Oh man. Just when you thought you were getting a handle on this whole internet thing. Just when internet video started to… like.. you know, become something you could get your head around. Just when internet video became popular enough that you could really start to GET this internet thing. Lower res? 2-3 minutes long? Lower production values? Get it. Check. Priced accordingly. Banners are like billboards, viral videos are like infomercials. I get it now. Oh, if only it were that simple. Sadly, things keep on changing.

Social Networking. Community. Social Media. We’re not super big fans of the term “social media,” but.. it’s all related, we suppose (as an aside, we’re not a big fan of the term “earned media,” but that is the subject of some whole future blog post.

One day, somewhere around 2004 or so, people started friending each other on the internet. Friendster first, then MySpace, then Facebook, and a million others along the way (personally, we like to give props to Livejournal, which has never gotten its due as groundbreaking in this space). Friending each other on the internet. What did that mean? Why is that important?

I think the simplest way to look at it is through the prism of Viral Marketing. Viral marketing spreads a marketing message through a friend network – people find something humorous, so they pass on a link to someone else to share it with a friend, so that they can have a shared, common experience. Before social networking, for most people, this was maybe an email, or an IM to someone. Maybe they’d email it to two or three people. But as they “friended up” with more and more people on the internet, tools were developed to quickly, easily propagate that message (or “meme”) to many people at once.

And not only that, other people could see this happening, and measure the rate at which this happens. All sorts of interesting things come out of this. Whole maths and measurements about viral propagation speeds and online mavens and such fascinating stuff: what message move fastest? What sorts of people move the most messages? Who do people listen to the most?

There are a million ways to view this. Measuring the social graph. Niche and subcultural communities. Interconnected functionality (via Web 2.0 philosophies). There are a myriad of opinions on what value this provides to a brand. Whether it can be unlocked. Whether it’s worth advertising against. There’s a lot of money out there being placed on a lot of big bets. Will Facebook be worth its $10 billion valuation? Was Myspace worth $500 million? I mocked it at the time and in most ways, I was proven wrong, but I still maintain Rupert could have given me a tenth of that and I would have built a better MySpace, and Facebook has more than proven this viewpoint as at least viable.

We’re not especially in the game of placing the big entrepreneurial bets on developing communities that strive to aggregate large communities so they’re worth some money to the IACs of the world. We do, however, have a proven track record of aggregating audiences, and so of course we constantly endeavor to bring these skills to new areas that are of interest to marketing and advertising, and this, indeed, is one of those areas. We dabble, of course, on the community-as-startup side, but really, more than anything, we look for other ways to unlock value for our clients through social networking and community.

This area (and its cousin, user-generated content, UGC) is a scary area for marketers. Last year’s traditional party line about UGC and advertising was that marketers were nervous advertising against UGC because they didn’t know what sort of content they would be advertising next to. No one wants to put an ad next to a hate group’s fan page. I’ve always thought that inevitably these concerns would diminish for advertisers. The cynic in my notes that Hustler Magazine has no shortage of advertisers, and the naive optimistic citizen in me could have sworn there was supposed to be some separation between the editorial staff and the advertising staff at magazines, so this should have been a big problem in the magazine world too, right? But I think my friend Patty Mitchell put it best: “you’re in a parking lot, having a fight with your girlfriend, and you’re breaking up. And over at the side of the parking lot is a billboard for Verizon. Do you blame Verizon for your breakup? No. Life happens. And advertising is there. We’re used to it.” My views are probably optimistic, of course, as the recent acknowledgments from Google about difficulties advertising against Myspace and Youtube suggest. Still, though, if I were in the media planning business, I’d recommend you take advantage of other brands’ nervousness and reap the benefits of low CPMs. But, then again, I am not in the media planning business.

Yeah, so it’s scary. Where we excel is making it just a little bit less scary. Harnessing UGC for your brand, without potentially exposing it to damaging messages – such as our work on the M&Ms world. Or aggregating a community around a holistic set of principles and beliefs, and offering them utility and value, such as the branded utility + community approach we take with Kashi.com. Or finding a way for people to feel like they’re part of a community, without them going and being able to upload a bunch of porn, like our work for the Webby Awards and the People’s Choice awards.

We constantly look for ways, through our marketing R&D prism, to incrementally improve the social networking and community landscape for our clients. It’s an ongoing process, and one in which you’ll see a lot of activity from us in the coming months.