Oh, the (Brand) Humanity!

Jennifer Rice of Mantra Brand led the standing room only session, “Brand Humanity: How Social Technologies are Changing the Way We Do Business.” With most of this session, if you don’t already know about the paradigm shift underway, you’re late to the party (and no, not fashionably late).

The presentation focused heavily on blogs, interestingly, rather than other technologies and channels such as social networking, wikis, and peer-to-peer distribution that tend to be more social. Yet with blogs, reaching out to an audience delivers a social experience. While it often starts as one-to-many broadcasting, the responses on any given blog and the linking among blogs makes provides a community element of blogs themselves. As an aside, Jesse Tayler of Netmodular pioneered a social blogging mechanism he calls “blogworking,” which you can experience at Adholes.com or AlwaysOn.

Rice delineated a number of sea changes due to consumer connectedness online: community shifts from closed to open, intelligence shifts from individual to collective, authority shifts from hierarchical to distributed, production shifts from dictated to collaborated, marketing shifts from awareness to engagement, marketing communications shifts from spin to authenticity, and the emphasis of business shifts from marketing to operations. Deliver the goods, then sell ‘em.

All in all, it was a refreshing recap of what we’re all witnessing and partaking in. Expect her to be invited back, and come early for a seat. Though note to ad:tech – get a couple bloggers and social networking reps on a panel moderated by her to mix it up a little.