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There is always a risk in changing. Sometimes it's possible to measure the risk and calculate the value of taking or leaving it, but sometimes changes are made in the dark-- the risks are unmeasurable or unknown. At the heart of all customer, fan, and audience reactions are a slew of stored up emotions, expectations, and desires. Psychology can be a useful tool in marketing, but unfortunately psychology cannot ascertain the future or perfectly predict the predictably irrational human psyche.

In the world of interactive marketing, the hubs of conversation are most definitely not agency blogs. For all of the talk about embracing web culture, understanding content creation, and taking the dive into social media, there is a gaping lack of collaboration and interaction between digital agencies. We're creative folks with our minds on big things. We understand the new economy, the new technology, and the precise future of advertising. We understand pretty much everything except how to take our critical lens off of our clients and off of media to reexamine ourselves.

The lack of interaction on agency blogs is appalling: no guest posts, rarely @replies on Twitter, and, not surprisingly, a lack of comments on posts. Most of the posts on agency blogs are vain attempts at gaining thought leadership. Of course, very little is actually gained. When a thousand arms reach for the pie in the sky, no one gets very much.

One of my good friends, Wilfried Schobeiri, wrote me an e-mail a few days ago about a trend in social media. He writes:

I was thinking today about OpenID, Facebook connect, twitter's connect thing, Google, friend feed, etc...Twitter shows my thought process:

In light of Google's changes to how they handle no-follow links (check out seomoz's video on this change), Andy Beard has posted an interesting suggestion for bloggers: switch to Disqus. Andy has a variety of reasons for suggesting Disqus, but the main reason that now is the time is because it places all of your comments in an external javascript file, which means that Google won't count all of the externally linking comments on your posts and thereby kill the flow of your Page Rank. I think it's likely that implementing Disqus or a similar centralized commenting system to prevent Google from crawling links in comments will become standard SEO procedure for blogs. In fact, I'm testing it out on my personal blog right now.

Because Disqus makes it easy for bloggers to setup Facebook Connect and other social media login systems on their sites, if Disqus or it's competitors start to see a large amount of new users, it's likely that Facebook Connect will also begin to see a very large increase in adoption. Therefore, the adoption of centralized commenting is likely to be one of many cornerstones for what Jeremiah Owyang calls the Era of Social Colonization, the period in which all sites become social.

There is a great article written by Naomi Dunford at Copyblogger titled "7 Ways You're Screwing Up Relationship Marketing". Naomi makes some excellent points about a common misconception people have regarding social media. Many people seem to think social media is the same thing as relationship marketing, or that brands need to follow the same rules as people to be successful in this medium. Well, it's not, and they don't. So, if social media isn't relationship marketing, what is it?