Just catching up on news feeds and came across a great post by Seth Godin about the “Nearly infinite” options online.

“…infinite is everywhere.

“There’s an infinite number of books at Barnes and Noble…

“There’s certainly, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of web pages. And even Facebook, just a small subset of the web, has an infinite number of friends for you to make.”

This is a trend we’ve talked about before, and the answers aren’t easy. As the blogosphere began to take off prior to the 2004 election, becoming a promintent blogger was pretty straightforward - blog a lot, build an audience, and contribute to the conversation. Today, Technorati tracks over 112.8 million blogs, a literal infinity to anyone who might attempt to read them all.

So with the established trend of nearly infinite material online, there are two ways to try to find what you want. Seth Godin discusses the pros and cons of the first, which is search:

“Search makes the infinite finite (at least for a while). With search, we turn the infinite selection on Amazon into a nearly manageable finite selection. Except search (no matter where you look) is pretty lame, and it doesn’t really turn infinite collections into manageable choices.”

The other trend is aggregation. Large communities have formed around blogs that have taken the best of what they read and then put up links to their favorite slice of the blogosphere. For a reader daunted by the infinite options to read, such aggregator serves a very important role.

For a blogger, authority (and traffic) can come through the simple act of directing readers to other blogs. By taking on this function, the aggregator becomes a hub of traffic and influence. Once other bloggers begin to see traffic spikes from a noteworth link from the aggregator, they might begin to write for the aggregator.

This concept is not new. It’s the same concept as a magazine’s “Best of” issue or a summer reading list. It’s why we watch award shows. By going to that one place, we get to see what we want, as chosen by someone whom we respect.

But aggregation suffers from the same problem as the original content itself. If there is nearly an infinite number of blogs out there, mathmatically, there also could be a nearly infinite number of aggregators. In the face of this possibility, it seems then that the online properties best poised to capture this trend of aggregation are the very properties who have taken a leadership role in the current blogosphere. Only if they fail to adapt to this new trend of user-generated content will they be able to keep their leadership. The one exception I would make here are old media newspapers going online. If these papers would be willing to add links to their favorite blog posts alongside their own articles (beyond the current “who links here” footnote), their traffic would increase dramatically. People who get their news online read blogs, and if newspapers refuse to link to blogs via their own websites, they are missing a huge opportunity for eyeballs and ad revenue.

For the political campaign, capitalizing on this trend isn’t hard. Hillary Clinton’s campaign did it with their Hillary Hub. By aggregating all of the stories about their candidate — at least the positive ones — the Clinton campaign made their site a de facto source for information. Campaigns will often resist putting information online because they believe it provides “opposition research” to their opponents. I have news for you — your oppenents already have all the research they need. Instead, there are two audiences a Hillary Hub attracts: supporters and undecideds. And who doesn’t want to reach them?

So as talk of Web 3.0 builds, and the search mechanisms that will accompany it, aggregation needs to be a key part of the conversation as an evolving trend in online communications.

In the past few months, Notes from Flat Creek has emphasized the need to recognize the growth in digital communication, and work to incorporate it into your communication strategy. But what are the benefits of digital communication? Why should you put your valuable resources into digital communication? The answer is: because that is the direction where all types of communication are evolving, and your message stands a good chance of being ignored if you don’t.

We’ve recognized the three areas that digital communication will most impact your communications strategy:

1. Delivery – Consumers today can choose the times when they want to be communicated with. Developments like blog readers and e-newsletters allow your audience to organize communication, and process it when they choose. By incorporating these features and others like podcasts, into your strategy, you will be able to deliver your message in a way that is convenient and continually accessible to your audience.

2. Access – Closely connected with delivery is access, and in two important ways. Digital communication allows consumers to access your message when they choose, and to store it for later use if it is applicable. Also, digital communication allows you access to a consumer’s undivided attention, through tools like opt in newsletters. When your audience chooses to hear your message, it will resonate much more than if they are bombarded unwillingly.

3. Management – Digital communication offers far more organizational and analytical potential than traditional methods. Email newsletters offer the ability to track open and click through rates, so you can better determine how to present your message. Customization is much easier through digital communication. You have the ability to tailor your message to virtually unlimited parameters. Also, anybody who has experience in bulk mailing knows that hitting the send button on an email is much easier that hauling bulk mail to the post office.

Beyond incorporating digital communication simply because of shifting trends, it offers significant benefits in accessing your audience, and managing your message. Recognize the benefits, and re-align your strategy.

If you need advanced notice that the internet’s importance will continue to grow in campaigning, here it is. AdAge, the well-known magazine that reports analysis of marketing and media, completed a study that found the internet has passed TV as an information source for voters under 30.

While many political strategists dismiss youth vote trends, due in large part to their historically low turnout, those young voters will carry the internet with them over the years. Not only that, but as with other studies on Internet usage, the Web moves quickly across age brackets.

For instance, AdAge reports that 26% of all voters — regardless of age — have viewed a political candidate’s profile on a social networking site. This is an indication that the trend is already expanding beyond the 30 and under crowd. The need for a strong web presence may be a lesson that becomes more clear in coming election cycles.

The Washington Post today has an article on the impact of the Internet on the 2008 presidential campaign. In short: for good and bad, it is having a huge impact.

In many ways, the Web is more effective than television advertising and direct mail, the traditional methods campaigns and independent groups have used to try to define their opponents, political analysts say. It’s cheaper, and it spreads information more quickly. But so far, anyway, its potential for affecting a presidential campaign is relatively untested.

At Flat Creek, we recognize that the Web isn’t the only tool that should be used by a campaign, but it is a powerful tool that should be given more respect. With numbers like the ones we pointed to yesterday, we have to ask a simple question - are you paying attention?

When it comes to atypical, insightful management advice, I typically turn to Jim Collins. But for a marketing guy, what Seth Godin serves up is crystal clear. In an information economy and especially in a creative industry, is there possibly a more important asset than our people?

“As soon as management starts conflating people with tasks, they’ve  guaranteed that the organization is going to get stuck. Probably soon. A better plan: rotate your people and continually reward and promote and challenge them. Make a big deal when someone makes the case for shutting down her task. Make it really clear through your actions that tasks come and go, but good people stay.”

Raise your hand if you have a Facebook and/or MySpace profile. Anyone here on LinkedIn? Have you ever commented on a blog?

If so, you’re part of a changing dynamic in how we communicate that very few PR professionals understand. At Flat Creek, we work to integrate communications messages across various channels, insisting that our clients focus on delivering an outstanding service or product as the basis for a good reputation. The product, the audience, and the goal are what matter most from a PR perspective.

Richard Edelman, the well-regarded president and CEO of the global PR firm which goes by his name, shares this sentiment in a recent post about how corporations must adapt their communications efforts in order to maintain some sort of brand integrity. His full post can be found here, but I’ve listed a few notable lines below:

“My central thesis is that corporations can’t buy reputation or brand loyalty any more. These are earned through performance over the long-term.”

“In this changed environment, I believe that PR can adapt as well as, if not faster, than any other communications discipline… Our aim is to educate when possible, build bridges when necessary, and respect the new market-based conversations always.”

“The new reality for communications is the sphere of cross reference, in which information moves unpredictably among equal stakeholders. Conversations now occur spontaneously, in peer-to-peer discussion, with individuals creating their own webs of trust including people like themselves.”

KEY NOTE: “PR is simply a reflection of reality, well presented perhaps but based on fact and behavior.”

National Journal has a great article today about a new process for drafting legislation:

“The standard method for writing a bill would have had [Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.] and his aides calling in consumer groups, telecommunications lobbyists, and technology experts to hash out the details. Instead, Durbin reached out to the editors of two online political blogs so that he could hear directly from their readers.”

While the article (found here) is an interesting anecdote about the impact of the Internet on Capitol Hill, there are several deeper questions that come to mind from my perspective as a digital PR practitioner. How did Durbin and his staff decide which blogs to reach out to? Who was posting comments to his posts? Did any organizations with a stake in rural broadband access get wind of his efforts and e-mail their supporters to get involved with the conversation?

If Members of Congress are reaching out to Internet users directly, how is your organization positioned to have a prominent voice in the virtual policy debates of the future?

There are several options, most of which begin with active monitoring of the blogosphere and having the ability to mobilize supporters quickly. Contact us and we can talk more about positioning your clients, organization, or message in order to be a part of the online legislative process.

Members of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) originally uploaded by zerohour1971

You hear a lot of politicians tell us the way to win the War on Terror is to just increase the size of our military’s special forces and then turn them loose on the terrorists. That’s nonsense.

Special forces are an elite group because they are a cut above the rest. If it were so easy to just cook up some more special forces, I’m sure the Pentagon would have happily done that by now.

No, elite organizations are not easy to build and hard to expand. So how does an organization become elite? If we look at the military example, there are at least two clear factors that contribute to their elite-ness: 1) top notch individuals and 2) top notch training.

The individuals who make up the U.S. Special Forces are not superheroes, but they are incredibly intelligent, capable (some may even say crazy) soldiers who push themselves to incredible extremes for the sake of preserving our freedoms. Likewise, the top performers in any company are the most intelligent, hardest working, and best problem solvers in the workforce. By being disciplined enough to pull together those people in an organization, you create the foundation for an elite organization.

But equally important is training. Let me ask you - when was the last time your team gathered for a staff meeting and asked a “What if?” question? What if this client asks us to do X? What if our competition goes in another direction?

Do you know how you would respond, as an organization? Do you know how you would overcome the obstacles?

We need to ask ourselves hypotheticals as individuals and organizations to be prepared. That exact situation we war-game may never happen, but the exercise of thinking ahead and planning a response will help any career, any organization, any nation.

Special Forces know what to do in the field because they have been trained for it. National championship football teams know how to beat their opponents because they have trained for it. Peyton Manning is a good athlete, but an incredible strategist. He studies hours and hours of film to get the elite edge.

Do you study your opponents? Do you practice your tactics? Too often we rush to solve a problem we have not prepared for with half-baked answers that are rarely adequate. Instead we should focus on training and discipline, giving our top performers the tools to execute in extraordinary ways.

We work in a competitive marketplace. In order to gain that competitive edge, we need to think ahead and train for hypotheticals. It is one step toward being an elite organization.

Those of us in marketing communications hate to see a perfectly good organization hand over their website to IT. It’s clearly a recipie for disaster.

But, what if they hand it over to marketing? Who owns it - marketing proper or PR specifically? Should IT still have a voice in this conversation?

Fundamentally, as far as we’ve moved in terms of corporate branding online, we have not reconciled the fundamentally different disciplines which are needed to really make “new media” work. It takes marketing, PR, IT and others (not to mention buy-in from management) to collectively work together to really make a project successful. But we haven’t merged those people effectively. More on that soon…

A lot of these thoughts are the result of something said this weekend at BarCamp Nashville by Chris Houchens, who writes a blog called Shotgun Marketing. While talking about social media (Facebook, MySpace, etc etc) in the context of corporate marketing he said, “It’s about reaching the audience that has already identified itself as your audience; it’s not about sales.”

His premise raises a much deeper question than how corporations should approach corporate marketing. It’s often a given that internally, marketing should own managing the online experience. But is that so? If the online experience is not about sales, then fundamentally it’s not a marketing function. Marketing is all about sales! So social media seems to fit in a different category, such as PR. Or are we back to IT?

Should it be that way? Who owns online?

Professionals and prognosticators are always trying to predict the future. What’s next for stocks, fashion, the Web, etc. For online professionals, the question is more narrow. Who will be the next Google? What will be the next trend to take the Internet by storm?

I have no crystal ball, but in keeping with Flat Creek’s perspective that the old rules still apply, even in the face of exciting new technology, I believe the next wave of online success will not be new applications or features but more likely adoption of existing technologies. The ones who make money aren’t the ones on the cutting edge of a brand new idea. They are the second generation who gets the idea right.

Look at Facebook as an example. Friendster introduced the Web to the new concept of social networking, but just now Facebook (and it’s grown-up cousin LinkedIn) are really starting to hit their stride. The reason? There are two steps to every great product success:

1. Introduction
2. Adoption

Introduction happens when a new product or idea hits the marketplace. Think VCRs or PDAs. But it took years for those things to be adopted as an industry. Often the first movers (such as Friendster) were crushed and follow-up companies (such as Facebook) took all the glory. Yahoo was a big mover in introducing “search” to the Internet. Yahoo is now a distant second to Google, who came along with a better product and fast adoption.

Today, we see the widespread adoption of social media - blogs, for instance. The next wave of adoption will probably take place where exciting products are still being introduced - namely, mobile devices. As consumers, carriers, and device makers all step up to the plate, mobile data adoption will follow in a cycle of growth. What will likely not grow are podcasts. Just as with cell phones, quality is key to product adoption. Podcasts just don’t have the quality products or content to make it to the mainstream. Mobile TV, however, is a great new addition and will likely grow as new products are adopted.

Do you know what’s next in your industry? Contact us. We might have an idea or two.