Approximately two or three years ago, when social media was still a baby (in Europe at least), there used to be at least one article per day that was worth the reading.
It was an exhilarating period for me. I had the impression of learning something every single day from someone assembling a cool piece of writing in the digital space.

Now let's get back to 2010, things have changed. It's not about figuring out why it matters, it's about twisting the way we, as agencies, can be utterly creative, new, innovative, fresh. And also, how smart we are at educating our clients upon those new deliverables. The ways of working as much as what we should do.

Yesterday, my work day ended with a excellent article from Danielle Sacks at Fast Company.

I strongly encourage you to spend 10 minutes reading it, and maybe even reading it twice, especially if you work in the advertising agency world, or if you collaborate with an advertising agency. It might provide the best possible overview of where the whole thing is heading towards.

Don't you miss the 6 pages of writing there: 

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/151/mayhem-on-madison-avenue.html

Now let's make a list of the key learnings of this article, for those who might be too lazy to read it entirely. After all, 10 minutes is a lot of time these days.

1/ Learn a lot. Don’t be afraid of the quantity. Eat as much as you possibly can.

Quotes from the article:

« I feel like I'm standing here and there are a thousand baseballs dropping from the sky and I don't know which ones to catch » 

The answer is: "Catch as many as you can, you will not catch them all, but if you abandon the idea of catching the balls, you'll be obsolete soon"

If you can't learn fast, you will get obsolete quick. The amount of information that you have to digest has never been that huge. The best people I have worked with, often creatives and planners, have one single common trait : they can absorb an insane amount of nowadays culture, using digital. If you don't spend the appropriate amount of time absorbing the information, my prediction is that your innate talent will get too short in this industry within the next two years, if not already.

2/ Be passionate about building the story, not only about telling it

Quotes from the article:

« Creative teams, the participants are told, now need to behave more like improv actors -- "story building" instead of storytelling -- so they can respond in real time to an unpredictable audience. »

Old Spice's campaign continuation has been a good lesson. Producing 200 videos on-the-go... I define myself as a storybuilder, not as a storyteller. This is the accurate one word definition of my job. But what I like the most about it is to get copywriters and AD around me to think that way as well. A defining moment of truth being... when I manage to have one of them having fun about building the story, not only telling it.
One thing that I know for sure: it is difficult but rewarding when it works. 

3/ Don’t count on media money to compensate on the weakness of your strategic & creative work

Quotes from the article:

« The death of mass marketing means the end of lazy marketing »
« With infinite ad inventory on the Internet, you just can't have people do [media planning] anymore, It's now being done by a piece of software. » 

In five years from now, a robot will be doing the media planning. The added value comes from the strategy and the creative. Period.
Being inventive, driving talkability around your ideas is what matters and probably the most interesting aspect of the agency life nowadays.
If your work is not fresh, never seen before, you’ll need 10 times more money in media to run it which I personnaly consider as a failure of our agency job.
Ask yourself : Would this idea work without media money? Is media helping to have more people see it or is it just saving a poor idea? 

4/ When the client needs help, it’s the best possible moment to work in this industry

Quotes from the article:

« I was too young for Bernbach. I didn't want to miss out this time. »
« In our business, whenever there's a disruption, our clients need guidance »

When clients need guidance, they become more receptive to ideas. Isn’t it great ? Let’s be positive. We just have to believe in our work as much as it deserves. Part of the excitement about advertising in the past is coming from the fact that the clients would enter the room, getting ready for the surprise the agency has prepared for them.
In one word : courage!

5/ The necessity for an open minded work place. It’s not about winning alone, but together.

Quotes from the article:

« We brought people in from the outside to lead digitally but they always tried to change us into a pure digital play. Then the ad types who wanted to do brands and big ideas would say they're jerks who dis us, who think we're dinosaurs. » 

First issue, being open minded, on both sides, digital and traditional. Which is idealistic, I must admit. But this has to be enforced by the management. And this is the reason why leading an advertising agency nowadays requires a whole bunch of qualities.
Being open minded leads us to the next point…

6/ Collaborative creativity : copy, visual, technology, social, strategy, UX

Quotes from the article:

« For years, the agency had been located in a palatial mansion outside the city. People were isolated in offices and by long hallways; different disciplines never crossed paths. Last summer, Grimaldi relocated the agency to an open office in downtown Boston. Now, social-media people, creatives, media planners, technologists, and user-experience folks are sprinkled next to one another at modular desks.
But we all noticed through its pitch process that you couldn't tell who the creative people were from the media people or the planning people. They all finished each other's sentences, regardless of what we were talking about. »

Open Collaboration is the most difficult aspect of all, far beyond the other issues. You can’t change a linear production line into a collaborative taskforce. It takes time, motivation, energy… But it has to be done somehow.
Most importantly, what needs to be fixed in that perspective is a human issue. You can’t work in a agency if you cannot bring added value to the table, if you can’t listen and embrace someone else’s work and improve it instead of destroying it.
I have the feeling that too many people in the advertising world are behaving as if they were the client. If you behave that way, cross the bridge and go work with them. Agency can’t afford to pay for people who are not adding value these days.

It’s the right moment to talk about money now…

7/ Collaboration means more time spent on any topic. Revamping the fee model.

Quotes from the article:

"We still don't know how to monetize what we do," admits Peter McGuinness, CEO of Gotham, which, like Mullen, is owned by IPG. "We don't monetize ourselves properly, so we don't hit our margins."

Another difficult issue that some might see as the tough understated one.
Collaborative work cuts your margin by half as soon as you pronunciate the words since it necessarily means more time spent that the clients are not ready to pay for.
The Taylorist linear process has to go, because the ideation process requires collaboration in the complex digitalized fragmented world we live in.
I think there are two answers to that one: HR. Make sure you’re delivering great stuff with the best talents. Make sure someone is doing this job full time. Premiumizing your work makes things a lot easier.
The second answer is : educate the client, be transparent about your workflow. Make them spend time in your agency understanding how you work collaboratively. They can’t argue against that one if the work you’re delivering is good.

8/ Big= Small+Small+Small as the longterm organizational plan

Quotes from the article:

"We want to be as small as possible and as big as necessary. It's not about scale; it's about scalability. Even though we have only five employees, right now we have 1,500 people we can put against an opportunity."
"Getting a piece of business doesn't mean they have to hire an army. There's a nice elasticity there.

This one is science-fiction in 2010 in my humble opinion, but that’s the long term model. Simply because the collaborative work explained above is easier to roll out in small multidisciplinary teams that can work with other small teams.
Think of five people willing to roll out a large idea that requires an event. Now think of another team who’s excellent at setting up events.
They do not have to work under the same flag, but they have to collaborate at some point.
Yet to be organized that way. It would be the longterm goal in my opinion.

9/ Being innovative involves a broader marketing effort sometimes

Quotes from the article:

"We are, by its nature, helping to build businesses that we do not own,"
"The answer can come from marketing, but it can also come from R&D or product innovation or design,"

Being innovative or creative sometimes implies to think out of the communication mix box. Last year’s Best Buy’s Twelpforce was far away from the simple TVC or digital execution idea.
It leads to another science fiction wish. Marketing & Communication can make you win if you put it at the center of the company, namely the way Nike has been doing things since the beginning. No surprising they are performing better since a communication idea such as Nike+ has been developped as a company level product innovation.

Feel free to post your reactions. I would be glad to read it.

(this whole article is a personal opinion)

And the actual presentation by Derek himself :

I would like to clearly state my point of view about Twitter, based on this question.
Twitter is a social network. Any tool that enables the construction of a social graph is a social network.
But, it should not be called a social network.
There are too many differences Facebook et Twitter to become comparable.

Let's start with a short definition: Twitter is a social graph and semantic based platform.

Here's why:
- Twitter's social connections are asymmetrical. As it is possible to establish a one-way social connection, it is much easier to build a social graph that is out of your friend/family/colleagues social spheres. Therefore, the "macro social graph" has a completely different shape if you compare it to Facebook. Connections are far more decentralized that Facebook.
Look at this blog post from David Armano, his illustration shows blue/orange nodes, but also less visible grey connections. Twitter is strong at grey connections. Far more than Facebook. It makes the "spreadability" factor much stronger than Facebook. It's common sense.
http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2009/10/alliances.html

- Twitter is semantic, it is weaving the semantic web. It draws connections based on #hashtags. That's why it should be considered as a "semantic network" as much as a social network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

- Twitter is an open blogging platform. It is a "function" mostly, not a "website" (the website is actually quiet poor). Being a platform, it enables things. While Facebook is a website that aggregates basically anything around the social connection.

Facebook is location based, a website.
Twitter is service based, a platform.

Who will win the battle of the social graphs?
The big one, website based, but poor one, the swiss knife of our social life? Facebook?
The small one, platform based, but rich one, while being semantic at the same time? Twitter?

The answer is:
There's no reason to compare!
I firmly believe that both are here for a long time. The purpose and definitions are so different.
Comparing is a waste of time.
That's why I hate the fact that we shall call those two "social networks".
It can't be a unique word to describe two completely different notions.

As we say in French, "il ne faut pas comparer des choux et des carottes".
And as Albert Camus aptly observed: "Misnaming things compounds the troubles of the world."