Arnold Waldstein's Blog

With the Hulu and GoogleTV announcements, the promise of WebTV on the big screen seems within grasp of most TV watchers…which is basically everyone.

I’m in the market to buy a really big screen, connected with web apps so I searched on Amazon, the discount sites and made a trip to Best Buy.

Oy!

The promise is there but the mess of misinformation, lack of clarity, fear of buying proprietary hardware and overall feeling that this is still a geek’s dream, unfortunately seems still true.

I jotted down my Commandments as a guideline to help make this convergence a mass-market love fest with the least amount of pain. This is my wish list.

Six Commandments for a better connected TV world

1. Make it easy

It’s just not easy to display what you see on your laptop on your big screen TV. Even with GoogleTV, that need is not going away as to get real access, cabling to your laptop or desktop will still be necessary.

TV manufacturers are still somewhat clueless and shopping for a solution today is as confusing as home theater has been for a decade.

2. Make it multi-screen

Laptop. iPad. Smartphone. Big screen. All need to work together and share content streams from the big content cloud in the sky.

We need to be able to seamlessly move from TV to laptop to iPad to phone to watch a synced, stored, time-shifted program.

We need to be able to do different things on different screens around the same content.

3. Content is king; networks are history

The web is the metaphor for connected TV, not the other way around.

I want to watch True Blood and Entourage, not be forced to buy HBO. Being muscled to purchase network packages is TV legacy; being able to acquire content I want is the promise of the web.

I think that most of us will pay for value as long as we are in control. This is the iTunes learning. I will buy individual songs even if they add up to more than the original album…and be happy because it is my choice.

4. Search is a given

Searching for video content needs to be as simple as searching for info on the web.

We are almost ten years into the world Google powered and it is part of our nature. We demand information overload and search efficiency for video content for everything from TV shows to movies to YouTube to cam clips.

5. Community and social are essential

Friend referrals. Intelligent Facebook info streams. Checking in. Sharing.

The first screen most people use every morning to check on the day is Facebook. And we share our experience on our Facebook walls, Twitter streams, Foursquare friend lists, Disqus comments, Tumblr communities.

This needs to extend to the content we watch. If access to the open web is there, smart startups like Tunerfish are already figuring this out. Facebook will certainly play here even if FacebookTV doesn’t become a reality.

6. Every hardware purchase needs to feel good

We are going to have to buy things:

-We need to feel good about buying hardware…you know, like the iPad. Costs a bit but empowers and enriches life.

-We don’t want to worry about buying the wrong platform. The Betacam/VHS conundrum is just not acceptable as a rerun.

There are certainly other asks but this is my wish list of ‘must haves’.

This is a work in progress…what would you add?

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For additional blog posts on social and connected TV, please click here and here.

Everyone is abuzz over GoogleTV creating a paradigm shift in entertainment…. myself included.

What could be bad? All digital. Surfing from the couch. Social check ins. An easy-to-use time-shifted TV viewing reality.

I’m ready…but for those of us willing to live in the small laptop screen or geeky enough to hardwire the pieces together we have not all…but most of the promised goodness on WebTV today.

WebTV is well beyond its early stage already. With movies, TV shows, great new web content like ThisWeekIn… The web is fast becoming a digital video and TV frontier.

Whether you are on your laptop, wired from your Mac Mini to your large screen with Boxee, using Hulu…this is no longer a small niche by any standard.

New numbers on WebTV and TV watching online from eMarketer are enlightening:

• 33% of the US Internet population watches full-length TV programs today; growing to 39% by years’ end
• Hulu alone has 38.7 million unique monthly visitors. Largest video streaming site on the internet after YouTube.
• 14.6 million-web devices that can run TV applications shipped in last 12 months, increasing to 83.4 million in 2014
• 50% of everyone who watches any video online, will watch a full-length TV show

Mind-boggling actually…in the US, one in three connected people watch network TV shows online and one in two who use video in any way do some portion of their TV watching from the web.

In Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm way of thinking, we are just this side of an Early Majority position with WebTV and the chasm-crossing leap is only a holiday season away.

So with GoogleTV and the Boxee Box and every TV for sale with an HDMI plug, what’s the difference between now and…then, when these solutions launch?

The obvious changes will be:

1. It will be easy and inexpensive to purchase and install for everyone
2. More big screens will drive more content
3. Some built in widgets (apps) like YouTube, maybe Facebook and IMDB
4. Browsing and searching via Google from the couch position

Honestly, this is great but not a revolution. The iPad was a revolution, this is a big iteration pushing the web to the big screen WebTV experience. I like easy. I like larger displays. I like apps. We need search. But I want what I can’t imagine which is more than just the webification of the big screen.

Richard Kastelein, a friend, blogger and founder of AppMarket.TV believes that one of the big gaps to bridge is ‘lean back interactive in your living room’ versus ‘lean forward at your desk or laptop’. It’s the remote versus the keyboard and the mouse. Content will come. But seamless control of the web interactive elements of search, community and social are the mountains to scale.

Hmmm…So according the industry and folks a lot more in the know than I, the intersection of the widgets on the big screen (like an embedded app), a consistent interface for search, social attributes and some cool device like glidetv for surfing are the formula for the future.

I’m missing something here.

If interface and usability are the kingpins, then why not Apple rather than Google as the architect of the best solution? Steve Jobs, more than anyone gets usability and the mass market. Google is search but certainly they don’t understand GUI or social or consumers.

And I can’t imagine connected TV to be a single screen solution. We are all sitting on our couches with iPads and laptops and phones. This is not going to change. So why isn’t the input one of these devices, like an iPad as the control and with special social content?

Maybe an anecdote might clarify my uneasiness at settling with GoogleTV as the answer.

Recently I was watching ThisWeekInVentureCapital with Mark Suster and Mo Koyfman talking about efficiencies on the web. Mo made a statement that when you take an old industry and bring it online, you don’t just webify it or make it more efficient, you take the core of the old and its value and find something new…something better. This seems right on to me.

So…what is that leap to something new with connected TV?

Maybe it’s just more efficient. Maybe it’s a standard interface with some widgets and open access to a gazillion apps. Maybe it’s a perfect and closed and controlled Apple world of ease-of-use and locked down. Or maybe it’s just what we have today but bigger.

I don’t buy into this.

A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined riding on the subway or sitting in the coffee shop, watching TV and working and tweeting on my iPad. Or building distribution systems for my clients that connected their Facebook fan pages to their e-commerce storefronts.

I’m a video and movie aficionado and ever so ready for connected and social TV. See my post on this.  But the web is still figuring out social video and socialization around WebTV. It’s not necessarily the model to copy. The jump from laptop to big screen is fraught with opportunities for new ways of entertainment and needs more than a redo of the current web reality, retooled for the digital living room.

You agree?

What will make you and the hundreds of millions yet to buy, do so and enjoy in a new and more interesting way?

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Thanks to my friend Jennifer Fader for always finding interesting data before I do.

Everyone wants connected TV.

Whether it’s a Google or Apple solution or both, the upside to connected big screens in our living rooms hold enormous potential for everyone with a television and an internet connection….which is just about everyone, everywhere.

The time is overdue for this to happen. On the web side, video content and programming has exploded in quality and quantity, become easy to find and share, and mostly free to distribute and watch. Web video content is begging for more and larger displays.

On the broadcast TV side, we have great programming, thousands of channels on incredible displays that are locked inside of disconnected networks, frustratingly archaic search methods and a seemingly uncrossable gulf between the TV content on the screen and the laptops and iPads on our laps on the couch.

I’m really anxious and excited about impending connection between the big screen on the wall and the real-time web. It’s a game changer.

And I’m really curious about where social and community is going to play into this whole new  TV paradigm.

I remember early TV and it was distinctly a social experience. In fact, I recall my grandfather’s first TV set in our house. A very small screen with large groups gathering around to watch, chat and connect with each other in front of this early technology with funky programming. And this social activity went on for years!

Now with quality and varied TV programming, huge displays, HD and 3D…the immersion of viewing has gotten movie theatre quality but the experience, at least to me, more solitary and disconnected.

On the web, social platforms and community are the core of how we find and share information and ideas. Even commerce has become a referral-based economy and at its best, is social in nature. The social metaphor is predominant in entertainment, gaming, information networks and business.

So with the TV screen connected to the real-time web and content digitally distributed, at the very least we will be getting  a flood of more content which is easier to find, and finally, friendly and seamless control over what we watch and when. At a minimum.

But will TV as a social experience come full circle?  Will the connected TV experience mirror, with a modern twist, what  it was at its outset way back in the 50s and 60s?

I’m thinking… yes, but in a totally new way of course.

It takes little imagination to see a Facebook iframe on the TV screen to share and chat with friends. And it’s easy to see social commerce with a click to purchase on the TV screen just like a click to purchase on your laptop or phone.

And why not sports book-like communal gambling over a basketball game? Or real-time video chat with friends across the country while watching an episode of True Blood? Or some yet-to-be-invented social game that let’s you Foursquare-like check in and find your friends watching the same show and connect with them?

Google and Apple and Sony won’t  be the doers here. But game developers, social widget designers, and smart entrepreneurs will be rising everywhere to help us take connectivity from the couch and make it social for those around us in the living room and my friends across the globe.

Social platforms and online communities transformed information sharing  on the social web. Connect it to the big screen and it has the potential to lend its dynamics to the connected TV platform and make watching more active, shopping a bit more collective and natural and entertainment just more fun….with friends.

Move over George Jetson! Your cartoon future may just have started to get real!

Hitwise numbers reported last week by Barry Levine in Sci-Tech Today, indicated that for the first time, Facebook not Google was the dominant driver of traffic to the Internet.

He captured this fact in a great phrase: Facebook is now the center of gravity for the Internet.

This is really a significant shift. No longer is search what drives the majority of internet users to launch their browsers in the morning, but it is now replaced by the need to go to our Facebook pages, visit and get our information from our communities. And undoubtedly hang out online longer and be social.

Is the big change here that we choose social over search? Obviously the numbers don’t lie and now Facebook leads as the driver of online activity. But this goes deeper and speaks to how we are finding information online and from a different vantage point. I’ve blogged on the shift to the power of our networks here and the wisdom of the community here.

Think about Facebook for a moment. We choose our friends, populate our communities and determine the content of the Facebook Newsfeed we see. For myself, the Newsfeed is my principal information source for many topics. New post by Fred Wilson…there. New post by friend Mark Essel…there. What’s new in the wine world…there. Tech news, art news, world views, silly points of views…all there in the feed from trusted folks I’ve chosen to allow into my community.

Most every topic that I’m interested in is in my feed when I log in for my first click of the morning and many times during the day. This personalized channel doesn’t miss much and it is constantly changing as I join clubs, add friends and post myself.

This information and news is all in-network, all referral, all from trusted sources that I allow to be displayed. With the new numbers from Hitwise and the astounding fact that 500,000 a day are joining Facebook, I’m presuming that the majority of people on the web daily are doing the same thing. Determining their communities, getting information from friends and doing just what I do. Which is in essence personalizing the information they see and adjusting the filters of who they trust.

The big question for me is not why we are there or what we are doing. But where does the search function live and what does it look like moving forward? Certainly with communities as the majority base, search can’t remain extant from those communities, with importance and popularity determined externally.

We search for information. It’s a natural state that drove us to Google originally. For data. For dictionary understanding. For all the stuff that inspires our imagination. Our hunger for facts.

Search is essential but importance ranking or popularity of information shouldn’t be determined impersonally. My community should be determining link popularity, not the open web and keyword densities.

Great questions are starting to surface:

-Where is the search function going to live? Are we going to have to leave the community and go elsewhere to get answers?

-Is the search mechanism itself going to start taking the preferences and the value of the community into consideration on what is trusted or more important?

-And is search going to be a function of Facebook? Of Google? Something completely new like Hunch? Or a hybrid?

It seems that the numbers from Hitwise are stating a priority. And that priority is community. Likewise, it’s logical that social and community search are the next steps. We simply require that our communities become the new filters.

To me these are the critical questions that the shift from Google to Facebook dominance raise.

Search we must have but personalized and community filtered and centered it must become.

The answers to these questions are unknown as yet… but they are interesting and important and will change the online experience as they work themselves out.

Making video easy…is hard. But it is starting to happen and adding a new dimension to socialization on the Internet.

On the social web and on Facebook, the trend towards sending and sharing video is growing at enormous rates. Internet TV viewing in the US alone has increased more than 50% year over year. But there is a difference between sharing a video on YouTube, viewing a concert on Facebook through Ustream and what innovative startups are calling social video.

The social aspect of video is blurring the boundaries between real life and real experiences online. But more interesting, it is letting people connect with celebrities, brands, politicians and leaders in a powerful new way. This is the game changer.

The state of art for socialization around video today is in three buckets.

With YouTube, you capture a video moment, upload it and share it by sending it around. Fun stuff and we all feel good when we get comments like ”Looking good” or ”Great vacation” or “Can’t wait to see you.” Similar to a video post on your Facebook wall. While richer content than a photo, not really that different.

With the streaming companies like Ustream, Livestream and JustinTV, we are finally getting events and shows delivered digitally to us on our laptops and phones inside of Facebook. It’s cool to watch a show, comment on the wall, or Tweet out what your thinking to your friends. Similar to Social TV. Their goal is to create a virtual living room or concert hall around the shared experience. The event is streamed, the comments are to your friends via chat. This is less about changing socialization than about changing the delivery from analog to digital.

The third, more embryonic and more interesting is what is termed social video and is finding a home on Facebook.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I am an Advisor to Vpype, a social video startup. Social video, from Vpype’s application, lets an individual or a brand or businesses create a video conversation with their friends or fans on Facebook. You use your Friends Lists and Event Manager to decide where and when, you broadcast live and share the broadcast channel with your audience who can ask questions, interact and shape the content of what you are presenting or talking about.

So social video is a two-way, one-to-many shared channel of communications where the broadcaster interacts live, unscripted with their audience. The entire event is saved, shareable and reviewable. The content of this video conversation is the combination of the broadcasters video and the viewers’ comments. The sum of both defines the experience. Think of a live TV show with an audience that interacts freely with the host.

OK…so we have a live two-way channel between brands and fans. It’s authentic because you can see the broadcaster. It’s real because it’s live and free flowing. And it’s more intimate and compelling because it’s personal. Yes, this is where real life and real conversations online start to come together.

But the game changing power of this comes from something special that is only available on the social web. And that is connecting with stars (from your local politician to a movie star) in real time in a personal way. Think for a second about Twitter and one of the many reasons why it’s so powerful. You can message Ashton Kutcher or John Mayer and potentially get a response back from them in seconds. For millions this is beyond a wow experience. This could also be Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco, your Senator, Yankee baseball slugger or your local celebrity chef.

With social video, this connection between brand and fan could become a video conversation on Facebook from a Fan Page or a personal profile. With these celebrities talking to their fans or customers through their Fan Pages directly.

Vpype’s Live Broadcaster is pioneering an interactive video conversation application for Facebook brands and businesses. I will do a follow-up blog post on early beta testers for Vpype as they come online, which include a Hollywood Screen Writers Pitch Contest, Evangelical Ministers, Auto shops, DJs, virtual online assistants and one public company planning on doing its Earnings Call via the social video product.

This is what is starting to happen on Facebook. Having a cloud-based architecture, a global massive audience that grows by 500,000 a day and a proven model for friending and socialization makes it a natural. Not to mention monetization from its advertising model. I’ve blogged on this here.

Today, social video is a conversation defined in a video and gravitar-based chat environment. Voice channels and split screen (Larry King-like) environments are being tested now. And with 4G networks within reach, the paradigm will go mobile for broadcasting as well as interactive video chatting.

It is still early days for this dream but it is really starting to happen. It’s empowering for all of us to be on the brink of another chasm-leaping breakthrough in technology and behavioral change.

As much as I’ve embraced the social web and Facebook today, this leap is really something to get excited about.

I’ll be online broadcasting and trying this one out.

Something very essential has changed in how we discover and share information on the web.

You remember the old marketing story that you need to plan your company’s growth as if you were throwing a stone to hit a speeding train at a trajectory in the future?

Not true nor possible any longer. We are the runaway train now and there are no tracks only breadcrumbs of ideas to guide us.

Web development platforms, distribution strategies, analytics and business models are constantly moving and making jumps to one side or another. Things are not in flux as much as they are growing in ways that no one can accurately forecast. We can surmise intelligently but the future is being created as we figure it out.

The day of the pundit and the grand expert is gone. Sure smart people can lay out the dots but there is no one right answer and there is no one opinion that connects and matters most of all.

And in the face of few undeniable truths, information and ideas and thoughtful opinions have never been more critical to figuring out what to do. The Yoda of today provide guidance and pockets of deep knowledge rather than complete answers and tightly held secrets.

Enter the real-time social web, communities of interest and the driving need forever expanding trusted networks.

Every day I wake up with some thought that demands discussion, be it around virtual currency or social data measurement or new way to discover an audience. And I reach out to find conversation threads that I can participate in and move to a decision or a better understanding. Conversations are the data points and content for new ideas and new ways to crop a thought so it becomes actionable.

Socialization is the fabric for a new kind of educational discourse that sits on top of dynamic connectors like Disqus and drives us towards blog communities of trusted friends. The curriculum is the banter we create around topics of interest. This process is inherently dynamic and reinvents itself continuously.

Authentic people, valued through their conversations and trusted because they are transparent and knowable in the real world are key to this. Hidden identities and unlinked personas are by definition not as valued. Socialization as a venue for community requires honesty and transparency. And I believe that this process makes folks both more civil and more unabashed, thus feeding the cycle of honest exchange.

Network growth is the offshoot of this process. The more you work to understand the kernels of ideas that drive growth, the more communities you search out, the more conversations with authenticated trusted friends you have and the more you become social and connected. And as well, the less isolated and more supported you become.

This process is quite remarkable and wonderful…but more importantly essential.

And this new reality leads to previously unheard of behaviors that really do work. Writing presentations and books live and collaboratively with your networks. The ideas of free (or Fremium) as channels for transaction. The reality that by sharing honestly, you are building a value chain for distributing your ideas and products. Many more are being created daily.

This process will not only continue but intensify. As ideas like social commerce take hold, tools for community and conversation will become even more dynamic and move to be as efficient on a mobile platform as at the desktop.

I already spend my days moving from laptop to mobile, moving from meetings, in and out of subways, and dinners with friends, following strings of conversations and thoughts and project updates. This is how I define work on a good day.

The unknowns will continue to surface and become more complex certainly. But there is a parallel development of social tools that make it possible for communities to continually iterate towards new conclusions just as the technology opens new frontiers.

Ahh… how much difference a few years make. The old world of e-commerce and transactional metrics are softening and social new world performance values are the developing realities for today’s businesses.

A short while back when the economy was booming, e-commerce was the word to describe the then new model and we learned how to navigate the world of click-to-transaction like scientists. The analytic systems from Google, FeedBurner and Omniture were our tools to get the job done. We measured everything and we optimized human traffic from a click to dynamically created content on a landing page to a transaction. This was harvesting at its most efficient. This was a transactional-based business reality.

But the world and the business model with it are changing slowly but dramatically. Old school e-commerce is changing and being modified by what some are calling Social Commerce.  Moving forward we are building an economics of social performance where community and commerce are tied together. Fred Wilson drove this home to me in his quote on social commerce from Rob Kalin, founder of Etsy.

The rising dominance of the social web appears to correspond with a questioning of the e-commerce model and created a new ecosystem for engagement with the customer. The focus today is the value of interaction and customer engagement first, the transaction later. The principal action is not harvesting clicks but building a place where conversations between the customers and the company, and between customers and other customers can happen openly in a seamless manner. The goal on the social web is to create a community. Sales and transactions build from interactions and from the community base.

Market makers and business owners know how to find the right click and how to measure every bit and action on the open web but when it comes to building and measuring the dynamics of a community with the goal of social commerce, for the most part, we are without clear guidelines.

This is fascinating because out of a period of e-commerce where everything was quantifiable, we seem to have few real datapoints to depend on. You can’t argue away the social web. You can’t deny the value of conversations between companies and customers. The rules of behavior and engagement are just being written now as we move from the crowd to the community and from harvesting clicks to building a social environment for commerce.

This is not an all or nothing reality. We have an arsenal of analytic tools and data. And we are experts at using them. We also have a bunch of new data points—posts, retweets, links, comments and Facebook Shares. All can be measured but no one really knows their value in the stated goal of creating a commercially viable community.

You can use logic and surmise the value of a post over a click, a retweet over a like, a Share over an embedded link but honestly, we don’t know how these gel to create that ineffable community formula. And if you think about it, all of these data points are superficial by themselves. You need to value the currency of the link, rank the reputation of the commenter, and understand the importance of the Sharer’s groups.

The basic issue underlying all of this flux is not counting and measuring but weighing the value of the information. Interestingly as we figure out the value scale of people’s proxies online we will also figure out commerce models that translate reputation into economics.

This is the Wild West and we are building groups and guiding them into communities with the intent of creating social commerce.

I think of this as good news. Uncertainty creates opportunities. Old systems falling means we get a chance to create the value system for the new ones.

And honestly, when commerce is not strictly a data harvesting activity based on price and match but a value system you need to establish a conversation with your market, it’s a lot more interesting and more like the real world rather than a grand catalogue of clicks and optimizations and transactions. People make it interesting and social commerce has put people rather than clicks at the center of the market where they belong.

The cloud is one of the great equalizers for companies doing global business.

Whether its Amazon’s EC2 or another service, building your offering in the cloud is a game changer. I’m not talking about the obvious upsides of storage, scalability and the beauty of having both without sunk capital on servers and infrastructure. I’m thinking about marketing and the leveling effect that the cloud has across geographies and computer owners.

Facebook’s new plateau of 350M users prompted me to look at this from a distribution and marketing point of view.

Facebook users by country.

1. United States                    94,748,820

2. United Kingdom                22,261,080

3. Turkey                               14,215,880

4. France                                13,396,760

5. Canada                              13, 228,380

6. Italy                                   12,581,060

7. Indonesia                          11,759,980

8. Spain                                    7,313,160

9. Australia                              7,176,640

10. Philippines                         6,991,040

(numbers from “Social Media Matters, Building Brands on Facebook”)

Turkey #3, Indonesia #7 and the Philippines #10 are the ones that catch the marketers and business modeler’s eye. Surprising high user numbers in countries that have low computer penetration.

When you match this list against the top 15 countries for PC and computer penetration per capita, Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines don’t show on the list at all. These countries, as expected fall into the ‘Have Nots’ as regards to computer ownership. No surprise here but just checking.

The ‘why’ of this is simple actually.

If you stick all the computing power and storage in the cloud, and make your client-side download tiny or nil your market becomes infinite in concept. Yes, this can be costly to initiate, and surprisingly hard to set up and difficult to manage but possible if you are motivated enough to figure it out. Your users have PCs in ‘Have’ countries, phones and netbooks in ‘Have Less’ countries and in places like Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines, some combo of phones and an Internet Café culture. So putting the weight and smarts in the cloud and little to nothing on the client side, lets your value be found and used regardless of the PC footprint. Likewise, an almost global market.

This is not true Democratization of access as it costs and separates out those without capital, but for Facebook and a host of other services and applications, this creates a one-world flattened marketplace.

I’ve been ranting for a while that marketing in today’s world, is not about add-on campaigns or line items, it’s about thinking through how to discover your market with the product or service itself, from inception. Whether for Facebook this was forethought or afterthought is irrelevant as it is the reality of their success.

Cheaper smart phones and netbooks will drive folks out of the Internet Café’s possibly to park benches and coffee shops across the world but the reality remains the same.

Draw three big circles: Global. Mobile. Social. And where they intersect is one universal market.

The cloud is the glue that can make them work from San Diego to Bangladesh to wherever if the offering is compelling enough. I like this. A flattened world engenders democratic access, at least in concept. As a marketer and businessperson, this is a powerful and empowering realization.

The challenge of building social communities within the enterprise has for a while seemed to be the next great frontier to conquer. So when Salesforce.com announced Chatter as the intersection of social media and CRM within a secure enterprise environment, I anxiously jumped on the demo materials to see if Marc Benioff could deliver something game changing.

Chatter is impressive. Photos, chat, link sharing, groups…and all this tied into your CRM system and happily existing in the cloud. You can interact with your co-workers; integrate CRM into a pictorial interface. It’s a clever social design makeover for the dark and productivity numbing design of most intranets and CRM systems that we’ve all been forced to use.

I would call what Chatter is doing clever social design; Salesforce calls it social collaboration. Congrats to them. Well done.

However what Salesforce.com focused on with Chatter is only one dimension of the social graph—that is the dynamic GUI and usability, but they halted sharply behind the most critical factor, that of personal empowerment and control. It’s an impressive attempt that will improve productivity and flatten the workflow no doubt, but it’s one-dimensional and at the end feels like work, not a community.

In fact, Chatter seems like a parallel community to the one we socialize in, in Facebook or MySpace or Twitter. Familiar somehow with all of the needed buttons to push, but intentionally unconnected to our personal real networks and lives. It by definition creates separation.

Imagine Facebook with no external plug-ins. Or better, Facebook, with all of your ‘relevant’ groups and external plug-ins and filters selected by company policy. Or Disqus with someone else at the controls deciding which comments stay or go in your portal and who has the permissions to post on your blog.

Social media per Wikipedia defines itself as ‘many to many’, ‘dialogue vs. monologue’ and ‘content consumers vs. content producers’. Salesforce and the folks who write this are of a like mind, but both are narrow definitions and missing the point. Their definitions are offshoots of the dynamics, not the dynamics themselves.

Social media, like the communities it spawns, are about personal control, empowerment and in a strange way freedom. It is about the democratization of the community members themselves. Whether on Facebook or participating in blog communities, the most important factor is your sense of control and the community dynamics that this engenders. You decide who your friends are. You filter and group and rank people, feeds, topics and content. You choose and define the world you function in.

And here’s the thing that struck me. Chatter allows Twitter feeds and even selected interactions with Facebook. But it appears to filter that information and decides for the individual and community what info is germane to work and what is personal. And from the descriptions in the literature, it allows information in, but generally, not out.  There are corporate filters that mine your networks to make you ostensibly a better worker.

Social media and our networks have changed the world. With my networks I can reach back across 20 years of work and personal interactions and access vast amounts of data and information from people that I already have a trust relationship with. I ask and I give things back. This makes me unbelievably productive and makes my value in some ways a correlative of the breadth and vitality of the networks I create around myself over time.

Two truisms jump out at me.

First, why would I or any individual within a corporation allow restrictive mining of my personal networks when I don’t control the filters? You are selling your personal contacts without giving them the ability to opt out. Seems just wrong on every level.

And second, if you believe in the innate power of the social graph, it is unnecessary to worry about controlling your employee’s socialization. If you hire great employees and empower them to thrive, you need not be concerned with them spending their work time socializing. In fact, you encourage it. You will realize that X% socialization be it online or at the water cooler, drives productivity through the roof. This is an old truth that is true online as well.

Social design is the tactical design language that adds dynamic dimension to information architecture and flow. And Chatter, if I understand its announcement promises, will break some new ground. But it is only a singular dimension and stops short of enabling a real community where employees bring with them the power of their own networks and reputations and connections.

This is a big step forward. But no matter how clever the social design, nor how empowering it is within the company, till it entrusts people to use their own networks and trusts them to be the arbiter of their own socialization, it misses the bigger point and the greater upside.

If your company is small, your product not quite there and your customer base embryonic, and you think your problem is your marketing budget, you are most likely wrong.

Marketing costs money and since cave man days, marketers have been squeezed to perform tactical miracles with whatever was left post product development. Marketers have squirmed and cracked under this pressure for generations.

Thankfully, it’s a new world today and much more interesting. Marketing leadership is not tied inextricably to dollars and programs. And money is not the exclusive currency of success or failure.

This is not to say that brilliant push advertising can’t work in some instances, but certainly no startup can do a raise to get visibility on the traditional tech advertising venues dominated by Apple, Microsoft and now Google. The class gap has become a chasm and it’s just not going to happen. Don’t even bother to think about this. Check, move on and be happy that this is gone.

Marketing chutzpah is no longer about squeezing a dollar out of a dime, perfectly executed traditional venues, or gimmicky schmaltz. It’s about building a product that has articulable value and a distribution strategy that is part of the product itself. And the honesty and smarts to build a community and social presence that has dynamics and viral oomph.

I hear whining and condemnation coming from my smart friends in advertising and traditional big brands, crying foul and calling me the faddish futurist. I’m being practical about pushing the concept of marketing into product development and holding firm to the belief that marketing is about finding a market, not about budgets and campaigns that sit as an line item on a spreadsheet.

My point of view is that today, without a social component, a two-way conversation with your customer or your community, you simply can’t succeed. Large company or small. It just can’t happen.

The larger brands have the leverage of the base. They have their own set of demons to deal with. But the startup has well…only the value of its product and its personality to capture their version of Seth Godin’s ‘sneezers’ who will start the drum circle going from the one to the many and from those many to many more.

The truism is that unless your customers and channel are your voluntary enthusiasts and marketers, you won’t move from company push to market pull without a thunderbolt of luck.

The change that the social web has brought for the marketer is empowering. The age-old discrete building blocks of Product then Marketing Plan then Distribution Strategy then Rollout are rolled into one. For business, especially e-businesses, how you sell, price, market and distribute the product are all part of the same paradigm. One box. The more you create separate buckets, the more you are stacking the odds against success. And yes, this means that the marketing manager had better be the marketing product manager and channel thinker as well. And that marketing tactics as an afterthought to product development is as useless as product development without an eye towards true customer value.

I don’t usually rant, but I’m impatient at the flood of reactions from traditional media types that the basic components of our markets haven’t changed. They really have and the big brands with big dollars don’t have a lock on the consumer’s attention any longer.