In case you haven’t been following the trend story, augmented reality is a set of technologies that enable consumers to digitally display relevant data over the live image of an object. Most AR projects and experiments today, however, are being conducted on the screens of smartphones. For a great demo, see the video below, by the very hot Netherlands-based AR company, Layar.

The excitement — and hype — that the Parviz article is generating is understandable. While the bundling of various technologies on smartphones — computation, video display, GPS, compass technology, messaging — appear to be driving the adoption of augmented reality, in theory there’s nothing stopping savvy technology vendors from unbundling these technologies and adapting them to the way the body naturally performs in the physical world. The Parviz lens is not the only attempt to unbundle technology. Earlier this year, a team from the MIT Media Lab unveiled a prototype for an AR-like product that enables the consumer to project data on any surface.

On a more theoretical level, just this week Nokia released a demo for a group of products that work together to create a “mixed reality” for the consumer. The most interesting of the products was a pair of spectacles that projects data — e.g., the weather, news headlines, text messages from your honey — above the main field of vision.

Critics of these various unbundlings claim that consumers will never allow themselves to be encumbered by new tech appendanges. But that’s what makes the contact lens so intriguing. There are many of us who would never wear glasses (too dorky). And there are many of us who would never wear contacts (too fussy). And I’d bet that there are even more of us who would never walk down the street pointing phones at people, places, and things (way too dorky). But with the options for “better vision” ever increasing, AR is beginning to look like it’s really going to happen. We’ve been dealing with the issues of vanity, usaability and technology-prosthetics for many generations. And we have learned a great deal. I trust that AR technologists and designers will get things right.

The AiNDEE™ hosted dialogue customer service system is intended to simulate a call center’s best employee with text voice and animated chat, all from a website. It’s designed to empower organizations that operate call centers with a more cost-effective first tier customer sales and support. It’s different from traditional online help systems because it is 100% autonomous, does not require a live human operator to answer each question, yet rivals a human’s ability to converse in a narrow area of expertise. Its uniqueness is its ability to carry on true bi-directional conversation, where questions and answers are given and answered by both parties for clarity and understanding. It handles the redundancy questions that typically clog a call center and it facilitates a more natural and cost-effective escalation path to higher levels of support.

I like the bits about “redundancy questions,” and simulating a call center’s “best employee.” How about the system’s ability to answer annoying questions? Much has been written about the dangers of robotic technology. But one of the big plusses is the capability of doing things that the best employee cannot — or simply will not — do.

For the uninitiated, augmented reality is a set of technologies that enable businesses to overlay data on top of a consumer’s view (say, over a mobile phone). The technologies have been embraced by an army of marketers and developers, mostly outside of the U.S. But with recent news that some U.S. mobile phones can now run augmented-reality applications, U.S. consumers can expect to hear a lot more about the category over the next few months.

And what is Nokia’s vision? It’s a world turned on by augmented reality that doesn’t necessarily depend on the phone. That’s a rather evolved view for a phone manufacturer. But perhaps Nokia’s world, too, has become augmented.

Atomic Clock (talk about real time)

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen lots of articles, blog posts, and tweets on the subject of real-time communications. In case you haven’t been following it, the big driver of this conversation has been Twitter. What’s becoming increasingly apparent to technologists, marketers and other folks is that Twitter is much more than just a wildly popular consumer service. It’s the first successful instantiation of real-time social communications. But what does real-time actually mean, and why are business people — especially marketers — so excited about it?

In a recent conversation with a prospective client, TCG learned about an interesting phenomenon, long known to marketers in consumer-packaged goods: by 4PM each day most people don’t yet know what’s for dinner. That’s a pretty exciting statistic if you are in the business of marketing the stuff — the food, the recipes — that make up what’s for dinner. Real-time is human time, and it’s every consumer marketer’s dream to “own” the conversation at a particular time of day (think “Miller time” (end of day), or the “pause that refreshes” (any break in the day). But unless you have a practical way for connecting with people at that time of day (forget the soaps; those days are gone), the opportunity may be lost. A new raft of tools and services might help, but there are a few things worth noodling over before you venture out:

A Better “Database of Intentions”? John Battelle has often described Google as a “database of intentions.” This is a particularly good way to frame the Google story: in one simple phrase, it helps to explain how a once-tiny company with a simple consumer service could grow so fast on ad revenue. Before Google, there was no viable database of intentions for advertisers. But for most businesspeople, Twitter is still seen as the consumer service rather as the owner of a rival “database of intentions.” Every moment of the day, people all over the world are telling their followers on Twitter what they think, what they like, what they dislike, etc. The database is nowhere close in scale to Google (yet), but this database has at least three advantages to marketers. Unlike Google, the Twitter database is open — anyone can study the ebb and flow of the chatter. Two, unlike Google, Twitter is designed to be social – when someone shares a comment, say about Miller beer — anyone following the comment will notice. Third — and perhaps most important to this conversation — unlike Google, the Twitter database is real-time. When a consumer says they like Miller, it’s not just simply time stamped (though timestamps in Twitter are very useful for marketing research). The person is saying it “now,” giving the marketer the irresistible opportunity to engage “now.”

Encroaching on Someone Else’s Time. But here’s one reason why a marketer should resist the temptation — or at least pause before giving into the temptation — of respond in real-time. Once you cross-over from the mindset of the consumer (the user of the service) to the mindset of a marketer (the user of the “database of the intentions”) you need to remind yourself that you can’t just go back out there without putting your consumer cap back on. Imagine you are a fan of hyper-caffeinated soft drinks, and you blurt out to your Twitter followers that you are presenting enjoying one, you might be surprised, not in a good way, to be interrupted by a representative for Jolt. The nature of the interruption should be carefully considered. Is it simply to peddle more product, or is it something that has value to a consumer who clearly is interested (e.g., consumers who complain about a product may not mind hearing from customer service, which is one reason why so many companies are using Twitter to field consumer complaints). This should be obvious, but marketing professionals as a class have never been particularly sensitive about interruptions (door-to-door, telemarketing, spam), and there’s little evidence to suggest that we will not misstep here.

Human versus Machine. Finally, there’s another kind of misstep which marketers — who now wear two hats — need to think about. As a backdrop, I’d like to go back to another thing that John Battelle has said, this time on the topic of conversational marketing: “Companies who are going to be very good at having conversations at scale, mediated by high technology are going to win. Companies that are bad at that are going to lose.” The key phrase here is “mediated by technology.” Because as more marketers attempt to have real-time conversations at scale, many will conclude they need to have those conversations mediated, somehow, by technology. The Twitter “database of intentions” is too vast, too unwieldy, for human hands, and already a number of useful, practical tools have emerged for enabling human beings to navigate that database. The problem is that it’s too easy to rely on machines to do the work of humans. We can expect businesses to misstep here, and do the real-time marketing equivalent of sending form letters. We can expect others to use these tools in a more intelligent way, offloading work that’s better handled by machines (e.g., using sophisticated semantic and sentiment analysis tools to identify people they should engage, something that technology vendors like MustExist do particularly well) and freeing up people to do what they do best. For in the final analysis, what it takes to be real-time is both the philosophical and practical commitment to be real … and to do this in the face of one of the most exciting new opportunities in the history of business (it’s bigger than marketing). As always, the temptation to do things the easy way will be extreme. Resist the temptation.

My odd experience came soon after reading about a 2006 blog debate about whether print or online offers the reader the more serendipitous experience — the experience of being able to discover things more easily, because of the way a particular world of information (print or online) is organized. What was making me dizzy was just how much stuff I might have been ignoring over the past few years when my reading was largely circumscribed by search, RSS and bookmarking (with two big exceptions: The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine). Sure, I probably read a lot more today than I did when I subscribed to every “new economy” magazine in the market. But my consumption of technology stories has been more structured, less daring, less serendipitous.

Which brings me to my favorite discovery during the flight — the emergent market for “body computing,” as evidenced by a string of mini-profiles in a section entitled “The Networked Body.” All sorts of interesting stuff happening here, much of it in the health-monitoring market. As it turns out, I was getting ready to train my searching robots on the general topic, but the magazine — one of the purest examples of bundled content, the driving business model in so many pre-2.0 markets — put the stuff right in front of me. And because I’ve been thinking about the topic (for this blog and another project) I especially joyed my magazine experience. I wouldn’t argue that this is the most efficient way of learning about something new, but it certainly was pleasurable.

One of the toughest things about life today is how much is planned and deliberate. A moment of freedom from the network — that is, pulling your body of the network — and you might feel an incredible surge of energy. And before we off off riffing on how technology might be developed to provide a digital equivalent to the print magazine experience, let’s not. No doubt we will have that someday. But let’s savor this moment a little bit longer. May not come again any time soon.

I am bullish on the AR market. But I believe that companies carrying the AR label are doing themselves — and the market — a disservice. While the phrase is catchy and marketable — sounds like virtual reality, but with added value — I believe it confuses, disturbs, and distracts people who are trying to make sense of this important market:

–Augmented reality is a category shared with offerings that are almost completely unrelated to what companies like SPRXmobile, Metaio and others are doing.
One of the most ardent supporters of AR recently warned, “don’t be misguided by the gimmicky marketing applications now.” While not all of these marketing applications are gimmicky, a great number of smart brands — A&E, Nickelodeon, P&G — are experimenting with techniques that do not follow the scenario above: i.e., going out into the world, and pointing a device at objects. Many of these marketing experiments ask consumers to hold an object — say a coupon to their webcams and see the object transformed into something else. Whether gimmicky or not, it doesn’t help to be grouped with these experiments.

–As a catchphrase, “augmented reality” doesn’t speak directly to the customer. It forces the question: what, in fact, are AR companies “augmenting”? You cannot augment reality — you can only augment our understanding of it. While “augmented intelligence” has its own marketing challenges — not as catchy, kind of creepy (but AR has that problem, too) — it is a lot closer to the truth.

–And speaking about the customer, “augmented reality” doesn’t help us to see future applications of this technology. I would argue that “augmented reality” speaks to the device — which today is the mobile handset. But the technology — again, better described as “augmented intelligence” — speaks to the human being, and points to an inevitable market for applications where the device is more and more about the human body. In fact, the component parts for AR — GPS, compass technology, facial recognition, object recognition — can be abstracted from the physical device and integrated into the way the body moves and functions (more on that in a moment). In other words, AR technology may accelerate us to a time when the body — augmented by a complex of amazing technologies — is the device. If that sounds too weird, too creepy, too Minority Report, check out the presentation below by Pattie Maes (of the MIT Media Lab) at the February 2009 TED Conference. Maes makes the case that those days are already here. At a time when machines are becoming more like humans, and humans are becoming more like machines — the twin phenonmena that have inspired me to write this blog — this is important stuff.

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in a wider technology context. We have a narrow definition that both (a) enables us to qualify — with extreme focus — what is Web 2.0 and what is not, and (b) discourages us from looking at the advances in the supporting, enabling technology. That limits our ability as professionals not only to describe what is happening today, but to predict what’s next. Recent though modest advances in AI — from voice recognition to pattern recognition — are powering all sorts of interesting applications, pointing to a future that is as much about machine power as people power.

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in a wider social context. In two very good articles in The New York Times, Matt Richtel recently made the case that distracted driving — resulting from our dependence on mobile handsets — may be as serious as drunk driving. The coverage perhaps marked the first time that a mainstream publication made a well-heard (emphasis on well-heard) public safety alarm on a Web 2.0 issue. But this is just one of many public policy issues that get scant attention in the “attention economy.”

–It has limited our ability to see social technology in closer personal context. In another book from the pre Web 2.0 era, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves argued that the relationships we form with devices are strikingly and disturbingly similar to the relationships we have with human beings. Nass, an HCI expert based at Stanford, is perhaps sitting in a place — between man and machine — where extreme focus might pay off big. For as much as we have become aware that the machine is becoming more like man, we are blissfully unaware of how much man is becoming more like machine. We’re seeing more and more research – not much, however, surfacing to mainstream consciousness — that our device addictions are taxing our neural anatomy, limiting our ability to perform, limiting our ability to relate to others. So, in the end, what has been cut off from our vision is not only the coming of smarter, more useful social machines (the title of a 2005 MIT Technology Review cover story about smart devices), but the extent to which we have become social machines as well.

I’ll be looking into each of these areas. Would love to hear from anyone with supporting or contradictory insight and research.

For several years now, the PR industry – one of the richest and most-established disciplines in the general marketing arena – has had to respond that what is perhaps the most serious challenge in its history. The advent of social media, with its practical and philosophical bent on DIY (“do it yourself”) has forced leaders in the profession to examine not only what it does in this world (the services provided by practitioners), but also who in fact should do the work. Perhaps the simplest way to frame the question is, what is the role of the agent – a professional who performs a task on behalf of the client – in a world where the client is supposedly empowered to perform the task him or herself. For PR leaders who are struggling to answer this question, this is not merely about the viability of one’s business. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s about one’s identity.

I’ll say more about identity in a bit. It’s perhaps the most serious challenge facing the PR industry today, and as the former partner of a Silicon Valley PR agency, I’ve had time and opportunity to reflect on what it means for my own personal and professional future. In fact, I’ve been part of the large mix of professionals who have persistently engaged in shaping the new communications profession, a market whose leaders and critics have responded in one of three ways over the past six years:

Ignoring the market (2003 – 2005): Quite naturally, when social media first began to gain currency in the PR market – when a handful of bloggers at companies and agencies began talking, arguing and collaborating with one another in an open forum – the industry as a whole took notice, but the overwhelming response from senior folks in the profession was tepid. It might help to remember that many of these early bloggers, with a few big exceptions, were not senior managers at their companies or agencies. Many of the first bloggers – and yes, social media at that time was almost all about blogging – were on the younger, less institutional, more rebellious side. For many senior managers, social media was seen as a fad, though an interesting one. The business case simply wasn’t there. And in the absence of a compelling, threatening business case, there’s very little reason to change.

Adapting to the market (2006-2008): After a few years of this, things began to change quite quickly. Soon the business case for social media – nicely captured in hardbound business books with mainstream followings – became clear: social media was not just a fad, but a way for businesses to more efficiently and effectively engage the market through the power of peer-production. By the time that Wikinonomics and Groundswell hit the shelves, executives all over the world were looking up, and of course PR execs were among them. Practically every PR pro — in-house and agency-side — began to experiment with a new communications mix. The first new service was blogger relations, which many PR pros mistakenly identified as an easy extension of media relations. And there were bolder, smarter experiments at companies and agencies that began to see social media through a broader lens, looking past the world of blogging and embracing the larger phenomenon of DIY technologies. But for most PR professionals, and the businesses that hired them, this was a period of adaptation, not leadership. Meanwhile, a chorus of critics began asking – sometimes in the open forums created by social media – whether it was time to rethink the whole profession, and get rid of the PR agent, and the PR agency, outright. Not everyone got the message – as was typical in this world, the most strident voices were from early-adopter tech world – but more and more people in the PR profession began to notice. DIY and agency were two concepts that were more than just theoretically in conflict. Either the PR industry would need to reconcile the two ideas, or someone else – perhaps the market – would serve as the arbiter.

Leading the market (2009-). The great reconciliation thus began, but it was not before the market began serving as the arbiter. Starting in 2007, when we first launched The Conversation Group, we began to notice what appeared to be an interesting and perhaps irreversible trend: more and more businesses began hiring and training people to do the things that agencies were offering to do as part of their social-media service. For some agencies and consultants, the trend was alarming. For others, it was actually good news, because now there was a market for a new set of services – leadership, strategy, education directed at helping organizations change to meet new opportunities made possible by social media. So while the trend suggests in an overall reduction in the market for communication agents for social media, it also suggests an increase in the market for change agents. It’s interesting how only a few years ago blogger relations was on the minds of every PR agency manager. For a growing number of communication professionals today the focus now is change management, a fuzzy discipline that only recently was the exclusive domain of management consultants and organizational psychologists.

But for most communication professionals, and the agencies that hire them, the evolution will not come easy. After all, the name of the game is change, and there are five broad areas that will require change:

SERVICE DEFINITION – the first thing the agent must need to rethink is the mix of services that now make sense for clients in the DIY world. Now more than ever, the skills that businesses needed to hire for and cultivate in small group of people – e.g., the marketing department – are now core, critical skills throughout the enterprise. But as we noted earlier, the opportunity for agencies is not to add more communication agents to the mix – extending the virtual team of people who can speak and act on behalf of the company – but to serve as change agents throughout the organization, providing more people inside the enterprise with the education, insight and tools to engage with their constituents.

RECONCILIATION OF SERVICES – for many communication agencies, the work of relating to the media will not go away. What will go away is the standard definition of public relations, which since the advent of broadcast has come to mean media relations. For a long time, that narrow definition helped to define and grow the PR profession; with the simple business proposition that “one can reach the many by engaging a few influentials,” the PR industry grew on the strength of one service (though not at the total exclusion of other services). Now, communication professionals are embracing a complementary business proposition – that the long tail of communicators inside the enterprise can directly relate to the public via their own networks, online and offline. For agencies, they will need to think about executing on both business propositions – continuing to serve as agents in the old sense (as PR agents) and agents in the new sense (change agents, educators for the openly communicating enterprise).

INTEGRATION OF SERVICES – A natural outcome of the dual-role some agencies are beginning to play is that some are earning the role of integrator on communication campaigns. But the opportunity here goes well beyond even the new, expanded definition of public relations. More and more, we are seeing instances where leaders on communication teams are integrating and directing the planning and execution of work traditionally managed in siloes by other groups – for example, creative (formerly the exclusive domain of advertising), interactive design, SEO, etc. This is not to say that communication agencies should have the skill set to execute in all these areas. But some are beginning to see that the opportunity is for leadership because in the world of DIY, communication has emerged as the critical, core competency.

BUSINESS MODEL – As agencies begin to grasp the new service mix and their role in integration, naturally they will be forced to rethink the business models that have long supported their viability and growth. Perhaps the most dominant model is the monthly retainer, which many agencies need to gain visibility and predictability for their businesses. The problem is that most retainers are weighted heavily on work executed by the firm’s communication agents – using younger talent as leverage for the agency’s overall billings. As noted, we do not expect the media relations business to go away, but the new opportunities for communication professionals, which place a premium on senior talent, will compel agencies to look at other approaches to leverage. This might require a reevaluation of the firm’s approach to growth – do you hire for more senior talent versus junior talent? If one chooses the former, existing models from consulting businesses in other markets (e.g., business consulting) could become interesting.

IDENTITY – Ultimately, it depends on what business the agency wants to be in. As we’ve outlined in broad strokes, the communications industry has been evolving over the past five years to meet the opportunity in a world where suddenly communication is a core, critical competence in the enterprise. When it was seen as a competence required only for marketing and spokespeople for the organization, communications had a value and a business model that rationalized the purchase and delivery of services. Now that it is core competence, it has another value – far higher, we would argue – and a different model. Both the old and the new are good businesses (reports on the death of the PR industry, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated). But the question for agencies – “what business are you in?” – is aspirational. The downside of the old agent/agency model was that agents literally stood between the newsmaker and the news reporter. Agents worked in the shadows – in many cases, secretly, behind the scenes of the true action in the marketplace. As change agents, they can enter the light, and engage in that action. And while reports of the death of the secret agent too may be exaggerated, we expect that many professionals and the agencies that hire them – the “change agencies” of the future – will welcome the change.