The Next Transition in Communication

Over time, the way in which communication happens has gone through some very interesting transitions. Each of them resulted in profound changes in information flow, and with that, significant changes in the discipline of marketing. We’re about to see the evolution of a fifth form of communication, and it will have an equally interesting effect on our lives.

1. One-to-One

The oldest form of communication is the one-to-one model. Face to face interactions and conversations were the main way in which messages were communicated. While very interactive, this was not a very scalable model at all. However, because it was the only way of conveying messages, it found an audience that was not overwhelmed with communication, and was likely much more receptive to new information.

2. Broadcast

The modern marketing industry was born with the advent of mass broadcast communications. Radio, print, or television enabled messages to be mass communicated to broad audiences. This was a highly scalable, but entirely non-interactive, as it was a one-way communication and allowed no way for the listener to engage with the communicator. Also, as broadcast grew, it reduced the attention span of audiences by overwhelming them with too many communications.

3. Email

The next interesting evolution in communication was with the advent of email. I’m not talking about email marketing, however, as that is much more similar to a broadcast model. Interpersonal email, however, added a very interesting element with the “Reply All” function. Now, the audience members in a communication group could easily respond to a discussion, and do so in a way that created ad hoc, topical group discussions. However, these discussions were closed to outsiders. A person who was not in the discussion would not see the discussion happening and could not join the discussion without explicitly being included by an insider.

4. Social Media

Solving this discovery problem, of course, was social media. Now, with the discussions happening in an open format, anyone can detect, read, or join existing discussions. The speed with which these communications happen has been well documented, and discussions on a particular topic can quickly grow to involve and influence hundreds of thousands of people. However, social media creates huge volumes of communications, most of which are not of interest. Filtering through this noise is a daunting challenge, and whereas most social media can be filtered by keywords or brand names, this still tends to result in an overwhelming volume of content.

5. Conversation Discovery

So what's next? As the major search engines apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what, we may be on the verge of a fifth major shift in how information is communicated. Passive conversation discovery, guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data, may be the way we discover what conversations are happening that may be of interest. Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. This finally allows the interactivity and openness of social media while not having the overwhelming volume of unfiltered social


Each of these evolutions in communication has changed how we interact with each other, how we learn, and how we market. This coming fifth transition promises to be as disruptive as any before it.

What are you doing to be ready?



(this article first appeared as a guest post on SavvyB2B)

Email as a Discoverable Medium

I wrote on Tuesday about the difference between messages being "delivered" and messages being "discovered". Today, it's worth looking at that difference in approach via a very tangible marketing example. As one of the most commonly used marketing mediums, email is worth using as an example.

Email can be delivered in a very direct manner – a single email can be delivered to the exact recipient intended, assuming an email address is known and permission is granted – but that does not mean that the message has truly connected. I'm not talking about email deliverability, although that remains an important topic, I'm talking about the ability of a message to be noticed or discovered by its recipient in an overflowing inbox.

We each receive more email on a daily basis than we are able or willing to read. As we look through our inbox, this means that we make very quick decisions on which emails to read and which emails to ignore. This is based on the person or source from whom the email is received, and the subject line of the email. Receiving uninteresting or non-valuable content from a particular source quickly leads to a situation in which we recognize, and reflexively delete or ignore the content. This is known as an “emotional unsubscribe” as we have tuned out of the communication, and although we have not clicked the “unsubscribe” link, we are effectively at that state.

Once an email has been received and opened, most audience are quickly scanning for interesting content. If it is discovered, it might be read, but if it is not quickly seen, the email will be just as quickly deleted. This is why, as marketers, we need to think of email as a "discoverable" marketing medium in the same way that we might think of any topic shared in social media in terms of how likely it is to be "discovered".

Each subject line and each article title within the email is a teaser that should be designed to capture the audience’s attention and compel them to want to read more. Without being misleading or deceitful, the best headlines intrigue readers and leave them wanting more information. Rather than assuming an email will be read, we as marketers can only assume that, at best, it might be browsed quickly.

The onus is upon us to make the content within the email, and the headlines that introduce that content, compelling enough that the reader takes the time to read them and discovers the message within. If they do, we have succeeded in having our information discovered. If they do not, however, we have likely pushed that person one step further away from being open to discovering our next communication.

Social media analysis moves mainstream

Last week, Webtrends announced that they had extended their customer intelligence capabilities into Facebook. In this new integration, there are two things happening that are worth commenting on. First, there is a continuing move to see a unified view of online behaviour, and online messages across all communication channels, and not a siloed view where each individual communication platform is treated as somehow separate.

In exploring the Webtrends solution, you can see this evolution taking place. When a blog post is written, Tweeted about, then shared on Facebook this is a natural way that information flows in today’s environment. An analytics platform that treats each of the platforms as silos would be forcing marketers to think of communications by “silo” not by “idea”, and that would be a significant mistake. The barriers between social platforms, and between those platforms and our blogs and web properties are rapidly disappearing and already virtually non-existent.

This manifests in both the way that the data is captured (not just within properties under our direct control like main websites, but wherever the audience is, such as on Facebook) and in how it is presented, as an integrated view of activity across communication platforms.

The second interesting trend that became apparent in looking at this integration of Facebook activity into the marketing analysis world was the lack of campaign centricity. Facebook, as with almost all social media efforts, has a “flywheel” dynamic to it. Effort is put in continually, and over time, the success begins to build slowly, but with its own momentum. This is drastically different than typical marketing campaign efforts where each campaign has a fairly defined investment/payback model; a point-in-time investment which is tied to a short-term payback.

Webtrends shows metrics on community success (views, shares, fans, etc), and indicates through “flags” where the driving events (such as blog posts, tweets, and marketing promotions) took place. By doing this, they guide marketers to the view that the driving events are there to build community, engagement, and influencers, which will then over time drive the creation of qualified leads. This view is significantly different than the more direct campaign-to-lead model of typical marketing, but a much more accurate representation of the marketing realities of social media.

As we market to B2B buyers, optimizing how information finds its way to them is crucial. To do this well means that we need to think more in terms of the ideas, and less in terms of the channel by which the information is disseminated. Similarly, as we build our engagement with our buying audiences in social media, we need to think more in terms of how our efforts are building and driving community success, rather than thinking in terms of single campaigns. With their new ability to analyze Facebook, understand the flow of ideas across social media channels, and see community success mapped against the events that drove it, Webtrends helps us make important steps in this direction.

What do you think? Have you tried their new capability in your environment? What insights are you able to gain from it that you weren’t able to get previously?