Many marketers chase technologies and new channels – e.g. “bright shiny objects.” It’s the trends, however, that are more important and often overlooked. Here are the three key trends that companies should begin to pivot into now.
This is the year that businesses will recognize they must:
“Real-time is the New Prime-time”
In December, when Queen Rania of Jordan spoke at the Le Web conference in Paris, she said “real-time is the new prime-time.” Her highness doesn’t just say it; she lives it. The Queen of Jordan has an active presence on a variety of social networks where she engages and inspires people around the world, all with the intent of driving awareness and engagement for her charitable interests. She engages in real-time in order to ensure she gets heard.
If an institution, such as Jordan, can be engaged in real-time then why not every business or NGO?
Consumers have finally migrated from thinking about the web as pages that we browse to an Internet of infinite “streams” where information cascades in real-time, often from friends. Twitter and Facebook feeds are two such streams. However, it goes deeper. News sites like the target="_blank">New York Times are embracing this model too by organizing content by date and time, rather than by priority.
The challenge here for companies is attention – it’s a finite resource. Information will scale, humans can’t. As a result, businesses will need to focus less on securing surface area and more on time and attention. One solution is to become a real-time business. However, this requires scale. One way to achieve scale is by synchronizing employee engagement and digital engagement strategies.
Digital Visibility
The average American visits 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages, according to Nielsen. Outside the U.S., these numbers tend to be smaller. What’s more, fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. A target="_blank">comScore study released this week found that Facebook alone accounts for seven percent of all time spent online.
The upshot of all of this is we are entering a new era of target="_blank">media agnosticism. Faced with infinite choices, we’re drilling down deeper into fewer sites and accessing much of the rest via Google.
Google is the number one site in almost every country; this means that news drives search and search drives news. But search results are now more real-time and socially driven. The visibility rewards go to businesses that create quality content that’s socially connected – and do so again and again.
The Data Decade
Finally, Internet users tend to be very mission-oriented. In other words we need to know what we want and then go seek it out.
However, things are changing. We’ve entered so much information into little white boxes – ones owned by Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google and others – that the machines can surface what we want before we even ask. In other words, the we can actually know what we don’t know. (What’ya know?)
Welcome to the Data decade. In the next ten years products, news and information will find us through algorithms and the lens of our friends. Companies that take a data-driven approach to comms programs will be in a better position to succeed. In the months ahead I will show you how anyone can easily data mine from their desk to easily understand, anticipate and address such unmet needs.
