Last year, Forrester published an interesting report called “The Future of the Social Web”. In it, they talk about how social interactions on the web have changed since it first reached maturity (around 2003) and where social interactions are going through 2013. When I first read the report last year, Facebook Connect was all the rage and the predictions that were made seemed like on the glimmer of the future. But when I pulled out the report again late last week and realized that in less than a year, many of Forrester’s predictions had become a reality and that their predictions for 2013 were really only just around the corner, my jaw dropped.
It’s easy when you work in this business every day to take for granted the speed of innovation. When each day’s RSS feed bring something new, you can lose sight of the bigger picture. This is a dangerous position because as technology accelerates us ever faster toward “the future”, brands run the distinct risk of being left behind.
Forrester’s report described the era of social colonization which turned out to be a brief blip on the Internet’s timeline. In this stage, Facebook Connect allowed people to traverse the web, taking their Facebook friends with them. The boundaries between social networks and websites started to receed and the response was huge. Websites loved how Facebook Connect so simply made relevancy and sharability possible on their sites. Users loved the novelty of hanging around with their friends on little social colonies outside of Facebook.
Next comes the era of social context. This is the era we are in now, with all of it’s privacy pain and misfortune. The concept is that sites will recognize people’s personal identity and social graph and personalize their experience based on it. So when you arrive at Pandora.com, the site is personalized with your Facebook friends playlists and favorites, allowing you to browse their selections and work them into your own. Mark Zukerberg has really taken a beating for being the company that ushered in this era. But you can’t blame the kid. He has build a company with an extreme and successful approach to innovation. I think his problem is that he built a site based on the concept that you have a safe place to go and share things with people you know. But now, in the Twitter and Flickr era, open sharing has become a more important trend and Mark & Co are determined not to miss the boat. For the average Joe, this trend shift is not even a part of their consciousness so for the largest and most popular social network to thrust it upon them is going to be painful. But, I have no doubt that users will come around to the idea of a social context web and in many ways, they already have. But can Mark take us to the next level of Forrester’s prediction?
The next era is that of social commerce. Forrester predicts that by 2013 (and perhaps before), communities will become much more powerful. Versatile, open IDs will merge social sites and the larger web into a common experience. Users will have complete control over their identities and will choose what of their personal data they want to expose to brands. Brands that have gained users trust will be able to offer more personalized experiences on a larger scale and sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will become the intermediaries between consumers and brands in the information-sharing dance. Since consumers will at that point be harnessing their collective buying power through communities, this intermediary role becomes critical and powerful as does the brand’s ability to solicit that user’s data. Trust in a brand’s ability to do cool (not creepy) stuff with your personal information will elicit community purchases and become a true competitive advantage.
Facebook is clearly on the forefront of this movement today. My question is for how long? There are so many utilities out there for sharing, rating/liking, reviewing, acknowledging, etc. Will something like OpenID bring the robust unification of utilities that will make life easier on consumers and data more robust for marketers? Or do these folks at the OExchange have the solution, with their quest for standardizing the link and information sharing process across the web? Or will Facebook themselves deliver an interoperable standard for these items? And as more and more of these utilities move to open source solutions, how will your own brand be positioned to take advantage of a future that looks very different than today and yet is only a couple of years away.
I swear we are not iPad obsessed. But we do think the tablet computer is about to be here in a big way and that it will again shape the way people consume media. The magazine industry is one area in particular where we think the iPad and future generations of the Kindle will really shine. Remember a few years ago when everyone said that magazines were here to stay because people liked the portability and the tactile experience of flipping through them? Insert the tablet computer into this equation and portability and tactile experience take on a whole new meaning.
VIVmag is an online luxury magazine targeted at professional women, 35+ with substantial HHI. Check out this amazing motion magazine cover and feature spread demo that photographer Alexx Henry and Co-Directors Cory Stassburger and Ming Hsuing produced to showcase how magazine content gets a whole new lease on life when it’s considered in the context of something like an iPad. Very fabulous indeed.
You can read more and get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the spread on Alexx Henry’s blog right here.
As an advertiser, I can just imagine the advertorial experiences that we could create to put a brand in the palm of user’s hand and make interactions truly enjoyable and integrated. Awesome.
Sally Hogshead’s book, FASCINATE, is a compelling journey into method and madness of persuasion. The concept is that whether you are pitching a new client, inviting a friend to lunch, luring a cranky toddler to sleep, or marketing a product, you are using triggers to elicit a certain response. Sally has narrowed these down to 7 (power, trust, mystique, prestige, vice, alarm and lust) and the book demonstrates and explains how dialing these triggers up and down can help you more effectively influence your relationships.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part discusses the role of fascination with references to sex, facial recognition in babies, the Salem witch trials, the Mona Lisa, and amnesiacs with a similar approach as the super-popular Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Stevel Levitt and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Fascinated yet? I was. Sally makes the point that we have moved from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy to an information economy to an experience economy. We are now in a fascination economy where companies and individuals that are fascinating or can make someone else feel fascinating as a result of their relationship with them will win.
I think this is an interesting point. Particularly in our field of digital marketing, experiences are now a dime a dozen. Gone are the days of wowing a consumer with some visually brilliant Flash zinger. Today, much of our marketing is based on social media which is predicated on the idea that people want to be the most fascinating thing out there with more followers, comments and retweets than anyone else. And if not that, they are trolling around to see what others find fascinating for entertainment. So Sally, I am in.
The second part of the book describes each of the 7 triggers in detail. This part reads like most advertising books and for the seasoned marketer, won’t be that revolutionary. That said, as any aspiring golfer (like me) will tell you, the fundamentals of the game don’t change but you don’t hit a hole in one until you find the visualization that works for you. Meaning, even if Part 2 feels a good bit like other marketing books, when considered in the context of a new concept like fascination, you are bound find some valuable nuggets that you can carry with you and influence success.
For me those nuggets were most closely related to my role in agency business development. Positioning an agency and its offering in such a way that potential clients are fascinated by it is the hole in one. The concept crystallized all kinds of ideas that had previously been just clouding up my brain like one big, amorphous lump (Sally, I’ll let you know if our new business win rate goes up as a result!)
The third part of the book is probably my favorite. My number one pet peeve about business books is that they always promise to tell you how to be more successful but they never actually give you a formula for doing it. Rather your are left with a bunch of stuff to consider and no real action plan for putting it into place. Sally’s book is the opposite. She gives her readers a clear plan for becoming more fascinating. I’ve already cracked the book open once this week when a concept we were planning to pitch to a client was falling just a little bit flat. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that again and again.
So in sum, read Fascinate by Sally Hogshead. You can finish it in an evening or two and you’ll come away with loads of actionable strategies for making yourself or your company more captivating to the people who matter the most. It’s available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.
