I marketed through listserv before email, and developed customer communities before social media.

Hooray for me, right? The point of that shameless appeal to my own authority is that in the last few weeks, I've seen a tidal wave forming that's going to catch a whole lot of marketers by surprise. If you think it's been hard to get up to speed on all the emerging technology, take a deep breath while the world shifts into second gear.

No, I'm not talking about Twitter, or Pownce, or Pligg, or one of the endless additions to the long slow freight train of new Web 2.0 applications. I'm talking about the erosion taking place at the foundation of stalwart applications and techniques marketers have only just figured out how to integrate after years of flailing.

In just the last few weeks, I've had a string of experiences that cast a long shadow over email marketing, search engine optimization, and even lead generation as an effective marketing tool. I'll take you through them one at a time.

Lead Generation is Dead. Long live lead gen.

This summer, my new agency MotiveLab started running its first lead generation program, with a whitepaper detailing 12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media. By almost any measure it was a great success. We’re nearing 600 fully qualified and registered downloads. We identified 30-40 significant prospects, most of whom we connected with by phone, and wound up making four solid pitches for immediate new business. Almost 8 weeks after starting the campaign, this morning’s batch of new leads weighed in at 19.

When I was talking about this campaign with a friend in the social media space, he looked at me like I was a dinosaur. “Dude, that’s so Web 1.0”. And suddenly it seemed so obvious. With 600 qualified leads, I had developed single points of contact, but no community, no synergy, no engagement. To keep alive the prospects who aren’t interested today, I have to continue expending energy to keep the one-way channel of communication open for months at a time.

Within an hour of talking to my friend—by the way, I’m talking about Jeremiah Owyang, who writes the Web-Strategist blog—I decided to do something radically different. My whitepaper had already run out 8 weeks behind a registration page, so I created a Facebook group, posted the whitepaper there for free, and posted an invitation on my blog for people to come and read the whitepaper and offer their own response. Kudos, criticism, whatever. In less than 24 hours, more than 60 marketers joined the group. I haven’t even aggressively promoted it yet.

Now consider the difference with traditional lead generation. Because Facebook is a profiled community, nearly everyone in my new group has a profile that tells me as much or more about them than a lead generation form. Instead of one-way points of communication, I have the opportunity for dialog, for synergy among members of my community. Yes, that’s a scary prospect sometimes, but if you moderate the dialog well, it’s self-sustaining and engaging in a way that lead generation can’t match.

I still have a long way to go in building this group and growing it to match the returns of past lead generation programs. But in my mind, the writing is on the wall. Traditional lead generation takes far more energy to sustain than developing a community of prospects and customers.

The End of Search Engine Optimization

I’ve long been a critic of Google’s “magic box” approach to search. You type in a word or phrase and, voila, the answers flow in. At least, that’s the idea. More often than not, the results page is the first step of a wild goose chase searching for relevance.

The primary problem with Google is that if you don’t know enough about the topic you’re searching, the results make little sense. You can’t tell what result to put any trust in, because you don’t have a foothold for discerning credibility and truth. Which leads to the second, more substantial problem. SEO. Search engine optimization has turned Google into one massive payola scheme. On any topic that matters, someone is paying a lot of money to make sure their information rises to the top, whether it’s the best information or not. Imagine going to the library to research a topic, and when you asked the librarian for help, she came back with a stack of books she’d been paid to promote, many of which were totally irrelevant to what you were searching. Not good.

There’s a growing list of search tools specifically designed to thwart gaming the results through SEO. Mahalo is one of the most prominent, which relies on a human network to build and validate the results generated from keyword searches. It’s a different take on the concept behind Techmeme, a news site that builds its feed not from press releases, but from the news topics being discussed within a rapidly growing network of trusted bloggers and friends. The idea is that it’s more reliable to lean on trusted sources of information than marketers.

This isn’t a trend that is going turn the world upside down tomorrow, but the momentum behind it significant. 80% of all web users begin a web session with a search engine. When those search engines become so gamed by optimized placement that they become unreliable, people start to get frustrated and migrate. The next generation of search is growing from this frustration, and is designed explicitly to block out search engine optimization, and incorporate social networks to validate content.

Email Marketing Is Gasping for Breath

In the last two weeks, I’ve cancelled every email newsletter I subscribe to. More than two dozen. It’s not that they’re worthless, it’s that I don’t have time to read things cluttering up my email. Yes, I use filters to drop my newsletters into a special folder--and then I rarely check the folder. Great information piles up unread, because email is a lousy and inefficient medium for consuming content.

I’ve long preferred RSS as a method for reading subscriptions, and recently I finally made the shift over to Google’s news reader, after watching Scoble filter through 600 feeds using key commands. What a difference. I can scan through feeds in a way that vastly simplifies the process of filtering and consuming data, and I can access it easily from my laptop, desktop, or any computer.

Add that to the statistics emerging of younger users not using email at all, or IM, but communicating through Text and social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and you may want to start spending more time getting familiar with social networking sites. I’m not even a motivated migrant away from email, but I’m already finding myself communicating more through Facebook and text, because that’s where conversations are emerging.

Reading the Trends

What do all these points have in common? Two related issues. First, we’re seeing the peak of narrow point-to-point communication channels, as better technologies emerge that facilitate communication based in community participation, and that allow us to process more volume intelligently. Second, social marketing is continuing to spread its influence not just over Web sites and content, but over applications and communication. People are not just tired of the constant flood of aggressive and irrelevant marketing messages filling up every channel of communication, they’re finding alternatives to tune it out.

Think about it. Do-not-call lists. Spam filters. The CAN-SPAM Act. These are all obvious social and regulatory markers of a society fed up with blunt force marketing tactics. How long before that filters down into the design of applications and communications technologies? Well, it’s happening all around you. Are you ready?