NETWORKS=RELATIONSHIPS

Social networks, electronic networks, business networks: networks are central to the success of modern organisations, argues Kevin Roberts, worldwide CEO at leading communications company Saatchi & Saatchi.

"There is no other way. Organisations have to work like a spider's web, like a network. They cannot run on a bureaucratic, command and control model. The two key things in my vocabulary, going forward, are connectivity and collaboration. The consumer wants everything and the winners are going to be those people who can connect and collaborate, at lightning speed, across markets, geographies, time zones, demographics, and diversity," says Roberts.

"First you need people who can connect and collaborate; second you have to have connectivity technology, things like mobiles, e-mails, computers, the internet -- we have been enabled and liberated by the internet --- so that networks can work."

Through networks come relationships. In the networked connected world marketers will speak the language of love rather than that of brands, says Roberts, who coined the term "Lovemarks" to describe products and services we form a strong emotional attachment to. But can you really have a relationship with a product or service? Roberts believes so.

"Everybody is looking for relationships, with products, services, or brands. We live in a world of insecurity, where people don't know what is going to happen to them. We do not trust politicians, companies, corporate life, there is terrorism all around us, technology is running at one million miles an hour, we don't know if we have got national healthcare, and we don't know if our pensions will be enough to keep us alive. Seven years is the average length of a marriage. Increasingly, we are looking for relationships."

A quick look at the world shows that there is a lot in what Roberts says. Look at all the internet sites promoting the community concept, not just the johnny-come-latelies like MySpace and YouTube, but the grandaddies of the internet like Amazon and eBay. And, in the world of bricks and mortar, the community concept is equally commonplace, as any frequent flyer will know.

"We are looking for relationships in the most mundane things, we are no longer looking for transactions, because life has become too transactional," says Roberts. "There is a really strong psychological undercurrent. Why is texting so big, why are kids never without their mobile phones? That is all about relationships. I think we are in a relationship era, because of the insecurity of our lives."

NOT SO LONELYGIRL15

When it comes to marketing to Generation Y, forget conventional, traditional media. Sure magazines, papers and television have their place, but the internet is where it is really at.

The rise of viral video websites like YouTube and Google video, and social networking sites like MySpace, are indicative of where the marketing world is heading. Seventy per cent of You Tube's registered users are from the US, 50 per cent are under 20. Video views have reached 1.73 billion.

In recent months one of the most popular people on YouTube and MySpace has been Bree, a sixteen year old, home-educated, schoolgirl -- otherwise known as Lonelygirl15. Millions tuned in to watch the shy but precocious girl talk about a panoply of subjects including the Tolstoy principle, turtles, friend Daniel, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and Purple Monkey.

However, as the number of viewers climbed steadily, rumours surfaced that all was not as it should be in the lonelygirl universe. Conspiracists maintained that the slick editing and production values hinted at something more commercial than a teenager's amateur video diary.

Sure enough Bree was outed as the not-so-lonely Jessica Rose, 19, formerly of the New York Film Academy (LA branch), and the filmmakers, Californian-based twenty-somethings, Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders, and Greg Goodfried who were signed with top Hollywood talent agents, Creative Artists Agency. The whole home video diary thing was a charade -albeit an extremely popular, and, for a time, convincing one.

It is not that someone produced a fake video - or series of videos - on YouTube which is so remarkable about the lonelygirl phenomenon though. The part of the story that demands the attention of marketers the world over is the consumer/audience response to unfolding events. Lonelygirl15 is the all-time number one video channel on YouTube with 3.36 million viewers and rising, and 38,500 subscribers.

It should be a case study in how to create a "buzz" for a "product" in the internet age. There may not be a "product" yet, but there surely will be one, a film, merchandising, whatever.

And the film makers aren't the only ones to latch on to the viral attraction of websites like MySpace and You Tube (and their inevitable successors). Music artists like Sandie Thom, Gnarls Barkley and Lily Allen have been promoted successfully through astute use of such sites. Marketers take note.

CAUSAL MAPPING

The world moves at a bewildering pace. At work we are bombarded by information: written information in the form of reports, schedules, regulations, emails; plus all the verbal information in meetings and various face-to-face encounters. And then there's all the visual information: designs, videos, posters, pictures; and all the other stimuli encountered in the workplace.

Faced with this information onslaught, individuals are unable to sit back and weigh all the evidence to come to a rational decision every time they are required to make a decision. So, instead, to help make sense of their working environment, employees construct simplified mental models of their world. They then use these models to inform their actions. Once such mental models are formed they can be extremely difficult to change, regardless of changes in the external environment. And they can have a significant impact on employee well-being and performance.

For an organisation to implement policies that improve employee morale, that motivate and engage the workforce, it first needs to understand what makes its employees tick. What shapes the way they view the world? What mental models have they formed?

Recent research in the UK by Gerard Hodgkinson, Fellow of the Advanced Institute of Management Research and professor of Organisational Behaviour and Strategic Management at Leeds University Business School, shows that one way to unlock the drivers behind each individual's thought processes is a technique called casual mapping.

Causal mapping reveals the way that individuals think, feel and make sense of their world. Using a series of arrows and boxes it can be used to show how the individual interlinks various decision-making factors. It is useful, because it reveals how individuals perceive their world. This allows an organisation to know which actions it can take to achieve a beneficial result - for the individual and the organisation.

Causal mapping was used to reveal the way i200 call-centre workers made sense of their working environment. It suggested that call centres are far from the "sweatshops" as portrayed in much of the media. It also showed the futility of using both a uniform system for measuring performance, and a standard approach to worker motivation. The causal maps revealed big differences, not only between workers in different companies, but also (and this is really important) between workers in the same team, maybe even with the same boss.

These mental models, based on subjective perceptions, inform the crucial decisions that employees make e.g. whether to come to work in the morning; to come to work on time, how hard to work, and ultimately whether to stay in the organisation or look for pastures new. Each decision influences individual, team and organisational performance to some degree.

Professor Hodgkinson's research focused on call-centres workers, but causal mapping is invaluable for assessing what drives employees to do the things they do at work. Policies can then be formulated to help ensure employees are more engaged and happier. Let's face it - happy employees make for a healthier organisation.

GONE PHISHING

Rarely a day goes by when the email inbox isn't inundated with missives from x bank (fill in the name of any large bank) telling you that the bank is updating its software and ordering you to click on a link, log in, and change your bank details.

Of course the bank is doing no such thing. Follow the instructions and you will end up handing over your bank details to some cyber criminal holed up in Russia, Nigeria, or another country popular with phishers. This nefarious piece of sharp internet practice, duping you into handing over your personal information, is called phishing.

Most people reading this are aware it happens. Even tech savvy computer users are being ripped off.

Companies are now being targeted. Recent research by insurers Royal & Sun Alliance (R&SA) and the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), reveals that corporate identity (ID) theft (or big game phishing) will cost UK firms £700 million a year by 2020. Last year's catch was £50 million. Corporate phishing is pretty similar to personal identity theft. It involves assuming the identity of a company. Once that's done the shady angler withdraws money from bank accounts, exploits lines of credit, and orders goods.

How are the cyber crooks getting their nasty little hands on corporate identity details? Apparently through scams, including phishing expeditions. These include contacting Companies House to change company details so that they can act in the name of a company. Companies need to be ever more vigilant when it comes to security: running security checks on new employees, shredding documents, securing digital passwords, buying up the various permutations of internet domain names to prevent misuse by phishers, and signing up to a Companies House service that notifies companies if a request to change company details is made.

Unfortunately, while you are shoring up the corporate defences against phishers, they are perfecting their next weapon against the unwary. It's called smishing - actually phishing on your cell phone. But it's easy to deal with. When you next get a text message informing you that if you don't go to the site of an online dating agency to which you've been signed up, it will set you back £x, just ignore it.

PAPER CUTS

In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison created the phonograph - as a dictation machine to replace paper memos, rather than the forerunner of the MP3 player. In 1975, Business Week ran an article predicting that the office of the future would be almost paperless. But it's 2006 and we're still waiting. The idea seems logical enough, the inevitable consequence of a workplace driven by technology. Now, the anti paper-in-the-office lobby may have to recant. Research suggests an entirely paperless organisation is not such a good thing after all.

Clive Holtham, professor of Information Management at Cass Business School, City of London, draws a distinction between information work and knowledge work. A call-centre worker is usually an information worker, retrieving, processing, copying and filing documents, processing information to predefined rules. Information is easy to share because it can be stored electronically. So the creation and sharing of information can be completely automated. It suits paperless systems.

Knowledge workers, on the other hand, are either creating new knowledge or sharing it. Knowledge is more difficult to translate into an electronic form. Only Hollywood has perfected the technology to plug into a person's brain and download knowledge. Acquiring and sharing knowledge is difficult.

"Knowledge workers need paper for many knowledge tasks," says Holtham. In the 1990s legendary advertising boss Jay Chiat of ad agency Chiat/Day was inspired to create a virtual office. Part of the plan, on top of eliminating personal office space, involved getting rid of paper. The results were not entirely in keeping with Chiat's vision. Employees stashed paper in their car boots, or towed it around the office in trolleys. People it seems are just wedded to the stuff, and for good reason.

"The interesting thing," says Holtham. "Is that once a project is finished, the paper is photographed, scanned, and archived. But, at the point that someone is doing their creative work, they should not be made to feel ashamed to be using paper, they should be encouraged to use it. People should go back to using paper, they might be more creative that way."

OUTTAKES

Professor Paaige K. Turner, assistant professor of communication at the Centre for Organizational Leadership and Renewal, at St Louis University in the US estimates that the average American worker spends two to four hours every day managing email. Four hours!? Whatever happened to increased productivity from technology? Take out napping time, rest room time, lunchtime, web surfing time, coffee making time, trips to the John and how much time is left for honest hard work? Not a lot.

Do you come in earlier to work, or leave later to deal with email? Do you experience a sense of inbox dread when returning from holiday? It's email stress. Employees are being overwhelmed by email. And it is partly the employees' fault. Ok, some employees are given Blackberrys by their employer. But many others volunteer. Why? Who conned us into thinking it was a good idea to check our emails while on a family outing at the weekend, and then reply to them? Apparently the term of choice is "Crackberry addict." As for the employees who were "gifted" one by their organisation - How long before someone sues for the stress of being permanently contactable?

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In his book The Singularity is Near, synthesiser inventor Ray Kurzweil presents a vision of the future where, in the fifth human epoch, biology and computers will merge. This is good, as nanobots will repair us when we are ill. It is also bad, as hackers will run amok. At the existing rate of progress Kurzweil predicts that computers will be smarter than humans in 20 years. What's the betting we will still be shouting at them though, when they suddenly shut down for no apparent reason?

The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. 2006 (UK: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd).