3.0
The 3 Buckets of Web Distribution: Get On To the Pageless Web
The Web is Dead” is Another Way to Talk About Web3.0

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

NASCAR drivers should watch out: the position of Chief Marketing Officer is fast replacing race-car driver as the riskiest job in North America.

According to Business Week, a CMO’s average tenure is only 28 months. Only 14 percent of CMOs for the worlds top brands have been in their jobs more than three years.

That’s dramatically different from their C-level peers:

• CEOs overall have an average tenure of 95 months (ITBusiness Edge)
• Fortune 1000 CEOs on average last 73 months. (Forbes.com)
• CFO average tenure is 52 months (CFO.com)
• CIO Tenure is 76 months. (ITBusiness Edge)

Change in Marketing Isn’t Always Good
High leadership turnover disrupts innovation and breeds chaos. New leaders often turn to their firm’s creative efforts to show fast, tangible change. This almost always distracts from thornier interdepartmental issues, which is where market strategy meets the firm.  This muddies the firm’s identity in the marketplace, and internally makes the new CMO seem fixated on advertising or MarCom rather than strategy and revenue growth.

There’s also a temptation for CMOs to bring in their own team, which can tank productivity while the new arrivals figure out the business and the remaining crop of young marketers politically showcase their worthiness.  Introducing a “hired gun” CMO raises fair questions about the career path for the company’s emerging marketing talent, many of whom will take the lesson that the path to promotion is an external one.

Marketing’s horse power has increased, it now has mechanisms to deliver 1:1 personalized mass marketing, using optimization, social CRM, and elaborate analytics. It is gaining a crew of experts in these disciplines, and more than ever CEO’s look to marketing to lead revenue growth. It no time for marketing’s leadership to be driving under a yellow flag.

Here are my thoughts on what we need to change in marketing — and by “we” I mean all of us: everyone in business.

Truth #1: Nobody Knows What the Hell Marketing is Doing
Why do Chief Marketers last one-third the time of their executive peers? The short answer: nobody knows what marketing is doing, and it’s easy for outsiders to imagine they can run the “make-it-pretty department”  better. That’s what phrases like “misaligned performance expectations” boil down to.

Fact #2: Marketing Needs to Get Its Professional House in Order
In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Richard Barker described a profession as a “generally accepted and relatively permanent knowledge asymmetry.” It’s when people recognize that practitioners of a discipline generally know more about a certain topic than than they do, and so trust their advice.

The body of knowledge required of physicians, lawyers, and even project managers is highly codified. In my current department, my first priority was setting a base of analytics and design doctrine so my digital managers could have a shared approach to the basics of our work.

Ask 40 marketers what a brand is: you’ll get 40 often very different answers. Until we have a common language and consistency, it’s no wonder that marketing seems to be “everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Fact #3: Uniform Reporting Drives Accountability, Credibility, and Visibility
Why is it that the collaboration of Marketing and Finance so often starts at the most rudimentary level?  The CEO has the general structure of a balance sheet whose key metrics are used to compare the financial performance of companies across industries. Profit and Loss Statements are standardized via Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), trued through an audit, and used as reliable corporate measures from Kansas to Kuala Lumpur.

But the Association of National Advertisers’ Marketing Accountability Conference found that most  financial executives don’t accept Marketing’s forecasts or ROI calculations.

• Nine out of 10 said they don’t use ROI metrics to set marketing budgets in the annual budgeting cycle.
• Seven out of 10 said their companies don’t use marketing inputs and forecasts in financial guidance to Wall Street or public disclosures.
• Four out of 10 said marketing forecasts made inside their company can’t pass the muster of a standard corporate audit.

CFOs and CMOs need to work together to build a shared business model, grounded in a set of key performance metrics that connect it to revenue and value creation.

Fact #4: GAAP Should Recognize Corporate Fortunes Are Tied to Brand Equity

The accounting profession’s conventions have been slow to recognize the growth of brand value as a corporate asset. Perhaps more than any other factor, this blind spot allows marketing to remain a dark art.

GAAP standards don’t account for the value of brands until a company is bought or sold. This creates a disconnect between marketing and the rest of the firm that orients its actions to the corporate balance sheet. I believe the creation of consistent and reliable standards for marketing measurement is the single most important business issue of this decade.

Jonathan Knowles and Wolff Olins blogged for Emory Universities Brand Institute:

To qualify as an “asset” in financial terms, a brand needs to be measured in terms of its ability to generate future cash flow… Changes in customer attitudes are nice, but in and of themselves they do not generate cash flow.

Their post goes on to recount a half-dozen models for estimating brand health and value. Fifteen years ago, the doctoral students teaching my finance classes were working on ways to get brand equity on the books.

While there’s plenty marketers can do to standardize their practices and work across departments, assigning a book value to the health of brands will both give a better view of corporate value to owners — and bring one of marketing’s primary fixations on to the corporate ledger.