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Tuesday
May202008
links for 2008-05-21
Young Urban Professional- Apparently, Tumblr doesn't get a lot of love from Google.
- Techmeme adds search.
- Like chocolate and peanut butter all in one.
Tuesday
May202008
Open Files: Nine Digital Trends for the Future
Every day a new social network is born and yet another dies. This makes spotting digital trends and tracking them to be challenging at times. However, I have found a system that works really well called Open Files. It was developed by George Stalk at the Boston Consulting Group (an Edelman client). It's become the framework for my latest talk, which I have been giving around the world.
Stalk tracks trends by breaking them down into three distinct buckets - faint signals that are here and now trends with real consumer movement and business models, a watch list - new directions that are emerging but may not be ready for primetime, and hallucinations, flashes that, if you squint, might vanish.
You can read a description of the nine big trends in my Open Files and peruse my deck over on Authentcities, the Edelman Digital blog. The trends include:
Faint Signals: The Cut and Paste Web, The Attention Crash, Digital Curators, Super Crunching and Collaboration
Watch List: Living Room 2.0. and Geek Markterers
Hallucinations: Digital Nomads and Data Leaking
Sunday
May182008
The Hyperconnected vs. 84% of Everyone Else on Earth
Two studies that crossed my screen tonight here in London point to a widening digital divide. I am not referring to the gap between those who are online and everyone else. The gulf I am addressing here is between those who are fully engaged with the web and, well, Earth.
The first piece of research from Parks Associates (via Dwight Silverman and CNET) reveals that one-fifth of all U.S. heads-of-household have never used e-mail. Based on the conversations I had in Europe this past week, this is even more pronounced outside the US where high mobile penetration makes things a bit more complicated to track.
Meanwhile, a separate white paper from IDC/Nortel (via Jackie Huba) - this one spanning 17 countries - found that 16% of the information workforce is already "Hyperconnected" and that another 36% will be joining us soon. Definitely download the PDF. It's an interesting read.
Source: IDC/Nortel White Paper - The Hyperconnected: Here They Come!
All of this data is consistent with what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff talk about extensively in their new book, Groundswell. If you play with Forrester's Technographic profile tool, you can zero in on just how wide the divide is within your target audience. They peg 52% of the US online population as largely passive.
Net, this leaves me convinced that despite all of the buzz around the growth of new media and/or digital advertising, neither will replace existing modalities for some time to come. Yes, Scoble, that's why Google News still rules. Digital media is going to be additive in the near to medium term. However, in a decade - perhaps sooner, perhaps later - it will be a different story.
The data bodes well for businesses like the TV nets that live off the 30-second spot. Some have written the :30 off for dead. However, that's a bit premature.
The challenge for traditional media companies and the advertising ecosystem that support them is that static advertising is no longer a growth businesses. This will become particularly true as the number of Hyperconnected skyrocket. However, for now, old still co-exists with new.
The takeaway for marketers is to utilize all of the relevant venues/tactics as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy (the same goes for PR). Ignoring something because it's old school doesn't always make sense.
Saturday
May172008
links for 2008-05-18
- Photos are faster than text sometimes.
- "Eighteen programs that add skyrockets to your 'genius phone.'"
- "Electronic communication in residential buildings has gotten a lift in the New York region in recent years with so many new condominiums hardwired for the Internet."
- This movie "goes to 11" and it's now available for rental and sale!
- "TweetWire.com is a neo-newspaper that grabs the freshest links posted to Twitter. "
- Walt DIsney World invades Google Earth come next Tuesday.
Thursday
May152008
The Promise and Peril of Ubiquitous Community
The following is also my column in next week's AdAge.
Over the last five years I have been asked countless times: "Steve, what's the next hot online community?" It seems as though everybody is on the lookout for the successor to MySpace, Twitter or Facebook. Nobody, even in a difficult economic climate, wants to be viewed as a latecomer.
Perhaps as a defense mechanism to avoid being wrong myself, I now give a boilerplate answer that I believe can last. In short, the next big community is not a single destination. Rather, it is going to be everywhere. To paraphrase Forrester analyst Charlene Li, social networking is becoming "like air."
She writes on her blog:
"I thought about my grade-school kids, who in 10 years will be in the midst of social network engagement. I believe they (and we) will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social.'
"Instead, I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be."
This represents a significant shift. For the past 15 years, online communities have primarily existed as stand-alone destinations rather than the web's equivalent of running water or electricity.
The problem, however, is that this model can't scale. Tastes change and people are always migrating to trendier sites-especially as their friends do. As a result, the Internet amber is littered with fossilized communities that once dominated. These former stalwarts include AOL, Angelfire, TheGlobe.com, GeoCities and Tripod.
Community today is a different animal. People now expect it to be part of virtually every online experience. Most media companies now allow users to leave comments or even create profiles. Hundreds of thousands of brands, NGOs and individuals have set up their own social networks on Ning.com. The entire web is going social.
Now, however, connective tissue is emerging to bring these individual points of lights together as virtual constellations. Google and Facebook have each launched systems that allow sites to plug into their architectures to turn them social. The tools equip site owners to enable visitors to tap their existing networks and connections in a way that adds value to the total experience. So imagine a Facebook user who can easily see on Digg.com which stories his or her friends voted up. Or a non-technical site developer who, with a few small lines of code, can add utilities such as reviews, members' galleries and message boards to their sites or applications.
As exciting as this is, the transition of community from a handful of big reach sites to a ubiquitous platform is incredibly disruptive for marketers. It essentially makes social network advertising, which according to anecdotal evidence is already a mixed bag, even more difficult. (And thus monetizing social networks.)
The end result is that marketers will need to shift the way they approach communities. Static advertising is no longer viable. The solution is collaboration. Marketers will need to tap these emerging social operating systems to build meaningful connections through their sites and others before competitors do.
Participation is no longer optional and the fist movers who dedicate resources will win.