Featured content

Clay Johnson hammered it in deeply: we need to behave differently, or we will information obese. Author and technologist, Johnson has a fabulous track record in advocating open source information, and governmental tactical transparency.  He just launched a website called InfoVegan.com and wrote The Information Diet. Johnson is afraid that an overload of information, mostly junk, will have a disastrous effect on our society, and on us, humans.

Johnson is convinced that the automation and industrialization of the media and the thoughtless consumption of it creates an obesity based on information overload and mass-ignorance. He advises a better “diet”.  “There is a strange shift” he claims: “In the past, ignorance was stooled on a blatant lack of information, now an uncontrolled flood of information triggers the same thing.”  He points an accusing finger to some of the bigger thinkers in society, journalists and influencers who are more obsessed by increasing clicks and hits and likes than focusing on the quality and trustworthiness of the info that gets released. “For publications, it seems that concentrating on quality is a lost effort: clearly, it does not pay…” That is why he believes we have a collective responsibility in keeping it healthy: “if we all go on an info diet, the media world will be less obese”.

In his book, he gives a clear path towards a healthy content lifestyle: he urges everyone to write at least 500 words before breakfast: “Be a creator. Be a producer. Set yourself in the state of mind of someone who has something to share. Don’t start your day as a content junkie.” He also advocates to time the periods of media consumption, to switch mail and mobile off on set times, to “go of the web for a couple of hours.” In reducing the time spent immersed in information, he believes we will become more critical on what we consume. “We eat three times a day, do the same thing for media consumption: schedule it!”

Johnson also pleads for more clever content consumption: who is feeding you content, and why. Are they left, right? Is the information biased? Can we verify? “Be a conscious consumer of information, seek information rather than blind affirmation of beliefs you already hold to be true. We need an information diet for more critical, healthier media that starts informing again instead of  persuading. We need this diet to re-cultivate a culture of healthy suspicion and common sense.”

Here is a big take away:  Social Media is not hip and cool anymore.  Walking here through the endless meeting rooms of SxSW in Austin, you still discover a mountain of applications, and a ton of cute shiny new tools. But clearly, not of that seems to  get the audience go wow anymore.

The wow goes to the nice idea, the better implementation, the smart strategy.  And… that is a good thing. Social Media is getting mature, it’s part of peoples reality.  People use it to find their way around, locate sessions, comment on content, book cars and taxis and hotels, hunt for food.

The different applications on the smartphones are used, often on daily basis. There might be fewer applications in average per phone than a couple of months ago, but the applications that make it to the phones’ homepage are truly used, truly used, and become a integral part of peoples life. Most people even forget that the app or service they are using was once called Social Media. It turned into the stuff they use every day: tissues, car keys, chewing gum, twitter, facebook, google maps, foursquare.

Social media is mainstream, it is everywhere, and it slipped into people’s lives and became quietly ubiquitous. As people do not get excited about car keys and bottle openers any more, they do not get easily excited about social media anymore either.

Focus goes clearly on functionality: does it work, will it work better, smoother, quicker? Will it interact with my social ecosystem? Does it link to my social networks? Do I really need it? Does it enhance my life?

The crowd became picky, asking for proof before want. Having new is not cool anymore, having best in class is. That forces developers and strategists to shift down a gear, and to push the pedal to the metal: that download from the app store will from now on have to be earned. The days of cool and shallow are over. Social media, social media application need to become relevant. Relevancy just became the new black.

Viral. Catching on. Views. Fame.  Every marketer dreams of making that one piece of magic that just auto-propels itself in the atmosphere, gets millions of views, is widely talked about, and brings a Golden Lion home at the prestigious Cannes festival.

But, then comes the gazillion dollar question: How do you get your campaign snowballing, how can we make your movie get a viral twist, how can we make your idea more even infectious? One movie gets trashed without mercy with only a couple of hundreds of views; the other one brings piles of cash, and a lot of fame. Every marketer, every agency, and every brand would gladly give and arm, a leg and a piece of a kidney to get the magic formula to guaranteed viral in a heartbeat.

Comes in Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at Wharton Business School. He wrote a book Contagious: Why Things Catch On,  that packs some real good insights based on more than 10-years of relentless research. Berger for sure is a very patient man. He concludes that for an idea, product or movie to get contagious, infectious or viral, it is not so much a question of luck, but a matter of careful planning, psychological understanding of the audience, and a healthy dose of science.

In one of the most talked about sessions here at SxSW, Berger demonstrates that getting widely spread, requires to look way broader than just at the usual influencers. While influencers certainly help driving the message home, and are primordial in helping you create precious awareness, they do not have that much to do with your campaign going viral. Real contagious content spreads like a wildfire, regardless of who is at the sending end.  Therefore, there is a much better pay off concentrating on the target audience and the message, than on intermediate messengers like influencers.

Berger also puts a lot of focus on the social currency. People only share what will make them look good, funny, ad rem, connected and smart. All the other stuff gets highly appreciated, but not shared. Campaigns should be calibrated to the impact they have on the social currency of the people likely to share the message. Worth of mouth has become a unique way to make impressions, and build a personal brand.  No-one sane will share things that might harm his/her carefully constructed image.

A third trigger is the element of contradictory controversy. The message needs an unexpected outcome. Something that triggers an alarm bell in the brain, something that is not following the highly predictability path that we are already plotting in our brain, Contagious content takes an unexpected side road, and triggers our interest, and makes a long lasting impression.

Look at this ad for Panda cheese. Pandas are always cute, right? 

For way too long, digital and social media have been regarded as two exotic planets, floating out there somewhere.  It was all about the number of followers, the age of your blog, and if you had some fancy names to thank in your social media book.  But, to the ultimate frustration of marketers, CMO’s and CEO’s, most social and digital stuff was just hanging there, not even remotely linked to strategy, campaign, or product.  Those days seem to be ever.  New strategic and planning mythologies are rolled out to ensure that social and digital are completely integrated, and that campaigns are deeply rooted in moving the needle business-wise.

Also, it looks like a fair share of developments in digital and social technology are finally getting out of the fluffy all virtual zone, but are rapidly linked to what they can do to enhance matters in this real, mostly physical world. Digital and social experiences are great, but for brands they only become interesting if they merge seamlessly with the real world., preferably driving sales.

Nike’s running shoes and application are a great example. How to build a community in a most individual sport: running. Adding real life sensors to real life shoes, operated by real life runners, and using the collected data in an online community where people can compare, share, and compete makes a social media experience very physical.

What Dassault systems is doing together with the Harvard University is also promising: get all the physical data of real places, like Paris, or the Giza pyramids documented in 3D, in the Cloud, man it with avatars, and invite schools to use this space technology to offer their real life students a perfect immersion in history.

Another good example is enhanced and augmented reality, build into fashion wear.  Google Glass comes as a pair of spectacles (sort of ), that  overlays your true view with all kinds of digital data. Offering the same technology Apache fighter helicopter pilots have been enjoying for some time now to everyone opens exciting new possibilities.  @JasonSilva, recumbent eidetic brain, energy bulb, futurist and philosopher raved on the Google Glass possibilities naming it  ‘a total paradigm shift and ‘one of the first examples of the convergence of the digital and human space in a way that is not intrusive’. Virtual data possibilities in real life through Google Glass are endless: from simply finding directions, accessing social network updates, weather, traffic and temperature, facial recognition and identification …

The real world is being touched and transformed by virtual and social technology more quickly and more radically than natural evolution itself and it seems only the beginning.  For brands, facing these exponential changes requires the willingness to let go of the obvious, and start making smart educated bets in expanding their marketing, communications and connecting strategies, looking for convergence with relevant digital, social and virtual technologies.

SxSW is like a giant puzzle. Hundreds of keynotes and panels are being held, endless discussions take place in meeting rooms and hallways. When I try to find a red line throughout the various announcements, something springs immediately to mind: SxSW 2013 is about the connected consumer.

A clear path is slowly showing: it’s not about the web anymore, not about location, not about sharing. Gone are the sessions on content, community building, endless apps… it’s not even about networking or hardware. It’s about changing habits, changing ways of thinking, changing ways of interacting. It’s about finding ways to deal with a rapidly emerging phenomenon: the connected consumer.

Big thinkers point it out: from the introduction of the web, over BBS and social media, digital communication is becoming an integral part of how we communicate as a species. We communicate as hard and as much on digital devices, email, social media and chat as we do in real life.   The web hosts our friends, Google is an extension of our memory, and the cloud harbors our data. Slowly the bits and bytes are becoming an integral part of our being human.

People are connected to the internet through small, handheld devices that have access to more processing power than the multi-million dollar computers of a decade ago, and pack more intelligence and communication power than the president of the United States a decade ago. Bluetooth headsets allow smooth in-ear communication, and open the way to voice controlling most intelligent systems of a car, a phone, an office, a home. Intelligent vocal interfaces like Apples Siri allow access to the countless petabytes of information freely available on the web, AI -connected systems like IBM’s Watson understand human language to perfection. Slowly, traditional interfaces like mouse and keyboards are disappearing.  Lights go on with a snap of fingers, smart TV’s controlled with small hand signals.

Where is the computer in your car? Your car is the computer, your living room becoming so connected and intelligent that it adapts to, and anticipates your every move.

Your shoes send data of your working out sessions to your personal trainer in the cloud, proximity systems give you information on your contextual environment, opening exponential possibilities to interact with shops in your neighborhood,  including getting rear time feedback on where the best food is, rated by your trusted friend.

Information on products, buildings, weather, stock exchange, traffic, directions and people near you is being streamed to consumers in real time, all the time. It gets displayed on retina sharp smart touchscreens, or the fancy augmented reality Glass from Google. Your personal information systems are connected with the plethora of intelligent sensor devices of the Internet of Things.

The consumer and his digital shadow (the avatar) are becoming Siamese twins. The consumer gets connected, and if Darwin and Kurzweil are right, there is no way back.

Agencies and their clients have claimed for decades that it is all about reaching the audience. Reach and GRP’s. But the audience is slowly but steadily digitizing itself, becoming part of a virtual, augmented self that is truly, surely and stubbornly undividable from the traditional self. This trend is not only unstoppable,   all data show it is accelerating at exponential speeds. To keep up with its target audience,  the whole of the communications industry with their market dollar spending clients will have to re-invent itself to be able to continue to find relevant touch points.  Slowly evolving will not cut the cake, disruption and radical change will be needed to follow the consumers to their hybrid lairs…