Inspired by Nico’s post and my own intuition I check the search queries for social networks and Twitter in Austria on Google trends. It turned out the Facebook already overtook StudiVZ in September 2008. Obviously this is not connect to the amount of active user and time they spend on the platform but it support the overall trend that Facebook will become the global social network. Besides this XING is quite stable in Austria, but misses out to further increase their presents before Linkedin will enter the market. Twitter is according to Google still niche, but I think you will get a different picture if you check out the Austrian Twittercharts, already a lot of opinion leaders and journalists signed up, again mainly technology, media and marketing driven.
Today in the morning I saw for the first time a granny sitting in the Budapest metro and totally engaged playing with her Nintendo DS lite. It’s hard to figure out if she played Brain Age (which is targeted to her) or a jump and run (she very active pushed buttons). But let’s just not forget the generation 50+ when we develop games, mobile or web applications. This generation starts to adopt new technologies as well, it takes longer but they do and the market is growing and it’s growing fast.
The first time that a brand could use sucessfully a flash mob. Great idea and cool to watch. Life’s for sharing and this message comes directly across. Seems like that T-mobile wants to start working on their image the second hit within 6 months.
Generations are extended periods of time that symbolize societal values, lifestyles and pop culture that are representative for this era. On Wikipedia you can find a list of Generations in America. The current Generation is labeled as Generation Z. Members of this Generation are very active consumers and producers. They are highly connected and use various types of communication and media technologies such as the Web, instant messaging, text messaging and mobiles, which makes them to “digital natives“. A more catchier phrase for this would be the Generation F(acebook). Which stands in my opinion for highly connected individuals that like to communicate and share by using various types of communication tools and are able to handle them simultaneously. It can’t take a long time till Facebook will introduce additional communication tools like audio and video chat.
Another scenario what might happen in the future and like many other scenarios we will not take this serious. Obviously it won’t happen in exact this way because most of the scenarios are an forecast of extremes and don’t pay enough attention to variables that can influence the development, but it might turn out in a similar way. One of the biggest problems of the human brain is that we are unable to imagine and anticipate the speed of development. Who would have thought of Twitter 2,5 years ago? Nobody. Who would have thought that everybody in developed countries will own a mobile and that it will influence the way we are communicating and living dramatically. Remember the 3 things you are right now always carrying without: keys, money & mobile. In the near future there might be just your mobile left.
I think we already started with the selling of experiences, feelings and memories and probably a lot of products and services will have a way much bigger human touch in the future. This will not happen because of the technological development this will happen because humans deep in their unconscious minds looking for human services and products.
Creative director Sol Sender (VSA partners) takes about the development of the Obama logo and the planning behind the campaign. Interesting to hear a bit more what happened behind the scenes of the Obama campaign and how it progressed.
The strongest logos tell simple stories.
Even Sol talks a lot about the how people adopted the logo, the great work of the team in social media like Twitter and Facebook, he also clearly points out what was the main driver of the viral success.
There is not doubt that it was peoples believes in the candidate and what he stoods for, excitement about his message and what he stands for in american history. That was the driving force to go viral in ways that we would not have imagined…This believe was the opener for people so that they took on the logo and started to make it their own and express them selves with it.
This clearly shows that as a brand (and I see Obama as a brand) you need to have a clear positioning that is expressed in a very few or one word (change). Your positioning needs to have relevance and credibility. And to finally get a movement going you need to be open and make it as easy and convenient as possible for people to connect with you and pass on your message. Sounds pretty easy and simple but I think most of the time when we are working on positionings and campaigns we forget about it.
And it started to make me think about creativity and it’s origin and purpose. Who are the people that can help us to solve problems in a way that we haven’t thought of before. The purpose of creativity should be to help us to overcome barriers no matter what kind they are. For me it’s more an intellectual process than an executional (I think this is especially in advertising usually the other way around). So where can you find this talents and thinkers? And even more important how can you make sure that you know that you found them? The creativity juice shows in a great way that it’s impossible to produce this kind of talent on purpose, either you have it or not. And the even bigger problem is that you need to find people and measurements to judge if somebody is creative or not. What’s the criteria? Imagination? Knowledge? Education? Awards? (which seems to be the common thing in advertising)
At Breitenbach und Brown (I can’t link to the actual post, only the page. So the post might be somewhere completely different when you click on it) I found a great post about Misfits and a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s speech about the mismatch problem. This might be one of the biggest barriers that keeps our society back because I believe in every industry you need creativity to overcome barriers. If we don’t know what it takes to judge creativity, we can’t ensure that we have the right talents at the right place. Years ago one of my professor told us:
“The only reason why you (students) are here is to learn things that you will need in the future to solve problems where you don’t even know right now that they exist and what they are about.”
To judge people and there abilities to solve problems that we don’t know yet is one of these things.
This Businessweek article at I found at GarethK shows on the one side how desperately Martin Sorrell & WPP are trying to understand the digital world and on the other side it’s sad they they just started 2 months ago. At least they understood that only digital can save the future of their holding but I’m not sure if this is enough. Because more important is that they know what kind of talent/creativity they need to overcome the problem. Up till now Martin only identified the problem and the playground but not how to solve it, which is the critical part. Luckily for him he has not the only major network that’s struggling with this.
To understand what people we need to take fully advantage of the digital world, we first need to understand what kind of mindset, talent and creativity this kind of people need have. Facebook and Twitter are not the key to this but the people behind it. We rather study Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams than how to run a viral campaign on Facebook or how to use fake Twitter accounts to promote XYZ.
This tweet of Harald Felgner lead me to a super interesting presentation of Benjamin Joffe about the main findings and learnings of 7 years of 3G service in Japan, Korea and China.
Some weeks ago I hold a speech about the future role of the mobile phone and I came to similar conclusion like Benjamin. Mobile providers need to shift their role from being the facilitator to become content creators. Only when you can provide users with new (and more human services) you will be able to differentiate yourself from the competition that provides generic voice, txt and internet services. In a similar way the iPhone is a great example of how you can differentiate through user experience from the rest of the mobile market. This is of course way much harder for mobile providers that have an intangible product. A tangible product is a very strong asset but there are additional ways how mobile providers can create a remarkable user experience. The fact that the m-commerce market in Japan is bigger than the e-commerce market in China shows what you can achieve if you manage to create new services, educate your target group and develop new revenue models. It seems to me that in Europe we still have a long way to go to educate the target group and create a proper m-advertising market that will further help to finance new services and innovation. But hopefully augmented reality services like Wikitude AR Travel Guide will help to bring the power of the (latest) mobiles in combination with new and human services closer to users and advertisers.
