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. 

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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?

There has always been something alluring about the myth of the creative advertising genius. A Mad Man style maven sitting in a palatial corner office, twirling a pencil and then devising a diabolical way to sell more cigarettes, cars or potato chips. But the new media landscape has made a mockery of that. It used to be enough to make ads that people remembered when they watched them. Now, being a great creative means being smart enough to ensure people watch them at all.

Early this year, I spoke at PromaxBDA Europe - a TV marketing conference in the Czech Republic. Prague is a beautiful city. Look outside your window and you will be rewarded with an exquisite gothic skyline marred only by a single building — the Žižkov TV tower. When I asked about it, I was told that the Soviets thought that if they beamed out a strong enough TV signal, they could blanket out any competing programming from Western countries. It was a cunning plan and quite possible in a world where television had a monopoly on moving pictures and sound in households. For the last 50 years or so, you could literally buy people’s attention. Now, it’s not so easy.

On the Internet, there is no concept of prime time. You can program television, but when online people discover and consume content, it is often because it has been sent to them by other people they know. Whether a tweet on Twitter, a blog post on Wordpress or a shared link on Facebook, the most influential distribution assets now are not broadcast networks but rather audience networks.

Consider the recent transformation of the social media space. Social networks have evolved from an orgy of self-expression to brand communication channels and tools of political influence. The new prize is realtime search. Traditional search is great for finding non-time-sensitive material, but if you want to know what people are saying and thinking right now about your brand, TV show or anything else, you need to be able to dip into the live stream of social chatter and link sharing.

From a creative perspective, real-time search creates a unique challenge. Stunning art direction is useless if no one actually watches your ad. In a world of audience networks, people will only forward your content to their friends and followers if it makes them look smarter or cooler by doing so. Their brand, not yours is at stake. You would be surprised how few marketers take that into account and are left wondering when their viral campaigns are socially vaccinated before they get off the ground.

Funnily enough, one of the best examples of smart social creativity this year came from far North Australia. Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign took three Grand Prix awards at the Cannes advertising awards this year. The campaign, which was ostensibly just promoting a caretaker job on Hamilton Island, generated more than AU$332 million in media coverage, 34,684 video entries from 197 countries and eight million site visits with an average of eight minutes and 15 seconds spent on the site per visitor. What made the campaign so effectively viral was not how it looked or where the ads were placed, but rather the power of its core idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to get paid to hang out on a desert island? Great ideas are like social candy to consumer networks.

Social media doesn’t mean the death of TV advertising, but it does place it into context. Broadcast is a powerful medium for rapidly raising awareness, but the reality of media fragmentation means that to get real engagement requires your customers to do the distribution for you. And that, quite frankly, is not easy. The trick of turning audiences into advocates requires more than just savvy media planning or bribing people with free iPods.

It takes true creative genius.

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What do you think? As always - I welcome your thoughts and feedback through the community forum. Click here to comment.

After a month in LA, I honestly felt like I was starting to see things. American fast food suffers from an identical crisis. Burger joints, juice bars, coffee shops - it's an endless parade of franchise repetition. But after I complained one too many times, I was pulled aside and informed in a hushed tones that I had it all wrong. 'You just need to know about the secret menus', said my friend. And she was right. I did need to know. Because even the most boring of brands, it turns out, have a back door.

Sameness is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. You might start life running a ultra hip underground Korean Taco truck in West Hollywood that plays accoustic K-pop remixes of the Beach Boys - but fifty trucks later, you will quickly swap unique and cool, for mass and market. But as I discovered, whether by accident or design, certain franchise brands seem to have evolved a secret language of signs and symbols known only to the select consumerati.

Here are a few examples:

- In-N-Out Burger has a very simple official menu, but a wide variety of unofficial ordering phrases. Ordering your burger "Animal Style" will grant you secret sauce and grilled onions, a "Flying Dutchman" is a burger with no bread or lettuce while "Protein Style" is a burger wrapped in lettuce instead of a bun. You can also upsize yourself by asking for a 3x3 or 4x4 (multiplies the meat and cheese). And even more bizarrely, there are small codes on the wrappers of most items. Look closely at the paper surrounding your cheeseburger and you will find the numbers 3:20, which equate to a Bible passage in Revelations: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hears my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with Me." God loves burgers too, it seems.

- Jamba Juice has an entire secret menu of unhealthy and rather inappropriately named smoothies including the 'Dirty Orgasm' and 'Hello Jesus'.

- Starbucks will serve you something called a 'Red Eye' which is a cup of coffee with a shot of expresso dumped in it. They also keep tiny cups under the counter which they don't advertise. Ask for a 'short' latte and you will discover the joys of more coffee, less milk. And for the real franchise fanatics, you can memorise the specific order of options used by Starbucks baristas when they yell at each other. Here's the options order: hot or iced, size, drink style, wet or dry, strength, milk style, and any final directions (extra hot, no foam, light ice).

Building secrets into brands reminds me of the art of hiding 'Easter Eggs' in games and movies. Programmers would often leave amusing pranks inside video games or software applications for those that knew how to find them. Early versions of Microsoft Office had hidden flight simulator and pinball games, and if you typed 'make love' into some Unix Operating Systems, the computer would reply 'not war?'. And according to legend, the original laser disc version of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' not only had naked stills of Jessica Rabbit, but the then CEO Michael Eisner's home phone number scrawled on a Toontown restroom wall.

All of this may seem a bit odd, but I think that more brands should have 'Easter Eggs' hidden within them. They provide a lenticular quality. From one side - consumers will see the mass market product - which you need in order to present a simple and consistent message to the world. But look slightly askew, and your true evangelists will have access to their own private world of special products, ordering styles, personalisation and brand mythology. And having been initiated into your secret society, you can be sure that they will be more likely to spread the word and do your marketing for you.

Of course, like any game of Chinese Whispers, things can get a little lost in translation. Think of the unfortunate Filipino man in the queue in front of me, who confident in his new In-N-Out Burger Jedi ordering skills, demanded loudly that he would like a 'Double, double... doggy style'.

1. Cloud
It’s ironic but even as the price of personal storage plummets, we find ourselves storing more and more of our content elsewhere. People have been talking about Cloud Computing forever, but suddenly it just happened. Almost everything we now create – documents, videos, photos, contacts and schedules – is easily kept online. The driver of this trend is not storage, but rather connectivity. Stuff is simply more useful when other people can see it - photos are more fun when people can comment on them, documents more relevant when co-workers can collaborate on them, and company data more insightful when it can be benchmarked against your peers. Like a webpage that no one links to, content on a hard drive sitting on your desk is a fraction as valuable as content floating in the Cloud.

2. Cheap
Personal tech is becoming cheap. And no, it’s not because of deflation. If you were watching the top 25 lists at Amazon at Christmas, you would notice that most of the items in the electronics category were Netbooks. Netbooks took everyone by surprise. Small, inexpensive and with great battery life – bare-bone computing bucks the trend that PCs should get more powerful with every generation. But here is the curious thing - in a way, we are still on the ski slopes of Moore’s Law. It’s just that now the entire Internet with its billions of servers, network nodes and storage farms, has become the world’s most powerful computer. Whether its communication, research or just fun - most of our daily computing activities can be executed using nothing more than a web browser and a wireless internet connection. Of course, the cheap trend will not just impact PCs. Across the board, consumers are trading quality and fidelity for convenience and social connectivity. CDs replaced by MP3, DVDs by online video, HD camcorders for cheap Flip video cameras, and now laptops for Netbooks. Expect more categories to follow.

3. Solid
Memory is going solid state. That means no more moving parts, no hard disk parking errors, greater speed and reliability. It started a decade ago as flash cards for cameras. Last year, the inconceivable happened - solid state memory turned up in hard drives for laptops. Soon it will be standard. There is a new architecture coming where our personal devices will be constantly connected to content and contacts via wireless broadband. In this scenario, local storage will work more like RAM - caching what we need locally and fast, rather than what we do now – bulky hard drives to keep copies of everything at hand.

4. Ubiquitous
That of course raises the question, what does it mean to be constantly connected? How we access the Web influences the ultimate nature of it. Consider the experience of the US as compared to Japan. In the US, most consumers accessed the Internet through fixed cable broadband while in Japan, the most popular gateway to Web content was through mobile devices. Not surprisingly, Web behaviour and content developed in very different ways in each country. In my view, the next wave of access innovation is ubiquity – a network that is continuously accessible and typically accessed without deliberate intervention by the user.pUbiquitouspaccess will have powerful implications for how the Web evolves. Your bedside radio will adjust its clock from the Web, your TV will download your favourite TV shows, your phone will update its address book from your social network, and the photo frame on your desk will display pictures that your daughter is taking on her holiday in real time. There is no magic to this. In fact, you may not even notice. In the same way you don’t need to understand phone technology to make a call, the Internet will gradually disappear from view.

5. Overlay
Here is the final, and in some ways most powerful trend – augmented reality. You might have noticed recent video games such as “Eye of Judgment” for Playstation, using toy cameras to project 3D animations over trading cards. That kind of technology is gradually appearing in phones. Already iPhone and Android based phones offer applications capable of cross referencing your GPS co-ordinates and pictures taken with your phone with product databases to give you reviews and local data. That’s only the beginning. Eventually with micro projectors or enhanced eyewear, the Web will become a persistent overlay onto the real world – providing us with content tailored to our physical contexts.

So that’s the fast five in five fast paragraphs. I could elaborate but in a way, they are all expressions of the same point which most of us knew ten years ago - the Web changes everything. Even the Web.

What's next for the Web? It was the unspoken question of many who gathered at the Web2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week. For Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, it all came down to a number - 6,527. Or, the exact number of days until now since Tim Berners Lee made the first webpage. All the innovation, the new wealth, disruptions in traditional media and the millions of Wikipedia entries - a seemingly impossible scale of human endeavor - had been created in that relatively short span. So, what are we likely to see in the next 6500 days?

Looking back, 2008 was an inflection point for the industry. In her annual high altitude scan of the new media landscape, Morgan Stanley internet analyst Mary Meeker pointed out that relative amount of time that consumers spent on websites has changed dramatically. When you look at the metric of global minutes, from 2006 onwards YouTube and Facebook have gained over 500 basis points of relative share, at the expense of traditional portal incumbents Yahoo! and MSN.

Behind this statistic are two underlying trends. Firstly, Facebook has become the Outlook and webmail client for an increasing number of people, especially kids. And in just the same way that free webmail anchored consumer loyalty to MSN and Yahoo in the early days of the Web, Facebook is building a new loyal base of socially networked fanatics. In his interview at the conference, Mark Zuckerburg revealed that 50% of Facebook users use the site daily. That's serious addiction. 



The second trend is even more unexpected. In the last year, YouTube has become the second most popular search tool for consumers. By August of this year, search queries on YouTube reached 9.2 billion (a 123% increase year on year), surpassing Yahoo! sites which had 8.5 billion queries. When I asked John Battelle, author of 'The Search' and CEO of Federated Media about this he said that YouTube’s growth was consistent with the trend of search being the navigational interface to information. For Battelle, Google's original innovation was allowing people to search for things using natural language phrases. The next interface evolution we can expect will be all kinds of inherent searches, whether it be through content recommendations or mobile phones allowing real time product comparisons. 



And in a way, that's exactly what Kelly envisages as the Web's Hollywood sequel. Or as he puts it - the World Wide Web as World Wide Database. Rather than simply sharing links to documents, the next generation web will be about accessing the implicit data. In Kelly's view, every object we manufacture will have a sliver of intelligence in it. The entire world and everything in it will go into a globally connected database of things, that is then shared and linked. We won't worry about how different devices operate or access content. They will all be windows into the same universal network. 



Ironically enough, it was a hardware guy that pointed out how this vision could impact on consumer lifestyles. Intel has been aggressively developing and releasing new types of low cost, mobile chipsets designed to power ubiquitous computing devices. Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini, demonstrated a device capable of augmented reality applications such as translating Chinese street signs in real time or showing you an animated overlay to a product in a toy store. It was, he admitted, a sleight of hand. A couple of giant computers under the couch were doing the heavy lifting for the demo. But, he said, by 2011 you could expect that a low cost chip as powerful as a current desktop PC would be available for your mobile device. Moore's Law, naturally. And, as Otellini pointed out wryly, no CEO of Intel wants to be the first to break it. 



Cloud computing, massive scale driven platforms, semantic webs, ubiquitous mobile devices, augmented reality - its a tall order - even for 6500 days. And if you find all of that a hard cocktail to envision, don't be surprised. As Kelly himself acknowledged, when he started Wired magazine in the nineties he expected the Web to be TV, just better. This time he's sure of one thing. Whatever comes next won't be the Web, only better.

It will be something completely different.