Last night I attended a MIMA presentation by Rachael Marret of MRM Worldwide called "The Age of Participation." Rachael posited some really smart ideas and solutions, especially around the topic of measuring participation, which she described as basically about applying values to specific actions taken by users. So, a person who writes a positive blog post about a brand is worth more points than a person who visits the corporate brand site once.

If participation is the critical, leading-factor for marketing in the future, then measuring and quantifying what we mean by participation is über important. (I hope to write a post specifically about MRM's theories soon.)

It got my brain going.

But then Mark Kurtz, VP New Media from Gage, hipped me to two interesting topics:

1) Esther Dyson's recent article in the WSJ about "The Coming Ad Revolution."

While the big news in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo andMicrosoft, a more profound revolution is taking place on the onlinesocial networks: The discussion about privacy is changing as users takecontrol over their own online data. While they spread their Webpresence, these users are not looking for privacy, but for recognitionas individuals -- whether by friends or vendors. This will eventuallychange the whole world of advertising.

It's really about brands taking on more human qualities, and behaving as we do. As Dyson puts it, "The new (social networks) model creates a more trusted environment for reachinghigh-value, frequent purchasers, whether of airline tickets,electronics, clothes or other items."

I've seen this issue with real clients twice in the past week -- Who's going to be our brand's ongoing contributor in this social network? How will we continuously engage the people who participate in this site you propose? One of the flip sides to the ad revolution is a different staffing model inside marketers and ad agencies alike.

2) General Motor's new wiki.

Imagine that -- one of the world's largest marketers inviting anyone to come in and help write its corporate and cultural history. Whodathunkit even five years ago? This is crowd sourcing, this is participatory, this is uhhhh, really smart. Jan Leth told us about how Ogilvy's "The network is human" campaign for Cisco actually started as a Wiki. I wonder how many people GM has assigned to content development and monitoring.

All of these things -- codifying a process for measuring participation, re-inventing the role of the brand and GM's foray into empowering consumers to write GM's own history -- are continuing evidence of positive mutation and evolution in marketing and advertising.