I am sooo tired of everybody asking me, "So what does one of these NeoAdNets look like, or taste like, or (yup) smell like?" Everybody seems to be hung up on form factor and interface. “What is the GUI like?” I used to be able to blow them off with something stupid like, “Think of it as AOL on crack.” Well, that got old pretty quick so a few months ago we started paying attention to coming up with a real answer.

The search for a form factor that can provide us with a workable prototype to begin a serious analysis of what a NeoAdNet is or is not is closing in on the last mile. It is evident from our work thus far that the closest app to foreshadow NeoAdNet architecture in real-world use today is a hybrid of social media, combined with the emergence of the behavioral analytics potential of social CRM. The last quarter-mile of this potential search for the holy grail is likely to be some form of enlightened peer-to-peer rich media email.

Certainly the effect of social media on audience behavior has indeed been phenomenal. This blazing attraction has not been without certain challenges. Measurement-minded marketers look askance at the vagueness of measuring brand influence through social media interactions, or at least “positive” brand influence. Social media is nowhere when regarded in the traditional CRM metrics focus. Of course the principles of CRM are ridgid compared with the rate of change within social media strategies that control the content, message and interaction of audience and influencer. Most strategists are left grasping at straws when trying to quantify results or optimize outcomes.

Email is a vital element of CRM metrics, because it offers measurable syndication in a very targeted, time-controlled manner. Combined with the power of social media, email provides a very cost-effective means of capturing unstructured data on customer opinion, behavior and interactions to balance the empirical conversion-oriented CRM world view. David Baker of Media Post referred to this as “the viral marketing perfect storm marketers have wanted for years.” Social media provides an inexpensive means of reaching the audience through a multitude of events, causes, promotions and syndication in a low-cost reach, syndication and feedback continuum.

According to Mr. Baker, our biggest challenge in evolving a NeoAdNet social media strategy to create sustainability is to succeed in mining unstructured data efficiently into usable, actionable information without the expensive manual processes needed today. To our way of thinking, the solution to that issue is to incentivise the audience to lend us a hand in the structuring process. This is where content-oriented data mining comes into play. By developing social network content platforms that advantage the same framework for planning, measurement and action that is ingrained in CRM planning, NeoAdNets will replicate the essence of what makes social media so effective.

NeoAdNets will tell us many things about the audience through personal information, profile information, preferential information and performance-related information around consumption patterns and attitudes. What is needed to complete that picture is a very tactical-level behavioral view that balances some of the assumptions we will need to make about how to monetize our audiences’ need to know more.

NeoAdnets will evolve the use of social segments to help us understand, within our traditional audience membership, which of these individuals have direct value as a buyer of goods, a secondary value as an evangelist/contributor to the brand, a syndication value as a social connector, and the appropriate channels for the type of content or information they will have interest in and be compelled to share to grow the audience. Obviously our objective here is to link social interaction with conversion and marketing interaction. Even more obvious than that is the need to determine how we develop actionable information from these events and interactions and most critically, how do we operationalize the processes and mobilize it into growing our networks.