Today finds me in Chicago, making the rounds of a great city that I don’t get to often enough. Meeting with senior folks at agency holding companies like Omnicom and Publicis, as well as clients like McDonald’s, I find this four-word mantra coming up, over and over: “Local Mobile Real Time Social“.
Fascination with these buzzwords is not news to you all, as readers here, but to have a moment when major brands are all looking for solutions in the same space is rare. It reminds me of the same vibe 15 years ago, when the four-word mantra was “world wide web whaaaa?.”
I think another way to parse this is to simplify: Social *is* local, social *is* local, social *is* mobile. The shift here is from disconnected to connected. From dictation to conversation. From isolated to social.
And that’s a very important shift. It’s not merely a marketing shift. It’s not merely a media shift. It’s a cultural shift in how we use artifacts of our own creation. Our society is leveraging technology tools and platforms to extend the ways we already know how to connect, thanks to 100 million or so years of biological and social evolutions. We’re learning to be social beyond the restrictions of region or affiliation, and this will have significant impact on how brands are created, nurtured, destroyed. Also, we’re reconnecting our social selves after major disruption due to technologies like airplanes, suburbs, highways, and mass media. There’s a book in all this somewhere….
To my mind, the (local mobile real time) web is reconnecting the world, and the possibilities for how those connections can create value are inestimably large. It’s why we’re in this business. It’s why I love it.
Today’s interesting linkage:
How long can you survive without mobile or Internet access before you break into cold sweats? (LifeScoop) Just for fun.
5 Landing Page Tips To Boost Your Conversion Rate (SEL) Sometimes this basic stuff needs to be remembered!
Experts: Internet Will Enhance Our Intelligence (MarketingProfs) Really?! Remember this debate?
Clear Channel, OMD and Illinois Lottery Team for Chicago Billboard Traffic Updates (ClickZ)
Online Marketing Summit explores social media, search and content … (B2B) COverage of my OMS talk.
Time Spent on Social Networks up 82% Around the World (Brian Solis)
How to Make a Great Facebook Fan Page (And Get More Fans) (Open Forum) I’d add that you must not see it as an island. Circulate across the entire social media ecosystem….
Thank you for sharing those links. Those are very informative. Great post.
cool
cool
cool
The article you recommended about whether Internet will enhance our intelligence is stimulating. I feel that the Internet is causing too much information overdose but not boosting our basic intelligence.
nice post john, web 2.0 era sounds like what your talking about.
Mobile phones of today are more powerful than the super computers of just a decade or two ago. Now we are better connected than the human kind ever was thanks to the recent technological progress. What’s next? a super computer chip fitted in everyone’s eye lens capable of doing things we would have never imagined. This thought makes me wish if I were born 50 years from now.
I think Internet is making us more intelligent and is making human kind even more intelligent. The more we stuff our brains with info the more well developed brains our children will have (similar to Darwin’s theory; if an animal uses a specific organ more the better developed that organ is in it’s children, the reason a giraffe has a long neck).