Accidentally on Purpose Blog

Giovanni Rodriguez, Shel Israel and I had dinner in Palo Alto last week and we were discussing the business applications of social media.  In that discussion we touched on a number topics, but how machine-to-machine communications could be considered or at least to some extent deliver on the concepts of social media really piqued my curiosity.  By the way, this isn’t an idle question.  Machine-to-machine is at the foundation of a little thing called Web 3.0.  I was adamant about saying yes it could.   We weren’t always in agreement, and to some extent I agreed with the dissent in the conversation as much as I agreed with my own arguments.  That conversation lasted about 20 minutes before we moved on to another topic and just when I thought I had forgotten the thread, I read this important announcement from Microsoft and it got me thinking about it all over again. 

According to the MSFT press release:

“The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.”

What really got me rethinking the notion of machine-to-machine social media was reading this post from Josh Catone at the ReadWriteWeb, where MSFT is limiting it’s view of engagement by focusing only on how consumers interact with ads:

This type of engagement mapping tool will become really powerful when it can measure not only ad views that lead to a purchase, but also any other type of online or social interaction. This is probably the end game that Facebook is aiming at with Beacon. Imagine the value advertisers could derive from a tool that looks at how your online activity leads up to a purchase. i.e., did you see a friend talk about the product on a Facebook wall post? Did you read a blogged review? Did you see the product talked about in a YouTube video? Did you look at any ads when all that was happening?

If Microsoft truly wants to map “engagement,” it needs to include in its focus the the ever-expanding “social” networks of people who are helping fellow consumers navigate the commercial Web. 

What do you think?  Could this be the beginning of the machine-to-machine version of social media?

I suspect that many people will be tuned off by machine-to-machine approaches.  But as one Stanford professor notes (Clifford Nass), some of our best friends are computers.

In a very smart article about the advent of social media, AdWeek’s Brian Morrissey eulogizes the death of the campaign microsite.  More and more businesses are looking for ways to connect with consumers where ever they go. 

The growth of social media is causing marketers to realize they cannot expect consumers to always seek them out. Web widgets and video-sharing tools make it easy for any user to take content that formerly might have lived only on a brand site with them wherever they go. And social media sites help them share that content with friends.

“We really believe in fishing where the fish are,” said Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola. “The old model is to build your own site, then spend media dollars to bring them there.”

Not so long ago, marketing was like the mantra in “Field of Dreams”:  “build it and they will come.”  Today, we know that we first need to understand what to build, and where to build it.  The first step, as always — listening!