Saturday, August 30, 2008
Where Marketing Is Headed
bySteve Rubel at Micro Persuasion blog highlights three key trends that will shape our future media landscape:
1) The Attention Crash
2) Social Networks Become “Like Air”
3) Google: The Reputation Engine
These trends, and more, are discussed in a report (pdf here) from the North American New Media Academic Summit hosted by Edelman in June.
The Attention Crash is about attention scarcity. This is obviously not a subject unfamiliar to anyone trying to balance life, work, emails, phone calls, Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, text messages, being a student or soccer mom, etc., etc., etc. The demands for your attention will get worse. Marketing, advertising and PR have to assimilate into this attention scarcity environment or their messages will be ignored. A great book on this subject is The Attention Economy.
The amount of content at everyone’s immediate disposal is already immense and still growing exponentially. Rubel points out, “Google CEO Eric Schmidt said ‘By the year 2019, it’s going to be possible to have an iPod-like device that will have 85 years of video on it. So you will be dead before you watch the whole [thing].’”
To explore the Social-Networks-Are-Like-Air trend you would be doing yourself a favor by ordering a copy of Charlene Li’s and Josh Bernhoff’s new book, Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies.
The third trend mentioned above is about the importance of search, but due to its dominant market share, the trend is mostly about the importance of Google. This trend has to do with the growing importance of search engine optimization (SEO). This is something many organizations don’t give the attention it deserves considering its potential impact on sales and brand building.
The whole New Media Academic Summit report is filled with thought-provoking discussion on things that can profoundly affect anyone associated with marketing’s future.
