I was fortunate as a Sage North America representative to step into a presentation this week by Forrester’s Shar VanBoskirk who was presenting at Sitewire‘s annual Expert Series client event. VanBoskirk presented early thinking on what her firm is calling the Splinternet: the Internet era we’re entering that fragments user access and customer experiences due to the proliferation of mobile device proliferation and password-protected content.

VanBoskirk warned that familiar marketing rules do not apply in the Splinternet and marketers need to start thinking about – if they’re not already – how content paywalls may limit being discovered during web searches and how content is served up to so many different devices.

She expects a growing focus on creating modular content to deliver messages and offers to multiple devices; the variety and capabilities of which seem to change monthly. Adopting an experimental mindset was another piece of advice offered.

Launch of the Starbucks Digital Network this week is a nice step into experimentation. Starbucks is offering customized content for in-store users of its free Wi-Fi network in U.S. company-operated stores. The coffee empire is providing exclusive music and news selections “modularized” for laptops, smartphones and tablets. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today are allowing Starbucks visitors access to some of its normally fee-based content for free. Yahoo, a partner in the Network, is also represented. I think this will be an interesting development to keep an eye on even though Starbucks has become an easy g0-to for marketing and technology innovation examples.

I suggest to corporate communicators that the Splinternet offers yet another opportunity to explore brand journalism – the business practice of publishing and sharing information valuable for an audience, removed of sales pitches and marketing jargon. The fact that consumers and business professionals are quite mobile and posses varied preferences for receiving information paves the way for brand journalism efforts to further integrate into online dialog and possibly supplant some marketing aspects of it.

VanBoskirk reminded that you do not need to literally develop a strategy for every device type, but think about which ones your audience use most and how your decisions impact those.

“Consumers want freedom of choice,” she noted, “but not chaos.”

Is Santa real? That’s the festive dilemma that Sitewire, a Tempe, Arizona based interactive marketing agency intends to help Jay Feitlinger tackle this holiday season. Actually, there’s a search engine hypothesis the agency is testing, while it gently encourages the blogosphere to develop a Santa solution for Feitlinger.

Specifically, the Sitewire folks are testing out a “link baiting” hypothesis to see if their efforts can help that phrase - is Santa real? - (see, there it is again) achieve top 50 status in online search rankings. Sitewire thinks it will take about 100 links to Feitlinger’s comment to raise it into the top 50.

Feitlinger, I should mention, is a Parentsconnect.com reader and commenter who posted the age-old Santa query a while back in an effort to acquire some practical advice about just what to do when the questions regarding Santa’s origin and authenticity eventually surface.

By some course of events this came to the attention of a Sitewire staffer who found the post to be ideal for the agency’s experiment, since the comment appears on a Web page that is not organically optimized.

I’m all for fun activities that can potentially lead to actionable results, so I’m playing along in hopes that some key insights turn up, as well that advice Feitlinger is seeking so I too can tackle the whole Santa thing when my moment of truth arrives.

Sitewire’s Blogonawire post invites us all to lend a hand by participating, and provides simple instructions for doing so.

With that, I wish good tidings to the Sitewire Santa and hope this post brings him a step closer to his goal.

(Well, one more thing while I’m at it. A quick shout out to the Sitewire folks for hosting Charlene Li as the featured speaker at their Groundswell Event this past September. Good stuff!)