If humanity incarnate struck a pose, its better side would be technology and marketing.
M.C. Escher- "Eye" 1946
We each have limited bandwidth for consuming content. Some people focus on current events, some on specific political issues, some on celebrity gossip, and others on the ins and outs of Facebook marketing, SEO, and celebrities like Steve Jobs, Joe Jaffe, and Chris Brogan. I hone in on the latter; on digital marketing, technology, and consumer psychology. Here’s why it’s a better area on which to focus your limited attention and free time than the general news:
1. It’s less depressing.
Innovation moves us forward. It inspires progressive thinking. It improves the quality of life. Competition propels business in the free market. Marketing tries to master this and sell it.
2. It’s pleasantly unpredictable.
Yesterday (9/14/11), theatlantic.com published How Our Predictions for the 9/11 Decade Panned Out, a follow-up to Richard Clarke’s 2004 piece for the January/February 2005 Atlantic predicting what the world would be like ten years after September 11, 2001.
The most notable predictions were:
4. GDP Plunges and National Unemployment Skyrockets
7. Dissatisfaction with Politics Gives Rise to An Influential Third Party
Richard Clarke probably based his predictions on the outcomes of comparable historical events. In business and technology, the annual trend predictions every January are often prefaced with caveats. It’s hard to peg what the future holds and the Internet is written in ink. But in politics and history, prediction becomes easier as time passes and history repeats itself. Interpersonal and global affairs are both still rooted in universal human habits and traits. We enact the most familiar archetypal story time and again. The driving forces behind war, crime, and conflict do not change; they manifest in new ways. On the other hand, technology develops on a different trajectory, more vertical in nature. It’s more fun to follow. It has the potential to surprise you. Tunnel vision upon gadgets, podcasts, and completely meta Twitter debate over viral marketing campaigns is more flattering for our camera face.
PC Mag’s July 2011 poll indicated that user dissatisfaction with Facebook is at such an all-time high that up to 50% might be willing to abandon the social network.
I read a thoughtful statement regarding this on Social Media Today by David Amerland: “Loyalty is a myth. Like banks and supermarket chains discovered in real life, the public is notoriously fickle, using whichever service gives them the most of what they want in a particular moment in time.”
Brand loyalty is more tenuous than loyalty to a social network. Granted, Facebook is a brand, but in a different way than Crest or Tiffany is. If anything, the high disapproval ratings of Facebook for its privacy policy and other flaws suggest that people use it because it has a monopoly, it’s all they know, and it’s convenient since everyone else is there. That’s a recipe for losing market share.
Force of Habit
Assuming that because Facebook has 750 million users, it will remain ubiquitous is naive. Plenty of widespread, hugely popular, go-to platforms have been abandoned en masse for the BBD (Bigger Better Deal). As Chris Brogan said on Six Pixels of Separation episode 262 when Mitch Joel asked if people would port to a new platform, “Two words: Cassette tapes…. There’s a new format in town. You kind of adapt or you find yourself saying “Wow how come nobody’s in my top 8 on Myspace?”
I don’t see Facebook going away yet, but Google+ will infiltrate Facebook’s market share over the next couple years. When Google+ incorporates businesses and brands, it will explode, as long as beta maintains such high growth.
Search
Content you post to Google+ is search-friendly. If you are promoting a brand (your personal brand most likely at this point), every Google Plus update has the potential to put helpful notches into your SEO belt. Since search is increasingly social search, status updates on a search-friendly network will be more valuable than those on Facebook.
In 2007, a reporter asked former Google CEO Eric Schmidt an “easy question:” What is Web 3.0?
After some grumbling about “marketing terms,” Schmidt obliged, saying that, to him, Web 3.0 is all about the simplification and democratization of software development, as people would begin to draw on the tools and data floating around in the Internet “cloud” to cobble together custom applications, which they would then share “virally” with friends and colleagues. -Rough Type, What is Web 3.0?
Web 3.0 Vision
Already in motion, the no longer air-quoted Web 3.0 will be the Internet’s vast data semantically linked to generate a highly efficient, customized user experience. Even physical objects like food containers will have an online address. (We can see early iterations of hardlinking with QR codes right now.) In 2010, farmers began receiving data from cattle transmitting gigabytes of biological and geographical status updates. Your home will become more communicative, with electricity and water usage data sent to the cloud. TripIt will talk to my Brinks Home Security account when I’m on vacation. Don’t be afraid, this is progress. Knowledge is power. AI can be good. The semantic web facilitates machines to understand the meaning of information online.
You will be continuously logged in, not having to re-enter passwords. Sharing with a friend will pull the contextually relevant contacts from your list, aggregating your address book, social network, and suggested second-degree mutual friends.
Today, user-generated content (UGC) not only constitutes an increasing amount of online data; it affects consumer behavior more than advertising does. In April 2011, “people who read customer ratings and reviews for Dell products [were] 138% more likely to make a purchase.” UGC will inform even more information and behavior. However, the format will change skins and become more concise.
We have largely unnetworked, unlinked data. It would be an historically accurate prediction to expect a micro crunch from the exploding conversational and social Web 2.0. But can you envision a trend reversal of the send-happy, prolific publishing of the average Facebook user’s 90 average pieces of monthly content? Google+ indicates a step toward Web 3.0 because it aggregates data and is cloud. Google Plus may seem similar to Facebook, but in key ways is a departure and progression.
We’re going to the cloud and bringing inanimate objects with us. Once there, micro personal status updates will be overshadowed by immense opportunity. On the current trajectory, I predict that this shift will seem like a big bang, but comprise small behavioral crunches. I.e., we will seem to share much more data, but it will be more 0′s and 1′s and less OMGs; more meaningful bytes overtaking 360 billion pieces of mostly banal user-generated content.
Over the last few years, hundreds of millions of ordinary people have become online content creators. The internet used to be a one-way street of consumption (Web 1.0 when advertisers sold to users), but now it’s a conversation where even the most lay users publish and user-generated content (UGC) rules social and consumer activities. (Web version iterations using .0 are a bit silly
As of July 2011 on Facebook:
- Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
- More than 360 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
- In 2010, Facebook revenue from user-generated content = $1.860 billion
Social media lends users networked, searchable content megaphones. User empowerment as publishers has become quotidian. Note the great reduction in censures berating the narcissism of content creation. People who still think Twitter is stupid or for alerting folks that you’re driving to work are considered ignorant and are becoming a minority (and that was in 2009).
Image courtesy of science.howstuffworks.com
But let’s not forget that (theoretically) since the beginning of “time,” the universe, earth, and this planet’s inhabitants from large to microscopic have existed and died in a series of bangs and crunches. Expansions and contractions. Even in human birth, the body contracts and expands to expel the new.
Our shared egos and stories, our willingness to accept new fads and to dive head first into change can only hurtle with increasing velocity for so long. Eventually, the asteroid hits and kills the species; the glorious empire falls; the plague wipes out the population. The bang and crunch cycle is macro and it’s micro to the point of imperceptible, compounding tendencies away from the status quo.
The shift won’t be crunchy (instant and dramatic) but more of a slow crinkling, like an irksome moviegoer’s candy wrapper sliding between sticky fingers for the entire film.
In Part 2 of this article, I explore the shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, a semantic linked data network where the Edy’s in my freezer, my Yelp review of a local frozen yogurt joint in Decatur, GA, my Kroger card shopping history, my upcoming Vermont country vacation near a dairy farm, and my recent viewing of an ice cream sandwich recipe on cookinglight.com will work as a team. Believe me, that is really exciting.
It’s where relationships die and drama is spewed. High schoolers use it to cyber bully. It also functions as an ad platform where you can be targeted as a consumer based on minutiae of personal details you give away in your profile. It’s not the place you want your resume or job hunting efforts anywhere near.
I first heard about Facebook Branch Out on my friend Melody’s Facebook wall. Her friend Rachel had invited Melody to Branch Out. My split second valence reaction: Gross.
Odd: I typically encourage competition (heralding Google +1 for simply existing)
Reasoning: Branch Out challenging LinkedIn is like community college Division 3 athletics taking on the 1990s Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls. Here’s the Wall conversation:
- These are professionals.
Rachel: Its a professional networking site (so like LinkedIn), only its on the FB interface, which obviously reaches more people – that, of course, is its advantage. It is just getting off the ground so I haven’t played around with it that much, but feel like it is likely to replace LinkedIn in this area for the reason mentioned above (also because I think it will have better functionality bc the FB ppl are better at social media..). Hope all is well!
Emily Binder: Where to begin… Facebook is not LinkedIn and never will be. (By the way, I’m not a guru.) Unless your personal brand is a page, not a profile, you are not on Facebook to represent yourself to the business world. If this is the main reason you’re on social networks, then just hang out on LinkedIn. LinkedIn reaches 100 million+ members with targeted interests. Sure, Facebook reaches more, but for professional networking and exposure, you don’t want to reach the majority of them, trust me.
Whoever runs marketing at Alamo Drafthouse cinema in Austin, TX is a CRM rockstar. This video is fantastic: Listen to a real recording of one angry customer’s voicemail left for Alamo. It’s a Twitter complaint on private steroids. (Well, it’s not private anymore.) Maybe marketers should be grateful that Twitter only allows 140 characters of a diatribe like this. (Warning: video contains some profane language, NSFW):
Alamo phone girl’s audio complaint brings to life who is really behind so many of the potentially devastating online grievances that customers haphazardly hashtag and hurl. Many online brand bashers are (unfairly) disgruntled customers reveling in their newfound bitching megaphones: social media. But if your brand can turn it around, you win: Why a Negative Review Might Not Be So Bad After All.
It’s easier than ever to find product or service reviews. But remember, now that we’re all publishers of content, some individuals suffer from an exaggerated sense of entitlement and they’re shouting with their tails between their legs. Our brains are wired to be defensive. (I.e., if you don’t read the fine print or follow the rules and then you suffer the consequences, don’t blame the brand; just avoid its unacceptable product or service in the first place.) Alamo Drafthouse spun this negative situation into a free, funny advertisement that reinforces their brand and strengthens their community.
Montreal-based clevercupcakes brand links to Montreal Science Center website with edible QR code
QR codes (Quick Response codes) are nothing new. Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave created QR codes in 1994 for vehicle part manufacturers to track equipment. QR Codes are popular in Japan and South Korea but have been slower to catch on in the West. A QR code is a matrix barcode presented by a 2D image of black or colored modules in a square pattern on white background.
Either dedicated QR barcode readers or camera phones can read the images. If you want to read a QR code with your iPhone, you need to download a third party app. I love the potential these things have, and the marketing applications are endless. So why aren’t they ubiquitous in the US yet?
Pros – QR codes:
- Hardlinking (linking to the internet from physical world objects). This is too cool. (Yet it also walks a fine line between nature and e. (Imagine a forest carved into a bird’s-eye view QR code: Thoughts?)
Kylie Minogue’s 2010 All the Lovers music video hardlinked nicely with a QR code which scans to produce the word LOVE:
- Convenience and mobility
- Ability to share a vCard (electronic business card)
You have been charged with researching the value of directing a media buy toward a specific platform such as TV, radio, print yellow pages, or Google PPC. How far should your due diligence go? In our digital information bonanza, I miss yesterday’s trip to the university library to pull out a giant binder of full survey research papers. Yes, I can find the full papers online but they are needles in shoddy research SEO haystacks.
Accountability of “research” is diminishing. What is the connection to the accompanying trend of widespread anonymity? Perhaps we’d rather not know.
Granted, survey research has never been guaranteed bias-free. But faster, efficiently indexed information at our fingertips costs us data integrity.
A new study released by AT&T claims that PYP (print yellow pages) advertising is highly relevant for marketers:
…The conclusion that print Yellow Pages are still valuable for advertisers and consumers was confirmed in another study by CRM Associates, which is a market analysis and consulting firm headquartered in Boulder, Colo. -Ken Ray, AT&T Advertising Solutions
Amidst many other studies demonstrating evidence that champions digital media spend, I needed to examine AT&T’s research methods:
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