Of course, the hot hire to make these days are social media experts. A terrible title, to be sure. Like ‘horseless carriage' or 'moving staircase', 'social media' is a retro tautology that only highlights how attenuated our conceptual models have become. My favorite is one most people don't notice - 'mobile phone'. Think about kids. Have they ever used a phone that isn't mobile? Or for that matter, ever experienced media that isn't social? Every savvy marketer today is grappling with the question of how to resource themselves in a world where consumers are often better at leading brand discussions than they are. But does the world really need more twitchy Twitter junkies ready to jump on every consumer bleat with a canned corporate response? I'm hoping that your future digital A-Team will be somewhat different. 

With the war for attention looming, here are three new recruits that should be on your list:

1. The Quant

As any diehard Tron fan will tell you, the geeks shall inherit the earth. And if Wall Street is any indication, the same guys who transformed the business of money during the eighties with their algorithms and super computers are set to take up permanent residence in the marketing space as well. We are still in the early days of consumer monitoring. Marketers are starting to listen to what consumers are saying on social platforms, analyzing traffic spikes and studying keyword search behavior. Its a good start, but horribly primitive - equivalent to trying to run a sophisticated hedge fund with a slide rule.

If you really want to understand where we are going, spend some time with an affiliate marketer. These guys are like forex traders - constantly scanning the online world for traffic arbitrage opportunities, and creating revenue programs that slip between the gap between acquisition costs and performance margins. Your future marketing quants will be a lot like this - part ethnologist and part math savant - they will use state of the art technology to monitor the shifting networks of consumer memes and traffic flows, always looking for new opportunities to exploit and conversations to 'lean into'.

2. The Storyteller

Media has always operated on a simple premise - professionals create content so that marketers can hitch a ride to sell their messages to unwitting consumers. But increasingly brands are realising that in an age where consumer networks are capable of mass distribution, they need to be in the content business themselves. Luxury brands do this better than anyone. They tell seductive stories about provenance, family history and craftsmanship - to gloss over the less salubrious truth of third world factories, conglomerate ownership and mass production.

The storyteller role in your marketing department will soon be filled by clever creative types, who will work with professional writers, photographers and filmmakers to spin brands into engaging pieces of entertainment capable of standing on their own. Media companies will still have a role providing eyeballs and context for branded material - but I believe the creative imperative will shift from the traditional custodians of content. As I wrote in my book Futuretainment, in the future media companies will need to think like brands, and brands like media companies. 

3. The Makers

As Johnny Vulkan, founder of Anomaly likes to point out - we always forget the first P in Philip Kotler's classic 4 P's of Marketing (Product, Price, Place and Promotion). So the final role that I believe you will see more often in marketing departments are true product evangelists. Not just product managers mind you, but true 'makers' who have responsibility for the total consumer experience.

If you have ever watched one of those fan boy videos of an 'unboxing' you will realize the power of product and packaging as a platform for branding. The maker role in the marketing department of the future will be the link between the creators of the brand and the creators of the stuff. They will be alchemists of the physical - from the design of objects to the beauty of packaging, from the tone of instruction manuals right through to the design of retail stores and experiential marketing events. 

- - - - - 

No doubt, some of the more enterprising of you will already be wondering if you fit any of these roles. And the really ambitious ones might even be asking yourselves, if you were to pick being a quant, storyteller or maker - which has the best chance to take the reins of CMO? But as before, I'd suggest that you are asking the wrong question. If the new marketing department of the future will be so central to a company's core brand and product, the real question is not who will be CMO, but what successful CMO should not be CEO?

I was quoted in a magazine article on the office of the future, appearing in the December 2010 edition of Virgin's inflight magazine, Voyeur. In the piece I discuss the rise of 'immersion rooms' capable of modular virtual stacking, equipped with pressure mats, motion sensors and full screen wall projections.

There was a game I used to like to play when I first started traveling. When I arrived in a new city, I'd set out with a map, a notebook and a coin. Rather than follow a plan, I'd delegate all choices to a coin toss. Heads, turn left. Tails, walk into that book store. Heads, walk three blocks and then take the first left. A flick of the wrist, sunlight catching shiny metal on a downward arc - a decision made. As I recorded my random adventures on my map - a new world would gradually render into being, like one of Calvino's Invisible Cities. I thought about those maps the other day when one of my clients asked me how they should embed innovation into their culture. Chance has always been a willing mistress to creativity - but could it also play midwife to innovation?

Sadly, companies often talk about innovation like it is a form of calisthenics. We have all read those over enthusiastic internal memos encouraging staff to be more innovative - as if, like sit ups or star jumps, it was just a matter of exercising a previously unused muscle in your brain. Some years ago, the Singaporean government was so worried that its citizens were hard working but not innovative, that they instituted a series of creative programs at schools. During the appointed creativity hour, kids were strongly encouraged to all be as innovative as possible, naturally in a quiet and diligent way. It was not, as you might expect, a stellar success. The problem is, whether you are a kid or a corporate VP - being innovative is not something you can just switch on. Inevitably we face a ‘white paper problem’.

One of my favorite artists is Max Ernst. Despite his prolific output of surrealist landscapes and images rich in personal mythology - he sometimes complained of the paralysing effect of a blank white sheet of paper. With an infinite number of possible things you can create, how do you simply get started? To get around this problem, he would begin some of his works by rubbing black lead over a piece of wood or a section of floorboard. From the randomness of the resulting images, he would be inspired to then create a masterpiece. 

You will often hear people talk about Google's 20% program - the policy that their engineers can spend a fifth of their time working on their own pet projects. Interestingly though, this is not the really smart part of how Google builds a culture of innovation. Simply telling people they can spend time working on their own stuff is to invite a 'white paper problem'. When I recently interviewed Justin Baird, an 'innovationist' (yes, that is his real title) at Google he told me that they have an internal online forum that allowed people to list projects and ideas that interested them. When you were looking for a project to innovate around, you didn't have to just stare at the ceiling and think up something entirely new - you could browse a database of ideas, people and initiatives to look for areas where you could contribute and collaborate. Sure - its great to stand on the shoulders of giants, but sometimes lots of very small people stacked on top of each other is just as useful.

I think we can learn an interesting lesson from Google’s innovation forum. Despite the persistent hype about the information revolution, we are still at the very early days of how we leverage the information, ideas and intellectual capital that is hidden in the substratum of businesses. Knowledge management was the hot buzzword in the nineties - but most projects, which required people to create masses of useless documentation - failed to engender either participation or inspiration. But what if we could introduce a little more randomness into the process. 

A colleague of mine, who visited the CEO of Best Buy told me that he saw three screens in his office - that constantly updated with what consumers were saying on Twitter, blogs and other social networks. This is just the beginning of a new way of visualising innovation triggers in real time. In coming years, the business analytics space will need to be overhauled with a bit more creative flair. Rather than relying on just formal reporting and planning processes, we should be presented with attractive infographics that randomly display customer comments, unusual transactional patterns, cross referenced data, and even random images and videos sourced from the Web. The true starting point of innovation is pattern recognition - seeing possibilities in changing consumer behavior or deeper truths in everyday business processes. 

So, if you could put your business on shuffle what might that look like? Are there opportunities you are missing because you are not exposing yourself to a wide enough set of new possibilities? If you look closely you will probably discover that the best ideas are not waiting for a brillant demiurge to invent - but are already lurking in the minds of your staff and customers, ready for the right opportunity to spring into being. 

Flip a coin and find out. 

After a long hiatus of not wearing a watch at all, I recently took possession of my dream piece - an IWC Perpetual Calendar. Intricate, complicated, and ironically - unrepentantly analogue. But the mystery deepened. As I opened the box containing the watch I discovered a small glass vial, sealed by wax and containing a tiny, perfectly machined part. 'You, or should I say - your great great descendant will need this on January 1, 2200', said the brand manager in response to my puzzled expression - 'it is the replacement slide for when the calendar year moves into a new century'. That set me thinking. We always assume that digital is the logical evolution of analogue, but could it be a relationship more subtle?

First, a confession. I love analogue. I take pictures on an old film Leica, I write with a leaky fountain pen on a small Moleskine notebook and I aspire owning my favourite albums on vinyl and a real valve driven hi-fi. Part of the motivation for my retrograde lusts are aesthetic. I like the look of film grain, the feel of paper, and the warm sound of records. But there are also powerful emotions attached to the idea that things can still be crafted.

A real part of the appeal of ‘steam punk’, where the high tech is re-imagined as a mechanised baroque fantasy of cogs and flywheels - is that we regain the feeling that technology is not magic but the results of human engineering. Like the Eloi, as our hardware has advanced, we lost our knowledge of its workings. Modern electronics can no longer be fixed, merely discard and replaced. Worst of all - the lack of permanence in the things that surround us is mirrored in the constant stream of social media and status updates. In other words, momentum gets routinely mistaken for meaning.

I think that is why Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem is so seductive. Imagine a world strictly divided between a technological and commercial saecular society and a group known as the Avout, intellectuals who live monastically in cloistered communities. The Avout are forbidden to communicate with people outside the walls of their monastry except during certain periods in which giant gates open - like clockwork - every year/decade/century/millenium, depending their vows. It is like a societal coping mechanism to prevent the loss of knowledge through progress.

You can easily lose perspective in the perpetual present. Think about your world. User generated content is already on the way out. Few create, most consume. Blogging is a dying art. Eventually, we won't even tweet. Our devices will simply automatically check us in, and signal silently to each other - until we ourselves resemble human sized packets in a distributed network.

I doubt that my little glass vial will survive into the hands of a great, great grandchild, but in a way that’s not really the point. Its just nice to be reminded that while the chaotic universe might not operate like Isacc Newton’s perfect celestial clock - through our devices and desires, we still have the capacity to create small moments of perpetuity.

You don't want to know what I paid for my iPad. Call it waiting list frustration, irrational fanboy exuberance or just plain stupidity - but it got the point when I convinced myself that no self respecting futurist should be without a MessiahPad. Now that I've had a few months to contemplate the depths of my Apple avarice, let me offer a few thoughts on what Steve's new toy might mean for news, books, authors and publishing at large.

Firstly, a confession. I've fallen in love with newspapers again. The digital revolution was not kind to the world of print. After tearing its money making heart out (classifieds, subscription revenues and finally, display advertising), it disaggregated whatever content was left, and placed it at the mercy of a search algorithm. But fire up the Financial Times or the New York Times apps on the iPad, and there is no doubt that the newspaper is back - in aesthetics, if not quite yet in financial vigour.

Still, these are early days and upon closer inspection it is clear that tablet applications reflect imaginations trapped by metaphor. The FT app looks beautiful, but just try selecting text, sharing articles on social media or performing the digital equivalent of tearing out a page to keep. My workaround is saving screenshots, but that is far from an elegant solution. On the flip side, RSS readers like Pulse and Reeder excel at making my thousands of feed subscriptions intelligible and infinitely share-able. But lets face it, RSS is still the lingua franca of geekdom not the newsprint reading masses.

As for books, I'm also a tablet convert and as much as I hate to say it - Amazon's Kindle is far better in emulation. Last year's personal zeitgeist moment was when I decided to move seventeen packing boxes of books out of my house into storage. Yes the smell and touch of books is wonderful, but the weight of them in my travel bag is not. I thought that was the end of it, but this year I've added my Kindle to my paperback mass grave. As it turns out, all the things that made Kindle great, are even greater on iPad - highlighting, high speed scanning of books and the presentation of your library.

Well, almost everything. Seriously Jeff, where the hell is the search button? Does its presence violate some antiquated book licensing agreement? And why can't I select text in a book and share it on my blog? In fact, why can't I share what I'm reading with the people in my social network? Apple's iBook store is not much better. OK, so Apple has scripted some neat animations of page turns and books sliding onto virtual shelves - but is this any different from the early e-commerce websites in the nineties that had corny animations of shopping carts and supermarket aisles? Be not deceived!

You see, the real reason why the iPad is not the future of publishing is that re-inventing the art of reading has nothing to do with technology. To make real progress, we need escape velocity from the limitations of the metaphors that bind us. You can have the world's most innovative device, but unless we rethink our business and content models - we are doomed to merely port our limitations onto new, shinier screens. Everyone was amazed at the Alice in Wonderland ebook - and for good reason. It was more than just a book on a tablet - it was an entirely new form of content that tapped into the inherent strengths of a new medium. But how many other brilliantly interactive publications have you seen like that since the launch of the iPad? Almost none. Even the second issue of Wired was a let down.

All of this poses publishers with an interesting conundrum. Making books, marketing books and distributing books has, for as long as there have been printing presses, been a tough job. That's why us authors largely don't self publish. But if publishing in the future means selling and marketing an application in the App Store, how well are today's publishers placed to achieve that task? And if others are better suited to that job, how will the new economics of royalties and commission splits reflect the reality of tomorrow's reading market?

As I write my next book, all of these thoughts are bouncing around on the trampoline of my mind. In a way, my first book Futuretainment was an analogue work designed for tablet world. Not a Kindle mind you, but certainly a device capable of giving life to the interplay of images, words and motion. We are in the midst of a publishing shift that should excite content creators with its potential. In some ways, creating a book in the future will be closer to producing a movie or a video game. You will need a team handling visual production, application development, mobile distribution, and social awareness. The simple days of a writer, an editor and a royalty contract are almost at an end.

But some things will also stay the same. The book, as a conceptual archetype will persist, as did the music album even in an age of digital singularity. Books are more than just analogue containers of related paragraphs - they represent a totality that collectively stands for something more. In a way, without them, we would have nothing to blog about.