Our obsession with the Next Big Thing isn’t surprising though. We live in a revolutionary time; where the shiny object constantly changes, the consumer ecosystem looks like a Tokyo subway map, and marketers are required to be both economists and prophets. In this rapidly changing environment, it’s no wonder we sometimes lose sight of the real goal of marketing: creating meaningful connections.

Throughout the day, that message was loud and clear: As marketers, we need to refocus our priorities to ensure that imagination, creativity, and innovation are the norm, not the exception. We all know this can be a tall order since most of our days (and nights) are filled with shorter deadlines, tighter budgets and increased expectations; and in the pharma industry, stricter regulations and policies create additional challenges to get creative juices flowing. It’s normal to feel discouraged by what we can’t do and default to reiterations of past ideas.

But after today’s sessions and being able to reconnect with some old friends from other industries, I feel hopeful and have realized that innovation stems as much from constraints as it does from freedom. Here are two valuable insights I gained:

• Innovation is everywhere: Ideas don’t have to come from just the design and development teams or even from within your own industry. People have immense natural talent just waiting to be discovered and cultivated. At Google, they have a “Google Ideas” site where employees can submit their ideas for company or product improvements and everyone can rate the ideas on a scale from 0 to 5. Every employee has a say and all perspectives are considered. The process has launched successful products such as Gmail and Google News to name a few.

• Celebrate failure: Don’t let the fear of failure stifle your creativity. There are benefits to being a first mover and potentially failing; namely gaining valuable learnings that can be applied to future endeavours. Angry Birds was actually the 52nd game that Rovio, the company behind the globally successful app, created. Imagine if they gave up after the first 51 failures – what would help tide you over on the subway ride to work?

So before you think it can’t be done or feel you don’t have a voice outside your own four wall, keynote speaker, Sir Ken Robinson reminded us all to that it’s essential to “Lead the culture of innovation”.

Today on Good Morning America, Mark Zuckerburg & Sheryl Sandberg announced Facebook has added an organ donation status option for Timeline.

Zuckerberg talked about the tool’s impact with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America:

“We came up with a pretty simple thing which we’re hopeful can help out. There are more than 100,000 folks just in the US who are waiting for organ donations and 18 people on average who die a day because they don’t have the organs they need. Simply by telling your story on how you are willing to participate in this, we think a lot of people who are on the fence may just be willing to do this could be convinced. That’s a shift in society that will probably take a while to fully take hold. But I think if people choose to share these stories with their friends that can make a big difference over time.”

View Mark’s interview on ABC News

Designating yourself as an organ donor is as easy as adding any other life event on Timeline. On your personal Timeline, click on “Life Event” and then “Health & Wellness.” You’ll see the option for “Organ Donor” at the top of the list (amongst other health and wellness milestones).

At that point, you can add where you are registered and your personal story. If you’re not currently an organ donor, Facebook provides a link to the official registry. As with all other Timeline entries, you can make your organ donor status public, private or only visible to certain groups of friends.

This isn’t Facebook’s first move toward implementing more socially conscious features. Over the past year, we’ve seen Facebook add a referral system for friends sharing suicidal thoughts and an anti-bully campaign.

Then, the trust graph was in major flux. People were figuring out how to use social connections (not just Dr. Google) to benefit their health. And, deciding if they were willing to interact with brands in that space.

Today, social destinations are among the most popular on the web. They are an essential part of many of our lives. And, they have truly revolutionized how we think about health.

Sometime in 2011, we all seemed to collectively realize: It’s just not going to be that easy. Instead, pharma would have to find its own way. To date, at least 60 pharma brands have done just that. They’ve built internal guidelines, tested approaches, and actively gotten involved in social media. Still, who doesn’t want to know what the FDA might have in store next? Here’s what we expect:

Continuing Stream of Guidance

Right around the time we had given up hope of those long-ago social media hearings actually resulting in any specific guidance, the FDA quietly released draft guidance on unsolicited requests for off-label information. Although reception of the new guidance was mixed, one thing was clear – the FDA has become incredibly savvy about the role digital plays in helping consumers make healthcare choices.

Inside the guidance, the FDA comments not only on that critical role digital plays, but also why it’s important that the industry be allowed to engage:

“…because firms usually have robust and current information about their products, it can be in the best interest of public health for a firm to respond to unsolicited requests for information about off-label uses of the firm’s products that are made in public forums, especially since other responders may not provide or have access to the most accurate and up-to-date medical product information.…”

You can read the critical takeaways from this new document on MedAdNews.

When this new guidance came out at the very end of last year, the FDA noted that it was the first of a series of planned releases. We can expect to see up to 12 similarly focused draft documents over the next two years. Personal bet: clinical trial recruitment will be one of them.

One thing that’s unlikely to ever happen: straight social media guidance. For the FDA, it’s about the message, not the medium. They’ve created guidelines for promotion and advertising (fair balance, truthful, adequate disclosure of risk, etc). They expect us to figure out how to apply them on Twitter.

Learn-worthy Advice from App Regulation

Last summer, the FDA proposed an oversight approach to apps – actually, a very specific category of apps: those that are an accessory to a medical device or transform a mobile communication’s device into a regulated medical device by using attachments, sensors or other devices.

The critical component there is that the guidance is around the role the tools play (the action/interaction), not the medium they use. Some of these “channels” (or platforms, or destinations…pick your word) shift the interface of healthcare (where people get it, how they use it, etc). That‘s where the FDA wants to focus.

We expect future rounds of proposed guidance to be focused on a critical action or interaction (not a medium). That said, the FDA has social/digital awareness (in a big way). So, each approach will likely offer specific POVs on what to do on open platforms versus closed communication. By open platforms, we mean both social destinations and websites/apps/digital tools with social elements – like rating, commenting, or connecting. By closed, we mean more traditional 1:1 and 1:many communication.

Potentially Game-changing Inquiries into Bigger Issues

The biggest thing to happen to healthcare and social media might have nothing to do with advertising and promotion.

This March, the FDA held hearings about using innovative technologies to expand the number of medications that can be administered over the counter. That’s right: prescribing by self-screening. The reason is simple: The system is over burdened. Writing about the hearings in the Federal Register, the agency said:

“Eliminating or reducing the number of routine visits could free up prescribers to spend time with more seriously ill patients, reduce the burdens on the already overburdened health care system, and reduce health care costs.”

The testimony focused on drugs commonly prescribed for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, migraine headaches, and asthma. The agency also may explore easier access to diabetes treatments.

Now, we’re not just talking about the (paranoid?) self-diagnosis you might be doing with Dr. Google or on WebMD late at night. This is a broader category of true self-screening:

• Kiosks at pharmacies
• Apps
• Meters and trackers

But it does take away one of the critical conversations we plan for: Doctor to Patient.

When the tools and the crowd become the expert, social communities and open platforms become more important. Cracking that new point of influence will put social media back in the spotlight.

What do you think we can expect next from the FDA on social media?

There are some initial questions that come to mind related to these campaigns:

• Who is creating these campaigns?
• What do they look like?
• Can the effectiveness of a campaign to improve health be quantified to show effectiveness?

This post will answer those questions using examples that have been well received and highly effective. Some I’m sure you’ve seen, others are just gaining traction. The key takeaway is to see how they are being executed, and keep in mind they all have a laser focus on a single health topic. It keeps their message on track, and also helps those that take part understand the overarching goal. A focused campaign eliminates the possibility of an audience not understanding and promotes consistent, organic sharing of the message.

Principles of a Social Health Strategy

The foundation of all strategies are very similar:

• Planning period that incorporates things like goals, background information, and user demographics
• Executing the work
• Finally, after lots of hard work and probably some sleepless nights and weekends in the office, that strategy is delivered live to the end user, with a feedback and evaluation loop

All the health campaigns below have done a great job at understanding each of those principles. That is why they’ve changed people’s lives and raised health awareness around certain topics. With all that being said let’s go ahead and take a look at what some of these social marketing health campaigns look like.

Stand Up To Cancer

This is a multi-channel campaign that is leading the fight against cancer. With the help of celebrities, a TV campaign, social channels, and a well-executed website, it’s truly bringing people together in this fight. The platform is very conversational in nature and welcomes people of all backgrounds to contribute however they are able. The resources that are available through this social health effort are unmatched, with many of those resources available directly on the website. There are some components that involve a financial commitment, but these all go directly to cancer research. The website alone reaches anywhere from 40k to 110k unique visitors per month.

StandUp2Cancer Home Page

American Diabetes Walk to Stop Diabetes

The American Diabetes Association has an annual walk to support diabetes research. It has become widely popular and is executed regionally. They didn’t stop at the walk, however, as behind the walk is a digital engine that has a well-integrated social component. The Step Out community and blog has a phenomenally engaged member base. You can also build your team online for the walk, which is great in creating momentum leading up to the event. The offline event connects in a seamless effective way with the team-building feature to the website. The website also entertains as many as 45k unique visitors per month.

ADA Community Blog - Stepout Diabetes

Born HIV Free (The Global Fund)

The Global Fund (an organization that fights HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria) have set up a campaign that focuses on stopping mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The program revolves around a heavy social component specifically on Facebook. There is plenty of information on The Global Fund’s website, but it’s clear they have put a huge focus into Facebook. They already have close to 200k likes, and the plan is to take this global by 2015. The Born HIV Free campaign is primarily based in Europe for the time being. Other elements of the campaign include a YouTube presence as well as Twitter. This allows them to keep all their followers up to date on the latest news and research.

Born HIV Free Facebook Page

Knowledge Is Power (Created by an individual)

In this example, a Pinterest page has been created by an individual. They have used the image tagging functionality of Pinterest to give people an array of resources to educate themselves. This particular page isn’t 100% health-focused, but there is a heavy tilt towards overall health education. Infographics and book covers are displayed that give information on things like heart disease and how to eat better. There are also some pharmaceutical companies exploring Pinterest, as well. It is a great way to appeal to the visual side of people to support a cause or educate on a array of health topics. The actual number of people that are followers of this page doesn’t have the scale of the other examples, but it does show the power of individuals to create meaningful social interactions.

Knowledge is Power - Pinterest

Alternative Health Meetup Group

Alternative Health is a social group created using the Meetup.com platform. Meetup allows people to start an organization on any topic and then obtain sign-up and registration online. The person who organizes the group gets a unique URL, and the Meetup website acts as a hub for all information related to a given group. It successfully uses an online platform to invoke live meeting events for organizations. In the case of Alternative Health Group, it has truly built a global movement. The group is diverse – from physicians to people interested in talking about alternative health. The quantitative success of this one is powerful. There are 460,966 members in 30 countries. The members are spread out through 1,266 cities in which group events are held. Using Meetup.com the social marketing and health touch points have gained phenomenal reach.

MeetUp Alternative Health Group

As you can see, the use of social marketing to improve health is alive and well. These examples are all driven by individuals and organizations to extend better health to the masses. These are all rooted in the greater good of successful health outcomes for individuals. Therefore these all could be considered marketing campaigns; however they are used in a way to start a social dialogue. The growth of this type of social marketing to improve health will only grow. It will be exciting and interesting to see what is next, and what is possible using all the tools at our fingertips.

Now, remember that vacation you took a couple years back? Chances are you have a ton of digital photos on your iPhone that you never got around to printing but uploaded your favorites to Facebook and Twitter. When you remembered to break out the SLR you uploaded those to Flickr and any digital video you took was either uploaded to YouTube or stored on your hard drive.

But, I bet you or your loved ones never created a scrapbook of the event.

Don’t you miss that?

What ever happened to that single collection of an event’s activities?

That’s the question we’ve asked in the lab and the reason we wanted to explore ways of creating a new type of scrapbooking that we’re calling Social Scrapbooking.

Today, we still have a photo and video camera, but we also have a ton of social outlets to capture an event’s activities. For instance, Twitter for what we thought, Foursquare for where we were, Facebook for how it was, Flickr for what it looked like, and the list goes on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could construct scrapbooks from all these activities?

For all you paper scrapbookers out there, your days of nursing paper cuts may be over.

Social Scrapbooking with Facebook

Thanks to Facebook’s Timeline we can view our wall as a scrapbook of our activities in chronological order. Add to this the ability to import other social outlets like Twitter, Instragram, and many others, Facebook Timeline could be close to all encompassing. But what about taking your timeline offline and onto a traditional paper scrapbook? You may recall Facebook’s announcement in October 2010 about the ability to download your information. It was then that we became able to freeze our wall and store our activities on our own devices.

Social Scrapbooking with Memolane

Yep, there’s already a site that creates a scrapbook of your social activities online. Although it won’t die cut your name out of polka-dotted paper, it will import your activities from Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and a ton more. Memolane then lets you create “lanes” around a specific time…like that beach trip you took last summer.

Overall, the way we collect memories has changed. Accounts of our events are no longer tangible. Although we’re generating more data, we’re unable to access it in a central location. Sure, we’re not going to want to reminisce all the time. After all, how often do you scroll to the bottom of your Facebook timeline. But heck, don’t you miss your MySpace posts or your AOL chat room discussions? What will you do with your Facebook memories when the next social network comes along? Will you want to scrapbook your social memories?

In fact, we’re already seeing the sophistication of apps move beyond being merely a tracker or calculator. The top apps on the market today connect users’ health and wellness to their social networks and to people with similar interests or health conditions. Here are 5 apps that are bringing social support to smartphones and health.

Nike Training Club

Specifically geared toward women, Nike’s free fitness training app is the closest thing to having a personal trainer anytime, anywhere. Users select a fitness goal and level, then choose from nearly 90 available workouts. Included with a video demonstration of each exercise is a timer to alert you when to move on to the next workout.

As trainees meet training milestones and earn badges, exclusive content like healthy recipes and celebrity workouts are unlocked.

Social Support: Trainees are able to connect with their Facebook account to automatically tell their friends when they start a workout, share badges, and milestones achieved. Friends can give extra motivation by liking and commenting on the update.

Quitter

Kicking any addiction requires support. Quitter helps users quit an addiction by offering 3 key motivators: 1) showing the length of time a user has been addiction free, 2) how much money they’ve saved from not indulging in the addiction, and 3) inspirational images. Originally designed for smokers, Quitter’s user experience can actually help quit any addiction. To track how much money has been saved and for how long, users enter when they began, how many units of the addiction they used a day, and how much it costs per unit.

Social Support: Along the way, the user can post their updates to an array of social networks to get that much-needed support from their friends, family, and even others trying to kick similar habits.

Avatar Alerts

Right here in iQ, we’re developing a solution to help those who struggle to adhere to a medication regiment.

Avatar Alerts works with any mobile device to accompany the patient through their daily routine. Based on logged or imported prescription data, the patient’s mobile device uses an array of notifications, such as text, email or phone. Avatar Alerts makes all these alerts entertaining and rewarding by applying a score to the time taken to respond. In other words, the faster a patient responds the more points they earn. These points could be used to customize a race car, purchase buildings for a city or any other brand or audience specific platform.

Social Support: Players can remind or be reminded by other players in their online community. Within this community, players can also compare others’ progress and even compete against them. If a player does not respond to these notifications, friends, family or even their social networks can be alerted to remind them.

To see a video demo, visit the Avatar Alerts profile on our Experiments page.

Healthy Habits

The first place winner in the Integrative Health category in the United States Surgeon General Healthy Apps Challenge, Healthy Habits helps correct bad habits by encouraging action.

Using a variety of behavior change philosophies, Healthy Habits promotes change by helping the user identify the reasons for desired change, logging and tracking of behavior, alerts and reminders, gamification, support systems, and visual representations of progress.

Social Support: Healthy Habits allows a user to update their social networks on the habits they are currently trying to change and the progress they’ve made along the way.

Endomondo

Using built-in GPS, Endomondo tracks a runner’s or biker’s route, distance, duration, split times, and calories burned of a runner or biker while also providing audio feedback. Want to see your last workout? Endomondo keeps a full archive of previous workouts and statistics, as well as a localized route map from each workout. The app also supports integration with a phone’s built-in music player and an array of different heart rate monitors.

Social Support: Endomondo users can see what their friends on Endomondo are doing in real time, send encouragement, tease them, challenge them, or join them. The app also supports automatic sharing to Facebook and Twitter from the website.

A presentation by Dr. Peter Murray, the director of the International Medical Informatics Association shared his thoughts in a recent presentation about how social media can be used in medical education. He has identified 3 potential areas where education could benefit from social media: 1) Research method for academic research, 2) virtualizing collaboration tools, and 3) the intersection of health and informatics with social media.

1 in 3 Surveyed Say Social Media Changes Attitudes to Medicines | InPharm

According to new research from the Health Research Institute, nearly a third of US social media users say the channel could change the way they think about their medicines. Kelly Barnes, US Health Industries Leader at HRI says, “Health organizations have an opportunity to use social media as a way to better listen, participate in discussions and engage with consumers in ways that extend their interaction beyond a clinical encounter.”

Facebook Pages For Brands Will Get Profile Pic Makeover April 26 | Ignite Health

Who would have guessed brands would want their logo bigger? Starting April 26, 2012, the profile pic for brands (which currently displays at 125 x 125 pixels) will display at 160 x 160 pixels.

How Consumers Are Using Social Media for Healthcare | DTC Marketing

Stat highlights include:

• 61% of consumers are likely to trust info posted by providers
• 80% of consumers age 18-24 would be likely to share health info through social
• One-third of consumers are ok having their social conversations monitored
• 75% of consumers expect healthcare companies to respond within a day or less
• 45% of consumers said social affects if they will seek a second opinion

Sony’s Patent for a Medical Device | Engadget

Engadget has unearthed a patent application by Sony from 2010 for a medical device. The device would monitor vitals, transfer this data to a TV, and alert your HMO if your TV show sends you into cardiac arrest.

This talk was inspired by the heated debate over SOPA (and apparently all the people in the audience who raised their hands when asked if they’d ever pirated a song or movie).

When Taplin was 22 years old, he went to work as the manager for The Band. For many years after they stopped recording, they made a good living – $150,000 – $200,ooo/ year. Eight years ago that stopped. Two of those great musisicnas are now bankrupt.

We live in a world where the only things people care about are intellectual property – software, books, music. But we don’t value them. The income in these industries has dropped precipitously. And, no one seems to care.

There are two typical answers we explore: technology and diplomacy. One we can break; the other doesn’t work.

People believe it should be free – you should just see ads to ssupport the content. Who benefits from free? Reddit benefits from free, Google benefits from free.

Artists don’t. That’s who gets hurt.

The issue isn’t about laws. It’s about volunteering to do the right thing. Starting with Google not selling ads on pirate websites, not linking to pirate websites, not pretending they can’t control the content on YouTube.

Change of sides:

Ohanin wants us to bring us data and hope. He says the data we see from people like Taplin is slective – yes, ticket sales at movie theaters have dropped dramatically, but revenue has held steady and even increased.  Yes, music revenue have decreased, but dollars spent on gaming have increased. With limited dollars, we’ve changed what we buy.

Ohanian is in the industry because he believes in hope. Like Kickstarter, where $99,344,382 has been raised – people giving people money directly for their art. The internet is a global stage where anyone with an internet connection can get access to your work and choose to support you. 10% of the films at Sundance were funded by Kickstarts.

It has a downside, sure – you can no longer build a business model around scarcity. You can’t force people to buy a little black discs.

But this is innovation. We’re going to see more projects like this that let people work with their fans and not treat them like criminals.

Here they begin the hand-to-hand combat:

• Only 19% of theatrical revenue is from movie tickets. It’s the DVD sales that are disappearing
• Gaming is using a scarcity model – that’s how they continue to make revenue
• These flimsy independent models on Kickstarter aren’t serious filmmakers – most won’t get a distribution model
• Artists cannot compete with free

It’s the business model that’s under debate. Pre selling your work (Kickstarter) or paying per download (only 27% of music downloaded is paid for).

The one part of the music businesss that continues to do well is Music Publishing – the flat fee that bars, stores, etc., pay to play music in their venues. What if we extended that model to the Global ISPs – every broadband subscribers pays a few bucks a month to get access to all the music in the world.

Ohanian sees another model – micro patrons. Harking back to the time when rich people funded an artist painting, say, the Sistine Chapel. Maybe people would pay, say $1/month, for ongoing exclusive access to an artist they care about.

Sooooo – what do you think?

As we wrap up here (i.e. in the last seconds before we dash out for a cab and an airport cocktail), just a quick nod to Baratunde Thurston – the best conference host we’ve seen. Thurston is the director of digital at The Onion and the author of How to Be Black. And, honestly, a complete delight.

• Mark Crumpacker, CMO, Chipotle Mexican Grill
• Stephen Hoover, CEO, PARC, a Xerox company
• Bob Lord, Global CEO, Razorfish
• Sarah Robb O’Hagan, President, Gatorade, a division of PepsiCo

Gatorade started rapidly changing when they asked where else they could compete:  Why are we only making drinks – why not food, shakes, anything an athelete would consume? Why just products? We have more knowledge about atheletic persformance than any other company in the world – why wouldn’t we turn that into a service model?

They believe that the teams who are most successful at innovation passionately believe in the work. At Gatorade, everyone on the team passionately believes in helping athletes be better, faster. Without that passion, it’s like having an orchestra that’s out of tune.

Razorfish’s new business model is moving away from just hiring great creative people to creating products that let them work with clients in new ways. One of the biggest areas they’re innovating in is connected commerce – ways to bring your social network to stores, ways retail can better know you. At the core of that is great partnerships – like working with Facebook to create something novel you’ve never seen or used before.

Lord (at Razorfish) has set a bar for good work: Are we giving clients brand new thinking? Is it our best thinking? It started out as a management mantra, but has been adopted much more broadly. It’s how they continue push themselves and keep the culture innovative.

At Chipotle, they initially believed that the more people who knew about food integrity, the more likely they were to become long-term returning customers. It turned out not to be entirely true because only 20 – 30% of people really care about that. In order to get people engaged in that idea of creating a more sustainable world and taking the exploitation out of fast food, they have to make learning about it a good time – delicious, fun, entertaining. So, Chipotle started a music label (their first song is by Willie Nelson – an iQ fave) and started producing videos and documentary. Oh, and the first video short story they produced >> it’s a delightful cartoon:

At Parc, they believe that every company is a technology company – whether they want to be or not. The companies that have really used technology to innovate experiences have challenging environments – challenging in a constructive way. They make sure criticism isn’t personal. It’s ok to fail. They know if you kill people because they fail, you’ll never get any innovation.

Fantastic reminder from Hoover at PARC: “Doing nothing is not risk free.”

In his introduction, Gray said that English is what’s known in business as a “weirdo.” He’s got a clicker on the outside of his office (like the kind that bouncers use to count how many people are coming in to a bar). He got it because he doesn’t like large meetings. When he sees 10 or more people in a room who pops in to see what they’re doing - three of you couldn’t do that? More people in a meeting are just more people who can say no.

That’s not the only iconic wackiness he’s added to the 162 person company. There’s a red phone in the dev area – if it rings its a problem with the site and it can’t be answered by a customer service rep, it has to be answered by a developer.

English credits a lot of his companies success (14 million app downloads,  100 million queries/month, profitable since 2008) to hiring the right people and giving them permission to fail. If someone isn’t failing or making mistakes, they’re not innovative. I don’t want 10 person meetings deciding thing. Taking risks is a requirement. We give people ridiculous power to try things and change things.

He looks for people who are fast and good, but also really fun. People who have past successes in different domains – he’s hired people (in part) because they had an Olympic gold medal, claimed a national foosball champion, or became an international grand chess master.At KAYAK it’s team first, customer second, efficiency third. English is working hard to foster the culture that inspires the best work.

English does hand off a lot of the creative to people who he trusts to take risks, but he stays involved in the business. He answers emails, takes phone calls from the millions of users who come to the site.

He says their ads are part of their risk-taking culture.

Like this one – the character is based on a real person who bullied the creative director in high school. He called the bully up to get permission to use his name and then gave a casting and makeup team a Facebook photo to create the character from:

BTW: This is the bully’s real Facebook photo (Revenge is sweet, huh?)

English says, it’s all about knowing when to make rules and know when to let go. It’s very liberating as a manager.

• Kate Brodock, CMO, Girls in Tech
• Bertil Chappuis, Partner, McKinsey & Company
• Liya Kebede, Model, Actress, Creator and Designer of lemlem

Brodock has one of those resumes that at first glance makes no sense – it’s a chaotic sampling of different things that interested her over time. The connector was a sense of personal activism – wanting to be part of changing or impacting something bigger. To her, that resume looks like a progressive opportunity to fix things. A lot of members of Generation Flux have that same kind of job-hopping, career-changing, identity-shifting background.

Chappuis is a management consultant. Dark suit, slicked back hair (he actually said the word rubric twice in the first :30 seconds). He doesn’t think the title of Generation Flux belongs on him, but Fast Company puts him there because he confidently works from a blank canvas – constantly cheffing up new ways to add value.

Liya starts to bring the common thread together – Generation Flux sees something they can contribute to and figures out how to do it. They’re life hackers.

One hallmark of GF is that Information Junkie gene – they love to know what’s hot and what’s next. They can be paralyzed by FOMO (fear of missing out). Safian asked the panel how they deal with it and embrace the chaos. The answers sounded deceptively simple – filters and folders, intentionally disconnecting and – all you business travelers will nod at this one: loving the time you spend on planes (where no one can get to you).

They seem to really love chaos. Juggling a million things is energizing. Being trapped in traffic is agony.

Chappuis says to successfully navigate a flux career, people need to be able to answer one question: What value are you adding (this week, this month). When you’re navigating through multiple organizations for relatively short periods of time, that’s the reputation you build.

Brett Mannes is a producer at Second City Communications (how cool of a job is that?)

Second City has been making comedy for 50 years. In that time, they’ve been co-creating they just call it improv. Here’s how Mannes described how it works:

• On stage all they have is their team and chairs
• They build improv by asking for input from the audience
• That shapes and builds the show
• In short: Co-creating with an audience gets them to a product they could have never got to another way

Now a Facilitator Named Sue has us play a game:

Gather a group of three people:

• Person 1: Take two minutes to describe the most amazing party you could create. A party that will be remembered for years.
• Persons 2 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with no, we should…

Then:

• Person 2: Your turn to describe the party…
• Persons 1 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with yes, but…

Checkin here:

What effect did the no, we should have? It left the ideator thinking they needed to go back to the drawing board or give in and do something entirely different. What about the yes, but?  For some it forced them to make the idea better, but generally had the same negative effect.

No is a great answer for a lot of questions, but it’s not a great answer for ideas.

Try it again:

• Person 3: Describe your party
• Persons 1 & 2: New rule of engagement, respond with yes and…

And, of course, the experience builds bigger and bigger ideas and people lean in. Yes and shares the risk and the success – it’s how we accept, acknowledge and add to ideas.

The hard part is that you lose control of the idea.  That’s uncomfortable.  But that’s where innovation happens – when seemingly disparate ideas or entities come together to create an exchange.

Four more helpful tenants of co-creation at Second City:

• Love every idea for a minute (try it on, you might be able to find the one piece of it that could actually move forward)
• How you do the work impacts what you get
• Bring a brick (a small idea we can build on) – not a cathedral (an exhaustive plan we have to accept or reject)
• At Second City, conversations are better than monologues by about a billion

• Bob Bowman, President and CEO, MLB Advanced Media
• Noah Brier, Cofounder, Percolate
• Scott Roen, VP Digital Marketing and Innovation, American Express

Roen says content is more like service than sales or advertising. It’s a way to start a dialog with customers and prospects in a way that we could have never done before. One thing content has done for American Express is let them innovate beyond the company’s initial or core business. Of course, they are and will remain a credit card company, but increasingly they’re becoming a total resource for small business.

Brier says we had to become content creators. On social networks, there’s no place for traditional advertising. We have to be a natural part of the ecosystem – creating, tweeting, talking the way a person would.

Both advertising and content start the same way – understand the people, the culture, the context. But advertising doesn’t always work at that level of human connection – the product pushes forward. In true content creation, you have to deliver things people want and value.

Open Forum: The Small Business Community

Open Forum is a community of small business owners that was inspired by the physical world. This was before Twitter and  Foursquare. Facebook was still closed (just for college students). At that time, American Express was hosting small business events all around the country. At the events, they saw that people were veraciously consuming the content and walking around networking like mad. They’d leave with stacks of business cards.

It just made sense to bring it online. Today, they have 200 experts giving ~2 million people/month ideas, advice and connections. The community is still growing – 100% year over year.

Roen points to three things that helped them succeed:

• Mission driven team: They’re shared goal is helping people succeed (not selling credit cards)
• Decentralized organization: People are empowered throughout the company to try different things
• Involved leadership: That’s what motivates employees. At a recent hackathon, C-level execs were looking at code with developer

Percolate: Social prompts for brands

Brier is often asked the same question by brand managers:  What should I tweet? He said it’s a funny question from a company that can send cereal to any story in the world. But he realized that companies have no interests – at least not the ways that people do.

Percolate is a social tool for brand managers. Its algorithms – interests graphs – help prompt a brand on what to say, what to share.

The tools can only do so much. Brands need to really see themselves the way people do. People who work at the brands think the brand is boring. But people on the outside think its this amazing company – full of stories.  Sometimes an outside voice can help you see what’s really there.

Gregg Heard is the VP of brand identity and design at AT&T. Gregg has been in the branding game for 22+ years on both the corporate side at AT&T, prior to that at Philips, and on the agency side brands including Logitech, Sony, IBM, Harper Collins, Caterpillar, Revo Sunglasses and UPS.

Smartphone adoption is now at ~50% in the US and dominate new phone purchases. This handheld technology has changed the way we interact with places, things, and one another. Greg believes that there are 4 types of digital interactions spurred by smartphone technology.

Digital Intimacy: Simply, it means we are closer with our friends and family even when we are apart.

Digital Kinship: Creating new connections and new types of shared interests that allow us to break down barriers between generations, interests.

Digital Guardianship: We’re more productive, even when we are pressed for time. It’s a simple message “Hey, I just landed, I’ll be home for dinner”

Digital Heroism: We have high-quality content available to us at any time. It allows us to create learning moments.

People ultimately love their handheld technology, but don’t have the same affection for the carrier. In fact, Greg compared it to the relationship between buying a car and then purchasing insurance. Buying a car is fun and sexy, much like getting a new phone. On the other hand, the interaction with purchasing insurance is not quite as exciting, similar to that of working with your mobile carrier. There’s a couple of reasons for that:

• Overwhelming and confusion
• A neccessary inconvenience
• Lack of transparency
• Unclear added value

In an effort to change this paradigm, AT&T is working to “humanize” their marketing approach. There are 4 key ways they hope to humanize their brand:

Look: Starts with a focus on the look of the brand. AT&T has announced new plans for a flagship retail space on Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

Speak: AT&T moving away from generic, impersonal text marketing. One example includes a text message alert that is sent when a customer leaves the country to alert them of potential charges begins with “Hey Globetrotter…” versus “You are now subject to…”

Sound: AT&T is beginning to brand sounds. Sonic accents that you will recognize in ads and in the technology. Think audio

Behave: The new branding strategy is also focusing on how tech can bring possibility to people’s lives: “it’s what you do with what we do.”

We all know data is important. It’s on the covers of magazines, trending on Amazon. It’s experiencing a powerful resurgance in value.

Patil set up a two-foot-long metal bar – a double pendulum. It’s hinged in the middle, so it can fold in on itself. Another hinge on one end is attached to a clamp, which is secured to the edge of a table. He asks us to predict when it will last flip. The bar begins to swing wildly, circling the spot where it is attached to the table, while also circling in on itself. There seems to be no way to predict when it will end.

In this situation, we’re each a data product. Trying to analyze and predict. But it’s wild and hard to figure out – chaotic.

Patil says, you’re competing againt this simple system with only four variables and you can’t do it. If you can’t figure out this.

You need two things to manage life on the edge of chaos

1. Timely, accurate measurement.
2. Low latency high speed controls

In other words: high speed observations and wicked fast reaction time.

Patil shared one of his favorite stories about how data managing life at the edge of chaos: People You May Know

Jonathan Goldman (data scientiest #2 at Linkedin) is an experimental physicists. Incredibly clever. He had this insight that there’s a feeling that you have when you walk into a conference room for the first time – you look for people you know to latch onto and you feel incredibly different when you find them and know “my people are here.” There’s that same initial feeling of alone/uncomfortable when you get to a social network for the first time.

The People You May Know module teleports people from a browser to a community. You know the algorithm for this. It’s the same triangle closing we do every time we meet someone: Where do you work? What do you do? Where did you go to school? Oh, do you know…

It’s now one of the most popular features on the social web. All because one guy through about how to deploy data in a clever way to simplify a complex world.

Doing that in your organization takes two big thing:

ACCESS. How can you give the people in your organization access to data and empower them to apply it in novel ways.

CURIOSITY. We reward success and massively penalize failure. How can we reward the creation, the novelty and treat failure like trial.

CONVERSATIONS. Use data to start a conversation, not to make a decision. You know things that the data doesn’t know. If you let it, data will drive you off a cliff.

• You’re not getting the best of your introverts’ brains (which are a third to a half of the people you’re working with)
• You and your colleagues spend too much time in meetings and not enough time alone (and it’s seriously hampering your creativity)
• You believe (perhaps unconsciously) that the best talkers have the best ideas

The difference between extroverts and introverts is how they respond to stimulation and prefer to connect with people.

Extroverts crave more stimulation and activity. Introverts feel most alive, energized in quiet environments. It’s a physical difference. One study gave introverts and extroverts math problems to tackle with varying degrees of background noise. They found that extroverts did best when the background noise was low or entirely quiet, but the extroverts did better when the noise was high and ramped up

When we can chose how much stimulation is coming at us, we’re the most energized, proactive and effective.But, our offices are all designed for extroverts – open, loud, uncontrolled.

To be creative we need way more solitude than we’re getting. Uber designer Phillip Stark said “I do the entire years work
From the middle of June to the middle of September, I don’t speak to anybody, and I do the entire year’s work. I’m in my bedroom, on my little table, from 7am to 7pm, with only my music”

Does that sound like a leader in your company? A valuable member of your team? Most companies would say no. They’re the missing the opportunity to promote the most creative people in the company.

Many creative people are introverts – who need and crave solitude. True creativity only happens in that solitude. Group Think muddies ideas when we try to build them together. She points to the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham: “the evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

Can took her search to Harvard Business School, the spirtual capital of extroversion. There, socializing is an extreme sport – nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone. If you’re working too much alone, something is wrong.

She sat in on a subarctic survival exercise. Basically people look at items from a crashed plan and rank their importance to survival. They rank alone and then as a group. The idea is that you’ll do better from a group because of the synergy between all these minds.

One group included an actual arctic backpacker – so they should have had a huge advantage. But the guy was quiet, more introverted. They group tended to skip over his ideas; they turned instead to the more chariasmatic speakers. They actually performed atrociously. When they looked back at the tape of where they went off the tracks, they saw that they choose great talk over good ideas.

How do we value the ideas of the quiet and outspoken equally so that the best ideas rise on their merit?

Three things you can do:

• Set up your offices more mindfully – with lots of space to chat casually and spaces with way more privacy and autonomy
• When it comes to creativity – think about a hybrid approach where people can work on their own and then come together in thoughtfully-manged collaborative groups
• Take a really good hard look at who you’re promoting and hiring –  you want the most visionary people not just the best talkers

BTW – My very very favorite missive on introverts: Caring for Your Introvert

David Fischer is the VP of Advertising and Global Operations at Facebook. David joined Facebook after seven years at Google, where he was responsible for Google’s online sales channel, which represents the majority of Google’s customers worldwide. Prior to that, David served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the United States Treasury Department during the Clinton Administration.

As marketers, we’ve always told stories. Social technologies don’t change that fact, but they do change how they are seen and how they are perceived. Today’s reality is that marketing doesn’t only gets viewed, it gets shared. That means your brand needs an “always on” strategy.

Content is fluid and ubiquitous

The reality is that the accelerated pace of content has huge implications. In the last 48 hours, the world has created more data and content than the 30,000 years prior to 2003.

Today, the price of content creation is basically nothing. The challenge isn’t having access to content or even creating your own, rather it is making relevant content available at the right times. That’s where curation comes in.

Lightweight is the new heavyweight

The point is that big marketing ideas are still important, but smaller everyday interactions must be used to compliment them.

92% of people trust recommendations from friends on social media, according to a new study from Nielsen. A separate study showed that when a consumer sees an ad on Facebook with a picture and name of a friend included, they are 50% more likely to remember that ad. What does that mean in extending the reach of your marketing? Friends of fans have been showed to create 81x higher distribution for the top 1000 brands on Facebook.

The takeaway is that, thanks to social media, advertising is moving away from interruptive to inclusive and shareable.

That has changed the way we brand. Telling our brand stories it’s not so much about inspiring and appealing to a single person or fan of the brand, it’s about the friends of fans, and friends of friends. Take into consideration Starbucks:

• Starbucks’ Facebook fans spend 11% more in the retail stores.
• Fans of the Starbucks’ Facebook page are 2x more likely to visit the Starbucks retail website.
• More interesting, friends of friends are 1.5X more likely to visit the same site.

Final Thought

The goal of great marketing isn’t about getting seen, it’s about being shared.

General (Ret.) Stanley A. McChrystal, U.S. Army; Founder, The McChrystal Group, is addressing the headline we keep seeing: ”Americans don’t lead well anymore.”

There’s a lot of data to support that – Katrina, the debt ceiling, etc. It’s not the events that happen to us, but the ways we deal with them.

How did we lose our edge? The problem may be that we were too successful. For years, we knew how to run the system. Our cohesion and assurance became almost tribal.

Then things changed. They started happening more quickly; there was more competition. Organizations didn’t work the way we were used to.

That created a leadership gap. The sport we were trained to play wasn’t the game anymore.

The military dealt with exactly this same gap. (This is a General talking – so, we’re going to go into a real operation now:) Operation Eagle Claw was ordered by President Jimmy Carter to attempt to put an end to the Iran hostage crisis by rescuing 52 Americans held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran on 24 April 1980. The humiliating public debacle that ensued damaged American prestige worldwide.

The military knew it needed a new kind of leadership to make sure that never happened again. It created the Joint Special Operations Command.  It was effective, but very focused.

Then 9/11 happened. Everything we’d defined as the enemy and the way things worked fundamentally changed.

We had a new gap. The Joint Special Operations Command was too narrow – the military suddenly needed more, broader resources. Across jurisdictions, across countries, across interests.

The goal was matrixing organizations around the world together into one true network, with a shared consciousness and understanding of the context so that they could work with smart autonomy.

But trying to create an organization out of people no one leader commanded  didn’t fit the organizational model we all knew. How do you build a team of people you don’t control?

So the military did what most businesses do: when faced with a new challenge, try to do what you always do better. Shoot straighter, fly faster. It works for a while, but eventually we run into physics. The military realized they weren’t winning (which is a military euphemism for losing).

The only way to innovate was to get that shared consciousness and purpose. It’s not comfortable, but it’s doable with the right leadership and design.

The general shared some of his learnings from that transition – telling us what works and what doesn’t:

No longer works: Traditional decision making
Now works: Shared consciousness and purpose

No longer works: Information ownership
Now works: Inclusion and transparency (a primary role of leadership is pushing context down)

No longer works: Organizational equities
Now works: Team

No longer works: Command and control
Now works: Trust

Stefan thinks intuition is essential – what would people like us really like? When his team presented rough sketches of a bracelet that could track movement to their CEO, he didn’t say – we need to do more research. He said: How fast can you build it. That gut instinct is what brought Nike Fuel to market in record time.

The most powerful force in the universe isn’t technology, it’s imagination.

There are two kinds of companies – process companies and product. Process companies have a checklist. They believe if they follow that check list, they’ll get to the right outcome.

Product companies are obsessed with the outcome – with the customer, the idea. They know innovation by its very nature has unknown outcomes. It forces you to become a better decision maker – to embrace bold calls, to pick high potential ideas and drive their success.

Stefan says Nike doesn’t do a lot of advertising. We make meaningful connections, he says. It’s not about persauding people to buy something. It’s about making an emotional connection – how can we help you get better? Advertising is moving toward becoming a service. We used to say just do it – and expect you to go out and do it yourself. Our consumers expect more of us now – we need to help them be successful.

One other great soundbite from the book: Convenient is the enemy of right. Making life inconvenient for yourself as a producer is really the only way to create the ultimate effective solution for people.

Safian welcomed Millard Drexler, CEO of J.Crew – a member of Generation Flux (on the older end by his own admission :) and part of the innovation engine of our age.

Drexler says most companies have management who don’t know what’s going on. They’re focused on quarterly results, what they can sell – not what’s really happening with their customer. He has a game to play:  Try To Reach the CEO of a Company if you’re a customer. It fails 19/20 times – and, if you get a letter back, it’s a form letter.

If you can’t control the product, the merchandising, the experience – you lose something. It’s difficult to “do innovation” in a company that’s large and diverse. Focus is essential. Some of these big companies need to be broken up. Companies with ownership at the smaller level will always do better. Companies that give responsibility at all levels really thrive.

It’s partly a challenge with boards. These big, disconnected groups that don’t have the vision to see what’s down the road and drive decisions. They’re afraid of making mistakes. They’re prep school buddies. Not independent boards. And, no one can talk to them. Most companies don’t breed entreprenuers because it’s almost impossible to get access to the top.

Drexler tries to stay involved at every level. He reads the emails, takes the calls. He recently ordered a product from a competitor. He and his team were opening it, looking through it to see how they packaged orders vs. how J Crew does. Someone pointed out, hey, we did this better than them. He said – don’t look for where we win, look for where we can learn. He asks someone every day – what could we do better and where are we screwing up?

They recently got an email from a customer complaining that something was left out of the package. The customer was right. He was disappointed by how they typically respond. Just fix it – no connection, no gift card, no real recognition that we screwed up. These real-world examples let him challenge common wisdom by taking on the assumption that we’ve got to do it more efficiently (save money) and replace it with the truth that we’ve got to do it best.

At J Crew, it’s all about getting out and experiencing things. Sending people to the stores – not asking them to read a research report. “You put Steve Jobs in a room with 50 homeless guys and a researcher will tell you the average income in that zip code is a million dollars.” You can make numbers mean anything. You have to get out and really see what’s happening.

Drexler has a pretty fun ways of communicating with his employees – 1,000 people on three floors of a loft building. He’s got an intercom (loud speaker) that he blares his messages through – surveys, questions, ideas. It’s one way he creates transparency – letting people know what he’s thinking.

Oh, and a closing thought I know some of our readers will really love: When you’re a micromanager, the day never ends

Daniel is a 26 year old technologist who started his first company 1997 at the age of 14. Currently he is the CEO and founder of Spotify, a legal music service that helps people discover, browse and play music. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).

Follow Daniel on Twitter: @eldsjal

Tweets and conversation around Daniel Ek’s, CEO and founder of Spotify, presentation to Ad Age Digital about how brands using music and Spotify as a platform, not a service.

Noah Brier has done a little bit of everything. In 2009, he was recognized as one of the 100 most creative people in business and one of four social media innovators by BusinessWeek. Today, Noah is known as the co-founder of Percolate, a content curation engine for brands. Noah shares his thoughts at NoahBrier.com

Follow Noah on Twitter: @NoahBrier

Check out the tweets and conversation around Noah Brier’s talk about how brand’s must show their inner publisher to be relevant.

Randall Brown has been bring innovation in marketing to Gatorade for nearly 10 years now. Today, as Senior Brand Manager for digital, social and marketing innovation, Randall leads Gatorade brand strategy and planning across all digital and online platforms including advertising, branded & custom content, social media, search & SEO, measurement & analytics and gaming.

Follow Randall on Twitter: @RandallB3

In 2010, 500K consumers were connected with the Gatorade brand. Unfortunately, these were not their core audience. More times than not, the conversation happening in social media around Gatorade looked something like: “Ahhh…it’s Monday and I’m hungover. Orange Gatorade, please.” <– Not Ideal!

Today, the Gatorade brand is connected with nearly 5M people…many of which are core athletes that use their products everyday. How did Gatorade in such a short period of time use social media to grow their brand? It was a very purposeful effort with a few key stages:

Define Social Purpose & Brand Behaviors

Your social purpose must equal your brand purpose. What is it that your brand is about and how can the brand portray that purpose? At Gatorade, their purpose is to drive athletic performance from the inside out. That means helping their core audience understand what should be put into their body, why, and the effect it will have on their performance.

The rest is simple…Brand Purpose = Social Purpose.

Living Your Ethos Daily

How does the brand’s social team go about planning and executing a systematic approach to engagement? What actions must happen everyday to live the brand. As individuals, when we wake up each morning we know what we are going to do. It’s intuitive whether it is scheduled out or not. The brand purpose must be that intuitive. From there, brand managers must figure out how to scale and operationalize the brand’s social acitivities?

Purposeful Experimentation & Measurement

Remember 6th grade science? Remember the scientific method?

1. Form hypothesis
2. Define your variable
3. Test and experiment

Social media works the same way. We can formulate hypothesis about how consumers will respond to specific brand behaviors, define variables that could alter actions, and then continue to test and experiment to optimize the results.

Randall shared the 2-pronged approach Gatorade uses to track brand behaviors:

1) Tracking your inputs

Quantify the scale and qulaity of your behaviors in the social landscape.

2) Tracking your outcomes

Quantify the scale and quality of your outomces impact with customers.

From there, we can understand the value and ROI from a multi-dimensional perspective:

• as “media”
• as an insights tool
• as a brand equity builder
• as a sales tool

Final Thought

Social media is indeed a new place. But, people haven’t evolved over the last 50 years, we are all fundamentally the same over time. If you are able define your brand’s purpose while still keeping the same understanding of people, everything else falls into place.

As senior vice president at Mastercard, Cheryl Guerin is responsible for US Marketing strategies and programs that drive greater preference for MasterCard’s brand, products and services across B2B and B2C audiences. As such, Cheryl is known for her directing of Mastercard’s award-winning Priceless advertising campaign.

Tweets and conversation from Cheryl Guerin’s presentation at Ad Age Digital Conference:

Mark Mahaney is the Internet Analyst at Citigroup Investment Research. For the past two years, Mark has been ranked #2 in the Greenwich Institutional Investor Poll for the Internet sector and ranked as Runner Up in the Institutional Investor Annual Poll for the Internet sector. He’s a big shot and always right on top of what’s next.

1. The Rise of All Things Mobile

Google: mobile advertising made up 6% of Google’s total revenue in 2011. That number is expected to hit 10% in 2012.

Amazon: Roughly $2B to $4B in sales via mobile devices in 2011.

eBay: Generated $4B in mobile (up 100%)

Priceline: Disclosed 270% growth in hotel bookings with 99% booked for same-day check-ins through mobile.

2. The Rise of All Things Social

3. The Rise of All Things Local

The internet makes local very attractive but it’s a very hard thing to accomplish. It takes a lot of troops on the ground but we will see companies like Groupon to continue to make (lots of) money in this space.

4. Online Mitigation of TV/Video Advertising

Traditional advertising has always dominated ad budgets. In 2012, we’ll see digital continue to overtake other channels (including TV). TV Viewership will begin a major drop-off in 2912 as people increasingly substitute internet content for TV content.

5. The Rise of Online Gaming

6. The Rise of Cloud Computing

Rise of the cloud is a huge opportunity fueling big venture capital investment. Young people who are native to digital have been very effective in identifying trends and opportunity for new tools and companies but watch out for the “19-yr-old risk”…are college kids equipped to lead?

7. The Rise of Mobile Payments

8. The “Hardware-ization” of the Internet

Who would have ever thought that Amazon and Google would get into the hardware game? But we are seeing it happening with Kindles, Nooks, etc.

9. Increasing Merger & Acquisition Momentum

Companies are showing an increasing willingness to utilize merger and acquisitions to achieve growth. The volume of M&A’s

10. Robust IPO Market

Hulu, Twitter, Zillow? Who is next? Most of the the 2011 IPOs were advertising/media companies. Interesting…

Did we miss a really nice tidbit from Mark’s talk? Help us fill in the blanks in the comments below and we’ll make your additions to the list and link back to you. :)

Jonah Peretti has spent the last six years creating viral hits, tracking online social behavior, and building technology to amplify buzz. The New York Times began referring to Jonah as the “viral marketing hotdog” not long after he was was selected by Vogue as one of 13 American Visionaries. A co-founder of the Huffington Post, Peretti is now developing a new platform called BuzzFeed.

Follow Jonah on Twitter: @Peretti

We’re seeing a profound shift from search to social in the marketing world. Just look at the two biggest players in each category.

Google world-view: “Connecting the World’s Information” – The key is connecting people with information they need.

Facebook world-view: The key is helping you express your feelings with your friends.

The content we share on the social web is compelling because it hits an emotional string. We share content that makes us laugh and we share content that makes us cry (and everything in between). It’s a much different experience than when we go to search engines to look for specific information.

What’s next for social?

As social media matures, the pictures of kittens, location check-ins, and personal updates are increasingly being joined by breaking news, original content and substantive articles. People are already getting everything they want all mixed together in their FB and Twitter feed. So where does advertising fit in?

1) Social Adveritisng needs to be native with other social content. Banner ads on social networks are not native. Advertising should be treated like the rest of the content. On a blog or website, that means a post with a thumbnail image, headline, author and intriguing content.

2) Social advertising is word-of-mouth marketing at Internet scale. To be strategic, advertisers need to think about how and why they are investing in social advertising. Who are they trying to reach, at what scale, and at what level of engagement?

We are the the very beginning of a big shift from search to social. The way ideas, media and ads spread on social platforms are very different than portals and search. It seems that there is a huge opportuinty for publishers, agencies and brands that truly understand the dynamics of the social web – not just compelling copy.

Final Thought

Understanding doesn’t mean being smart. All too often we try to group the smartest people in a room to come up with great ideas and strategies that are perfect down to the smallest detail. In the second wave of social disruption, the smartest people will be the folks that have a deep understanding of humans (aka emotional intelligence).

About the speaker:

John Harrobin is the VP of marketing communication at Verizon Wireless. John leads a team of more than 160 staff and multiple agencies responsible for all national advertising, brand management, media planning, merchandising, sponsorships, and go-to-market functions at Verizon. He’s also responsible for managing Verizon’s media and production budget of over $1.5B.

Today, the best marketers possess the ability and willingness to mine data and use that in their decision-making and marketing spend. Digital has made this more sophisticated than ever. As VP of marketing with one of the world’s largest communications brands, John has 5 key principles that all marketers should abide by today.

1)  Don’t just create new messages, create new tools.

2)  Structure media against people, not content.

3)  Look for insights from the edges.

4)  Data Management Platforms and algorithms only work when people know how to use them effectively.

5)  If you think you’re done, then you really are done.

Seth Farbman was named CMO of clothing brand GAP in February 2011. Formerly the worldwide managing director at Ogilvy & Mather, Seth has developed marketing campaigns for consumer brands such as Coca-Cola, UPS, Unilever and Time Warner Cable. Farbman also founded and became president of OgilvyEarth, a top-ranked sustainability marketing practice.

Follow Seth on Twitter: @SethFarbman

Seth Farbman, CMO of Gap, enlightened the crowd at Ad Age Digital with why GAP doesn’t see it as digital marketing but rather relationship marketing…and it’s igniting their brand.

Jason Kilar is a modern day media tycoon. Jason began his career at the Walt Disney Company before making a leap to Amazon where he spent nearly a decade. During that time, Jason wrote the original business plan for Amazon’s entry into the video and DVD businesses. Today, Jason is the CEO of Hulu, the online video joint venture of News Corp and NBC Universal.

Follow Jason on Twitter: @JasonKilar

In 2007, Hulu began development. Today, they serve up more video ads than any other network online — including YouTube.

Relentessly improve TV (for users and advertisers alike)

Hulu began with a simple philosophy, let’s change the game for both TV viewers and the brands that advertise during the programming. With that in mind, Hulu actually began with the advertisers with 3 things in mind:

1. Viewers should not be getting advertising that isn’t relevant

2. For 60 years, a single show was the proxy for distributing relevant advertising. Today, Hulu (and other digital platforms) can look across entire online activities by a user to match and target advertising.

3. Ask the consumers what they think. Hulu provides an opportunity at the top of their content to let the viewers notify them if the ad is relevant to them. Also, they let viewers choose which advertisement they want (think: Coke vs. Sprite vs. Dr. Pepper).

Billing: 100% completion

Hulu only bills when 100% of the ad was viewed. That is different than any other advertising channel today.

The Future of TV?

1. Personalized: The consumer experience will be extremely personalized…very similar to the Pandora experience versus the experience you get from a car radio.

2. Comprehensive Content: The amount of content that will be available at anytime, on any screen will be complete. The future of TV viewing will allow viewers to watch any show any event ever recorded anytime and anywhere they prefer.

3. Life: TV is a one-to-many experience today. While TV is very social today in that we talk about it with friends after the fact. The future will make TV even more of a social experience.

4. Convenient: We all know instances of how we missed our favorite show or historic breaking news, but that will no longer be the case. As in #3, TV will be available anytime and anywhere and will be able to be re-accessed in the same manner.

5. Format: Context will determine format. Today, we have very standard time formats (30 & 60 minute segments), but the future will bring us a greater variety of time formats depending on the context (in terms of content, format, timing, etc.)

6. High Value Advertising: Advertisers will have an even closer relationship with their core audience and will be able to speak with them much easier creating a more efficient process and higher returns.

Key Takeaway:

“You can never underestimate the power of convictions and relentlessly pursuing better ways.”