If you want a glimpse at what a media outlet might look like in the future take a look at how Dare’s Mike Litman has developed his blog. Using a similar model to Newser he’s curating content from around the social, marketing and PR web and presenting it in a highly visual format. And it’s working – he’s broken into the top 150 in the AdAge ranking of marketing blogs.
In Mike’s own words:
“Traffic in raw terms dipped a little in the first month since I changed things around a bit but its normalising again (up 90% in the past month). Time spent on site per person and social engagement per post is all up considerably.”
“Postrank reports that 72% of all site engagement now happens via Twitter, with Delicious accounting for a further 14%, and FriendFeed 2%. It’s a reflection of the far reaching, multi platform age.”
“I’ve noticed that trend over the past year where tweeting is the new blog commenting. Its blog commenting for the time poor but at the same time its more social. I always find commenting on blogs to be a closed experience so it seems to make sense.”
There’s no perfect template for creative briefs. But with the iPad there could well be. This template would be interactive and customizable in real-time – just drag ‘n drop the elements you need. Or download new ones.
This is something I’ve been thinking about recently too. We don’t print out images on our camera any more. When I was back home recently for a weekend, dad took me through a load of old family photo albums from when my brother and I were younger. It was nostalgic, it captured the memories perfectly. I think it’s a shame now with the way things have gone digitally with cameras we lose memories because of the more throwaway nature of it all. If you don’t take the photos off your camera they are in a way lost forever. Then there’s the case of taking all your photos off the camera, putting them on to your computer and your hard drive dying. With the HD dying, those memories do too.
I like it how Polaroid seems to be reinventing themselves, getting Lady Gaga on board etc because I like the concept. Instantly printed photos. But the photo quality isn’t as good as say your conventional 8MP+ digital camera. If Polaroid teamed up with Carl Zeiss and did some super sweet instantly printable photo camera I’d be there like a shot.
For its 75th anniversary, Monopoly’s getting a massive update, pitting brazen and new against proven and old: Circular board or quadrilateral? Cash currency or fake credit cards? This is the stuff of ruined relationships.
In the monopoly wars, I’m imagining there will be two camps, not four. there will be people who are OK with the circular board and the switch to digital currency, and people who are fine with neither—the purists and the pragmatists. There will be a middle ground in this fight, but it will be drenched in blood.
I think I might be one of the purists. I get that the new design makes a bit more sense, and that giving players credit cards is less trouble than managing a bank full of cash. But you know what would be even less trouble? A video game.
Monopoly Revolution will be out in Fall, for $35. And don’t worry—you’ll still be able to find old-style boards, too.
Monopoly is one of those things that is such a timeless classic you can’t really tamper with too much. But they have. Will be interesting to see the take up on this.
The following notes accompany a presentation titled Future Social to the 2008 LIFT Asia conference and relates to this post. The slides can be downloaded from here 3MB
You’re tired, you’re looking for somewhere to sit and rest a while and you come across the space pictured below. What can you do here? Can you have a phone conversation? Could you take out a laptop? Do you think it’s OK to smoke here? If it’s hot – can you take your shirt off? What kind of services does this space support? Is it the kind of place where it’s OK to talk with a stranger?
What about this person? If you were sitting there how might his presence affect you? And you decision about whether to stay in this space?
But what if you knew more about him? What if you knew that he has very few friends? Or that he got top marks at a very prestigious university? That he has a poor credit history?
How does your perception of this space change depending on what he’s doing? What if you knew he’s a medical student and he’s revising for his final exams? He’s want to be a heart surgeon… and set up a charity to treat kids… whose parents can’t afford treatment. Or actually watching a adult movie? Or that he’s tracking the final stages of an auction on eBay? Or that right now he’s writing nasty comments about you on the LIFT conference web site? Or more likely that he’s multi-tasking and doing all of these things at the same time
As you’re standing there deciding what to do next – how would your decision making process change if you knew he was going to be there for another 4 hours? Or that he’ll be done in the next five minutes?
The rest of the presentation details nine trends that frame how to consider this design space:
The first is that ever more of life is pocketable – that you will increasingly be able to carry the tools you use to communicate, entertain, that help you understand where you are, what you want to do next – the very stuff of life in other words. As soon as things become pocketable they end being carried and used in a wide variety of contexts. Within what time frame does what stuff become pocketable? How does allow new ways to connect, to what and whom? And what services can they access?
With the exception of pure play socially driven services it will always be easier to design something for sole use rather than shared use. Even if sharing an experience through one device is preferred there will be numerous situations where people will end up having serial solitary experiences – being together in the same space, doing the same thing but experienced through different devices.A simple example of this is the way that Japanese mobile phone users add privacy filters to their screen – not only does it make shoulder surfing on the Tokyo subway impractical – it makes it more difficult for two people to watch the same movie. Yes there are exceptions to this – notably when it is desirable to save battery life or when sharing is as simple and delightfully close as sharing headphones.
That so much more of what we carry is or will be connected – with people, services, the infrastructure around us and other objects we carry. Connected things talk – so what they will talk about? Currently the big shift in this space is whether and how we share location and other rich contextual information, with whom, and with what level of granularity?
Whilst sharing music, video, intimate details is both inherently human and mostly positive – we have to recognise that when the default is to share then it creates significant social pressure on those that prefer not to since the question of opting out of adopting a technology becomes one whether to opt out of society. You can see it today with late adopters who are pressured by relatives or their employer’s into carrying a mobile phone, but the same applies to any mainstream connected technology.
The connectivity, infrastructure and increasing sophistication of online services enables us to reduce the time between asking the question and having the answer and at some point we’ll have access to automated and real time associations of people, what they do, their history, and based hundreds of millions of lifetime’s worth of data sets a prediction of what they are going to do next. Of course not just want they want you to know, but all the other stuff that leaks around the edges.
Technology is being adopted at a younger age by kids who don’t’ share your sense of the right or wrong way to use something. How quickly will your technological and social literacy become niche? How long before you are effectively illiterate?
That the boundaries such as personal and work life that still exist today will continue to erode. For all our intent to maintain these boundaries the discipline it requires is usually overridden by convenience and to some extent social pressures. The photos show a commuter in on the outskirts of Cleveland answering work emails on the way to the office, and during a study in Iran a participant told us about how whilst women need to wear a headscarf in public – there was a significant leakage in that photos were taken in private without headscarf say on a camera phone and that these were then being handed around amongst friends – consequently eroding social norms.
That the speed of technological change will continue to increase and that for some services the lifetime will be measured in days or hours.
That pocketable is just a nano-sized stepping stone to becoming invisible – invisible not in the sense of the designer’s nirvana of a seamless experience, but simply that its technically possible to make objects that are too small or hidden for other’s to see. And that with this – the emphasis on social cues and how we plan to use them becomes even more important.
In the video below I outline the big themes in the paper. My full introduction follows.
# # #
During the last decade, we’ve seen social and digital media move from being purely the domain of tech-savvy types into a mainstream phenomenon. All you need to do is consider one statistic: Twitter was mentioned on television nearly 20,000 times in 2009, according to SnapStream. As a result, companies are investing in it and – slowly – seeing results.
Given the hype, much attention has turned to guessing what will become “the next Twitter.” It’s ample fodder for tech and marketing pundits, the media and clients – especially at the beginning of a new year and a new decade.
However, in many ways this is the wrong question to ask. Where once it was hard to sleuth out emerging platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook before they grew, now they just seem to surface out of nowhere. You’ll know the next Twitter when you see it.
The bigger opportunity for clients, we believe, is to identify the global societal and technological trends that are reshaping how we think, act and buy – and to pivot into them early. Trends today tend to develop more slowly and are harder to see, allowing clients to take a more thoughtful, thorough and systematic approach.
In the following pages you will find 10 essays on such trends written by some of the smartest thinkers in digital marketing. These ideas, when looked at together, reveal four key themes:
The shift to digital technologies by both consumers and marketers is now global and pervasive across all aspects of our life and growing daily.
Our engagement with each other is migrating rapidly from computer to handset.
Companies (and organized interests) are just beginning to wake up to the engagement imperative – and how to fund and develop it over time.
And finally, the future is about carefully using the data people generate to make smarter decisions, while adhering to concerns over privacy.
We hope you enjoy our 10 ideas for the new decade. We welcome you to challenge us on our thinking. After all, that’s the only way we can grow.
Average gamer age is 32.
26% are over 50.
80% of Wii gamers are female
On average 18 hours are spent a WEEK playing video games
The Xbox 360 is 10 times more likely to fail in the first 2 years than the Nintendo Wii.
With all the technological advances we’ve seen in recent years, if there’s ever been a sign that said “welcome to the future”, it’s the N Building.
This commercial building in Tachikawa, Japan, has a QR code designed on the outside panels allowing cell phone users to take a picture of the 2D barcode (similar to Blackberry Messenger & other apps) and be directed to the building’s website.
Furthermore, users with an additional app installed on their device (only available on iPhone right now), can aim their camera towards the building and be greeted with an augmented reality layer over the building, showing a more interactive display of the the building’s stores, their sales/promotions, and even showing tweets from within the building.
If you’re confused – or amazed – just watch the video below.
Welcome to the future 2010:
N Building is a commercial structure located near Tachikawa station amidst a shopping district. Being a commercial building signs or billboards are typically attached to its facade which we feel undermines the structures’ identity. As a solution we thought to use a QR Code as the facade itself. By reading the QR Code with your mobile device you will be taken to a site which includes up to date shop information. In this manner we envision a cityscape unhindered by ubiquitous signage and also an improvement to the quality and accuracy of the information itself.
December 15th, 2009 we held an opening which included the limited release of an iPhone application made specifically for N Building. If a QR Code is static, what could we do with a dynamic device like the iPhone? Our proposed vision of the future is one where the facade of the building disappears, showing those inside who want to be seen. As you press on the characters their comments made on online appear in speech bubbles. You can also browse shop information, make reservations and download coupons. Rather
than broadly tagging, we display information specific to the building in a manner in which the virtual (iPhone) serves to enhance the physical (N Building). Our goal is to provide an incentive to visit the space and a virtual connection to space without necessarily being present.
For its 75th anniversary, Monopoly’s getting a massive update, pitting brazen and new against proven and old: Circular board or quadrilateral? Cash currency or fake credit cards? This is the stuff of ruined relationships.
