My reaction to the new MorphMonkey marketing campaign on Facebook is… well awkward. It just makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Yet that’s the point.

A press release from the American Social Health Association explains the campaign:

“In an unusual creative move, a team at Duval Guillaume (DG) has agreed to spread an infectious disease by working with the American Social Health Association (ASHA). The aim is to… highlight the dangers of Chlamydia to young people during April, which is STD Awareness Month. …(The team) devised a Facebook application called MorphMonkey in which users are invited to “make a love child” by morphing pictures of their own faces with that of their friends.

The humor then takes a different turn. The infected user is notified that they have caught the infection from their friend and is prompted to discover more on the ASHA website: www.ashastd.org. The message is “Spread it here so we can beat it here”, according to all involved with the program.”

I learned about this new application from a post on TechCrunch. I find the comments below the post interesting to get the social buzz. The campaign is quite edgy in that the MorphMonkey application page on Facebook makes no mention of Chlamydia. Essentially participants… dare I say it… get caught with their pants down.

Here’s the MorphMonkey application page on Facebook.

Whether it’s Google’s fault or not, the web is getting smarter. The technology itself is moving toward a place where it understands more about who you are as a user, and what it’s showing you inside of your browser. Years from now these developments will have a profound effect on web experience for users, and it will have a profound effect on the economics of online influence for marketers. What will it all look like?

Search becomes Artificial Intelligence. Right now, search engines merely seek to show you something relevant to the keywords you typed in based on much-guarded, mysterious, and ever-changing algorithms. But these algorithms are limited because they are based on keywords, and as even Shakespeare lamented, words have their limitations. As the semantic web becomes a reality, search engine technology will break free of words and actually gain an essential understanding of what web pages ARE - beyond the words on them. This will make search engines more like a search “brain”, which will be able to synthesize the web to meet your needs - once it understands what those needs are.

Your identity unlocks your web. But even if next-generation search engines understand the web better than ever before, the understanding of what you need is still limited to the keywords you input, right? Well, there are big changes there as well. OpenID is the movement to unlock your identity from the websites where it is most established (think LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace profiles) and make it portable, such that when you arrive at a new website it will be able to know who you are. This goes beyond solving the inconvenience of managing a multitude of login profiles - it means that websites could understand your interests, your web usage, your shopping habits (provided you let them). The implications are sweeping. The web can then unfold itself to you in a way that it doesn’t for anyone else, and the gatekeepers for making that happen will be the next-generation search engine. Google and others will eventually know you, and know the web, such that it might at times seem as if it is reading your mind.

The web as one big social network. If you unlock your identity from any specific website, it follows that you will also be able to unlock your social connections in the same way. An unlocked set of connections that you have to other people is often referred to as your “social graph.” You may be thinking how nice it will be that you won’t have to put all that work in to “friend” people as much, you’ll only have to do it once and then you can take it with you. Actually, the way that is done will change too. Friending will cease to be the main means of establishing your social graph. You see, the communication technology you are using (for older folks it is email, for younger folks it is IM and texting) is listening. It’s learning who you communicate with and how often, and about the length and nature of that communication. It knows more about your true social graph than you probably do, and in the future it will be able to make that graph portable and attach it to your now-portable identity. Signs of this happening are already evident. Google’s OpenSocial platform and Social Graph API are great indicators.

The web experience in 2015 will be one where you take your identity and your network with you, and semantic search engines and websites will respond (if you let them) by showing you where your friends are and what content most meets your needs.

How does this affect online influence and marketing? Some of that is already being explored by the folks who are dealing with marketing in the insulated social networking environments that exist today. The successes and failures there are being well documented and adding to professional understanding of best and worst practices, so I won’t try to cover that ground here.

The key thing to understand about this 2015 vision is that in the future social networks won’t be a side attraction to the main flow of information on the Internet - they will be the Internet. Those who explore and begin to understand the dynamics of that new environment by playing in it today will be well-positioned to lead, while others may be left behind.

The South by Southwest Interactive festival is starting up in Austin today and continuing for the next few days, with a host of keynotes and panels that will appeal to web designers, developers, and businesspeople alike.

Powered will be rolling out some folks that fit in all of those various categories to attend the proceedings, but here are just a few good panel picks just for marketers relevant to the social space. Keep in mind that they are producing audio recordings of every keynote and panel, and these will be available after it’s all over.

The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Campaigns of 2007 - 3.8 @ 11:30
Likely to serve up some valuable lessons in terms of what not to do

The Art of Speed: Conversations with Monster Makers - 3.8 @ 3:30
A take on viral and social marketing from web pioneers

Social Marketing Strategies Metrics: Where Are They? - 3.8 @ 5:00
Marketing thought leaders get “real” when it comes to investing in social initiatives

Social Strategies for Revolutionaries - 3.9 @ 11:30
“You’ll need to combine a radical’s spirit with a strategic framework to get your company to act.”

Sunday Keynote Speaker - Mark Zuckerberg - 3.9 @ 2:00
This young CEO and his company Facebook are challenging for social dominance

Social Networking and Your Brand - 3.10 @ 11:30
Understanding this relationship has been the genesis of social commerce

I remember well the first request I got, back in 2003, to become friends with someone on Friendster. The idea was pretty simple - you logged in, you created a profile, and you created a hard link from your profile to the profile of the person who invited you. You invited your other friends to do the same (if you had any), and over time this network of online links started to resemble the linkages you had in your offline life.

This foundation is what all social networking websites have in common. By setting up your virtual identity and establishing virtual relationships, you are able to accomplish many of multitude of things you would accomplish by networking offline.

You might be trying to find a new job, make new friends, plan a vacation, buy a digital camera, stay connected with old friends, sell your consulting services, promote your retail store, explore new music - any activity that is enhanced by having relationships offline can be enhanced by social networking online.

Over time literally thousands of social networking sites have sprung up to serve those varied purposes. Some are generalized and serve many purposes, like Facebook, MySpace, or even LinkedIn. Others are very specific, such as Lending Club (Borrow money from someone), Neighborrow (Borrow stuff from your neighbors), Cafemom (Meet other moms). Depending on the purpose of the network, they will have different, specialized features to serve their purpose.

Social commerce has come along as what I view as simply a newly defined sub-category of social networking - the group of people who are networking with others for the purpose of shopping and eventually purchasing something. Because people are focused on this task, certain networking features don’t make sense, such as the ability to form groups, add friends, or play games (all prominently part of Facebook and MySpace).

So you may not encounter some of these features in heavy use within Social Commerce sites. But you will see other things you don’t run into on popular general-use social networks, like Ask an Expert or User Badges. Good social commerce technology isn’t simply white-label social networking, it’s a different and select subset of social features.

But is social commerce social networking? Yes. But it is social networking with a purpose. People engage with brands when they are in a shopping mood, not when they are just looking to hang out with their friends. So give them a social network that remains tightly bound to their focus on shopping, and they will pay you back for it. Literally.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal is an interesting piece on how big brands are using social networking software to establish their own mini-networks to act as focus groups for the development of new products and services.

Some key outtakes:

• The article highlights the creation of the “I Love My Dog” network by Del Monte whose 400 members actually collaborated with the brand to conceive “Snausages Breakfast Bites” - a breakfast food for dogs that tastes like eggs and bacon.
• Del Monte’s product conception cycle took 6 months instead of 12 due to the continuous availability of this group of dog lovers.
• The article sites engaging content as the biggest challenge:

. . . the consumer companies that run these private networks face the constant risk of member boredom – and ultimately, member flight . . . the companies that set them up have to constantly add games and other features – as well as provide incentives such as coupons, giveaways and sneak peeks at new products – to keep members around.

• Other example of brands doing this are Coca Cola, Walt Disney, Proctor & Gamble, and Sylvan Learning Center (who has a group of mothers they use to test ad campaigns).
• According to Inside Research, spending on proprietary panels came to $40 MM in 2007, and will grow to $69 MM in 2008.

The article mentioned that Myspace and other big networks are looking at providing the ability for brands to tap into segments of their user base for this purpose.

What does this mean in the broader context of Social Commerce? I think it highlights the importance of data - and the resulting insight - that these types of buying communities can generate for a brand. Most social commerce communities get launched to educate and aid the consumer in the research and buying process, while capitalizing on that engagement to learn more about their audience as a side activity. This trend indicates that there is an opportunity to move even further, growing the focus from learning about the consumer to learning from the consumer.

There’s been a fair bit of conversation about MySpace’s Never Ending Friending report. I was at the IAB event where the study was unveiled. Interesting stuff to be sure, but also befuddling (I suspect) to marketers. For me I think it boils down to…

It’s not just about what your marketing and advertising says anymore. I think that’s a really, REALLY hard thing for most for us to accept. I mean many of us have spent most of our careers agonizing over marketing plans, creative briefs and agency meetings. It was so much easier in the old days when you had a decent shot at making people think about your brand in the way you wanted them too. But the increasingly collaborative nature of the internet is really changing that. Now your products - and the experiences people have with your brand - really almost need to stand alone.

Of course you still have your shot at getting your message out. Not everyone is that connected. Yet. But more and more it’s going to be about what you do and how it gets other people to say things. Brands almost might want to go so far as thinking of themselves as a consumer to consumer matchmaker. Learning what other people think is a powerful catalyst for choosing a brand or staying loyal to it.

And it seems to me one of the more important things a brand can do is take to heart what the word of mouth marketers have been saying for a while now – “be worth talking about.” In a cluttered and noisy world, that may seem daunting. But the good news is that when you consider applying that principle to not just your products, but your marketing as well the number of opportunities open up. And the other good news is there are more ways than ever to get that message to spread if it truly is worth talking about.