FOUR FOR THE FUTURE
As the year ends, I’m amazed at the major changes we’ve seen – especially in the social media space where “nice to have” initiatives and “toe in the water” gestures have quickly morphed into mission-critical strategies and major resource commitments for almost every business – regardless of size – except for those that don’t really care whether they succeed in the future. As I like to say, embracing change is optional - even in today’s hyper-competitive market – but, then again, so is survival. The ultimate choice is always yours. But if you want to stay ahead of the pack and keep your business moving forward, read on.
I think that there are four primary trends which are at the constantly-changing intersection of the newest technologies and the latest social media tools and channels which will be game changers in the years to come. We’re already seeing their influence and significant changes in the behavior of the most innovative market leaders as well as in the actions and reactions of those select groups of consumers who will continue to be the key influencers and bell cows for the rest of the herd.
(1) You Are What You’re Interested In
If 2012 confirmed that hyper-personalization is here to stay and that we now absolutely know who you are and if the technology-driven merger of mobile and social (which I call “mocial”) points toward a near-term future where we will know precisely where you are, what’s left to explore? More than you think and, as always with the web, there are opportunities galore to create new approaches, new solutions, and new businesses to capture and capitalize on these new data appetites.
For one thing, and certainly the hottest area right now, is that we need to know what you’re interested in – interested in doing, buying, seeing, selling and voting for among other things. Hence, the advent of the Facebook “want” button (now being tested by the likes of Victoria’s Secret and Neiman Marcus) and Facebook’s strategic acquisition of the Karma gifting site (getkarma.com). As I said earlier, from a data capture perspective, tracking gift gifting gives you double the data since you have high quality current input about the interests and tastes of both the donor and the recipient as well as lots of rich demographics.
Similarly, the rapid rise of digital scrapbooking led by Pinterest and Learnist and Open Tapestry encourages millions of consumers every day to spend their time and energy telling us what they’re interested in, what’s hot, and what’s not. Sharethis.com tracks content socially shared by consumers in order to target their interests. We’re watching the social graph morph into the interest graph right before our eyes at an incredible rate of speed. Bottom line: tell me what you pay attention to and I’ll take it from there. It’s all about intent data and anticipating purchase behavior. And the key word here is anticipation.
We’ve heard for years now that, in the digital world, speed is more important than size and that it’s the fast who are eating the slow today rather than the giants who are trampling the little guys. That’s a little too simplistic for me – certainly aggressive iteration is also critical for success – and, frankly, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re moving if you’re headed in the wrong direction or not listening to your customers. Darwin said long ago that the evolutionary winners weren’t going to be determined by size, speed or strength. The survivors were the ones who were best able to rapidly adapt to changes in their circumstances and their surroundings. Iteration uber alles. But speed still kills (in a good way) in some markets.
(2) Know Before They Know
Speed is, in fact, the name of the game in the era of high-velocity computing and it has already enabled and empowered stock traders and their machines to change the financial markets and these technologies are about to completely revolutionize the rest of the web. We want to know (before our customer or consumer does) what they’re thinking and where they’re headed so we can “skate to where the puck will be” as Wayne Gretzky used to say. Chango.com tells businesses where their prospects and customers are “looking” rather than landing – which seems so slow and old school – somewhat like search results.
Think of these technologies as creating the “shifting sands” of selling. These high-tech marketers are way ahead of us and able to configure and change what we see on the fly and right before our eyes. Targeted, precise offers will be waiting for us as web pages load (in 30 milliseconds or less) the very first time we visit a new site – courtesy of Chicago-based Local Offer Network. Personalized pricing for virtually any product is already a fact of life on hyper-active shopping sites like Safeway.com. Orbitz.com recently fessed up to sending hotel offers that were roughly 11% more expensive to consumers visiting its sites while using a Mac instead of a PC.
Facebook Exchange (and a whole new group of DSPs ) know a lot more than whether you’ve been naughty or nice – they know where you’ve been looking and they enable offers from those sites to greet your return to your own pages contained in reminder/remember micro ads featuring the exact products you checked out, but haven’t purchased yet. You can now buy and personalize - not simply targeted access at an individual buyer level – you can taper and compose individual messages to those consumers at the same time.
(3) Real Time is More Important than Real Place
Virtually distributed labor (“wiki-work”) super-enabled by our constant and portable connectivity will be possible on a global scale to an extent which we can just begin to imagine. Workers (especially the 40% who will be freelancers by 2020) will be accessible and employable in real time regardless of place. Location will become an increasingly irrelevant consideration in terms of employment. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been a leader in this area and well ahead of the curve for quite a while.
An equally important part of the wiki-work phenomena (whether it’s taskrabbit.com, choremart.com, 99designs.com, or quirky.com) is the likelihood that we will recapture millions of hours of previously lost or unproductive “scraps of time” that will now be available. This will permit under-employed target populations (like stay-at-home Moms or place-bound retirees) to re-enter the workforce with paid and profitable opportunities literally at their fingertips - wherever they may be.
(4) Who You Know Matters More than What You Know
And finally, on a less happy note, for at least the near future, I’m afraid that tonnage will still talk and dominate the social media channels and conversations. The biggest blowhards will continue to roll right over the brightest bulbs and reach (who and how many you know) will prevail over relevance (what you know) until we recapture these channels and start to curate the conversations in a more measured and intelligent fashion.
As far as I can tell, Klout.com and the other early entrants into the influence space (like PeerIndex.com and Spotright.com) are all about the size of your mouth and your megaphone and literally ignorant of the value of your message and your actual connection (and meaning) to your theoretical “audience”. We’re slowly starting to see that “the crowd is crap” (good for assembly, but crappy for content and editorial) and that the only outside input that really matters are the opinions and thoughts of the people we “know” and those whose opinions we actually value and respect.
We need more niches. If you want to see a vision of where we’re headed – call these the “tribes of tomorrow”, I’d check out Kumbuya.com and start a tribe of your own today. And have a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year.
