We digital folks are a rebellious bunch. We don’t like being told what we can and can’t do. We like to think anything is possible and, sometimes, we even make good on our hubris.
With each passing year new products come to market that amaze us, not just through technological sophistication, but because they unlock desires and urges that we never knew we had. Alas, we often fail more than we succeed.
The most successful players fail the most. It’s a part of the price you pay when you set out to innovate. At places like Google, failure is almost a religion. Yet there is smart failure and stupid failure. Smart failure happens when you trek out into the unknown. Stupid failure happens when you ignore the rules. These four are the most important ones.
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We know intelligence when we see it. Witty repartee at a cocktail party. Outstanding results on standardized tests. Winning the big prize on a quiz show.
Defining it, however, is a bit harder. Ask anyone, even professional researchers who are supposed to know about such things (and therefore be very intelligent themselves) and you’ll get a very disparate set of views.
The question of intelligence is coming to the fore because we want to make our machines intelligent (presumably that would give us license to relax and be a bit dumber). It’s an incredibly hard problem. To solve it we will need to solve the intelligence problem. There has been some progress, but we’ve still got a long road ahead.
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Social marketing is hot. What once was vaguely referred to as “word of mouth” is now a huge business. Facebook is worth nearly $100 billion and social listening and community assignments have become lucrative sources of ad agency fees.
Strangely enough, social network analysis has largely been ignored. In an industry obsessed with metrics, that seems like quite an oversight.
Since the late ‘90’s the science of social networks has been an intense field of study. It has changed the way we combat terrorism, study ecologies, fight disease and even evaluate organizations, but has yet to carry over to ad agencies and marketing organizations. Here are three areas where insights from the scientific community can be directly applied.
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When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was nothing less than the validation over one way of life over another. A decades old debate was ended, seemingly in an instant. We one, they lost. End of story.
Yet the story isn’t truly over. In fact, the debate lives on quietly and, beneath the surface, you can be sure it’s still there.
Communism wasn’t just a system, but also a set of institutions. It was propagated by a set of behaviors that made one successful in that system. We’d like to think that the end of the system meant an end to the behavior, but I’m not so sure. To see what I mean, let’s look at what you would have to do to be a successful communist executive.
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Global terrorism. Financial Crises. Digital technology. We are truly at the fulcrum of history. Comfortable old notions are no longer warm blankets, but shackles in an era that demands agile maneuvers.
It seems as if we have unleashed powers that are beyond us, that we have opened the genie’s bottle and maybe we shouldn’t have.
There’s some truth to that. However, what is often missed is that the forces that are driving our volatile world were let loose long ago. In fact, they were always there, but we were led to think they weren’t by notions of great men who, for all their brilliance, turned out to have been mistaken in some important ways. In the end, we’re better off for it.
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Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about content strategy in marketing circles. I must confess, I don’t really know what that is.
Possibly, that’s because I’ve spent a large portion of my career in publishing, shared a lot of time with other publishers, gone to conferences, the Stanford Publishing Course and never, in all that time, heard of such an animal.
Nevertheless, marketers seem to be quite excited by the idea. Content is becoming a hot area and so would seem to require a strategy. Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, I don’t know what a content strategy is. However, after being involved in dozens of successful media launches over my career I do know how to publish. Here’s how it’s done.
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Innovation seems magical. Like Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck showing off his new wonder or the simple fact that we carry devices in our pockets more powerful than the computers that put a man on the moon.
So it’s not surprising that the path to innovation is shrouded in mystery, something only to be undertaken by those dazzling intelligence, incredible daring and a certain flair.
However, in truth, there is an astonishing amount of agreement among experts on how to go about it. From scientists, to economists to entrepreneurs, the same themes repeat themselves with almost metronomic regularity. So while the endpoint of any innovative process is impossible to determine, the path to innovation is well paved.
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What country has more people on the Internet than the United States has citizens? Ding ding ding! China.
China has over 450 million Internet users and we’re now witnessing Chinese digital culture turn into a precursor of things to come.
If Japanese mobile culture set the future vision for mobile in the ‘00s, Chinese digital culture looks set to become a similar bellwether in global digital culture for the next decade. In simple terms, with so many people participating online, we can look for emerging behaviors that may bubble up in the West as well.
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“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future,” is a quote attributed to people as diverse as the physicist Niels Bohr and baseball legend Yogi Berra.
It is, of course, a mangling of the English language, but resonates because it’s true. Prognostication is a tricky business, usually best left to carnival hucksters and high priced Wall Street analysts.
However, despite the pitfalls, we can make some reasonable assumptions. Some important digital trends have highly foreseeable outcomes. We have a good idea about what limits will be hit, problems that will follow and some concrete notions about how they will be solved. The future exists, it just hasn’t arrived yet.
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