I have been exchanging posts with the creative director and founder of Webjam - (that's two different people) about what a community is and what online environments are best suited for community formation. In his Neuromancer books William Gibson references the Sprawl which is the eastern seaboard of the USA which has turned into one big dysfunctional suburban mess. And in some ways its not a bad description of facebook - not much order and lots of people and groups of people interconnecting. 

The kind of communities I believe my clients will encourage me to put together and pay me to do so are not sprawls with random postings but quite intentional ones. Where there is a clear purpose and we get somewhere. Otherwise is it really work? What does the client get out of it and so on? Clients are accustomed to paying intentional communities for a product whether that is the product itself - outsourced - or a creative product like a campaign. Where the hours are timesheeted and costs are visible or can be deduced.  But the emerging social channels aren't like that at all. Which raises questions about how these channels can attract advertiser funding. 

What needs to change is our measurement methods. We don't rate a rugby team for their efficiency in bal handling. We evaluate by the number of fries and converstions down the far end of the pitch, their ability to keep possession and their ability to move the ball forward towards their opponents touchline. Managing the team better is about managing the ball not micromanaging the players. And in a rolling scrum it is often impossible to figure out who is holding the ball and who is moving it forward - it becomes a case of momentum not individuals standing in the right place or doing the tright thing. 

Social media channels work in exactly the same way.  We need to measure the forward movement of the ball - the message - not the individual movements of the players., Even a great player who reads the game perfectly - its not where he stands but where the ball is that makes the difference.  Half a century ago the equivalent was the jazz ensemble where there was a tune and choruses and people sort of took it in turns - but often played over each other and experiemented with different scales to take harmonies to their absolute limit but the whole thing hung together in a way that was totally compelling. Somehow we need to keep the jamming metaphor central. As a musician I am always worried that a 'jam' will turn into a 'noodle' where there is no discipline, no commonality and people do their own thing. But a jam is worth striving for because to get a completely programmed result you need to write a score - that isn't jamming - that's classical composition.

Measuring productivity is tough because online I may be participating in many different jams at once - which take minutes, hours or even days to play out. But the outcome is never predictable - we know where we're trying to go with it and one of the main goals is to aggregate an audience which if we're interesting enough we can do. And keep them jamming with us.

The biggest change is that it probably means that the marketing client is going to have to change their budgetary planning to something like a casino tale. The marketing budget becomes chips - and they place chips on different games- lots of them.  Which for clients used to spending 5 million with the stroke of a pen must be sheer terror. All that decision making with no idea what you're going to win at the end of it. But what marketing has been missing out in recent years is the gaming element - business leaders have been building global businesses with marketing as a cost centre following in their wake. This is a chance for marketers to get back into the game and to show they can play for high stakes and win.

For the rest of us what we need to learn is how to keep the ball moving and prove we are jamming not noodling. I'm still working on it.

I got a question about this via Twitter yesterday and after sounding off on the topic thought you might find it interesting. It is certainly relevant to Brand peletons because it expresses the simple truth that people don't choose an individual brand immediately but hold a shortlist in their heads. The construction, structure and use of this shortlist needs to fit with your promtional strategy. This is what I wrote.

Next is the spread in the repertoire. Funnily enough if the punter is looking for a car and say they want reliability they don't pick the 3 most reliable models - they will go for a spread of drivers to broaden out the choice - again part of the delaying process and to keep their options open - its is almost like a process of triangulation. Pick 3 high spec cars and its quite hard to choose between them - go for high spec vs comfort of ride etc and you have a fight on your hands. And the purpose of brand consideration is to help make decisions - not a rational process and not one of binary elimiation of branch after branch - humans don't optimise they excel in general problem solving. I got this from the Mental World of brands  book which has quite a lot of useful material on brand consideration and how this relates to brain structure - but don't ask me to quote chapter and verse.

Next is the hierarchy. Usually there is a hierarchy of my first option, second and so on. So if you have a basket of 4 brands you haven't got a 1 in 4 chance for each brand - they are arranged in a rough priority.  I tend to work on the basis of an exponential scale - like richter or decibels. The one which is the notional top ranked is twice as likely as the second which is twice as likely as the third. (This by the way is useful when trying to determine how likely your agency is to win a new business pitch. Use an exponential scale! Which is why big brands tend to make safe and reassuring noises and smaller ones go all out with a much more differentiated offer becaues they are so far behind they have everything to play for.  If there was an even chance the brands would behave very similarly but in reality the outsider is rewarded for breaking rules the market leader rarely so.

Using brand consideration thinking the job is less to get the sale than to get into the basket to begin with and to manoevre ones way to advantage inside the basket. The sale is the final putt - not the drive. By which time you should have done most of the important work.

I'm not sure how much of this is will be of use to you since it may be that you just want to look at brand consideration as a consumer issue to be researched and tracked whereas for me it is a live marketing issue. Marketers get your brand into the consideration basket. Don't just bang on about being the number one choice.

To answer your specific questions - different market sectors will have different levels of consideration because the length and complexity of  the purchase process and the size of the basket the customer is prepared to construct is going to be different. And moving it forward to advocacy is a whole new board game we'd have to talk about.  Because that is going to relate to the quality of the experience -  there is a feedback loop.