When talking to a fellow trendwatcher the other day, we were discussing Tag Clouds and Folksonomy basics. It wasn’t until then that I started thinking about the true impact of keywords and their power as tool to measure popularity. Well, the discussion soon led to another – the innocence of UGC and the impact of conscious keyword insertions vs. the impact of unconscious keyword insertion.
We can consider two different sources for keywords online. One is based on the users placing keywords to tag items and to populate articles according to evaluated relevance or for mapping purposes. Considered a pure UGC and Web 2.0 tool, this is broadly used online as tool for measuring the impact of events/brands/news/etc… online, as users create a relationship between the various Tags. Those tags will also be used by other users to generate interest. In a stresstetained world, we have little time for research and social bookmarking websites, based on conscious user input, as well as tag clouds, satisfy the need to be updated on what’s popular. Continue reading ‘Keyword Wars - Is the Long Tail massifying?’

I came across an article the other day that got me thinking for a while. It’s about the Google Effect - on reading and writing habits. A particular sentence haunted my mind when I first read it.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Why? Because it’s describing my reading habits. In the past, most people would be able to focus on a specific theme or subject and read about it for as long as their concentration would allow them. But Google created a system in which you are always compelled towards jumping to the next page, searching something deeper by clicking on a hyperlink on the text, or simply click the “Back” button because the first two lines of the article just didn’t interest you enough. So what is happening is that more and more people are becoming all around knowledge databases instead of specialists of a given subject - not only do the specialists are becoming more valued in the work marketplace but also brands are struggling to keep their audiences interested.

I could go on ranting on the subject, but the fact is that you already lost interest in the first paragraph. In case you didn’t, I recommend you thoroughly read the article in question - although long, it shows you the shift that Google is causing in our learning patterns. As a Marketeer, you should take that in account - you audience is becoming less concentrated and if you want to captivate them you should consider a strategic high-impact approach on the first contact they have with your Brand. Deepening the contact should come in an N-2 phase. Otherwise, you might have lots of page views - but a very little returning rate or page time, as your consumers will probably be clicking around somewhere else to jump to the next subject.

I came across this video on my Podcasts and I have to be honest - I loved it. I just couldn’t understand why. As you know, viral takes many forms on the online world, but two specific forms have been growing in a substantial rate - the “experience”-driven viral video and the contraption viral video.
How can we define each? For starts, the “experience”-driven viral video are videos such as the one I posted first. Like this we have the picture-a-day videos, for example, who’ve had quite some air time on Youtube. They range from face pictures to show the evolution of man in age, pictures of pregnancy to show the baby’s growth or pictures of the weight loss attained in a determined number of days. The main focus of these videos is simple - shortening time (and distances, in some cases). By displaying the changes / experiences / experiments of certain user, always accompanied by a really emotional song, spawning a considered time span, virality on these types of videos is attained by displaying a concept so difficult to percept on a daily-basis - how time affects us all.

Contraption viral videos are quite reminiscent on the Looney Tunes Coyote Acme contraptions. The father of this type of contraptions is Rube Goldberg, a North-American cartoonist with a big talent for creating systems that do really simple tasks in really complicated ways. These contraptions are usually comprised by a never ending complex system, made with common or uncommon items that via a small impulse are all activated in a methodical and studied path. They usually serve such purposes as switching on a light or creaming an egg (Cadbury’s free advertising anyone?). What is the interest with these types of videos? Well, not only are the systems a display of skill from the users who create them, as they are a display of applying complexity to mundane tasks that everyone take for granted. And they’re funny to watch!
So marketeers, how does this relate to you? Simple - you want to do viral videos? Then think on two concepts - time and chindogu. Always consider time as a corner stone of your campaigns - how to apply the fear of aging to your brand and how to turn it emotional. And the chindogu principal is always a good method to not only exercise your creativity, but also a method into finding the solutions towards problems that your consumer might have.

Reminiscing on the old economics class I had, one concept that always comes to mind is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Adam Smith determined that economic balance is regulated by a natural force that keeps things in shape. I remember at the time that I thought on how this applies to other areas of society – such political, sociological or technological terms. But I will not digress into those sectors – those have already been explored by specialists far more knowledgeable than me. Instead, I’m focusing into what I know best – the Web. I believe that, like in economy, there is an invisible hand regulating the online world – but exactly how and to what extent?
As I mentioned before on my Generation Nostalgia post, the future generation is still going to be information addicted – via blogs, wikis and forums, but with a different approach. We are living the peak of Generation C, where everyone is entitled to an opinion and where the opinion leaders are still focused around a few major players such as the Fake Steve Jobs or Kevin Rose. But more players are rising and each blog on the blogosphere, as each article on Wikipedia, is a certified user generated and validated source of information. And this leads to the inevitable question – what is considered a reliable source of information nowadays? More and more kids are using Wikipedia as a bibliographic reference in school work – how are we sure about the quality of the information they used?
The next generation will, in my opinion, gradually overcome this problem via a natural selection. As opinion leaders rise in the net, so will the filtering as to separate the bookish information from the regular opinion. The wannabe’s will fall as crowds will gather around the true opinion makers. Sure, this already happens to some extent nowadays – that’s why some blogs have so many visits versus others who don’t. But in the next generation, the Oldies – who will be Teachers at that time – will be able to look at your grandkids assignments and say “So you got this from Wikipedia. If it’s not written by X, Y or Z, then it’s not 100% true!”. What’s the difference from now? In a nutshell, the naiveté from the current internet users and general offline world will be replaced by a refiner sense of fidelity towards information, thus generating not only User Generated Content, but Validated User Generated Content – like a certification that will be required for blogs and sites to be considered a truly reliable source of information.

Trendwatching isn’t all about reporting what is currently happening trend wise – it also requires an effort to be able to predict what will happen if things continue going down the road they are going now. It’s not a crystal ball method – we are not predicting the future or giving sure answers. It’s more an empirical approach to society – using the tools we have now, the knowledge we gained through the research to write these article and a gut feeling to say what we believe that will happen in the future. Continue reading ‘Crystal Ball - Generation Neo’