At Social Web Strategies, we’ve been saying that the future of the social web includes data portability. An April Forrester report drew the same conclusion.

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience.

Brian Solis at Social Media Today writes about Forrester’s report, saying that social networks are evolving into a social operating system, and that “social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior….I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.”

None of this is really news, maybe clarification. I was in conversations with Tim O’Reilly and others in the early 2000s that acknowledged that the Internet/Web was an operating system and inherently social. Those conversations led to the paper Tim and Dale Daugherty wrote that loosely defined concepts labeled “Web 2.0.” The Data Portability Project kicked off in 2007, and we’ve been trying to get our heads around individual data management since the 1990s (thinking of P3P). Thinking about the semantic web has been brewing since the turn of the century. Various data interchange formats and semantic web projects have emerged since then.

What’s interesting in Solis’ piece is the concept of SRM – Social Relationship Management – vs Customer Relationship Management and Doc Searls’ idea of Vendor Relationship Management. CRM and VRM combined make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We get to a point where customers and vendors are transparent to each other, and are part of a larger social ecosystem that can facilitate authentic and symmetrical relationships. Solis says

The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides.

How much advertising can you drop into the information ecosphere before it’s effectively neutralized as saturation diminishes attention. Christopher Meyer at Harvard Business talks about “The Next Bubble: Eyeballs”:

The push for share of voice has created an arms race, where brands spend more and more to hold on their share of a slowly growing market. Like housing prices, this will sustain itself until someone — that is, the buyer — walks away from the table.

Could that moment be now? Observers are wondering if US consumers will ever return to their past spending habits. Since the last decade’s growth has been attributed to the wealth effect — households feel richer even with a zero savings rate because their houses and financial assets make them money while they sleep — it makes sense to imagine an increased savings rate following catastrophic asset depreciation.
Consumption will decrease, and in response, companies will…increase advertising?

According to an article in the Miami Herald, PR and advertising are at a crossroads, challenged by changes in the mediasphere and a belt-tightening economy. According to the article, some are finding ways to embrace new media, while others are still using traditional media, though in a way that’s more targeted or niche.

Despite uncertainty about new media, the article says it’s the “one area where firms are hiring…. Despite the uncertainty over whether views or tweets will pay off, few feel they can afford to miss this boat — wherever it’s headed.”

In his latest ClickZ column, Dave Evans of Social Web Strategies tells how to get started in social media. He covers three things you can do:

1. Listen (really listen) to what people are staying about you.
2. Be clear about your business objectives and goals.
3. Step into the social web – find a platform and give it a try.

Read more at ClickZ.

Contact Social Web Strategies for more information on getting started in social media.

Social Web Strategies has been working with FG Squared to cultivate Austin’s social web scene and make our city the nexus of social web innovation and development. Steve Golab presented with Bijoy Gosami of Bootstrap Austin and Heather McKissick of Leadership Austin at last Thursday’s Social Media Club. Bijoy and Heather have been working with several others (including our own Jon Lebkoowsky) to promote Austin as the Experience City, focusing on the concept of experience design via Bootstrap Austin’s Experience Subgroup. The three will present again at the 2009 Interactive Austin conference on April 27. Working with Mike Chapman and FG Squared, Jon Lebkowsky helped create the program for Interactive Austin, and is featured as one of the “gods of Interactive Austin 2009″.

Great post at the Society of Word of Mouth by our strategic partner Brian Massey. This post echoes some of what Brian and I have discussed recently (and what SWS has been saying as well) about traditional marketing:

The culture, the strategies, and the beliefs that your business has relied on for the past 20 years are being actively dismantled. We have identified the load-bearing walls of your ideology. We know which screws anchor your most contrived messaging, and we are now loosening them.

The Internet is not causing this change in culture. We are changing culture. The Internet is just our weapon of choice, an interconnected wrecking ball being wielded with one purpose: to bring down the false, calculated, posing communication that assaults our sensibilities and clutters our world.

Your skill at communicating powerfully will fail you. Say something powerful, or shut up. Create your logos, but we will decide what they mean. Tell us you’re the leader, the innovator and we will make you a liar no matter how good you are.

I love this:

Here are some clues that will help you along.

TV is not an effective way to communicate, video is.

Radio is not an effective way to communicate, the human voice is.

Print is not an effective way to communicate, words and images are.

Web sites are not an effective way to communicate, solving problems is.

Read the whole post here. You can also listen to Brian read the post here.

Giovanni and whurley have a new site, called MarCom, a place to aggregate news and information about the marketing world. Good writeup in TechCrunch (with a few comments complaining about the site, which appears to be built on Drupal). Since I like Drupal, I think the site itself is fine, and it’s a pretty rich resource for people who want to think and talk about contemporary marketing, which is very broken and changing fast.

Seth Godin defines viral marketing… not everything viral is marketing. Common sense? Many folks don’t get it.

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

To be successful at marketing online, you have to lose all your traditional marketing baggage, that’s one thing. Then you have to make sure you didn’t also lose the mission. I just looked it up, Webster’s has a succinct definition of marketing: to expose for sale in a market.

Viral marketing, Godin says, “is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers.”

Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

(Thanks to the Person who tweeted the Godin piece.)

Peter Kim has compiled a list of social media marketing examples, which he’s been updating with contributions from his readers. As of today, he includes 270 brands. [Link]