• by May 25, 2004

San Francisco--The city by the bay is often dubbed "fog city," but there was nothing foggy about the energy here at the Ad:Tech show, except maybe the brains of show attendees who had plenty of parties to choose from last night. There were at least four cocktail receptions and three larger parties--and those are only the ones I knew about ... The crowds were fairly raucous but the daytime energy was fairly serious and that's a good thing. The days of irrational exuberance here in San Francisco are gone for good, we hope.

Nearly 5,000 attendees are sinking their teeth into a show that feels as though it's drawing a much more diverse crowd and has taken on some exciting subject matter. Consider a discussion I attended yesterday called "The New 'Social Web,'" in which panelists discussed the future of social networks like LinkedIn, Tribe and Friendster and why marketers might want to tap into them. Panel moderator Rick Bruner, president, Executive Summary Consulting, ran down a laundry list of phenomena spawned by online social networks and blogging. They include instant messaging plug-ins; wikis, (yes, w-i-k-i-s), publicly editable blogs that I'd never heard of; moblogs, a combination of wireless photo and text messaging; and flashmobs, which made news last year and were leveraged by people who communicate with one another via wireless text messaging to flock to the scene of a celebrity sighting, a sale or a non-event.

The idea of real people forming actual communities of interest on the Web via Friendster or Meetup, and extending those groups offline is a powerful phenomenon. But it's also a phenomenon that advertisers may never be able to tap into, certainly not with any scale. With career and professional networking, it's a little more clear cut-one can see how an advertiser that wants to reach entrepreneurs could leverage a Ryze or a LinkedIn--but it's less so with other types of networks and blogging.

Blogging--whether with words or pictures or both words and pictures--is a highly individual currency. Blogs typically mirror the creator's idiosyncrasies. They are, "the ultimate meritocracy," Bruner notes. When they begin to scale to a massive audience, they become fodder for marketers. And then what was self-published eventually becomes underwritten and follows a more traditional publishing model. All the community feedback morphs into a "letters to the editor" section.

Blogs highlighting what people are saying about a brand or trend--positive or negative--are highly valuable to marketers as a form of online intelligence. If they hijack those blogs either by advertising or funding them, or creating their own, creative minds are likely to have already jumped ship to the next new online trend.