Trendscout and coolhunter Josh Spear about digital natives:
Much more interesting than the fact that he gives a speach on digital natives at the Google Zeitgeist conference is the fact that he seems to market himself effectively…
The new trendbriefing is all about the tyranny of transparency:
„Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY for some, TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH for others.“
Opinion portals, blogs, review sites, forums, video sites, etc. etc. The modern consumer has every means to publish his or her opinion about everything – and every consumer can also find opinions on everything. And it’s only going to get worse over time, says that report. The amount might, as they write, outnumber the fake reviews written by the brands themselves leading to greater „honesty“ and „trust“.
But it also means that users will need ever better and more intelligent filters to find anything useful – especially something useful for THEM. Since the reviews might be written by users with a completely different taste for things. Other fields of danger are company internal things being spread, of course.
Yet, I don’t feel sorry for these companies. If they have things to hide, then it’s a threat for them.
At the same time, it is a huge chance for companies. Of course, people will also spread good news, so there will be a lot more word of mouth going around.
But the main factor is in the fields of market research: It has become so easy and inexpensive to find out, what consumers are really thinking about products and services! The more diverse the landscape of reviews, videos, soundbites or photos, the better results of an „online conversation research“ can get. I recommend to everyone to go „egosurfing“ – either for your own name, or for your company, your brand.
So don’t try to solve the problem of transparency, grab the opportunity of endless free consumer insights!
I know I am fairly late with this, but this is absolutely astounding! Yahoo! Pipes let’s users create their own feeds based on any information on the web. Here is an example of a meta-search-feed:
The pipe you’re looking at demonstrates how to use a few of the more powerful modules. In this example a variety of sources are queried with the same term. The results are merged into one feed. Next, all the items are sorted by what was most recently published. Finally any items with identical titles are removed and a new RSS feed is born.
This is how it looks like:
Once you have created a pipe, you can subscribe to the feed via the usual suspects – bloglines in my case.
Apparently you can meshup all sorts of types of information. A popular one for example is a mixture of appartments for rent and google maps.
A fascinating example of how „plattforms“ and „programming“ become less important, because users only meshup what is of interest to them any way. Question is: how can marketers make sure that users still receive marketing messages? (And like receiving them, at the same time – that will be even more important!)
Another name for a „new“ generation – this time it’s all about „C“
Gen C is a generation of people defined not by age but by activity. The story of how I heard of it has involved two appropriate C-words already: Community; Connectedness.
There are more:
- Creativity
- Content
- Control
- Complexity
Gen C make their own content. Gen C form strong communities, and care about communication. They want to be connected. Gen C take on broadcast media on their own terms: They get involved, and are happy to make their own celebrities. Gen C control their own lives; they’re happy with complexity and continuous partial attention. Gen C work and live creativity: they work in creative industries, don’t look down on making and crafting, and want to adapt mass market products in acts of co-creation.
The article at Schulze & Webb (Pulse Laser) goes on about the empowerment, expectations and responses linked to this thought…
(thanks)
Wo ich sonst so bin...