Just added two friends to my blog roll.

Joey Caspersz’s Monday Morning Blues is a riot –if you are a Sri Lankan.

Fazli Sameer’s obersevations  here of Colombo, and Bambalapitiya are so good, it’s as if he had been walking down the streets with a video camera and zooming in on the details.

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In the past 2 days, I was asked what Hoi Polloi means. I mentoned the Greek definition, about the ‘masses.’ If I may reiterate, since this web log has been around for over a year, it is based on my marcom philosophy that ordinary people –and not ‘brand managers’ have more control over the messages. Hoi Polloi is about intelligent end-users who are participants –not ‘targets.’

So it was serendipitous that I got a link from Monty Metzger of CScout reporting from a conference on Swarm Inteligence, in Germany. It seems like an extension of Howard Rheinghold’s ideas. Rheingold, is the man behind the concept of ‘smart mobs’ as outlined in his brilliant book on the subject, published a few years back.

The 10th German Trend Day featured topics on knowledge management, advertising, word-of-mouth communication, teen culture, and social networks.

Swarm Intelligence holds that "The majority is cleverer than each of its members."  My favorite example, is podcasting. I am writing an article for IABC magazine on the subjest, so if anyone has some really good examples of podcasts being used for branding, guerilla marketing, or something truly innovative, send me a link, or post your message here.

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Podcasting is coming of age, and is poised to become the authentic voice of an organization. It’s the age of radio, rediscovered for a good reason –a communicator’s ability to talk with, not to, the audience. It’s going to be an enormous force in marketing communications, and for internal communications, whether we are targeted as employees or customers. Why? Because (1) audio is one of the more efficient ways to distribute content. Not just marketing content, but news about a particular topic whether it is your 401K, a company policy, a product recall, or an event. HR managers better listen up! Also, (2) we have all got weary of the flashy marketing web sites and politically correct prose of email from the upper atmospheres of the organization.

Podcasting is primed to become less and less a one-way broadcast, and more of a conversation. For the moment we need to download a program or click on something to listen. What would happen when we are able to participate live in a podcast, via a private network? What if we could call in, or text the host, via a mesh network?

Speaking of conversations, if you haven’t been there already, go to IT Conversations, the leading light in podcasting, a brainchild of Doug Kaye. It’s not just for IT folk. You can listen to folks like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, and Tipping Point fame, Larry Lessig, and Steve Wozniak)

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I feel humbled. It was nearly a 103 degrees on Sunday, but a Girl Scouts (Troop 1211) in Chandler, Arizona decided to go ahead with a previously planned car wash and garage sale for our Sri Lanka Tsunami relief project, Wave of Hope.

For more details, check the official site.

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I love this topic, not because it is a recurring, provocative, adrenalin-pumping one that gets people across the room all fired up, but because it makes us all pay attention to how we conduct our business, whether or not we are in advertising.

Whenever I speak to people in advertising –meaning the ad agency crowd– they tell me how the shake up in the message creation and media targeting isn’t reflected in the way their agencies are run. The specializations that these ad/communications agencies have brought in, still operate as semi-independent camps.

It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise to hear an established ad man, Jack Klues (from Starcom Media Vest) say that the process of generating Creative work (that which moves from a client service brief, to ‘Creative,’ to Production, to Media) is obsolete. We all know that ideas don’t need to be generated by the idea chiefs, so why do ad agencies only deem a small clutch of people ‘Creatives?’

Break the silos! Dismantle the assembly line! Let creative ideas flow through every pore of the agency! That’s essentially what Klues said in his address to the 4As conference this month.

“The ability to conceive a great idea isn’t limited to someone who has the words ‘creative’ or ‘copy’ or ‘art’ in their title.”

He goes on to say that “an office relocation won’t improve our ability to find the consumer.” 

How does this apply to marketing communications? Not too long ago I heard someone ‘remind’ an account manager to leave the marketing decisions to the marketing people. The manager backed off. It sounded so eighties, and so presumptuous –almost as if only those with brains outfitted with a special chip could even begin to understand the consumer.

Having been on both sides of the fence –and had those dubious ‘creative,’ ‘copy’ and ‘creative’ prefixes to my title, I often jump in to undo the damage, telling everyone in the organization that they have a the same ‘right’ as me to contribute to the branding, or to the campaign. But I don’t hear it said enough, as I evangelize the idea of branding as something you do from the inside-out rather than the other way around.

MarCom people can tap the creative energy of everyone, if they would only break out of their own assembly-line mentality. Marketing Communications is about finding and implementing creative solutions across a wide range of communication channels. If we recognize that ‘Everything Communicates’ then we have to empower everyone to communicate, too, no matter what silo they (still) work in.

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