Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, FriendFeed - you name the vehicle, what's very clear is that we are now swimming in a much larger ocean of information than ever before. Over the next few years we can expect an array of software tools to filter, sort, edit and aggregate this information in ways that match our personal preferences. In the meantime, however, it's just a heckuva lotta data.
Another issue many of us don't think too much about is how this fountain of information will be paid for. Yes, it's possible that Twitter will start charging something, and maybe some of the other vehicles will charge, also - but almost certainly the biggest cost burden will fall on advertisers and marketers, who will be producing a prodigious amount of "ride along" marketing appeals, with increasingly relevant messages.
The fact that new tools are becoming available that allow marketers to interact with one customer at a time will probably fuel a revolution in how we consumers pay for the information and content that we consume. Marketing used to subsidize content with an "implicit bargain." If you watch our commercials we'll provide the TV show for free, or if you read our newspaper ads we'll let you read the articles for free, as well. But we don't know whether you, personally actually did watch the commercials or read the ads. In the future, however, marketing will gravitate toward an "explicit bargain." If you click on our ad, or go through our entire video, or pass along our message to someone else, then we'll pay for this content you want.
In this environment of proliferating and unprecedented interactive vehicles, the biggest impediment to success is likely to be lack of imagination on the part of the marketers and advertisers themselves, because this lack of imagination will slow down the funding process. And it's an affliction we find whenever a new media vehicle is introduced, if it doesn't fit the budget models or business case definitions by which marketers evaluate their current vehicles. If the new vehicles aren't comparable to the old ones, then the cost-benefit analysis requires a good deal more imagination - and guts - than most marketing departments have.
What's the value of a re-tweet, for instance, and how would you compare it to a click-through on the Web, or a 30-second TV commercial, for that matter?
Excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang here http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/ on how advertisers and marketers, in the future, will use social-media information to make their messages even more personally relevant (and therefore more profitable for the marketers).