Something struck me recently when reading Dave Churbuck's blog. For those of you unfamiliar with Churbuck, he is VP Marketing at Lenovo and a pretty fab blogger in his own right. He has a way of cutting through much of the subtle, latent Web 2.0 BS and calling things out.

I happened upon Churbuck's post around the time I was "connecting" on LinkedIn with past coworkers and trying to loogle them. It started out quite innocently with me trying to find one of my good friends on there who is a student at UCLA's management school. I kept on getting an "upgrade membership" button that kept flashing every time I tried and failed to click away from the page.

When did LinkedIn start bugging me to upgrade my membership? Thinking back, I had started noticing this a while back, but it took a few months to settle in my mind to the point of distracting me from enjoying the site.

Unfortunately around the time this malaise set in, I was also on Facebook. My friend had sent me another of those SuperWall pictures which required me clicking on the image to see what it did, but before I could get to that image I was navigated to yet another page which prompted me to send the very image to all of my friends before I was allowed to open the actual image. Thankfully it also selected all of my friends as recipients of this picture so it saved me the work of having to send a picture of a dog to 50 of my nearest and dearest.

On the flipside, when I tried to "pull one over" on the system by "unselecting" all, it prompted me to choose one lucky recipient of an Alaskan Husky picture which most likely barked and sang"Happy Holidays" to the tune of "Feliz Navidad" when clicked on. Annoyed that I had just spent seven minutes of my life driving towards a reality far less appealing than the my mind's conjurings, I started to philosophize a bit on Churbuck's likening of "spam" to this tactic that Facebook API developers have taken to spreading the word of their creations. Initially I had taken to this feature, especially because I could choose which of my friends would care to partake in a game of Scrabble with me and go a few rounds. Same with Flixter. In a sense it also allowed me to be more social with people I wouldn't have contact with on a daily basis and rediscover or discover connections I never would have found otherwise.

Newsweek maintains that Facebook is the console of the future (replacing Wii??) and it will connect people socially through computers as never before. Considering it's the sixth most trafficked site in the world, it's a possibility. But really short of wireless remotes combined with action-oriented competitive games w/amazing graphics, how can the existing Facebook APIs compete with what Sony, IBM, and Microsoft are putting out?

In the news today, Ford is launching a host of widget ads to promote their new Microsoft-powered affiliation, the highly touted voice command device for mobile and digital music, Sync. For those of you who haven’t yet visited the site, the Sync My Ride slogan is rather catchy for a domain even if the commercial campaign for the Ford Focus which cross-advertises the Sync doesn’t quite convey the message as readily. Both campaigns are in line with a Net-Gen/MTVu-generation demographic which makes sense given the pricetag of the Focus and the interactive-heavy, rich design feature set of Sync.

Ford’s widget ads, which can be seen on AOL sites starting this week, will boast portable API-friendly code to embed the widget on other sites. While I understand what Ford and Microsoft have to gain in the process of building a community of MySpace and Facebook users flaunting their products, I’m not sure what users get in return. To this point, if there isn’t an existing community of users and advocates for a product (like Sync), how does a campaign like this get wheels. Does it have all the ingredients? Or is a bit like putting a cart before a horse?

Google’s Gmail ad campaign stemmed from a preexisting fan base of avid and enthusiastic users to build a more cohesive community through the power of user-generated video and the simplicity of its message: Just how does a single email navigate from point A to point B? In other words, what’s its path? (Google’s satellite feature to map out user video locations is a nice add-on to the video visual) Google’s success with this ad, much like many of their initiatives, stems from a keen understanding of the precise intersect between timing and innovation. Had Google launched a campaign like this before Gmail branded itself as synonymous with “email” and asked users the very same question, it would have sunk.

Widget ads do appear to be the wave of the now with major industries (entertainment, automotive, romance) piggy-backing on the new trend, but again, I’m brought back to the same burning question. What’s in it for me? As the consumer? As the Facebook member? As the occasional MySpace voyeur? What do I have to gain from posting a widget from the film August Rush with trailers from the film and local show times unless I’m a publicity agent at a PR firm or an industry-related site owner that gets some sort of monetary pay-per-click/pay-per-impression incentive? (assuming there is a performance model in place) Companies like ClearSpring, PointRoll, and Interpolls, who is hosting the Sync product, are already fast-track on the way to creating systems for tracking and monetizing traffic based on widget ad revenue. As an aside, Yahoo is currently working on sprucing up their widget platform, most likely to accommodate for this growing trend.

I get that advertising models these days are shifting with the times to incorporate ways of involving the everyday person in opportunities to have a “voice” in their public campaigns and that truly successful campaigns empower individuals by giving them ownership and a sense of tangible pride in their brand, but whether the widget ad model can support this model remains to be seen.

When is a new form of in-your face advertising not really an intrusion? Maybe when it's in your ears instead? According to Joe Pompeii, founder and president of Holosonics, beaming scary voices into your head from a billboard is actually helping minimize intrusive advertising. Holosonics, a technology company that enables highly focused "audio spotlights,"  provides the voiceover from a new Manhattan billboard promoting promoting A&E's new ghost series, "Paranormal State." Walk down Prince Street in SoHo and a directional speaker literally whispers creepy comments into your head.

The technology itself is quite interesting, and makes a lot of sense for Holosonic's initial market: museums, libraries, and other quiet places that can use audio narration to enhance the visitor experience. But hearing ads in your head while innocently walking down the street certainly strikes me as pretty intrusive!

As in museums, Pompeii claims the new approach is similarly all about lessening noise pollution:

"If you really want to annoy a lot of people, a loudspeaker is the best way to do it," he said. "If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people."

Sorry, Joe, I'm not convinced. I'm sure it's a pretty cool experience to hear this particular promo for the first time, but the prospect of getting pitches in my ear every time I walk down a street, through a store, and around any other public space (all of which are no doubt anxious to auction off more advertising space to eager sponsors), is creepy indeed.  Intrusive advertising is still intrusive, even if it's more narrowly targeted.

We all know that content is king in marketing in these days. If you don't have great content, it really doesn't matter what cool channels you're using. But how do companies think about creating truly compelling content, especially if you're steeped in the world of traditional pitches, white papers, and promotions?

Scott Anderson, Vice President of Customer Communications for HP's Technology Solutions Group (which serves business customers) provided a great answer during a BtoB webinar today on how business technology buyers use media in the buying process.

According to Anderson, HP has made three major investments in content creation in the last two years:

• Build a new editorial team staffed especially by technology journalists, rather than marcom people. As he noted, journalists typically have both a more skeptical eye and better story telling skills 
• Organize a platform to enable HP's subject matter experts (engineers, consultants, etc.) to bring their own voices directly into the market (rather than being "translated" by the marcom staff) with blogs, forums, and other conversational contributions
• Create more opportunities for HP customers to share their own stories and ideas at events and online.

Has HP fully swept out the old and embraced the new? Of course not. You can easily find all manner of traditional features and functions promotional content from HP -- and not all of it is useless. According to buyer research presented by tech publisher CMP during today's webinar, many buyers do actually want to see the technical details, so long as it comes during the right phase in the buying process.

Most important, though, HP has taken three important steps forward in creating a more content-rich, content-driven, and conversational approach to the marketplace: Tell better stories, share expertise and knowledge in authentic ways, and help your customers talk to each other about the issues you care about most. Not a bad model.

The battle for power between content creators and content distributors has roiled huge swaths of the media, entertainment, telecommunications, and technology industries since the digital age began in earnest in the early 1990s.  Marketing and creative types typically claim that content always has and always will rule; the more techie-oriented among us generally give the nod to those who control distribution.

The rise of social media, where innovative software platforms almost overnight become their own media companies with users doing the content heavy lifting (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Digg, etc.), ups the ante dramatically. In this context, BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine wonders if the debate is closed: "Millions of people tell stories now--on blogs, on MySpace, on Flickr--for free. There is a surfeit of storytelling. Millions of people do not sit around writing software for free. Advantage: programmers."

Reporting on the recent Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Fine highlights the impressive innovation and equally impressive self-confidence among the tech-minded denizens of social media, but does leave himself some wriggle room in suggesting that the end of the commercial storytellers might not be quite upon us (of course, one would expect nothing less from someone making his living selling content).

From a B2B perspective, though, I wonder if the storyteller's fate is nearly so dire. It's one thing to write off large chunks of  consumer news media and entertainment in the face of freely published commentary and conversation. For business people, however, there is far less tolerance for amateur hour. Business people are as interested as anyone in the ideas, experiences, and insights of their peers; that's why well-organized live events and online business networks and communities are flourishing alongside their more trendy consumerist peers. But so too are professional custom publishing and thought leadership marketing, often tied directly to those events and communities.

The reality is that great content drives great conversation, and busy business folk have little time to prospect for the useful nuggets buried in the largely useless piles on most broad-based sites. Yes, there are great tools for search and filtering, but it's still a whole lot easier to rely on -- and pay for -- the professional version. More sophisticated platforms and distribution channels will always be useful, but, at least in the B2B world, they still mean little without powerful content (i.e., business stories) at the core. Count me as a strong optimist for the future of the storytellers. What about you?