#IPASocial

So I went to an event back in January about Social Media and the Future of Agencies. Sounded like interesting stuff, but it turned out to be an opportunity for the IPA to try to sell us some research which looked like a bit of a snapshot of stuff that was happening while missing a lot of the important stuff, the reasons why it is happening. Well it looked like that from the presentation, but it was hard to tell because none of it was shared and there were no opportunities for dialogue about it. Except of course there are always opportunities for dialogue in the interwebs, and lots of people including me were fairly critical about the whole idea. It could have just finished there, as another missed opportunity, but then Nigel Gwilliam from the IPA got in touch with everyone who had commented on the event to how the IPA could make the things they are doing more relevant, more like a conversation.

And over the course of a few months this developed into a few of us putting our heads together to work out what we think are the most important principles for brands and agencies to understand when navigating the new ways in which people relate to each other online. We've also added initial thoughts about what each of the principles means, kind of conversation starters so that hopefully lots of other people can add their thoughts. And then there's going to be an event, which might hopefully be some of the things that the last one wasn't. So there's some speakers to get the conversation going, and then there's some conversation.

And these are the subjects that we think people might want to talk about. Everyone who has written the thought starter piece will be blogging it over the next week, and we're suggesting tagging it all #IPASocial. Keep a look out and please join in.

There's apparently a plumber of Yahoo Pipes somewhere in the IPA who might even be able to aggregate this tag on their site soon too, so we can really live out the perpetual beta principle.....

1. People not consumers – Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda – Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning – John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes – Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people – Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive – Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta – Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don’t – Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again – Graeme Wood

10. Measurement – Asi Sharabi