Robert Scoble

Phil Fernandez, CEO, of Marketo (marketing automation company) yesterday announced the company was going to IPO to raise money to take it to the next level. But this interview isn't about that. It's about where marketing is going in the future. We talk about a range of topics from outdoor advertising to contextual marketing that will arrive thanks to wearable computers like Google Glass.

John Gotts, CEO of http://connectgop.com, has something interesting cooking with a social media system that hooks together Republicans. Generally I don't get involved with politics, especially Republican ones, but I've been tracking Gotts for years (the company started out as a social media aggregator named Chumly and then pivoted toward politics when Gotts realized that politicians, particularly Republicans, were way behind in social media and needed help getting going). He's pretty secretive about what he's doing, since he's competing with Nation Builder, a company full of rich former Facebook execs (and it's well capitalized too). He thinks Nation Builder will be picked by the Democrats, which leaves the Republican side of the house open. We just were at a speech by Harper Reed, who ran Barack Obama's tech reelection team, and Reed said that their technology was being disbanded and that he'd never have been able to share databases with the Republicans. Cross-party data sharing is a huge no-no, which leaves a huge hole open for John Gotts and his firm to drive through. I share this to scare the Democrats into building a system that keeps data around between campaigns. Gotts' does. Also, they should build a system that shares data between all Democrats. Gotts' does. John Gotts might be the most dangerous guy the Democrats have ever met. Worse of all he doesn't share the dogma of many other Republicans and is mostly focused on helping Republicans win. If that doesn't scare Democrats, nothing will. They should study him and fear him. If the Democrats don't, the Republicans are the tech leaders by default.