It seems every other discussion I enter as of late has something to do with privacy and or the things “they” know about us. Maybe it’s the paranoid circles I travel, or maybe we are seeing the beginning of a significant change in our human paradigm. Digital technology is maturing and enabling us to connect/interact/react in ways we never before imagined. Human nature drives us to interact (you remember that “No man is an island” junk from High School?) and Digital technology is superpowering our ability.
Remember life before Facebook? How many old friends have you lost touch with? How many viable relationships could you maintain before Facebook? How many can you maintain now? (I have 181)
It’s a little overwhelming to think that we are actively crafting a Digital overlay that will enable Digitally enabled beings to interact with other Digitally enabled beings or objects across space (think telekinesis), time (think time-based stitched panoramas made from FLICKR images chronologically navigated), and wordless communication (telepathy?). Imagine being able to see and hear and interact with objects from amazing distances. Imagine wearing a digital outfit. Imagine.
As Augmented Reality, the superimposition of the Datasphere onto reality, becomes more viable we will gain access to vast amounts of real-time data and there are a few issues we need face very soon.
Privacy – The ‘Millenials‘ have already succombed to the collective and have given away the illusion of privacy. Social media products like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have become platforms for their near-narcisistic need to self-proclaim. They communicate outwardly, freely and without fear. The rest of us, especially those who remember the 60’s are going to face challenging times over the next 10 years. Data availability and detail will continue to improve and we will all be faced with a choice: Does data serve or punish me?
What does it mean that marketers know where I live and what products I’m inclined to buy? Is my cellphone constantly broadcasting my location accurate to the meter? Am I being monitored for selfish reasons? Ok, you can sit down and stop shaking…. It’s not as bad as you think. We at Tanagram firmly believe Digital will serve us in powerful and meaningful ways and we spend a great deal of time imagining what those might be.
The truth – You ARE being watched. There, I said it, and nothing exploded. The fact is the Marketing Industry is facing one of the most challenging times since its inception. Gone are the days when they could ‘tell people what to believe.’ Gone are the days where they could produce a single, one-size-fits-all message that compells consumers to purchase products. Digital has made us (consumers) much smarter and because of this, we require much more sophisticated communication and interaction to even begin to consider a product relationship (that’s what it is when you become loyal to a brand). We the consumer have become extremely powerful and marketers are afraid.
So what evil things can they do with their monitoring? Well, that’s where we take an unexpected turn. You see, the only way they can sell is with the truth. They can no longer pay talking heads tell us what to think, lies are posted on Twitter for thousands to view seconds after they are broadcast. The backlash from a malformed or misguiding ad-campaign can cost millions in revenue but even worse it can cast the originator as not reputable and have significant long term effects. Everybody remembers Blackwater, right? Their brand was so destroyed by blunder and lies they had to rename as Xe. So if they can’t lie to us, how can they push their products? They have to connect with us like real people, meaningfully. To do that they grab gobs of data and look for consumers who would actually benefit from and are interested in the products they sell. They then do their best to be helpful and useful so you, the consumer, will learn they are trustworthy and legitimate. They spend fortunes on non-profits and other ‘Cause Marketing’ to be viewed as contributing members of society. Ultimately, they work very hard to maintain a real relationship with you. You see how mild mannered this once arrogant monster has become? Joking aside, they cannot take your free will. You will continue to be a fickle and informed consumer and they cannot afford for you to think that they have any intentions other than serving you the best they can. Also, there is no mind-control chip. They cannot hypnotise you into stupid purchase habits (for me this is a non-issue, I only buy stupidly) and if they could, they wouldn’t because the consumer backlash would destroy them.
So what do we do with these needy, shivering, whelp marketers? We give them our data. Why, because they will serve us better if they know our likes and dislikes. They can’t afford to annoy us anymore and they don’t want to waste money trying to sell to those who are disinclined. Broadcast advertising is going away. Advertising of the future will take place at a personal level in meaningful ways. Here’s an example: Perhaps you are driving home, late from work and you haven’t prepared the family meal. Your local preferred local grocer sends you a text message offering a discount on cooked chicken dinners (or your favorite dish) and saves the day.
That is where we are going, we just have to make the choice.
NOTE: The goal of this post is not to troll and get attention by posting negative comments about media giant AT&T. Instead this post is intended to help all of us better understand what is happening in the world as we embrace micro-transactive interaction.
At the risk of sounding a little “Hippy”, today our thoughts, beliefs, and consciousness are traversing the digisphere in real-time at the speed of light. Because of this we know things much faster (true or not) and are on the way to becoming a digitally connected meta organism. Patchouli aside, the “Twitter Effect” has been linked to very rapid attendance drop-offs of bad movies (including Bruno), leaving the movie executives stunned and broke. No longer does it take a week or two to hear you really shouldn’t see a movie, it happens instantly. Similar effects have been noticed in politics, and stock trading as well. So what do we do?
We learn!
“The Feed” has the power to share knowledge in a more relevant and timely manner than any other medium that exists today. Try searching Twitter for the answer to a problem instead of Google. I was surprised to find my answer in one search after over an hour working the Google query strings. Even better, The Feed offers responses. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, make a post, ask for a Re-Tweet (RT), or use hashtags (#) to get to individuals who are interested in a specific topic. Connected people are an amazing resource.
So that brings us to the purpose of this post. In addition to being a powerful resource for answers, The Feed is an outstanding tool for gathering insight into customer opinion. The successful companies of today realize that building close, meaningful relationships with customers is the only truly defensible business strategy. In other words, Intellectual Property is easy to steal, but you aren’t going to steal my friends unless I upset them and drive them to you. That’s how social media works. It’s close relationships founded on seemingly insignificant communication transactions that are very similar to those you might have with a friend walking in the park.
When it’s time to address the potential issue of your customer’s viewpoints it’s a good idea to take a long look in the mirror and evaluate how you appear to the public. With the newly available RSS query subscriptions offered by Twitter and Google Blog search it’s relatively easy to set up a series of searches that will provide you a view (a mirror) into the shared opinion of your company (or yourself) by the meta-organism/feed.
We’ve created an example here. It’s an iGoogle page that hosts RSS feeds that are designed to eek out positive and negative views expressed about AT&T. (You’ll need an iGoogle account to subscribe to the tab) but we think it’s worth the price of admission. The story is passionate, dramatic, emotional, and bleak.
In addition to the views into The Feed via RSS windows, we’ve provided a number of links to resources including Hashtags.org, MicroPlaza, Twendz, and TWIST. We would like to invite you to develop your own opinions and discuss them here or on Twitter or FaceBook. What do you think AT&T should do? Do you think these people are all crackpots? Do you think blog posts like this will increase negative comments for companies like AT&T?
Greetings and salutations. It’s a short week here at Tanagram as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s independence. We’ll be closed on Friday July 3rd. We hope you are too.
Here is a recap of this weeks interesting discussions:
Live this morning, Whitehouse.gov has launched a new redesign. Notable additions to the site, (aside from a new look) include a blog and some pretty strong content. During his campaign Barack Obama leveraged the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc) to share thoughts and connect with the people. His team’s use of Twitter tended to be more as a broadcast platform announcing different events and linking to video instead of bi-directional communication but overall it was an effective approach. While everything President Obama is doing to leverage Digital is groundbreaking from a governmental standpoint they have yet to take the real challenge and build an online community. Imagine a place where you could see legislation discussions happening in real-time and interact with decision makers? We applaud President Obama’s administration for taking steps in the right direction but encourage them to push further. Digital could be the tool that connects citizens and leadership to affect real change. P.S. We’re waiting to help!
Greetings and saluatations (just dated myself). We at Tanagram have been swimming naked in the digital pool for 17 years and for us a lot of what we do makes perfect sense. Through various discussions with colleagues, friends and even strangers we’ve realized our thoughts and processes don’t necessarily make sense to those who are not fanatic swimmers (keep that metaphor alive Joe!). This post marks the beginning of a series we’ll be calling “Better Togethering.” This series will talk about Actor Definition, Conversion Goals, Game Design, Measurement, Iteration, and of course Value. As a first foot on the ground we’ve attached a video (sent by a good friend) done by CommonCraft, that does a great job describing the Social Media landscape. We look forward to your feedback, questions, and challenges. You’re interaction will educate us, and we’re very excited about that.
Maybe it’s just me but I could watch this application for hours. It’s so fascinating to have little peeks into other people’s lives and to see where they are in the world. Perhaps it’s the suggested integrity of each person’s post that makes this more compelling to me than the DiggLabs visualizations, but I can’t peel my eyes off the screen long enough to think about it.
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