It got me thinking a lot about how we talk about apps, services and generally what’s next – particularly in digital marketing. It seems to make sense that rather than to continually chase after the latest toy or technology, digital brands and the planners behind them should start first with values. Not unlike a solid strategy leads to the right tactics, or even how form follows function, so too should a digital marketing experience be built on the right values.

Starting with the values – the constants that remain unchanged and resonate in ways that matter most – provides a guiding framework for thinking about what’s next in digital marketing.

Is this a big idea? Maybe. Maybe not, but I like how it changes our thinking. So I thought I’d put together a quick deck on this principle and submit it to the AAAA Transformers Program for consideration.

I think there are others that have done a wonderful job discussing many of these themes as well, including big ideas in what’s next in marketing and branded utilities, but I thought I’d share a couple ideas to the larger conversation in hopes that they add a little extra value.

Feedback would be lovely.

And taking a play from the Obama inauguration playbook, the NBA.com video feed will be integrated with Facebook:

That supplemental game footage — dubbed TNT OverTime Extra — will also be available on NBA.com for the second straight year. But this time around, TNT has attempted to improved the online viewing experience by partnering with Facebook to integrate the social networking site’s “status update” tool with the clips.

This is how media should be – distributed, augmented and social.

I’m disappointed to be leaving the Verizon network, but the lure of the iPhone experience was just too much to avoid. Besides, my bulky Treo just wasn’t cutting it for me anymore.

So aside from leaving Verizon, and learning how to type on the tiny glass keyboard, I’m looking forward to most every feature of the iPhone – especially rocking the Twitterific app.

Once it finally arrives, I’ll post my thoughts on the experience. 7-10 days can’t come fast enough!

And this week’s launch of Socialight at CTIA brings an equally impressive service to letting users make these same recommendations on the go with their mobile phone by creating their own “urban mixtape.”

A mixtape lets Socialight users easily curate a personal collection of places and tag it with their own information or existing editorial content. These can be created, shared, and accessed on any mobile or web device. Users can receive an SMS or email the link to their Urban Mixtape — easily viewed on any web-enabled phone — and dynamically reordered around their current location. It can also be accessed with a GPS-enabled handset using the Socialight Mobile application.

As Michael Sharon, co-counder of Socialight, told us, “no one really uses guidebooks anymore. If they do, they just use a few pages. This is closer to what people are doing anyway.”

As our digital and physical lives continue to blend, it’s these types of hybrid experiences that will shape digital marketing, not as tools to be gamed, but as social applications that provide an organizations’ customers with a better and bigger microphone to talk about them.

“By 2012, we anticipate one out of every $4 spent on advertising and marketing will be earmarked for alternative media,” PQ Media president and CEO Patrick Quinn said. “Technological advances have led to critical changes in consumer behaviors and media-usage patterns, which have pushed the advertising and marketing ecosystems into a seminal period of transition. Driven by these market forces, brand marketers are seeking new strategies to connect with consumers through engaging means in captive locations while at the same time providing proof-of-performance metrics. This confluence of trends is fueling the migration of dollars to alternative media.”