Search Sense

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether we are developing into an integrated agency and about the implications of this for innovation in digital marketing, and how this addresses the challenges of how brands communicate going forwards.

My take on the term ‘integrated’ is that it is normally used to refer to the combined offering of media planning, buying, and creative services. In digital marketing this often translates into: how much budget can we spend driving people to an award-winning platform we have created. I am obviously being deliberately simplistic in my definition but the point remains the same, how different is this approach from creating a 30-second TV spot?

For today’s marketing environment the integrated story is as tired as the 30 second slot it was built around.

Around the insanely stimulating work environment that is Spannerworks I think that we have settled on a way to articulate our view, and it’s been arrived at holistically and from a point of re-framing the question. Integration fails because people don’t act in an integrated way and some activities just don’t integrate because the thought process is different. People are connecting, traveling, and creating via networks - a concept that’s as people-centered as human history, the only difference today is that we can do it on a far bigger, faster and more complicated scale.

So we settle on a view that is more about connectedness than integration. Connected brands will win big because they interact with their environment. Ideas become the new network hubs of innovation, with the brilliant ones taking centre stage in people’s imaginations, earning attention and engagement in the process.

One thing is certain, changes to our communications environment are transformational they are complex, rapidly evolving and perpetually in motion. But I guess you cannot be involved with a revolution without getting a little stressed out can you? Back to the media plan? Press delete now…

Over at Open, Antony Mayfield has been discussing ‘facebooksofting’, a term dropped into a recent conference to describe mucking about on Facebook – apparently “softing” means relaxing in Norwegian. Antony says he quite likes the term and may start using it to irritate people.

He’s also been relating the discussion from the blogosphere, about whether the social networking site is:

about to connect the world and become the new Google or [an] inflating bubble of hype that will soon burst.

Antony also mentions a BBC Trust event he attended. Apparently the conversation immediately turned to points relating to the BBC that the Trust had not intended to address, but which were dominating conversation about the BBC in the blogosphere. In short, the Trust found itself unable to define the conversation, an observation that led Antony to talk about the new challenge facing all organisations:

You can’t set the agenda in a network. You can encourage, initiate, influence and invite, but you can’t ignore what’s there or you will disqualify yourself from the most important conversations, discount your usefulness, mark down your relevance and even your legitimacy, ultimately.

Antony has also been wondering what the National Union of Journalists is thinking, as some of the Union’s most respected members express their dissatisfaction by leaving.

One of Spannerworks’ own journalists Simon Handby has written for the Press Gazette on the subject of being noticed on the web having been, well, noticed on the web, via Hackbash.

Over at Experiences in Online Marketing, Dax Hamman has been talking about the way in which Google has become like the Hoover of search engines, as well as reviewing the new Guinness advert.

Meanwhile, Nilhan Jayasinghe has been keeping us all updated on the latest news from Google, after the Google PageRank update penalised those who have been paying for links rather than earning them.

More work for those of us in content creation, perhaps?