My philosophy on social media is well-founded!

This article about says it all! Heck, even the headline captures what I’ve learned in my own daily experience working the front lines of a corporate social media presence for the last two years!

Brands Need a More Human Face to Avoid Being “Foreigners” in Social Media, Highlights Research

It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy when research bears out your personal beliefs! When I let my humanity come through the most is when I get the most positive response from our ‘fans’ or ‘friends’ or whatever you’d like to call them that day. Another quote/headline (also bolded in the Financial Times source article):

Consumers Value a Human Face and Gravitate to Brands that Act Like a Friend

So, I say thank you to Financial Times and Firefly Millward Brown (the research company that conducted the research and wrote the study)! The 10 ‘tips’ to using social media listed in at the conclusion of the article are the same rules we in communications have recognized for a while, but they always bear repeating.

QR codes – a 2D dud?

… these barcodes will take off in the US.

-Why QR Codes Will Be Big Business in the US, Allen Stern on CenterNetworks in August 2008

See? you don't quite know what this is useful for, do you?

That kind of says it all, doesn’t it? We’ve been hypothesizing about QR codes since 2008. And Stern’s article (from 2008) mentions that QR codes remind the author of a technology he saw first in 2000 that he thought would become big business in the US.

I hate to be the party pooper, but I just don’t see QR codes taking off in the US. For whatever reason (my best guess is the serious lag between the introduction/early excitement about QR codes and smart phone adoption in the US), QR codes have never really taken off, here. And despite all of the talk to the contrary (and article just the other week in Mashable explains  how QR codes finally seem to be going mainstream), I doubt seriously that a large enough part of the US population even knows (or cares) what QR codes are.

Now, the biggest hindrance to adoption of QR codes was (at one time) the available technology.

But recent data from Nielsen research predicts that 50% of the US population will be using a smart phone by 2012 – right now that number’s just over 20%.  And Comscore shows that there are over 45 million smart phones in use as of April 2010, with a majority of those being Blackberries.

Even with tremendous growth like that, however, many smart phones still don’t come with pre-installed QR readers . What value would a QR code provide that is so immediate or unique that a user would take our their phone and get a QR reader application? Really? Just so I can see an augmented reality advertisement? Dan Neumann at Three Minds takes this position, as well, and calls for the official offing of QR codes as a marketing idea in the US.

However, just a few months ago, trend firm PSFK interviewed Alan Bendetto of JMango, which is a QR Code ‘solutions provider’ – because apparently QR codes are still coming. Big time. At least, according to their trend analysis. And the barcoding.com blog continues to talk QR codes, too. I’ve really got to wonder where this growth is that they’re seeing.

No one I know uses QR codes. For anything. Ever.

I don’t think they’re a bad idea, I just think that QR codes are an idea whose time has passed. If they didn’t catch on in 2008, they’re certainly not going to catch on now. Can we all just call this one and let QR codes slip away into obscurity and get on with the next big idea for mobile? Please?

Tags: 2d barcode, marketing, mobile, QR codes, smart phones, smartphones, usa

Caught in an echo chamber…

Do you hear what I hear?

I caught this very informative (not surprising, but still eye-opening) article from ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez on the New York Times’ Technology section yesterday and it’s had me thinking…

I know it’s been said before, but now may be a time to remind ourselves (‘us’ being the nerdy types who get all excited about a new ‘it’ technology every few weeks) that WE are not the norm. When your read so many content sources related to marketing and ‘new’ media, sometimes it’s hard to remember that the average American really has no clue what we’re talking about most of the time.

In Sarah’s article, she draws on research from Forrester that shows that only 4% of their research set had ever used a location-based service like 4Square, Gowalla, Loopt, BrightKite, etc. That’s 4% for ANY of these services combined.

I know it’s still important for brands that have an image of being ‘on trend’ and among the early adopter set to participate in the next ‘big thing’ pretty early on – for the rest of our brands, however, we can probably take our time. I hope that helps take the pressure off some others of you – it certainly reminded me to breathe a sigh and let go of some of the pressure to convince others to ‘keep up with the times’.

Tags: average adult, average American, early adopters, echo chamber, location based social media, social media

Email doomsayers

Caught in the destructive gale

How many times have we heard that something is ‘going to go the way of the dodo’?

We heard it about radio when television was introduced. We hear it about newspapers because of the internet. Now, we’re hearing about email going away because ‘teenagers just don’t use it anymore.’ Such esteemed minds as Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg are being quoted saying they just don’t see a future for email. Brian Solis said so in his blog (he’s joined as an advisor to Threadbox, which he essentially describes as an email replacement tool).

So why don’t I believe it?

I don’t believe it because the history of communications technology shows that it’s rare for a widely adopted technology to be completely destroyed. Even in the gale of creative destruction that I’ve mentioned before (being one of our favorite phrases from my Master’s program), technologies just don’t go away. Kevin Kelly said so in his TED talk from 2005, as well – technologies don’t want to die.

I mean, really – vinyl is still hangin’ around tenaciously. Check out the 9 rules of convergence by Planning Innovations – I can’t speak to the credentials of this source, but it certainly seems sensible to me – especially the 9th point:

“A converged product will not replace any of the contributing categories unless the contributing categories were already on their way out.”

I don’t see the email is already on its way out. Also, I can’t seem to find the study now (if you know where it’s at, please help a sista’ out!) but I distinctly recall seeing a study that shows that, despite the generation they belong to, internet users choice of tools changes as they age because of the changing demands of their lifestyle. So the people who are teens now and communicate mostly by text messaging, will slowly shift to a greater adoption of email as their life changes and requires them to spend more time tethered in front of a computer for work, and so on.

The things that DO go away are the tools that NEVER got off the ground. Mini-disc players. Google Wave. Second Life. I can imagine all of these being wiped clean from our collective consciousness at some point. But email? Nope – I just think we’ve got a lot of people crying wolf.

Tags: adults, email, generations, social media, tech adoption, technology, teens

The future of the article

I’ve been thinking frequently lately about how transitional so many of the tools and technologies we adopt lately will be in our lives. As the pace of innovation continues to run in high gear (or at least it seems so), it feels a bit silly to settle-in to any of the technologies that are ‘today’s big thing’.

Personally, I see the movement toward increasingly mobile-based technologies and our seemingly endless appetite for community-provided content moving toward a zenith in widely adopted wearable computer. The idea was first introduced years ago (I actually used to be friends with a guy who, together with some friends, invented a wearable computer back in the ’99 and got a fair amount of attention for it). I think that the first widely adopted version of that technology will be released by Pranav Mistry, though, as part of his Sixth Sense project with MIT.

My prediction? Our everyday lives will be lived in augmented reality. As far as social platforms or content-based media, we’ll settle in to a form of publishing that resembles the media we’ve seen in the past in terms of financing (multiple streams of income from advertisers, subscribers and one-off products or opportunities). In terms of functionality? We’ll see more demand for experts and research, but with wider opportunity for community commentary than we see, even today.

I think that the format we’re used to seeing (a linear article with annotations or footnotes at the end) will change and that the wearable computer will alter this even further with the opportunity to provide commentary at different PHYSICAL levels of space. So, for example, maybe the article will sit on top, but you’ll ‘drill down’ (almost literally) for additional commentary by experts or the notes left on an article by your network.

There’s a lot more to be said, but that’s all my futuring abilities can handle at the moment. It’s going to be a fun ride, so saddle up!

Tags: augmented reality, future, media, publishing, sixthsense, wearable computer

There can be only one…

Okay, so it’s not Highlander, and there is probably room for more than one major social network, but it’s been a very interesting week in social media land!

A week ago today, TechCrunch circulated a memo by Ning’s new COO, Jason Rosenthal, (replacing Gina Bianchi) that officially called ‘game over’ on Ning’s free platform. Additionally, the Ning staff was slashed by 40%.

Then this week at f8, Facebook announces a slew of new (free) tools to extend their reaches further into the web and build on Zuckerberg’s dream of a whole web ‘social graph’.

Several smarties that I know are calling for Facebook and Google to duke it out for dominance – but it makes me wonder… Change is happening so quickly, that I wonder how this will look when the dust settles in another 20 years or so.

I think we’re living in the center of a very large ‘gale of creative destruction’ as one of my esteemed professors liked to say.

Tags: f8, future, ning, social graph, social networks, social platforms

Emerging Media Dictionary

I started this as a document to share with co-workers and clients at work to help with two things: 1) to help them understand the space that I work in and 2) to help me remember not to speak in jargon that has to be explained in a dictionary.

In speaking with a few friends, I decided this could be something to share publicly here.  I borrowed much from socialmedia.wikispaces.com and others, though I did change up a good number of the descriptions since the way I think of them varied a bit or they needed more ‘plain English’ descriptions for sharing here.

Tags: dictionary, emerging media, glossary, new media, social media, terms