Cloud communities will begin to alter our interaction with other in our day-to-day routines. If you look at how the Japanese culture has been overrun by the cell phone and all the standards that have arisen from the innovation there, then you’ll begin to understand the impact that the Cloud Community will have on our lives. The URL will no longer by the destination or address used in advertisement, nor will the physical address and telephone numbers. The information will be based off of the 2D and 3D barcodes on the advertisements. Even television will begin to be altered by the changes. Why try to dump the contact information on your market and use up space and time that should be used for sharing marketing material? The recipient isn’t going to remember your contact information or take the time to record it when they are being bombarded by information at every turn.
On top of the marketing material, the marketer has to also consider the community aspect of the campaign. The viral marketing campaigns used frequently within the last 4 to 5 years have already reached their limits and have saturated the market. The idea that “any press is good press” is not true, and often times, the more attempts to persuade the consumer a marketer uses, the more the market begins to feel like it is being vomited on. Good old fashioned word of mouth is going to be the single most affective marketing technique as we move into the cloud community era. The more friends, co-workers and communities link to each other online, the larger their influence and voice will become. Not only will individuals influence stick with them as the move from one community to another, but so will the market voice that follows them.
A perfect example of this has already been seen within the last two years. Microsoft’s Vista campaign wasn’t a failure due to the techniques, the information or even the product. The campaign failed as a result of communal voice, the media wolf pack ran together and spread the news louder and faster than any marketing campaign with any budget could counter. The result this time around is that Microsoft has been forced to listen to the voices around the Internet and be more open with it’s progress for Windows 7. Another aspect of their altered campaign is that they are showing off the improvements and featured in a more controlled environment with the “louder” voices on the Internet. This helps reign in the mass negative wild fire that spread even before Vista was launched.
So, what does this mean to the smaller businesses, the blogs and the other organizations out there? Simple, it means that while you might have a loud voice, if you have the influence, there are a lot of other loud voices out there, and your influence is more important than the volume and the information you provide. The inter-personal relationships and virtual friendships will be more valuable that the money spent doing character campaigns, information dumps and bribing the world towards your side. Essentially, you have to have friends on your side that have influence themselves. This also means that fan boys are counterproductive and harmful to your message, because they will push people away and reduce the effectiveness of your communities ability to communicate to the world.