Marketing has loosened up. Controlling the customer experience was once considered a virtue. Funny how this was the discipline when media was relatively limited. Today’s brand guardians (the term is a bit of an oxymoron, now) yearn for a somewhat anarchic distribution of the message, hoping it would create its own momentum across all networks. Buzz marketing, for one, is the art of getting it started. Monitor, yes. Control, no. In fact, the more you lose control, the better it could spread.

Notice how easy it is to stumble on a book once the ‘search inside this book’ feature is turned on at Amazon. The portion of the Amazon site encouraging authors to participate in this program says it uses actual words from inside the book (not those keywords supplied by the publisher.) This gives people a chance of finding the book in search results when they use words that may not even be directly related to the title or author.

I bring this up just to illustrate how an author could get tremendous marketing lift by giving up control and allowing his book to be available this way. We often talk of marketing communications from Big Company company perspective. In this digital era, it’s amazing how we could too.

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My son’s school, Brophy College Prep has just announced that starting with the new batch of incoming freshmen, all students will be required to buy a Toshiba tablet PC. The purpose is clear –apart from the stated one of replacing expensive text books: Students are living in the age when much of their education experience in the analog world has a digital counterpart.

Their homework is already hosted on Blackboard, used by thousands of academic institutions.

How will we communicate with this Net generation? Don tapscott writes about this, how the 88 million in this generation won’t be avialble on the on-to-many technologies that are still around. He writes:

"…to today’s media literate kids, television’s current methods are old-fashioned and clumsy. It is unidirectional, with the choice of programming and content resting in the hands of few, and its product often dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator."

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Microsoft is running a teaser campaign at Origami Project and this is the signal to a war we are going to see between the old rivals once again.

Lots of speculation on what this device will be, including Scoble’s cryptic post, and 102 reader comments. My guess is that it’s a portable media center aimed squarley at the iPod –or rather, where the iPod is headed.

Why? Microsoft has seen Apple unstoppable force in the MP3 revolution, and is not going to wait around for Apple to lead the wireless revolution as well. Expect a pre-emptive strike at the territory that the Apple designers are scoping out.

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