verdino bytes

Nice presentation by Christine W Huang looks at storytelling in the age of Web 2.0. Well done with some nice examples and thought starters (even though I suspect it would benefit from a voiceover.)

To market his mammoth new novel, Under the Dome, Stephen King is seeding the entire book -- in more than 5,000 microchunks -- across thousands of different third party sites. Very cool.

Media is changing, not shifting. Distribution, once scarce, is now plentiful. Media exposures, once scare, are now plentiful. Audience attention, once plentiful, is now scarce. These are the facts on the ground and they are changing the underlying foundation of media, not just shifting it from one channel to another.

Dave Morgan's column on MediaPost is worth reading in its entirety but the excerpt above nails it for me. Great distinction: where marketers and media companies are talking about 'shift' they should be talking about outright 'change.'

I've always liked the "Did You Know?" series of (first) presentations and (then) videos -- they're great perspective-giving, vertigo-inducing romps through the ways in which technology has changed and will continue to change the way people communicate, connect, learn and work.

The latest edition -- created by xplane as a promotional piece for The Economist's Media Convergence Forum -- is the best yet. It takes a panoramic look at change across the media landscape. And while it includes the requisite 'old media is dying' proof points, it also looks at the ways old and new have (and will continue) to combine in game changing ways.

From 1934... clutter and consumers' desire to bypass advertising are nothing new.

Interesting chart from Burson-Marsteller Paris shows the new flow for breaking news: consumer eye witnesses break the news on Twitter, the news filters to mainstream digital channels before being picked up by television and eventually print.

Any of us who spend lots of time thinking about social media already understand this inuitively because we see it happening all around us, and this is actually a concept that I've been exploring as I'm writing my book. So it's great to see it visualized.

Hat tip to http://adamstewart.posterous.com for finding this.

Answer: people you know and people you don't (according to Nielsen.)

From their press release:

Recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries.

Ninety percent or consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.

“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.”

However, in this new age of consumer control, advertisers will be encouraged by the fact that brand websites are trusted at that same 70 percent level as online consumer opinions.

Carson adds, “We see that all forms of advertiser-led advertising, except ads in newspapers, have also experienced increases in levels of trust and it’s possible that the CGM revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers.”

New Forrester research forecasts the flatlining of total marketing spend, while the digital spend effectively doubles between now and 2014. Notably, social media investments (not including display ads on social networks, which are already counted in the display advertising number) will grow even faster and are projected to top $3 billion within five years.

I've stopped short of calling Verdino Bytes a "lifestream" because, at least in terms of how I user Posterous, it isn't. That said, I do think that lifestreaming is an important trend and does represent an evolution of how people create and consume content. I explore this as one of the themes of my book (http://bit.ly/micromarketing.)

This presentation is a good, brass tacks look at lifestreaming from the perspective of someone who has wholly embraced it as a means of creating and aggregating her online identity and 'trail.'

With "passing time" clocking in at 100%, perhaps the web is the world's new favorite pass-time. Other than that, inputs (educating yourself, gathering information and being entertained) still top outputs (expressing yourself, entertaining others and sharing opinions.)

Interesting thoughts about tools to help people make sense of the torrent of information resulting from consumer content creation:

'Here is a very rough look at how a storystreaming platform could be used to make sense of the confusing flood of information coming out of social media streams. To keep thing simple, the mockup only shows how Twitter sources might work. The final implementation would take information from many different sources. Make sure to click on the image to see the full-sized version.

The stream management system is shown on the left, and one possible version of a “published” storystream is on the right."

The Long Tail allows us to ask for what we think we really want - my iPod is full of stuff that (I think) really interests me - the podcasts and the music. What is missing in my iPod is a surprise. A bit of a different tune coming from nowhere, a bit of pure otherness, oddness, difference and randomness needed for inspiration. In terms of music, last.fm seems to be the half-way answer: it can surprise with a song that you haven't heard...but it cannot really, really surprise since it is still taking you on a guided tour within the confines of your taste (culture?, class?).

 

The current big thing in marketing seems to be targeting people with messages that they have asked for (gave permission to receive) - because of their interest, hobbies etc. Sounds good but I feel that there is some inherent paradox in this - advertising needs to surprise, needs to be unexpected and often needs to annoy in order to provoke a reaction. If you give me just what I want, I might not spill a champagne in your face but I will definitely get bored and start to ignore you.