The Fall of MySpace And The Rise of LinkedIn

Social networks are cool. They are so cool that I’m part of at least five of them.

The trouble with social networks is that they are fickle. What is popular in one moment is not necessarily popular in the next.

I’ll be honest. When I first joined Twitter in 2008, I wasn’t sure if it was going to take off. I actually don’t remember the original account name because I logged in once in 2008 and haven’t since. At the time, I thought that the “texting” like structure of Twitter wouldn’t work online. Given today’s date, I was wrong.

I came across an infographic about social media from Mashable, “The Winners & Losers of Social Networking”.

I think infographics are cool. They are so cool that I’m going to try to learn Adobe Illustrator. We’ll see how far I go.

I’m passing along this infographic because it’s cool and it combines two things I think are cool.

Augmented Reality

So have you heard of the book, "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez? If not, read it after you finish reading this. It is a wonderful story in so many ways.

One of the concepts in the book is augmented reality (AR), where a virtual layer is added on top of what we see normally. It is similar to the idea of a HUD in flight simulator games. A more detailed explanation from How Stuff Works is here.

- Imagine being able to do mobile search by taking a picture of a pair of shoes that someone on the street is wearing and have the information about cost and where to buy immediately layered on top of the picture of the shoe.

- Or imagine being able to know when it’s time to put milk on the grocery list by just looking at the fridge through eye glasses.

- Or imagine being able to identify a plant in nature by seeing its name on top of it and whether it is poisonous through a contact lens.

I’m somewhat iffy about sticking anything in my eye. However, the possibilities of this type of technology are tempting.

Recently we’ve taken another step in making Augmented Reality more ubiquitous. A New York Times article, “Augmented Reality Comes Closer to Reality” touched upon the subject.

The article summarized some of the advertiser opportunities for this type of technology via Google or Apple. One of the early players, Autonomy, is “hoping it can create something similar to Google’s AdWords network in which it is possible for potential advertisers to buy particular objects and have an advertisement displayed whenever that object is recognized.”

While very exciting for advertisers, I do have a word of caution.

I suffer from ad blindness, and I’m not alone. When I’m online, I know exactly where not to look to avoid looking at ads. I know exactly how to time 30 seconds to avoid the video ads before I watch something online. I also use a DVR to avoid commercials on TV. (Yes, I timeshift the way I watch TV.)

As a consumer, I see the potential of Augmented Reality as a means for providing more information about the world I experience. I see it very much as a tool for more information first.

There can be cool entertainment or gaming applications, (how about a scavenger hunt that uses AR?), but I think they are secondary.

If I’ve learned where to not look to avoid seeing ads, what happens when every object I see potentially has an ad attached to it? I would prefer to not to have to blind myself to avoid seeing ads, but I understand it is a little extreme. I could just take out the contact lenses.

But the allure of what can be is too exciting. So I kindly ask advertisers to put some reason into their campaigns while the technology is still being adopted.

I’ll promise to learn to stick something in my eye.

Emergent Systems

A New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks, “Tools for Thinking”, piqued my interest in the sense that I am interested in the way people process information. Selfishly, I am interested in ways to make me think “better” and “smarter” than everyone else.

Below is the link to the piece.
Tools For Thinking

The bits about Path Dependence and the Einstellung Effect were interesting in their own rights. (I vaguely remember these concepts from some article long ago.) What really interested me was the concept of Emergent Systems.

I work in Advertising, in Media to be precise. Eh, to be even more precise, I work in a Media Agency. Unless one is already familiar with the Advertising industry ecosystem it is possible to have never heard of a Media Agency before. It’s ok. I didn’t either until I started working at one.

What made me have a further think is that as I was reading David’s summarization of the concept it reminded me of my industry. Upon further investigation (i.e. Wikipedia search on the terms “Emergence”. Here is the link.), I realized that this concept is not new but its relative application to the internet is new. Now, what if the argument was extended further to try to describe advertising today?

I'd venture to say that the advertising world is complicated.

A thought experiment...
- 1. If I watch a TV commercial for McDonald’s during my morning news check, and then
- 2. I see an print ad for McDonald’s while reading the paper on my way to work, and then
- 3. while I’m updating my status in Facebook in my local Starbucks I notice that my Google maps on my iPhone shows a new McDonald’s near my office, and then
- 4. my office mate and I go to that new McDonald’s for lunch....

Which exposure to McDonald’s branding deserves the credit for me buying my lunch? Does it matter? (Well, yes. My industry depends on this information.)

Traditionally, measurement has had a very top down approach. Let’s build a model. Let’s see what the model says to do. Let’s do what the model says. With the advent of the Internet (and really the movement towards consumers actively choosing what content they will consume and when), there is now a gluttony of bottom up measurement. The Internet is trackable. Now we can have a lot of information (in aggregation, of course), about how users are choosing and consuming content.

So taking the concept of Emergent Systems, how do we begin to better understand this complex system knowing that it is basically a consumer seeing some kind of advertisement of some brand somewhere? What does it mean that more and more content is being delivered digitally? Is it possible that the steps towards a solution are within the realms of biology? Or maybe the humanities?

I see steps moving in that direction but they are baby steps. It is my hope that someone else in my industry has read the opinion piece and is starting to think twice about how we approach of these problems. Either way, the article was interesting to me.