The give and take between explicit requests and implicitly inferred assumptions is the natural state of how we live.

Offline we don’t really think about this.

Face-to-face with family, friends and tight-knit interest groups we accept that serendipity just happens, more often than we expect. The sum of explicit and implicit requests and assumptions is what make human dynamics what it is.

This dynamic is also the core DNA of community, online and off.

Given the right environment, this interplay of explicit demands providing keys to implicit inferences just surfaces naturally. This is why community works and very much why it matters.

As marketers and business owners, this is key to what we do and why community dynamics are both marketing goals and a gauge of the health of a growing business.

This is a simple and basic truth, yet bears repeating.

Great companies learn from what our customers ask for explicitly and listen hard to what they infer implicitly. This listening is a core competency of marketing and business development, interpersonal and inter-customer communications.

This is true not only of companies built on the ‘network effect’ of spiraling interconnected customer growth, but all business that gather their customers around each other, and themselves, to continually recreate their market dynamics.

Yet, as marketers, we spend a lot of time reconceptualizing the value of community. It’s a never-ending process. A healthy discussion certainly but ultimately a conclusion you need to accept without pure data as proof.

The exploded focus on what is referred to as the ‘implicit graph’ and the power of implicit data over the last few months has by default shined a brightened light on the value of community. What the curation segment and social networks call the implicit graph has no greater proof point than the dynamics of a successful online community.

Community is the sandbox for the power of implicit connections and test bed for how to use that data.

This is what a community platform like Disqus, the socialization around video in Google+ Hangouts, the inference-based connecting power of Foursquare and personalization of Hunch are all getting at.

Community is hard to make happen. But the pieces that marketers move around in social design are the people themselves. We resift the sand in the sandbox till it works.

In social communities online and off, implicit connections are a function of human behaviors, encapsulated in conversations.

On social nets the behavior become data. The networks need to collect and sort through an ever-growing matrix of social data and algorithmically connect implicit input to explicit inferences.

There is a core connection between the gestalt of community and the data driven power of the implicit graph as a tool for social discovery. This started to come together for me last month when I participated in two workshops around “Social Discovery and the Implicit Graph.” Eric Friedman from Foursquare wrote a post on the workshops that is worth a read.

They were group brainstorms organized and led by Disqus, Hunch, Foursquare, StumbleUpon and Tumblr. Each of these companies has a business interest in figuring out how to drive implicit recommendations that are personalized for each individual over time.

Nothing was decided. Much was discussed. The standing room only crowd was inspiring.

The following from the conversation stuck with me:

-People expect the benefits of implicit suggestions on their social nets.

It’s not creepy that Foursquare should suggest things that we want to do when we are somewhere in NYC, it’s what check in-apps should be doing.

Having to explicitly ask for everything we want is both unnatural and boring. It belies the value of connecting and the power of the networks themselves.

People want to get suggestions on what they want without asking for them.

-People expect companies and brands to know them personally and implicitly.

Each of us invests time in sharing our thoughts forward and chronicling our lives as they happen online. This is public information and companies have access to this.

Translated…there is a market for Hunch in my opinion, big time.

-People want implicit discovery as a personal tool.

Search is not enough. Inferred info streams ala Facebook news feeds are not adequate. People want searchable context and companies like Disqus with the implicit data of 50M commenters in their database that can provide enormous value for discovery. The market appears to want it. I certainly do.

When I think about Foursquare in this context, what they are really doing is creating a social, inference-based platform that creates micro-flash communities on demand, one implicitly value-based connection after another, check in by check in.

You can build an analogous map for StumbleUpon, Tumblr and Hunch.

This is very cool stuff. Powerful, heady and just plain hard to do. A bold attempt to build social consciousness into artificial intelligence, code-driven algorithm that spits out time sensitive, personalized implicit suggestions.

I think this is still all about community.

Community works, my bet is that the implicit graph will also.

We intuitively understand the power of our social nets.

They are part of the fabric of our lives. Liking and sharing are natural behaviors; Facebook and Twitter are platforms for our personal expression.

For businesses and brands though, harnessing these nets with intent for business purposes is tough…often elusive. Most businesses wriggle around on the friendship graph, entreating others to follow and like them, stumbling forward through a fog of loose connections.

The gist of the challenge is ingrained in the naturalness of the social web itself. It’s a reflecting pool for our lives and public by design. Whispers become amplified; conversations become a form of attention grabbing media themselves.

The social web is host to an ongoing live channel with ‘us’ as the star, innately external and globally immediate. This is key to both its power and to channeling the subtleties to make it actionable.

Think of it this way.

Being a natural communicator and performer with genuineness, poise, excitement and humility is no small feat on or offline. That’s the realm of stars and performers.

Being natural in the spotlight and publicly poised is just not that ‘natural’ for most of us.

For businesses hidden behind a URL online rather than the archetypal counter at the local store, the separation creates uneasiness. Being face-to-face shines an easy light on our personal foibles. Being ourselves on the web is akin to performing on a global real-time stage. If only the professional performers can play here, this is zero sum game.

Self-help lists for the online marketer or tips for the tweeting CEO are just not enough nor that useful. People and companies need less dressing up and polish and more context for conversations. Being genuine is more powerful than being professional.

Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame, sheds light on this in a great post defining what he calls ‘social objects’. For him, context is discoverable in a social object that encapsulates interests and passions. It’s a connecting node on the mesh of the interest graph.

He also alludes to the need to embrace the inner geekiness behind every social object.

Wine geeks. Gardening geeks. Foodies. Motorcycle fanatics. Rabid sports fans. The web lets us follow our interests globally, immediately and with uncanny depth. We are all like a ten-year old kid rattling off facts on dinosaurs. We live in a world of passionate geeks searching for communities of interest. I’m certainly one.

He’s onto something.

I posted about context as a filter over friendship and how the interest graph is the playing field for connections and dynamic communities of interest. Hugh’s social objects are islands of aggregated passion around an interest that cuts through the noise of friendly social chatter and surfaces like safe harbors on this graph.

This just works. Focus on your interests as the language for connection, and passion as the rhythm for communications and you are not performing, simply conversing.

What does this mean for businesses?

Everything…with a twist.

It’s too easy to state that we want a conversation between company and customer. While true, it doesn’t bring you any closer to action than would a list of general ‘to do’s’ for your Facebook fan page.

This is the action gap personified.

A market’s need for context and connected interest is not well served with lists that skirt the issue and spiral away from a solution. The gap is real. The solution requires a new and more focused lens on the situation.

Few companies have rock star CEO or CMO bloggers. Or big juicy viral topics that connect the masses in a sweeping horizontal flash. Or are brilliantly coy in their poise.

But all companies have passion points. If you are a start-up, that’s what drove you to create your business and solve a market problem. If you have market traction, that’s why your customers come back and engage with you.

Building a brand is hard. Finding a phrase that captures your core value is elusively magical. Marketing needs to lead this process, but as a discipline is behind in understanding its role.

These passion points are true for disruptive companies bent on transforming the world, like Etsy with an artisanal marketplace or Kickstarter with crowd-sourced funding. True also for the most vertical niche like custom snow boards. Or just stuff we love in our neighborhoods like a farm-to-table local restaurant or a natural wine bar with weekly tastings.

Companies like Shopbop accomplish this through a great shopping interface that make purchasing women’s clothes online easy and fun. Or Boxee, through an easy flowing, information rich enthusiast and product blog. Or communities like Ravelry for knitters or SEOmoz for search experts

For every possible slice of the universal marketplace pie there is a unique vernacular and a singular bridge to connection.

You need to start the process of discovering your marketplace with this bridge. Your customers won’t tell you what language to speak but they will let you know you have it right when they start talking back.

The social web has a connection conundrum.

Our own enthusiasm with the democratization of expression has created the very noise that is making it hard for ourselves to be heard clearly–or even found.

The antidote to social noise, the key to finding connections around interests lies somewhere in the interest graph and the choice of context over friendship as a filter for relevance. I blogged on this here.

This is a real problem for everyone on social web. It’s a gotcha built into the fabric of social ecosystem itself, not an isolated bubble nor a mass hallucination of the uber tech aficionados.

Finding real connections with like-minded individuals and for businesses, connecting with their marketplace requires a fresh look at the social infrastructure, with a new lens…or maybe the current one turned inside out.

Social media logic says to keep creating interesting and honest content, keep recycling and resharing links and this will create intersections of value. This brute force approach is too haphazard and works less well daily. We need to understand how social design intersects with businesses needs; where context connects with customers.

And how it becomes actionable—how do you find and have conversations with people who are interested in both sports and raw foods? How does your company connect with people who are trying to solve a problem that your company’s product is built for? Actionable context is the goal.

Think of the filtered web as a mesh of layers getting finer and more finely tuned as you surface from the amorphous friend’s graph to discover interest connections and context for conversations. You need to pop out value connections from the social graph, not just add to it with more content and noise. This is not a science but it is marketing with focused social intent.

Harnessing interest and context is the realm of the curation tools and platforms. There are scads of companies in a race to win our attention, capture our network data, discover context and build new communities of interest at the intersection of these social graphs around our specific needs.

This is just really hard to do and today, more promise than reality. Filtering relevance and connection out of broad-based social networks is non-trivial but key to discovering business utility within the wondrous social framework of the real-time web.

I believe that you need to focus on context over friendship and discovery not just curation as the goal. That’s the end game and the fuel behind the race. I’m positive that every curation platform, especially the more aggressive ones like Summify and XYDO and the scrappy smart ones like Eqentia, are all chasing this.

I search for contextual connections every day for my own and my client’s businesses and have tried many of the platforms. This is my wish list to make curation useful and discovery tangible for both individuals and businesses.

‘Good enough’ curation filters are neither good nor specific enough to be useful

Curation is in some ways just smart search with an intent to aggregate and share.

The same problems that plague search plague curation as well. What I see in Summify or XYDO, I’ve already seen in my Facebook wall or Twitter streams. And most of what I see isn’t that contextual, it’s simply a garden-variety search result with social plugins as a layer.

Two ideas jump to mind that may help to remedy sameness by building context around more unique information:

-Broaden the input stream

The world is not just Facebook and Twitter. Few (maybe no) curation engines import Tumblr content. And none have found a way to work with Disqus to plumb the massive implicit data that resides in their comment systems.

35 million Disqus commenters having conversations on over 750,000 blogs is a global pool of connection value that is untouched. That’s an ocean of context to channel.

-Self-tuning and personalized curation controls

When most players in a new segment are building the same thing, something is amiss. Curation tools are essential but they mostly seem generic and force context based on link popularity. This is both a yawn as a social play and non productive as a business solution. The curation process needs to be personal, customizable and adjustable in real-time.

The hierarchy of curation terms would be a good start, like you adjust bid terms in a pay-per-click ad campaign. These are personal filters, your screens with different mesh densities, that need to move from the very specific (rarely used) to the general (everybody uses).

Being able to parse and rearrange streams of information by keyword lets you define your own context.

For example, my list of curation keywords for natural wines (general to specific) is: Artisanal-> Natural->Organic-> Biodynamic-> Region-> Vineyard->individual vintage.

I want to pull the adjustment levers at will, adjusting the search as I refine the information and the context I think is most promising.

Check out Eqentia’s dashboard for this. It’s a good one, letting me curate by type and sort by a variety of factors, not just popularity.

Sharing is not contextual by definition

A Facebook ‘Like’. A link ‘Share’, or a ‘Follow’ are not delimiting factors and while they inform, they don’t really guide finding information or context.

Think about what happens on a comment string of Fred Wilson’s or Mark Suster’s blogs. These guys are master curators of focused and topical communities. Both are the epitome of context and a bright spotlight on the interest graph for technology and start-up discussions.

Their dynamic encourages sharing, learning, friendships, communities of extended interest and even new customers and partners. They are a wonder and but very much the exception.

Few of the curation platform players seem to understand that content without dynamic context is really neither interesting nor that valuable. The mix of search and social is uncomfortable and bolted on, like Google trying to integrate social data into search.

Interest footprints are complex and multifaceted, like people themselves

When I decided to hang my business and wine blogs off of the same URL, a couple of friends thought I was wacky. But that is my interest footprint and my personal passion graph and just who I am. Today over 90% of my business connections converse with me about wine. That intersection of wine for me, is a shared footprint along with business needs.

Follow any comment string on a dynamic community. If the commenter is from Colorado in the winter, skiing comes up. If from Spain, Mencia and Galica surface. If from London, the Tate Modern. This is human nature. The platform needs to encourage and support conversations as they naturally occur.

Human nature is telling us something about social business design. We want to have interests intersect even as we are searching for just one. Few of the curation platforms seem to be listening.

Discovering context is the end game of curation

The need to filter social networks to create value is a natural reaction to the raw value and size of the networks themselves.

Social nets like Facebook and Twitter need to figure this out for their own models. The rest of us do it for pursuit of interests, business connections and enlisting customers. It’s a real problem with no apparent nor pat solution.

Some niches have developed communities around rock star bloggers. But there is an infinite yearning for groupings around informational needs in travel, arts, sciences, crafts and on and on. On my list of have-to-finds, very few are located. And just putting out more and more content to create a magnet for context is a non-answer.

Businesses fall into that same need to discover these groupings to find new interest for their products. They need to channel the contextual exhaust from these communities of interest into commercial connections. They are looking for these informational-sorted, socially-fueled links in their sales and community funnels.

It’s this commerce piece of the search for context that is the Philosopher’s Stone of the social web.

The market leading solution will be some variation of a B-to-C-to-B curation paradigm. People want to connect socially, create communities of interest with new friends, share information and refer each other to products or vendors or destinations.

When this happens, not only will individuals have dynamic channels for connections but businesses will have a new customer acquisition pipeline from these communities of curated interests.

And the platform that figures out how to go beyond friendship-based communities and referrals to context and interest-based commercial traffic aggregators will have solved both the value for their network users and the business model for themselves at the same time.

Web traffic is the marketplace talking to us at a click level.

This is true both pre and post the social web.

But just about everything else has changed, including the very nature of how SEO works as a traffic driver in a world reconfigured around the social web.

Two guys who really get traffic, Henry Blodget (CEO of Business Insider) and Kevin Krim (Head of Digital, Bloomberg) were on a panel at Media Summit 2011 recently talking about traffic. I sat in and per them, the traffic growth breakdown looks like this for content sites:

• Direct  =   40-60%
• SEO    =   30-40%
• Social  =   20-35%

This looks textbook perfect but to most of us is more aspirational than a reflection of what our own stats look like.

Content rich sites are finding themselves challenged by traffic growth, especially in natural search. At one level, this stems from a crowded and competitive keyword universe. Domains are scarce and most common category keywords wildly competitive and seemingly impossible to show above the fold where it matters.

But more than keyword competition, the seemingly counterintuitive connection between success in natural search and success in driving community and social traffic is at the core of the new search order and at the heart of the traffic challenge.

I advised a client on this recently and it afforded me the opportunity to vet my search assumptions to a handful of highly referred, smart people and agencies in the SEO field.

To be clear, I’m not an expert. I’m the customer of SEO services. I don’t need to understand everything at an atomic level but I need to feel informed to the point that I’m comfortable making the tradeoffs in schedule and budget to get the best traffic results.

Understanding the changes in search in a social world took more work than I imagined…and the comfort with vendors and their approach has not been easy. Every business owner and marketer must be facing the same choices when noodling over how to grow their traffic and their businesses because it is they, not the experts, who need to make these resource and business decisions.

To help myself understand, and with some guidance from smart people I bumped into, I built three thought categories that helped me, even though they broke the mold somewhat of how traditional agencies service their clients.

How to decide what really matters to drive more traffic in SEO?

Brad Prescott, an organic search publisher who thinks at the intersection of social, search and lead gen, shared the following with me as a guideline to rank search activities in order of contribution to traffic.

• Content  = 40%
• Backlinks  = 40%
• Spider friendly code = 20%

I view these as a virtual slider to help make decisions and develop qualifying criteria of what makes sense to do and when.

For example:

-Great content with spider friendly code won’t have a great ranking without strong backlinks.

Translation:  the proof of the quality of content is the quantity of links that get shared. Your market is guiding you on what they like. Code is irrelevant at this juncture.

-Great content with strong backlinks will rank well without spider friendly code.

Translation: If the content is interesting and shared, you can still rank well even without spider friendly code on your site. You can compete in the rankings war even without the pain and cost of massive code changes.

-Great content with strong backlinks will accelerate in rankings greatly if you clean up the code.

Translation: If content is great and humming, you’ve got approx 20% of upside cleaning up the code level. This is tough work, involves engineering and for small companies is a tradeoff between building out the product or fixing the plumbing. Sometimes it’s right. Rarely ever the first step. A great first step when starting from scratch, harder the more the site gets iterated together.

You might think these simple conclusions are obvious. From the conversations I had and quotes I took, they are not.

For example, if you have seemingly topped out in SEO-driven traffic growth but have low social and SEO sources, what is the first activity?

• Fix the code because while not easy it is a discrete action that is knowable?
• Reconfigure your thinking and content approach to discover how to turn your customers interest into sharable information bits to drive more unique traffic?

People often choose what they know and avoid having to do what they don’t have a clear scientific path for. This happens all the time. It’s the wrong choice.

I’m a believer in an integrated marketing and search approach. Everything does tie together at its core. But the argument that you need to do code level work at the same time as content and backlinks is misguided logic to my thinking. This is text-book not the priority driven real world. Certainly everything contributes, but you should choose what is most pertinent not what is most familiar nor discrete.

Part of the problem with traditional approaches to SEO at an agency level comes from a seeming mismatch between how search used to be and how it is today.

There is a skill set for understanding how to create spider friendly code. A skill set for thin slicing the world into keyword matrices. A marketing strategy to build partnerships for backlinks. And the hard and critical and unchartered work of creating socially interesting and shareable content.

No one individual can do these all. I question whether all four can exist within an agency that is targeted towards and affordable by a small or mid sized company.

Thinking of the world from a keyword perspective matters…and is learnable.

Keywords, as Joel Greenberg, a marketing pro told me, are one of the spices that SEO offers to the traffic equation. And keyword knowledge is key. It used to be considered SEO DNA. It’s less overtly critical now but still important. Search and marketing and even social activities are more coherent and directed when you have this keyword map of your business ecosystem.

SEO experts think in a matrix of keywords. Translating and slicing your business goals and product strength into market terms that the search world defines for you is a powerful asset.

Mapping words against competition. Mapping words against the reality of garnishing that competitive traffic. And then teaching your writers and content curators, your community managers and tweeters, how to think about and use the terms, matters.

This is a learnable and teachable skill.

This is expertise that you need to find a way to acquire. If agencies won’t work ala Carte, find individuals with credentials to help you plot this out.

Social and search, in today’s world are more alike than different.

This is the big aha that stunned me and shone a light on where natural search is today and how to harness it for your company.

The key for both search and social is that your content needs to be interesting and relevant before it can shared and liked and referred. Very simple. Very powerful. Very difficult for many companies to do.

The good news is that the tools and networks for sharing are everywhere. The challenge is that being interesting and relevant is certainly obtainable but not trivial and is not something that a search expert or most experts can teach you.

As an example–not everyone can tell a joke but everyone likes to laugh. Therein is the situation for producing content. You need to be able to tell a joke or become the curator of the comedians, because that laugh is what is shareable. That laugh is the link that drives unique traffic.

That is why social is hard for companies. You can’t buy it. You can’t hire a proxy. You need to keep peeling back the layers between yourself and your customer till you connect. And build from there.

This is true for search as well. Google has access to all Twitter data and some of Facebook’s as well. And per them, your popularity, gauged by network chatter is part of your natural ranking.

The great post that gets retweeted and shared. The post’s comments that get shared and retweeted create both social referrals and social proof for Google’s engines.

And backlinks, whether they are a referred link on Twitter or part of a syndication out to your network, to Google are just backlinks.

It’s harder to tell how search and social are different than to list how they are alike.

This is a changed…and much more interesting world where the categorical relevance of SEO intersects with the personal communications of social.

Wrapping up

As business owners and marketers what we do, all day every day is figure out the connection between our products and the marketplace. How to grow and create value is our job description.

Over the last few posts, I’ve dug into how the social web has moved the customer into the center of the commercial bulls eye. How marketers are the connectors of customer and market value. And how human behavior broadened and found areas of expression on social nets that simply wasn’t able to be seen prior.

Honestly, I usually think of search and social as distinct, even competitive approaches to providing relevance to the customer. The Facebook <-> Google standoff.

I’m sure that exists to some degree; not so in the SEO and the social worlds.

Search informs the efficiency, especially through keywords, of social spread. And social proof  has changed its value scale and transformed the core of how search engines rank value, and create rankings. That’s what drives traffic and what determines, to a large part, your business success.

How powerful is this? How radical a change is this?

When the answer to how to increase your search rankings on Google is to write interesting content that engages your customer’s values and interest and incites sharing…everything is different.

Search and social start to dance to the same drumbeat and the customer’s satisfaction is the drummer.

And just like you need marketers and product coders to really build a winning product that organically can find its early market, you need a partnership between SEO scientists and great communicators to really crack the SEO and social code conundrum

This is a better world. More challenging in some respects, more approachable by all.

Marketing has traditionally been thought of as a split discipline, with strategy driving the concept and direction, and execution and tactics charged with making things happen.

Nothing could be further from today’s reality than this.

The more you separate the strategy from the execution, the more you wall the actions from ideas that directed them, the more you lose touch with the dynamics of the market.

And the more you view marketing as anything less than an ongoing continuum with your customer, the more you are stacking the deck against you.

Something very intrinsic has changed that drives this.

In many ways the reality of today’s business and marketing world has occurred because it can. Not only the hierarchy of power, but people themselves have changed.

I don’t know which came first–the technology that empowered the change or the human drive for different market dynamics. Regardless, the result is a new landscape with the customer as the center of gravity for the commercial world.

Human behavior has evolved alongside the technology and the marketplace has reconfigured itself to the new world order. And marketing, that connecter has shifted focus toward process of discovery and communications with the customer. In fact, marketing is that process.

I had an email exchange with a University marketing professor after I wrote my “Customers rule” post last week. This sums up his stance:

While customers have more power to vote with their dollars because of the Internet, it’s just an enabling technology and not a paradigm shift. There were customer centric companies before the Internet.

We are on opposite sides of this discussion. Not about the value of the customer but about the depth of change in today’s commercial ecosytem.

Undeniably, the tools are powerful and enabling but I believe that a basic human and commercial shift has occurred. This is not merely a continuum of core business values, but something new and more profound.

The real-time web and social nets have enabled new behaviors to arise and the social landscape has changed with them. With freedom of choice, personal power of communications and a readily available global audience, the result is a different commercial and (even) political world.

Communications and social tools are not the change–how we use them and how that has affected us is. This is a paradigm shift, not just faster cars on the same roads with the same rules.

Think about the check-in space and the social nets.

Have check-ins exploded because we have phones and are always connected or because it tapped into a behavior looking for a platform? Or the incessant need for sharing on social nets. Is Twitter or Facebook the catalyst? Or was human behavior ready to share and brand itself and the platform enabled that?

Things changed because they could, because a new platform of possibility empowered by technology but inhabited by a customer-centric world has evolved.

I believe that this is driven by the behavior not the tools. And this is not a subtle distinction, especially as it affects how we market to and discover our customers.

Great customer-centric companies like Nordstrom who invented the ‘no questions asked return’ policy in the 90s changed the rules of business dramatically. They realized that most people were honest and only returned items if they really had to. But they are not like Naked Wines , a company that opens up the supply chain of wine production and sales to the community along with a no questions asked, no cost mail-in returns policy. Each fervently believes in the customer. Each is a product of its times and the times have changed.

Certainly there is a different model for every company.

Groupon employs the social net driver to power its viral loop to acquire customers, a new twist on email marketing selling local products on a global social platform. Lululemon created a brand that drove fierce customer loyalty around the intersection of street gear and yoga clothes and good vibrations by local word of mouth (pushed by social nets) with hyper friendly in store policies, all without an online component.

But for each, a new culture fueled by new technology served a demand of the customer to sold to in a certain way–their way. Great companies figure that out. The models are endless with flexible technology as a servant to design social and personal commerce.

So what does this have to do with the traditional polarity of strategy and tactics in marketing?

Everything I think.

What is the goal of all businesses?

• At its simplest, to find a way to bring value to your customers. Certainly you need to do this is in a cost-effective, margin-positive way but without customer value all the rest is moot.

What is the goal of marketing?

• At its core, building that value chain between customer and company.

How does it get done?

• An ongoing, dynamically informed process. Smart iterative execution.

Whether you are an early stage startup with a new product or a more mature company looking to extend the line, the process of discovery will be dynamic for both. Not the same of course but dynamic execution nonetheless.

The process of discovering what you should do is tied to the idea you set out to quantify. Each will be unique. Each will be dynamic. Each will be iterative.

Traditionalist marketers will state that this is how it is always done. They are wrong.

Traditionalists will counter that this is a non-directed process. Not so.

Budgets, criteria for measuring success, timelines and resources all are essential. Just that finding the right process is the initial goal. Discovery is the focus and the customer is the group that will provide the information.

This change is empowering and the surge in entrepreneurship speaks to it.

Today you can come up with an idea, create an online space, gather those with like minds and establish a global community of people to vet your ideas with.

Today you can build a sizable community with only your friends and their friends and test ideas in a invitation only space before you ever go to market.

Today you can start with your existent business and test an extension of services or products without a public launch, with mitigated risk to your core business and gather data to make a decision with.

But this is hard to do, old paradigm or new. It has always has been a herculean task to build a new brand or a successful business or create a market out of an idea. Still is. Just that the process is different and the skills to succeed changed. And the barriers to success less about resources and more about ingenuity and early market creation.

I believe in market magic. In that ineffable ‘thing’ that happens when value and customer connect. When the chasm gets crossed. When ideas become a market reality.

Everything is different but somehow the magic is more accessible under the new order. Sure there is more noise to cut through. More competition for everything but with customer values as the clear target and social nets as marketing’s road to travel, directionally everything makes sense.

Marketing is top of mind for everyone lately…and it’s not a love fest.

This love/hate maelstrom started in February with Fred Wilson’s posts on Marketing. The three-part series generated over a thousand comments and a treasure trove of great ideas, voiced anxieties, articulate but defensive posturing and really honest queries by a host of entrepreneurs striving for just one thing…success.

Nothing could make me happier than to see this discussion raised. Like all discussions that become viral, the need was there long before the event triggered it.

Large company or start-up, the need for businesses to connect with their market is the only quotient of success. And while the methods change as the tools change as the business world evolves, the goals remain the same regardless of the tech or behavioral trends of the day.

And marketing is the architect of that connection, that capability that creates the value chain between company value and customer belief. And that’s why this discussion is so surprising…and so important.

The 1000+ comments responding to Fred’s posts, speak to a core misunderstanding and mistrust—yes, a dislike for what marketing does. I responded to scores of comments on his blog, redefining, clarifying, taking it to heart that what I do–what I truly love doing, was on trial.

But it pays to listen when the marketplace speaks, especially one as broad, as diverse, as successful as the one at avc.com. Such profound misalignment over something so basic and critical to company growth begs further thought.

This debate surfaced again this week with a post on “Why does Fred Wilson hate marketing?” by Brian Morrissey, Editor in Chief of Digiday, a marketing blog I follow. Brian states that there is a discrepancy between the world of VCs and the “…staid marketing world of selling more stuff for clients” that the rest of world worries about. These are Brian’s words about what marketing does today.

This is getting to the rub of the whole matter.

If marketers aren’t clear, the market is bound to be confused. How Brian defines marketing is out of whack with the times.

Marketing is what it has always been…the connector between product and market, between brand and belief, between the vision of an early visionary product and its first enthusiasts, and a core element of a product’s potential of finding support, distribution and a following.

The discrepancy between old-school methods and new tools is more profound now. The real-time web and huge social nets have changed everything dramatically. How we build products, find communities, discover pricing and build an ecosystem of support are completely new and changing daily. How companies connect with their customers is equally done with a brand new, not yet written playbook.

This is indisputable.

But it appears that with all the noise from market pundits on the uses of social tools, the core value of marketing has not translated to the realities of today’s business. That appears to be what the market, our customers, the commenters in Fred’s blog are telling us.

The fact that someone as savvy as Brian Morrissey is defining marketing as a loud shouting discipline from a time long gone is a true indication of the breadth of the chasm between what companies need and their perception of what marketing can offer.

Fred’s words, which he knows I disagree with, are not talking about what marketing does but how it is positioned and presented in the face of today’s socially driven world. I talk to companies every day and he is not the only one that is tired of seeing advertising positioned as the answer, budget depleting PR proposals presented to bootstrapped startups and paying for special teams to come in and save the day.

We as marketing pros are complicit here. If the thousands of smart entrepreneurs who read Fred’s blog don’t get that marketing isn’t just advertising nor big budget agencies and a crutial key to a company’s early success…hey, this our problem to be fixed and an opportunity for all sides.

Pushing old school definitions of big brand campaigns only fuels the misunderstanding. And telling those with influence like Fred and the readers of the blog they just don’t get it is like yelling at your customers if they don’t like your campaign or understand your messaging. A bit ridiculous. Certainly counterproductive.

The right path–as always– is to listen to the market.

One of the most basic rules of marketing is to make the very people whose support you most need, integral and part of the process. This could be the sales force for a lead gen program. The product group when you need to build viral hooks into the product itself. Or even the most basic, embracing your early enthusiasts on a dynamic platform to get feedback and spread the word.

Or, in this case, the world of entrepreneurs and their funders who have somehow lost touch with the value that market building thinking brings to the table.

The truth as I see it, is that while big-spend shouting and noisy campaigns have never been more purposeless, true marketing has never been more key.

Marketing in the hands of the best and there are great marketers out there today is in concert with the iterative and dynamic process of how we build product today. In fact, many of the name brand serial entrepreneurs are just that, great marketers who can manage to a P & L.

Marketing is deep in craft. The science of traffic is essential to employ (SEO and SEM). The craft of connecting a story to influencers (PR) certainly has its place. The logistical brilliance to get the impossible done or that just really smart promo at SXSW or during the marathon are all tools on the marketing belt. But…these categories of skill sets by necessity evolve to suit the times and the market, not bolted on nor grandfathered in. Or worse, presented as a must have at prices that only big brands can afford.

Every startup and every product and every community is discovered through a marketing sensibility. With literally millions of solutions and everyone globally connected online, the possibilities for massive success are dampened only by the challenges of being discovered and connecting with your market.

This wildly viral debate about marketing is a loud wake up call. And a huge opportunity.

It’s a wake up call to marketing thinkers and professionals and brilliant tacticians to pay attention. Because the market is telling them they are not buying an old school approach to a new world order of business.

It’s also a wakeup call that there is huge opportunity for marketers and entrepreneurs, as well as larger companies to figure all of this out. To demystify some of the social media mumbo jumbo, to imbue strategic market thinking with dynamic tactical excellence.

And mostly for marketing and business and product people to partner at a core level to figure out how connect value with its market.

There is no winning the argument of what marketing is or does. There is only changing the discussion to fix the problem.

New York is taking a page out of the mobile gaming and check-in space playbook to solve some large public information access problems.

The city’s challenge is to close the information gap between the millions of citizens on the street and the thousands of construction projects that impact daily city life. Simple problem; not a simple solution.

Most QR code-based projects fall prey to the chicken-and-egg conundrum. Snapping a code is easy but the information received is still incomplete, usually being developed by the users themselves. But in New York, the pieces, at least in concept are lining up. Public information is there but buried in public records. A population on foot, carrying smartphones are demanding the info. The QR code with free reader apps is the theoretical missing link to tie the process together.

An interesting if geeky article, Use of Quick Response (QR) Codes on Permits, on Mayor Bloomberg’s website opened my eyes to this QR project.  It popped up in my Facebook feed the other day thanks to the inveterate NY watcher @jenxo.

Here’s the situation:

New Yorkers live in the world’s largest and most chaotic construction site. Everywhere something is being built, fixed, redone, or scaffolded. This is life since the first settlers landed on the island and started building and it continues daily. It’s noisy and messy and incessant and indecipherable.

The city needs to connect the people with the data on the fly. The numbers are large–179,00 construction permits and 33,00 after-hour variances (in 2010) for the 975,000 buildings in NYC. And millions of people on the streets and roads. Using smartphones with QR readers as the solution is a profound idea. A complex project that if it works well, breaks new ground in making real-time web apps with IR readers a solution for large scale urban information projects.

Once again, dense urban cities are the sandbox for new uses of social and mobile experiments with the web.

This is how it is designed to work:

Starting in 2013, every construction site in the city will have a QR code (like above) posted. Readable through a handful of fee apps available for smartphones, it ties into the database of construction permits for all activity in the city.

You want to know who owns the building, what is being done and the schedule for completion?

Snap the QR code.

Interested in the name, contact information, license details of the designer, architect and contractor?

Snap the QR code.

Want to know if the builder has a variance that allows horrible noisy scraping noises on Sunday morning?

Snap the QR code and find out.

Want to know why the building looks much larger than the one the community approved?

Snap the code and check out the variances.

This is a really quite cool design. This is not a new technology looking for a reason to be. This is a mobile app with a reader solving a large scale problem.

The idea is a derivation of what we all do with check-ins with FourSquare or playing mobile games. The city is adapting consumer entertainment design to democratize data access in this dense and complex urban area. The result, if it works, will be a great proof point for the humanizing capabilities of the web and technology as a tool to really better life.

Extending the paradigm if it works:

Once the infrastructure is in place, the endpoint QR codes can do almost anything. The article spoke of QR codes on public vehicles and garbage trucks linked to educational videos on YouTube rolling out now. There are endless dots of data and information to be connected in New York…and I bet most urban centers.

Logical extensions to the construction permit concept require few leaps of imagination. Restaurant and clubs applying for liquor licenses, comment sites for taxi cabs and health certificates for street vendors. New York is a complex place. Mobile technology just may be a panacea to make it a bit more understandable and arm the citizen on the street with information to be in control of their neighborhoods.

For me personally, taking great mobile apps like the MoMa iPhone app and adding a QR code is an obvious must-do for all museums and public buildings. I would love to be able to snap a code and get architectural and historical information on buildings and monuments throughout the boroughs.

QR code based solutions, I would love to see:

• QR codes on every one of the 60,000 SKUs of wine sold in the city so I can remember what I drank and find info in the store while I’m shopping or sipping at a wine bar
• QR codes on food labels and farmer market stands (especially those labeled as Organic) to search information in real time while buying groceries
• QR codes on conference badges so I know who I am talking to without asking
• QR codes on pet labels to identify owners and their vets so lost pets can be tracked to the owner or taken to a vet who knows them

Wrapping up:

There are numerous mobile apps that help us navigate our cities, be more productive and know when the next subway train is approaching.  Adding the QR code with direct access to public data puts the consumer in control. This was always the dream of the social web. With QR codes and no-cost scanners and smartphones, it’s starting to come together, at least in theory.

Certainly New York is not the only city which has latched onto the QR code as a possible answer for mobile public information access. The information gap is everywhere.

If you have examples of other QR based apps or plans, I’m interested. Please share in the comments.

Do you ever wonder why everyone posting on your Facebook wall is happy or tan and interesting? Always eating at fabulous restaurants…or in my case only drinking the very best wine?

Welcome to the ‘other’ social filter.

Social information filters allow us to see what interests us, find more relevant information quicker and connect to people or causes of like mind effortlessly. They are core to the value of the social graph and of course Facebook.

They are magic of sorts. We hang around Facebook because it is relevant in a world we define.

But we also feel at home on Facebook because we are the architects of our physical identity which is inextricably tied to our social identity. We filter and control our physical image and persona. It’s human nature and part of socialization to look our best. Facebook understands this and let’s us easily architect the info we show. Everyone of us deletes posts from our wall that we don’t like.

We can “control the lighting” if you will on how we are perceived.

In an interesting post by Om Malik yesterday, “Now Starring You, in a Movie about You” talks about what he calls MeTV that ties into this perfectly:

‘I always thought millions of us were living inside our own weird version of reality television. But reality television can be ugly and sometimes too stark. Movies are curated, edited and have a sense of polish. That is one of the main reasons why Ratcliff (developer of the app“100 Cameras and I”) believes apps like his and Hisptamatic are selling briskly on the iTunes store. “The filters can turn ordinary into extraordinary.”

Turning the “ordinary into the extraordinary” is a potent phrase. This is about the intersection of identity management and personal fashion on our Facebook walls and blogs. It’s naturally what people do on Facebook, at a party, in a meeting and in life.

Om is mostly talking about photos and points to the massive growth of Instagram as a photo filter as an example. He is talking about images and filters…I’m thinking about live social video and chat.

I’ve been an enthusiast for social video for as long as video has been pushed around online.

All the infrastructure barriers to social video are mostly gone. Cheap bandwidth and free storage abound. Handheld mobile play and capture. And we have Facebook and Twitter identities as the social glue to tie us all together in a world where sharing is a behavioral norm.

Despite a host of interesting early products and a focus on the less self-conscious Y generation, social video and chat are still a juicy promise but a very early reality.

Even I, with all my passion for the medium, infrequently use any of the services except Skype for international business calls. Something has been missing.

I think Om, by identifying the ‘why’ of the boom in photo filters has found at least one important key to the puzzle. Social video chat feels and acts and looks like a dorm room video cam. Home-movie like. Awkward and overly self-conscious and glaring.

This is a filterless, uncontrolled reality. From childhood on we look in the mirror to see how others see us. Suspending the ability to control this seems antithetical to human nature.

For a long time I believed that the social and video chat market was waiting for a behavioral change in people to share more visually. I now feel the core human tenet of filtering our image to control our persona and identity may be the missing link.

Adding filters to video is not easy. It’s simpler for a B roll edit or filter, very challenging for a live stream. That’s why broadcast studios are what they are…expensive and complex and few.

To borrow a few words from Om’s terrific quote, in order for the ordinary to become extraordinary, we need to filter and stylize the video stream. And in order for that to be part of the social graph, everyone needs to be able to do this on the fly.

Seems possible in the face of all the other barriers that have been erased.

On the heels of Om’s post, the media was abuzz yesterday with the launch of SocialEyes, a well-funded startup with Rob Glaser of Microsoft and RealNetworks fame as the Chairman and product guru Rob Williams as CEO.

Om’s ideas and Glaser’s new company connect in an interesting way.

Rob Glaser understands the intersection of digital and audio video with the mass market better than most. And he has the chutzpah and connections and vision that few in this segment have. And first glimpses of the product coming out of Demo yesterday are interesting. SocialEyes looks like it has separated itself from the crowd and has learned from the companies that pioneered the space.

I believe that social video is the next communication’s frontier and have been blogging on it almost since the beginning. I want SocialEyes to get it right. I want someone to leap the chasm and unlock the gate for social video communications. Rob Williams, a really smart product guy, has mashed up some cool features. Adding B roll and content feeds with what looks like curated publishing channel on YouTube creates a semblance of dashboard and video publishing control. He knows that the market needs something more.

My only question is about you and me and how we can control the filters of our appearance, which is our social identity online.

Call this segment video chat or video conferencing or social video…it’s a lit image of ourselves nonetheless for all to see during the event and shared across the web in snippets of your live image.

The utility of live chat and the fun of connecting live with friends and partners is very compelling. My sense is that the more you can controlling the lighting and airbrush the image so we look like ourselves, the faster the mass market will grab this and make it their own. All the other components are in place, just the filters have been missing.

I’ve always been a fan of the movie marathon.

Used to be, you stacked a pile of DVDs next to the couch and hunkered down. Now with streaming on demand, digital distribution and handfuls of screens and streaming devices to choose from, digital entertainment has gotten way more interesting.

I started out just wanting to entertain myself over a busy six-week period of work and vacation and travel. Eighty-six episodes of this near genius series seemed the proper candidate.

It turned into an immersive experiment in how much streaming media has changed entertainment, trying out a bunch of devices, and whether socialization for time-shifted entertainment had made much headway in the last year.

The media acquisition part was simple. I had a bunch of episodes on DVD, some ripped media on my hard drive, and some shared files from friends but most of the series from the iTunes store. ITunes, the easiest access is a deal…$1.99 per episode. $2 dollars for an hour of The Sopranos is a bargain any way you look at it!

Watching whatever you want whenever is no longer a dream. A huge step forward and a meaningful stride towards the end of the cable company’s autocratic stranglehold over our evenings.

Watching wherever was a pleasant surprise. Choosing an Apple ecosystem makes this simple. Buy anywhere you have WiFi.  Sync seamlessly back to your media hub and the hub remembers where you stopped watching.

Watching on my Macbook at the coffee shop, on the plane or propped up on a bunch of pillows in the hotel room worked as it should. If this is a two-person marathon, get yourself an audio splitter to drive two sets of earphones for the plane and train.

On the subway, the iPad was perfect. Running somewhere and can’t wait to till the evening to complete the episode, the iPhone does the trick.

And of course, getting the media from your laptop or server to the big screens in the house was the most important. AppleTV, while not devoid of issues, lets moving files to the big screen with AirPlay a snap. A single purpose system, limited but super functional and cost effective.

If you are going on vacation and know that your hotel TV has a HDMI plug, bringing your AppleTV along takes less room than your shaver and worth the trouble to continue the movie saga in a larger format.

Don’t discount the importance of support for even the simplest devices. With an Apple system, when things don’t work, you have the Genius Bars and moreso, their online tech support. Being able to have direct lines into someone in California who speaks English, cares, calls and emails you back is actually priceless. And having coverage on your laptop, covers your wireless and AppleTV devices as well.

All’s not perfect with the Apple system though.

Issues with the Apple system to watch out for:

-AppleTV, while restricted in use, inexpensive to acquire and easy to set up, just doesn’t always work. Disconnect the power and reboot is required 30% of the time. Really annoying but the reboot almost always does the trick.

-I upgraded from a MacBook Pro (huge hard drive) to MacBook Air (smaller) during the streamathon. Using Apple’s Time Machine to reimage the Air is a nightmare if the image of the Pro is bigger than the storage on the Air. Ended up removimg all the movie media to a storage brick, deleting it from the Pro, creating a smaller image for the Air then rebuilding. Two trips to the MacStore and a support call were necessary.

-iTunes has its own weird file dissonance and memory issues. When you move movies from your hard drive to a remote server, there is a lot of fussing as iTunes remembers only the first location of the media. A lot of deleting, moving and rebuilding is necessary. Another support call cured this.

What about Boxee?

This is the rub and the biggest issue for me. I’m a Boxee fan and Boxee Box user and believe in the system enough to patiently wait out the bug fixes and slow signing up of services like NetFlix. They have a vision of the future, they understand that the intersection of the web and the big screen requires a social fabric… and I’ve bought into it completely.

But, and this is mightily annoying, you can’t stream iTunes formatted media through the Boxee Box to the big screen. Media yes. Ripped movie files yes. iTunes purchased media no. Per Apple, Boxee is working on a fix to be compatible with iTunes. Till then, I’m either gong to have to make the choice or run two systems at home. I’m running both now.

What about social?

I participate in a number of social networks. And I share daily on my blog. I wanted to share my experiences with my networks while and about this rewatching of The Sopranos.

I posted on Facebook, shot out some still pics on Tumblr and Twitter but just posting that ‘I’m loving re-experiencing Season 2’,  with a screen grab is really flat and uninteresting.

Or as Tony Soprano might say ” The true nature of social sharing has yet to reveal itself.”

There’s been a lot of early innovation in sharing around live broadcast events but little in the time-shifted media area. Check out my posts on socialTV @ appmarket.tv.

I’ve played around with GetGlue a bit but wasn’t drawn in. The right direction and we need a verticalized social network around film. But it feels flat and really early to me. If you have other sites or communities to try out, please let me know.

What’s missing is the ability to share clips, in video. Most copyrighted entertainment is not on YouTube and without this live scene-sharing component, I ended up taking this movie marathon ride mostly alone.  If I had attended a conference, visited a vineyard in France or gone skiing for this amount of time, sharing with pictures and conversation would have been an ongoing activity. For something so immersive, so emotionally connected to myself like a movie or TV series, not being able to share the passion is a loss. This ability to share scenes from a movie, and as well being able to share snippets from a video blog are new frontiers to cross to make video a common language online.

Some early work on solving the scene sharing language was done by Socialbomb. They pioneered with HBO a way to share scenes with friends across a blue-ray connected network.  Early. Visionary and  bit funky but it allowed you to share snippets of scenes with friends on Facebook and Twitter. Something like that off of streamed media is beginning to  approximate a social language for sharing movie experiences that make sense. My post on it here.

For all the issues, this era of streaming on demand on multiple screens for the mass market is firmly here. Cable with their antiquated vision of legislating what you watch and when and with outdated pricing models is fading away. We will all be glad when it is gone.

Social is the next frontier. It cropped up after the real-time web became the norm. It will crop up now that streaming live and time-shifted is moving into the mainstream. Keep an eye on Boxee to lead the charge on discovery that future.

And about The Sopranos. Well…eighty-six hours was too short and abrupt for me;) I already feel a sense of loss now that the streamathon is over.

Watching it in wherever and whenever I wanted created a delightful fog where I’d wake up wanting the next episode immediately. What a great show. And I must admit, that second time around, Season 6 held together a lot better. I’m sensing that I might have to pick out the top five episodes and spend another great afternoon re-wacthing.

Community and communications are two parts of a social whole.

The Facebook and Skype merger rumors are a perfect backdrop to relook at the Facebook community paradigm and how it will change with Skype as a partner.

To hundreds of millions of people, Facebook is the web. The first place they go in the morning and their principal source of news information. What’s remarkable is that while Facebook has defined social, you can’t really have a conversation there. Share of course; talk not much. This has been a missing link.

Today, on Facebook, we can post and comment but real conversations are not possible. Comment strings get moved to email or blog posts or a phone call or to a coffee shop for a meeting. Facebook is a check-in portal to see what’s going on. To do anything beyond sharing, you need to leave.

Facebook wants “To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so.” According to Kara Swisher who broke the merger story. Adding deeper communications capabilities in voice, text, and video are naturally the next step for Facebook and an evolving need for the ever growing group of people who run their lives from their profile pages.

Facebook fulfils that unique promise of a place to hang out at the intersection of our off and online lives where you share…and to many, create your life.  It is the ‘homepage’ to the global and flattened mass market, the news source of reference to most, and fast becoming a merchant mall to most global brands. Google is where you go to work and look stuff up. Facebook is where you share it.

The merger would add a communications layer (Skype) to Facebook’s community network that makes sense on at least three levels:

1. Voice and text

Voice communications is a ‘gimme’ for the social graph. It’s been overdue in arriving.

Why say “I’ll call you”, jump off of Facebook…rather than make that call immediately? Having an integrated phone book built off of Facebook membership seems like a no brainer. Skype is great alone. Integrated without an extraneous Skype phonebook is considerably better.

No one likes the phone company. If we can make calls from our social homepage…we will. And since many of the Skype calls we make are international, this feature has the added benefit of accelerating international expansion to the Facebook network. And to the members, the more people on the network, the more useful it is.

Texting is an obvious missing link

Most notices from Facebook and my blog communities come through text.  Texts are our rapid alert system from our networks.…”At the store.” “Meet you at the movies.” “Sign on to Facebook to chat.” Why have a one-way text pipe? On Facebook, on my phone…I would simply send text from within my profile…so would hundreds of millions more.

With Skype integrated, this issue is resolved…and of course, from a single Facebook address book.  The sub 25 year-old, mini-millennium generation, would jump on this en masse as text on the phones is their principal communications jargon.

And with Skype’s partnership with Avaya (think VoIP PBS) it is possible to conceptualize a fan page as a business center with conference calling and call analytics. Powerful in its possibilities. Your fan page could become the portal into your VoIP-based, Facebook centric global BBS system.

2. Video chat and social video are the big promises that just haven’t materialized

Social video has been stumbling forward in fits and starts. I expected it sooner, but it has eluded the mass market’s momentum…so far that is.

Creative startups like Vpype, and even Facebook with video wall posts have tried to make it easy to use video as a new social form of communications. They’ve succeeded in making it easy; they’ve been unsuccessful so far in making this a mass market need…or want for that matter. All the pieces are there…cams, free usage, address books, but human behavior hasn’t made the leap.

Video Skype calling to friends and for business is already a well accepted behavior. Integrating this capability within the social graph from a branded and trusted provider like Skype could possibly push behavioral usage to fruition. Maybe we needed a communications brand to kick start this.

My sense is that if you add video Skype calling into the social ecosystem of Facebook, the dream of party-line video calling, interactive video presentations and distance learning just might take off. Social video may go from a good idea to an explosive reality…and drag along the work of start-ups who are verticalizing the video pipe for all of us, with apps from entertainment to business.

3. The Facebook social TV channel

Live conferences from Facebook corporate are streamed frequently, and free. Boring stuff but there is already the concept of TV within Facebook. It works pretty well actually on the small screen.

TV, the holy grail of home entertainment is a living room paradigm. Skype and Facebook are already built into millions of connected TVs and DVRs coming out this holiday season. Add Facebook Connect, Skype’s SDK, a connected TV broad footprint and Facebook may be the network for content consumption, including TV as a social medium. I’ve blogged on this here.

“Facebook is the equivalent for us to what TV was for marketers back in the 1960s. It’s an integral part of what we do now.” This comes from Davide Grasso, CMO from Nike. Facebook could well become the new social TV platform, where people watch and share video content in a brand new way.

A Skype and Facebook merger or partnership makes sense to me. Check out Om Malik’s piece on GigaOm for a positive view and Rick Aristotle Munarriz in The Motley Fool for an aggressive anti-merger point of view.

Regardless of the outcome of the Skype/Facebook saga, integration of community with communications will occur in the Facebook network and deepen a whole social reality that is greater than the sum of its community and communications parts.