For those who’ve been around before the dot-com crash, you’ve probably remember those first days, with portals, vortals and the whole remediation of mass media to the web was dominant. Brochureware (brochures repurposed as websites) and directories were abundant and brands began a gold race to a different medium, expecting the masses would follow along.
That didn’t work, as McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” was mostly fit for a broadcast age. Enter the Cluetrain Manifesto, Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 and a new conversation age: from mass media to social media.
With this new communication paradigm, people shape the medium: from Twitter lingo to collaborative platforms, media became social, with many online citizens entering the conversation.
Paper.li, The Daily, Flipboard or even your regular iGoogle are the first wave of personal media, with users and algorithms adjusting the media stream. These new personal media platforms draw upon mass media and social media (our social graph to be more precise) and combine them to create personal dashboards with our own set of preferred media.
We’ve come a long way, from blogs to new forms of publishing such as Storify. To truly become the media, both producing and curating our own content, a new kind of service that adjusts the output to our media habits should appear. Update: it’s rather telling than one of the few ways of making something go viral is to make it personalized. From Elf Yourself to Uniqlo’s UTweet, there’s plenty to choose from.
The question these days is: will it come from Facebook or from Google? Considering that we’ve been crossing the media the past decade, I for one would appreciate that publishers took the lead. Both the Guardian and the New York Times have been brave enough to experiment, but considering the mass media potential for online video and the upcoming TV platforms, i wouldn’t be surprised if some major network decides to take a radical leap for the next decade. If they don’t, Google will disrupt as usual.
Personal media and the platforms to aggregate/create it are worthy of more attention than the social media echo chamber. Yes, we’re social beings. But we’re also individuals, searching for better ways to cope with our desires, interests and yes, media. And as we cross our media, we atomize it: more personal, smaller but always part of a bigger system. So, where’s my media microscope?
A series of recorded interviews an talks by one of the most influential communication theorists. And amazing how most of it still makes sense nowadays.
And the only ones loosing are the publishers. Suckers. How about they finally come to their senses and start thinking seriously about building their own attractive platforms?
The 2011 Digital Marketing Outlook (DMO) study, conducted by SoDA and its research partner, AnswerLab, revealed significant information regarding budgets, hiring strategies and what marketers value the most. For example the study discovered that 80% of marketers plan to increase the volume of digital projects in 2011 with 43% planning to decrease traditional paid media investments
On the early days of this blog, i intended to cover all kind topics, from comics to science. Debunking Astrology was one of the first posts, where the skeptic in me showed off. Even if i don’t take a public stance against pseudo science as often as i should, some things should be exposed, with homeopathy as one of the main offenders to science.
That’s why i’m supporting the 10:23 Campaign, joining next Saturday a Global Overdose to expose homeopathic remedies as in fact worthless. People in more than 60 cities all over the world will join to ingest an overdose of homeopathic pills, and since those remedies don’t have any active ingredient and work as a pure placebo, you should get the point of what homeopathic products are good for.
In Lisbon, we question how the official drug administration, Infarmed, considers these pills as valid farmaceuticals to be sold along with antibiotics or birth control pills. If you’d like to expose this scam, come and meet us next February 5th, at 10:23am at Jardim do Príncipe Real, Lisbon.
Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.
The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.
One of my favorite bloggers, Jonathan MacDonald, has a regular category on the subject of fallacies. While not half as smart, I’ll try to write about a question posted on Quora, a common trap some marketers are prone to believe in: that what matters on Facebook is the number of fans (or more awkwardly, likes).
Let’s start with a selected quote by someone (video below for RSS readers) who knows a bit about these things:
“It’s worthless to have a lot of friends on Facebook, because they’re not really your friends. They’re just people who don’t want to offend you by pressing the ignore button” — Seth Godin
For Facebook Pages, with a low friction to press the Like button, a brand can easily create the illusion that fans = consumers = sales. If you think that makes sense, better choose other career than marketing. And don’t even consider mentioning that PR stunt about the value of a Facebook fan.
“If numbers are your strategy to win at this thing, you’ve already lost. This thing is not a game. There is no winning. There is only mattering. If you don’t understand that, you aren’t making a difference.” — Jeffrey Zeldman
Zeldman puts it best, it’s the relationship that matters. The amount of influence you can have on your fans, the power to affect their behavior, and ultimately drive their purchase intentions, are achieved when you care about your fans and not by a shallow, quick fix numbers race.
Fired up? Ready for a new year? I sure am. And instead of writing one more pointless post with predictions for 2011, i actually changed something after my holiday break.
So here it is: a light redesign of ASourceOfInspiration.com. The reasons are simple: bring all the inspiring content (Twitter quotes, YouTube favorites, Delicious bookmarks and Tumblr images) into my own URL, sharing more visual content along with the regular posts. Oh, and trying out a fluid layout with HTML5 and CSS3.
For those subscribing the RSS feed, you’ll have the regular posts but in case you want the full pack, there’s now an alternate feed with extra videos and images.
While working on the new theme, i realized how much i missed coding. Strategy is important, but so is tinkering with stuff. Maybe that’s my resolution for 2011: play more. Have a great year!
With Facebook reaching over 3 million users in Portugal, it’s increasingly important to understand how users perceive brands on Facebook. Research company Netsonda has just released their 2nd study Face to Facebook, with some new data regarding portuguese users:
More than half (58%) of users “liked” brand pages to receive regular updates;
Over 2/3 of users visit liked brand pages;
91% of users trust brand pages they “Like”;
78% of users visit Facebook at least once a day;
58,2% of users spend more than 1h per day on Facebook.
Worthy of notice, the fact that non-profits are amongst the favorites, with brand or product pages attracting 55% of users (a considerable increase from 37% back in June).
Adobe Max starts tomorrow, but the company has an early release with Project ROME, an all-in-one content creation package, deployed as an AIR app. Preview below.
