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)

Information Will Find Me

As the way that we find information becomes increasingly driven by social influence, it’s interesting to look at where this trend goes in the longer term. The logical extension of this trend is that the consumers of information – our prospective buyers – will expect that the information they should be interested in will find them, rather than them finding information. Much as in the consumer world, songs, books, and movies are recommended to us based on collaborative filtering techniques, information in the business world may soon find us.

A combination of our own unique social graph, and that social graph’s interests and reading history, may soon make the dominant trend of information discovery one of passive recommendation, rather than active discovery (such as via search). As each individual’s interest areas, business role, and social influence graph becomes more and more known by search engines and content portals, the information being presented will cater itself more deeply to what is likely to be of interest.

Analytics across extremely broad populations and vast amounts of data on what was actually clicked or viewed will allow this process to become startlingly precise and highly accurate, further increasing its effectiveness, adoption, and relevance to marketers.

The question for marketers, of course, is how to have relevant content discovered by appropriately interested buyers in this way. The two key points are relevance and interest. As marketers, we need to focus on creating interesting content that is of relevance to each type of buyer we are likely to encounter. This content, whether it is eBooks, webinars, live events, or interesting data, can then be introduced to the discussion through well targeted nurture marketing approaches.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target.

When your information is found, and deemed interesting by an influencer population, it will find its way to a much broader population. Vice versa, if it is not found, or not deemed interesting, it will not find its way to a broader population.

In a world driven by passive information recommendation, there is nothing more important than having your information be found interesting by people who are "like" the people you want to target. The more relevant, interesting, and targeted the content is, the more likely each potential influencer is to read, recommend, or share it, which then guides whether audiences beyond your own will have that content recommended to them based on their unique interests and social graph.

Message Delivery vs. Message Discovery

The most obvious change in marketing that we are seeing lately comes down to how our messages reach their intended recipients. This is driven, of course, by changes in the behavior of our audience of potential buyers. The information “filters” we use are shifting from being economic filters, driven by publishers, to social filters, driven by the relevance of individuals and their messages. As this takes place, we as marketers need to shift towards thinking about how messages can be "discovered", rather than how they are delivered.

There is no more obvious place where this transition is happening than in the worlds of search and social media.

Search, either natural or paid, provides an active way to discover information. A prospective buyer actively seeks information on a given topic based on keywords. Successful marketers are able to ensure that their content is present at the top of the search results, either through an effective search engine optimization strategy, or through good search engine marketing and a healthy search marketing budget.

In the various social media channels, however, information is not pushed out directly, but rather it is published, and then discovered by an audience based on recommendations from their peers, content syndication, and chance. The more interesting and relevant your content is, the larger an audience of influencers will share it, forward it, and link to it, bringing it to the much broader audience that they influence.

Distribution via Influencers

Unlike in search marketing, however, there is no clear metaphor for applying a marketing budget in order to achieve broader distribution of your information within social media. Although a variety of paid structures are being experimented with, none have received the wide acceptance that paid search marketing has.

This means that the most reliable way to ensure that your messages are maximally discoverable within the world of social media is to build strong relationships with the key influencers in your space who are likely to share those messages and ensure that your messages are sufficiently interesting, relevant and non-salesy in order to make them shareable.

Your long term reputation with each of these key influencers is based on a history of creating high quality content, but each individual content piece stands on its own in terms of its ability to be found to be interesting and sharable. The techniques of great journalists are of use here in making each content piece most interesting and most likely to be read.

Headlines, Teasers, and Discovery

Whether it is an article title, an interesting statistic, a tweet, a news headline, or a catchy name for an eBook, the majority of your potential audience will only encounter the briefest of summaries of what your content is about. Convincing your audience to take the step from headline to content by clicking on your content is as much art as is it science.

The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.

The art of writing provocative, catchy, and intriguing summaries of information in just a few words was originally developed by newspaper editors writing headlines. Their goal was to have their publication “discovered” by those passing by a news stand. Now, in a world dominated by the need to make information discoverable, these skills are required more than ever. Each article, headline, or tweet should be thought of in the same light. The better the headline catches the potential reader’s attention, without being misleading, the more the content is read and the messages within it discovered.