Makes me think of the constant need for us to operate as a 'team' for our clients, whether within Wunderman, within WPP ... or even a looser affiliation. And even more important is the fundamental requirement for 'team spirit'. Dictionary.com describes this as ‘the spirit of a group that makes the members want the group to succeed”. Contributing for the greater good.

Networks are mathematical abstractions denoting relationships between entities. Pretty dry if you don't love theorems. Networks only start to get interesting when the relationships get clothed in meaning (ie, what they mean to the linked entities), and when activity results in (and throughout) the network because of entities using their relationships. Activity means that entities, or some of them, by using their relationships, get something they want. This might be information, goods, money, control, support, fame and popularity, or even a cup of coffee. This is fairly obvious, especially in retrospect. There's also another kind of activity linked to networks, which is the activity of the network itself changing over time. This change may give or take from the individuals, but it's much more about the network as a whole becoming materially different. Expanding or contracting, and qualitative changes too. WWW, facebook, youtube, and all the baby clones are like this. This activity of the second kind may gain enough momentum that the entities have little choice... Tom.

It’s a little off topic, but now you’ve got me curious. If you wanted to price a P&G;campaign around Business Outcomes, how would you price the campaign? What metrics are P&G;trying to measure? Presumably sales, but how do you correlate pricing/value of a specific online social campaign to an offline product (especially when there are probably numerous advertising channels, and on and offline social networks running simultaneously)? P&G;is into collecting Connectors and Mavens, but that would be some serious Data Mining project trying to determine which housewife’s blog, Vocalpoint member, facebook friend or healthcare professional is the most influential in their physical or virtual neighborhood, by how much, and did your campaign sign them up (or did you sign up the friend of the friend of the person in question). Without any immediate or easily correlatable actions to a social campaign, aren’t you forced back to charging by CPM, project or hour instead of by Business Outcome?

Measurement and the use of metrics has been a big part of running a business since Taylor (and in the minds of business leaders, for a long time before that). My feeling is that Marketing Departments lost the plot and the imperatives over the years, as Finance and Operations got more power and did their efficiency and effectiveness bit better. Marketing, like Cinderella was left behind to do the cleaning (and run marketing campaigns). Lester's Prince Charming contribution for Direct was really the ball. After a long hiatus, the slippers are now finding the feet. [The above contributions shows a data/metrics person in a "creatives" role, using metaphor and analogy where a bunch of charts and tables would fail]. Tom.

I like that -- the slippers finding the feet....time for the Princess to bloom

I love that proverb - but thought i had the ownership of it outside of Italy!....it's so true. You can never have too many friends - except on Facebook.

Now think about how Facebook has changed the notion of friends -- we had a few friends growing up -- now we have thousands -- whar are friends for??