Because this is a campaign, we  need planks in our platform.  Damn the polls, let’s go with these, composed, in Lincoln-en-route-to-Gettysburg fashion, on the back of a cocktail napkin after a couple of mojitos at Casito del Campo:

- Think of the GameChangers panel as being one less panel on how to monetize social networks that you’ll be asked to attend.

- People in the audience who’ve had improv experience will be asked to step forward and demonstrate GameChangers exercises and principles. This will keep things lively.

- You will learn about something that is not “a new application to improve web-based interactions.”

- You will learn why the most effective brand narratives are a product of continual improvisation.

- You will learn how biological evolution is a result of improvisation.

- You will learn about the Godmother of Improvisation, how comedians hijacked her techniques in 1958, and have been holding them for ransom ever since.  Until now.

- You’ll learn why TRON is one of the most successful motion pictures ever made.

- You’ll learn why you don’t necessarily need technology to augment your reality.

- We will have musical accompaniment.  Improvised, of course.

- We are going to stage at least one unrehearsed, never-before-attempted, improvised scene that involves the entire audience, which could be great, or it could be an absolute disaster, and you won’t want to miss the drama of that.

You have until Sept. 4 to register on the SXSW website and vote. Don’t think about it, do it! Now! Go! Here’s the link:

People here represent insurance companies, big pharma, start-ups, physician networks, social networks built around various health concerns, and NGOs. There are several physicians in the audience, and one guy, Vik Duggal (www.konstructr.com) from the construction business who makes a remark on which, the way I see it, the entire conversation pivots.  Until Vik speaks, the focus has been on privacy issues.  And then Vik says, “All of these comments about patient privacy and the relationship between employees and employers assume the current model.  I’m in the construction business and I can tell you that everything about it is going to change in the next five years.  What’s true today will not be true in the future.”

It’s like Vik dropped a lit cigarette into a gas tank.  The room erupts in conversation that the moderator soon loses any chance of moderating. I had not planned to say anything, but when the moderator tries to calm things down by saying, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not optimistic” I shout at him, just to keep things lively, “That’s your choice!”

A young physician from Brooklyn, Jay Parkinson, is launching his own social network, HelloHealth.  He says, “Doctors like patients who come in already educated about what’s wrong with them.  Education and prevention are the best medicines we have.”

Later I tell the story of how, at no cost to me, I healed myself of a case of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) using Google search and a YouTube video of a treatment known as the Epley Maneuver; and how my accountant had paid over $6,000 to ‘the health care system’ to get healed of the same ailment.  One guy jumps all over this.  “And who would you have blamed if it hadn’t worked?” he asks accusatorily.  “Myself!” I bark back at him over a whole chorus of people chiming in with anecdotes of their own.

At one point near the end of the session, a woman with an autistic child makes the following statement:  “I can tell you that the parents of an autistic child typically know more about autism than the average physician, and in my experience, the average physician welcomes what the parents know.”

In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. In other words, you can have the swellest piece of content — a great product, an incredible film, a breakthrough technology — but if no one can find you or your content does not connect in a meaningful way with your audience, your tree will fall in the forest and will not make a sound. In the Networked World, context is king. Context makes the falling tree mean something to the forest, gives it its sound, its flavor, its grain, its significance.Creating context has, in fact, become a whole new occupation, one that didn’t exist three years ago: the Pollinator. Pollinators are experts (or fast-becoming that way) in cobbling together social networks and communities of interest that connect brands with their audiences. Pollinators are skilled listeners, and know how to turn ’suggestions from the audience’ into productive brand behaviors. They understand a brand as a fluid experience for the customer, an experience that requires continual nurturing to evolve. Pollinators design the context in which these experiences can transpire. They are professional contextualizers.

YouTube and Google are the highest-profile examples of brands that create and own context. They do not create content or experiences, but give content a home and make useful experiences possible. Everywhere you turn these days, you see brands shifting their focus from static content to the fluid context that keeps their narrative lively and engaging.

Here are three other companies who are in the business of creating context:

Mochila is an application with widgets that let owners of content connect with distribution channels and advertisers in a win-win-win scenario. Mochila’s Chairman, Ben Chen, describes his company as a ’syndication engine’ that automates and simplifies what would otherwise be an enormously complicated process of defining relationships and revenue streams between large numbers of producers, distributors and advertisers. What had been difficult if not downright impossible for the average content-creator gets made easier by Mochila. The enormous 24/7 appetite of distributors gets fed. Advertisers can tie into channels and content that contextualize their brand.

Morf Mobile is a mobile content provider founded by Van Jepson, who created the well-known site, Hot or Not? That web phenomenon invited its audience to contextualize random photos. Morf, geared toward a young adult audience, contextualizes content by parsing it into mobile channels and communities of interest. It adds context by tying real world experiences to online ones. Impulses to buy, connect, alert, comment — action! — become more immediate options when mobility gets added to the mix. For further context, Morf enables its licensees to private label their channels. Your brand can use the Morf technology to create its very own context. For example, fans of Artist X can dial up the Artist X channel to share news and keep current with the community and its favorite performer. Artist X, meanwhile gets a channel that lets everyone at a concert become an ambassador for the brand, or buy Artist X’s music and merch before they leave the parking lot.

It’s not only newbie brands who are generating value via context. Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop site lets people outside the company have a shot at making money by developing new products and innovative ideas. Applicants can browse a list of P & G’s ‘Needs,’ which includes items like “Packing for Cylindrically Packaged Food,” “Pain Free Hair Removal From the Roots” and my favorite, a call for a “Unique In-Mouth Experience.” P & G calculates that there are 1.5 million people in the world who have engineering and product design skills comparable to the skills of its own engineering and product development staff of 7,500. Changing the context of its development process by opening it up to the world and incentivizing participation enables P & G to increase its potential development staff by 7,500x. They call them ‘Game-Changing’ deals, which is not a very unique in-mouth experience, but we are flattered by the imitation flavor ; )