Filed under: Digital culture, Future of Media, Future of Work, geek, Geek stuff, Social media, Thinking, Trends stuff, Work Futures | Tags: digital curator, micropersuasion, steve rubel
A great post borrowed from Steve Rubel who writes Micropersuasion
Credit: Met by jesst7Content: it’s everywhere. Content is in your inbox, your feed reader, outdoor media, your living room, your pocket and, increasingly, on every web site you visit. It also increasingly resides on sites built and managed by your favorite brands, which are bypassing the media and going direct.
The democratization of publishing is without a doubt a revolution. When we’re all dead and gone, the 21st Century will be remembered as a Digital Renaissance – one that rivals the original that preceded it by 700 years.
The Internet has empowered billions of people and is distributing their creativity across millions of niches and dozens of formats. Quality and accuracy, of course, can vary. However, virtually every subject either is or will be addressed with excellence – by someone, somewhere.
However, the glut of content as we all know also has a major downside. Our information and entertainment options greatly outweigh the time we have to consume it. Even if one were to only focus on micro-niche interests and snack on bite-sized content, demand could never ever scale to match the supply. Content is a commodity. The Attention Crash is real and – make no mistake – it will deepen.
Enter the Digital Curator.
Filed under: Advertising, Gen Research, Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Research Methods, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: coolhunting, Dcode, Henley Centre, Piers Fawkes, PSFK, The problem with trends, trendhunting, trends, Trendspotters, trendspotting
Piers has called the Emperor’s bluff and now he’s naked . . . . Here’s a sneak but check it out for yourself, it’s a good post.
There’s something wrong in the trends business. It’s broken. It’s broken by lack of imagination, lack of collaboration and secrecy. Below we’ve listed some major areas that need fixing, not for our competitive sake, but for an industry to evolve and become useful enough to inspire its clients to make things better.
Trends services have an unhealthy reliance on control, restriction of information and perception. Trends companies put up gates that guard this mystical information that somehow only they could gather. This presentation from Henley Center’s d_Code is an example of how the trends industry attempts to scare companies into thinking how little they know. There’s no explanation of why d_code knows better, just that they somehow know a lot more than you do (and they’ve got the graphic designer to prove it). AgencySpy gave this great reaction to the presentation in 2007:
“No ideas. No dissection of new cultural movements to help you on your way. No outlay of creatives, organizations, thinkers that are shaking up the underground to shape the future. Nada. Every one of their clients should feel like they just got punk’d.”
Filed under: Advertising, Agency structure, Future of Work, Geek stuff, Innovation, Innovative co., Innovative stimulus, Lifestyle trends, Looking for insights, Macro trends, Research Methods, Thinking, Trends stuff, Work Futures | Tags: feeder, ideas, Innovation, innovation feeder, innovation research, innovative, ivy ross, jody turner, Macro trends, old navy, social trends, trends, trendspotter, Work Futures
Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.
When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.
So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.
The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?
Filed under: Digital culture, Future of Media, geek, Geek stuff, new product, Social media | Tags: Bill Gates, Buyout, Flickr, Microsoft, Microsoft takeover of Flickr, Partnerships, Protest, Spoofs
Flickr users are making their opinions known about the potential takeover by Microsoft. Check out the visual protests by users here. Thanks for the tip Charlie.
Filed under: Genius, Thinking, Trendy Trend sites | Tags: Blogroll, Innovation, Research, Resource listing, Resources, trends
Whilst I’m in the sharing mode, check out this stormer of a site. It’s called Creax and it’s basically a hub of creativity & innovation sites. It includes some fantastic links, many of which cover social research, innovation tools, trend sites and science resources. Some of the sites I’d seen before but many were new to me. This is one site you most definitely want on your resources blogroll.
You can find it here
Filed under: Brain stuff, Community, content communities, Digital culture, Future of Media, Geek stuff, Innovative stimulus, Looking for insights, memes, Mind candy, Social, Social media | Tags: Gavin Heaton, memes, Servant of Chaos, thinking blogger, thinking blogging
- If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
- Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
- Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote
So here are my nominations:
Filed under: Emergent media, Trends stuff, Gen Y, Digital culture, creativity, Futures, Macro trends, Lifestyle trends, Social, Geek stuff, Borrow this, Work Futures, Gen M, Future of Media, Social media, Innovative stimulus, content communities | Tags: online trends, online consumer trends, experience the message, business week, US online internet usage, online stats
I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display – anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.
You can check out Max’s original post here
The original Business Week article can be found here
