The future of social networks #3
#3: Pivot Points – scale, privacy, and specificity
Alex Steer writes: I blogged yesterday about the ‘Four Cs’ of social networking – the constants that underpin people’s desire to interact online. Yet the future of social networking will be determined by how they choose to interact, and this changes far more unpredictably. We can’t know the outcome of those decisions – and they’ll vary, anyway, for different people at different times and in different places – we can identify the shape their decisions and behaviours will take. To do this, we have identified six critical uncertainties that will shape the future of online social networking. We call these the Pivot Points – scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview. In this post I am going to explore the first three of these.
Scale – Big Net or Tight Knit?
We know that people around the world value the openness and connectedness of an increasingly global society – but at the same time they can feel daunted by its complexity and variety. So will they want the scale benefits of large networks, or the intimacy benefits of small ones?
A Big Net future would be good news for Facebook or Twitter in their current form, as consumers seek out big social networks, with large numbers of relatively superficial connections. Buzzwords in this future might be sharing, crowdsourcing, and entertainment; brands can connect by creating content with broad mainstream appeal, designed to be shared widely.
In a Tight Knit future, though, consumers would seek small social networks, close and meaningful connections, with content tailored to specific groups and interests. Buzzwords like curation, collaboration and community do well, and small and intimate networks thrive.
Privacy – Closed Fist or Open Hand?
The reconfiguration of ideas and expectations around privacy in a highly-networked world is likely to be a flashpoint for businesses and brands in developed markets in the next few years, but even in those markets behaviour and attitudes are out of sync – and in emerging markets the dynamics of privacy are very different. So which will people value most – safeguards on private data, or the easy transfer of personalization across sites?
In a Closed Fist future the data toybox is shut. Networks and marketers are required to respect personal data boundaries, and store only the data they need, for as long as they need it, and with the clear permission of users. Privacy, control and safeguarding are the watchwords.
But in an Open Hand future seamless, multi-platform convenience is king, and data is used smartly to deliver custom offers and add value through targeting. Networks and marketers would recognize their online users as soon as they log in, and tailor offerings based on data – no annoying tick-boxes or manual configuration required.
Specificity – One For All or One For Each?
The last few years have been dominated by the big networks, acting as one-stop shops for their users. But this is only one possible way of maximizing the simplicity of our online interactions – another is to be far more granular. So will we expect single networks to facilitate all our social connections, or will we divide our time between several?
In a One for All future, ‘umbrella’ networks – the Facebooks and Renrens – do well; the buzzwords are multifunctional, multimedia, multipurpose. Brands need to provide a range of ways for consumers to interact with them within the big networks – from video content to competitions, social gaming to customer service.
But in a One for Each future, consumers will expect to use many, tightly-defined networks for different parts of their online lives: think compartments, specificity, functionality. Brands have to respect users’ “digital partitions”, and be in all the right channels, without ever forcing customers to link up their separate social streams to access content or services.
In the fourth post in this series, I introduce the three remaining Pivot Points – pervasiveness, utility and worldview – and some implications for businesses and marketers. Click through to posts one and two. The t-shirt design at the top of this post is by Jazzmo, and it is used with thanks.
The future of social networks #2
#2: The social life of social networks
Alex Steer writes: To understand some of the ways in which online social networking may change as it evolves, we also need to understand what will remain constant. This has been difficult, because much of the development of social networking over the past decade – and much of the media commentary and advice to businesses, brands, and marketers – has been led by technology and has privileged novelty. Over the past few years, the hot topics in social networking have included photo and video sharing, in-network apps and games, mobile social networks, social commerce, geo-location, barcode scanning, and of course real-time search. It can seem like a never-ending game of catch-up.
But interactions between people are a constant, and they can be captured simply through “Four Cs”. People use online channels to communicate (stay in touch), to create/curate (originate and pass on content with their stamp of approval), to collaborate (work towards shared objectives), and to consult (give and receive information, advice and opinion). These four activities are the heart of the user value in the online space. And by way of a brief diversion, this model also makes it easier to see some of the social origins of social networking in older platforms and systems such as email, Usenet, instant messaging and blogging.
Social networks are social phenomena, after all, and much of the best work on their dynamics has been done by anthropologists and sociologists, not technologists or marketers. As social entities, networks are understood as clusters of shared relationships and interactions between individuals. These interactions can be brief or persistent, light-hearted or serious, and so on. Our social interactions are not lined up like dominoes – I know you, and you know Jim, and he knows Kim, and she knows Tim – but tend to be mutual and interconnected. Whenever several of your friends forward you the same email, you’ve been hit by a network effect.
This is why networks are powerful social forces: they transmit and reinforce ideas. Social scientists sometimes use the word meme to describe these ideas transmitted through social networks. Anything from a religious or political belief to a running joke can be considered a meme. Though there’s been a tendency to ascribe the success of ideas in networks to the influence of certain highly-connected individuals (the “influencer theory” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point), research by sociologists including Duncan Watts of Yahoo! suggests that there are no specific influencers, and that a trend can start anywhere. Ideas spread because they are worth spreading, and they spread through social networks.
So there are some constants to why people choose to interact online. What changes more rapidly is how they choose to interact. In the next two posts we outline the six Pivot Points – today’s interaction decisions that will shape the future of online social networking.
This is the second of four posts this week by Alex Steer, introducing our latest analysis of the future of social networks. Post number three will run tomorrow. The first post can be found here.
The future of social networks #1
Over the course of this week we are running a new blog post every day to launch our latest analysis of the future of social networks. The project has been led by Alex Steer in our New York office. In the next four days he will be outlining our findings here – Andrew Curry
#1: Seeing through uncertainty
Alex Steer writes: Thinking back a decade, you have to pinch yourself. In 2001, when internet penetration ran at 10% or less even in advanced markets, online social networks barely existed. Today, they are the most widely-used online services, with membership of the largest networks reaching well into the hundreds of millions. Today Facebook has around 720 million members, and China’s Tencent QQ instant messaging network over 600 million – figures that are likely to be out of date if you read this more than a few weeks in the future. In the US, Facebook alone accounted for almost 9% of all website use in 2010, overtaking Google as the most-visited site.
If it’s been a dynamic decade for online social networking, it’s also been a disruptive one. The rise of networking giants such as Facebook and Twitter can seem inevitable in hindsight, but in practice there’s been a rapid turnover of winners and losers. MySpace, which at its peak claimed membership by one in four Americans, was sold by News Corporation in June 2011 for a fraction of the price it paid, its active user base collapsing. For those who look at Facebook in the 2010s and see nothing but runaway growth, MySpace should be a reminder that present scale is no guarantee of future success.
For businesses, brands, and marketers, this can feel like unstable ground. How do we know which networks will be around and thriving in a couple of year’s time, let alone ten? How do we decide how best to design services or communications in an unpredictable environment? And, in trying to back the right horse, how do we know whose advice to take?
There’s no shortage of advice on ‘doing social’, even if much of it is contradictory. But it’s wrong to think that the social networking category is defined only by Facebook or Twitter. The category is broad and often ill-defined even by experts – but at its heart a social network is any online service that lets users interact and form social connections. The choices which users make when they are online are a better guide to how usage and behaviour might change than the technology.
For this reason, to help think about social online behaviour, we have identified six Pivot Points – points of tension based on the choices people make when they engage online, and the conflicts they experience – that will shape the future of social networks. These decision points – around scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview – can help businesses and brands anticipate the future in a category they cannot predict. On this blog, over the course of this week, we will be exploring these.
This is the first of four posts by Alex Steer introducing our latest analysis of the future of social networks. The second post, on ‘the social life of social networks’, will run tomorrow. The word cloud at the top of this post was generated by Talent Genius and is used with thanks.
Coming shortly – the future of social networks
Andrew Curry writes:
Our thought leadership series, Future Perspectives, is designed to share new thinking about a whole range of issues which we think could be of interest and concern, either to organisations or individuals. So far, we’ve tended to publish these in fairly conventional formats – The World in 2020 and The Future of Global Brands were both published as reports.
The latest piece, though, is about the future of social networks. The work’s been led by Alex Steer in our New York office, and it seemed to make sense to publish it online first. So, from Monday through Thursday next week, we’ll be running a series of posts written by Alex which outline this new thinking. There will be tweets as well. The work identifies a series of tensions, or ‘pivot points’, which will shape the evolution of the social networking space. What are they? Check back here next week to find out.
The full ‘Future of Social Networks series involves five blog posts: Posts One and Two discuss where we are today, and what underpins online behaviour. Posts Three and Four look at user tensions which create different behaviour online, and Post Five looks ahead to some of the implications for the shape of the social networking space and for innovation. The image at the top of this post comes from Place It Local, and is used here with thanks.
Piercing the Shard
Andrew Curry writes: The Shard is inescapable from our London office. The city’s soon-to-be tallest building, a piece of concept architecture by Renzo Piano, can be seen from our office windows and most of the approaches to the office.
Obviously, size matters, at least to architects of a certain age and a certain gender. And it also seems to matter at a certain time. As the economist Andrew Lawrence has demonstrated with his Skyscraper Index, announcements of buildings billed as the tallest are an unerring leading indicator of the top of the market, that boom is about to go bust.
Behind the branding of ‘the Shard’, the building’s brochure promotes a “vertical city”, which seems not so much cutting edge as strange sixty-year old Corbuserian throwback. But in a sharp post over at the London Review of Books, Rosemary Hill points out what a modern city The Shard would be – a city with no public space:
A city without a centre, no school of course, or church, or art gallery, town hall or library, just a great glass millefeuille of individuals getting on. … Other, horizontal cities are going the same way: selling off town halls, letting high streets wither in the blast of supermarket competition and closing libraries.
Of course, the privatisation of public space has been one of the recurring themes of the last fifteen years, the darker underside of property-led regeneration. London’s City Hall, for example, eight hundred metres downriver from the Shard, sits on land which seems like public space but which is privately controlled (as protesting photographers pointed out recently). Le Corbusier had an honest ambition to build a city in the sky. For the Shard, it’s just marketing. But in a recession, you have to drum up some excitement about all that empty space.
The picture at the top of this post was taken by The Futures Company designer Gus Newsam. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.
Advertising after messaging
Alex Steer writes: Chances are, if you work anywhere in marketing or media, you’ll have read something like this at some point over the last two years.
The advent of social media has changed the communications landscape forever. The old rules of advertising – in which brands pushed marketing messages out to consumers – no longer apply. Consumers, empowered by social media, are savvier and more demanding, looking for authentic brand experiences, not just messaging. To thrive in the age of social commerce, you need to provide dynamic opportunities for consumers to connect and co-create with your brand.
OK, I made this example up, but could easily have been pasted together from scores of white papers, blog posts and conference presentations. It’s the kind of rhetoric that makes us feel we can see the future, and that the future is nothing like the past.
Just one problem. It’s wrong.
Like a lot of wrong ideas, it’s a patchwork of truths. I’d like to pull out three of those truths here, then throw in one more obvious truth, to show that they create a different future environment for advertising from the received wisdom above.
The first truth is that good advertising is inductive. It presents a join-the-dots of images and information, but it leaves you to draw the conclusion, and make your own lasting association between product, advertisement and brand. That inductive spark is what draws people into good advertising – it’s why ‘Just do it’ (do what?) is a better slogan than ‘Nike products improve your sports performance’; why Apple chose ‘Think Different’ (about what?) rather than ‘Computers with an unusual operating system’. Good marketing involved engagement and co-creation long before it could be interactive.
The second truth is that digital media channels are taking the burden off advertising. It’s easy now to raise an eyebrow at old ads, crammed with product information and claims. But digital channels provide opportunities to connect with people at more points in the purchase cycle, from early consideration (websites, apps) to after-sales support (Twitter, instant messaging). In a ‘just-in-time’ information environment, less shouting is required.
The third truth, as Andrew Curry noted in his piece on the future of advertising, is that consumers are better interpreters of media messaging now. But this is a long-term product of the old media, not just the new. Sheer volume of exposure makes us both less attentive to individual messages, and more critical of them when we do notice them. Some long-term shifts in social values and attitudes to power and authority are also driving this.
I promised the fourth truth would be obvious, and it is. We may all know that markets are conversations, but this is often quoted as if all it said was ‘markets are not diatribes’. But conversations are purposeful as well as interactive. So the fourth truth is that, in a media environment with more noise and fragmented attention, it is more important for marketers to get to the point.
This fourth truth casts doubt on the idea that advertising’s role now is just to represent a brand’s values entertainingly in an ongoing dialogue with consumers. It suggests, instead, a future in which advertising messages need to be more surgical and more rewarding of attention – delivering that engaging, inductive payload to the right people, in the right channels, and just in time.
This is a moment of change. The power of media participation is in the hands of a public impatient with propaganda and noise. But the alternative to noise can be signal as well as silence. Advertising needs to step up, not give up.
The picture at the top is courtesy of Coker College, and is used with thanks.
The futures of fashion
Claudia Rimington writes: What is the future shape of fashion retailing? We did some internal micro-research on this recently in our London office – exploring the drivers of change which may shape the sector and identifying some of the ways in which fashion brands may change as a result.
We came up with six possibilities:, laid out here in no particular order:
- Caravanserai: An online store which sells the “most beautiful fashion from around the world”. Maori scarves and cashmere knits from the north Himalayas are typical products. Clothing is rare, fair trade and tagged so you can see the artisan who made it. A brand for well travelled ABC1s.
- Trunk Show: A pop up store which sell one off garments by emerging talent, such as artschool fashion grads or graphic designers. At the show you meet the maker, buy unique items and take part in a one off event. You have to be ‘in the know’ to find out about it and news circulates only a few days before. Locations include construction sites and disused buildings.
- Neetwear: A company founded and ran by ‘NEETS’ – the British government’s slightly dismissive acronym for people ‘Not in Employment, Education or Training’. By working for NEETWARE, the NEETS get a start with a job and some skills. The clothing they make is high quality basics with twist: functional/crafted duffle coats and jeans.
- Iris: A clothing store which makes tailored clothes using digital technology. Customers are measured up by advanced scanning technology in an in-store booth. The items they want are customized and sent in the post. Targeted at the busy female urbanite who wants things ‘just right for her’.
- ‘Tailor’ made: A brand which connects you with talented ‘tailors’ in developing countries. The tailors sit on an umbrella website, where they sell their eclectic but high quality garments. You get distinctive clothing at a fair price – fair for everybody involved.
- Selica: A brand which sells exceptionally high quality garments with a minimalist aesthetic. Clothes from here are ‘investment pieces’. Each item lasts for years (pieces come with a Five Year guarantee) and can be worn everyday – the straightforward designs guarantee to match all items in the wardrobe.
The thinking behind such sessions is to keep us on our toes in thinking about how innovation spaces might develop in a particular category or sector, and as ever the challenge is imagining how such emerging futures might scale. Of these, ‘Tailor’-Made seemed to have most potential: crafts portal Etsy meets micro loan site Kiva before crashing headlong into the strong trends around the intention economy.
The picture at the top of the post was taken by TheCyberGypsy, and is used here with thanks.
Changing green
David Bersoff writes: In the US, the current thinking is that ‘green’ and sustainability have become flaccid consumer touch points. But while The Futures Company has found decreases in the level of green activity, our analysis shows that these decreases are not evenly distributed. Instead, the biggest declines in green behavior were disproportionately centered among those with the least commitment to living green.
Apparently, without a tide of marketplace excitement, media attention and green chic to sweep them along, the least committed dropped many of the behaviors in which they were previously engaged. In contrast, the more committed became somewhat less zealous in some areas, but stepped up in others for a net gain in green activity participation.
In contrast to the behavioral data, the attitudinal trends show a significant cooling towards environmentalism even among the greenest consumers. While it is not uncommon for behavior sometimes to outstrip attitudes, this is not a stable state of affairs. Decreased attitudinal support may over time lead to the erosion of green activity participation if left unaddressed, especially regarding those activities that are not perceived to yield secondary benefits. In addition, with a less fertile attitudinal soil to plant them in, it becomes much more difficult to introduce new sustainability-oriented behaviors into the marketplace, especially those that require significant lifestyle change.
Ultimately organizations need to develop long-term strategies for helping people lead greener lives that can be effective even in the face of consumer passivity and lack of interest. Going forward, to the extent possible, green needs to baked into marketplace offerings, and not offered as an option that consumers can take or leave.
But the history of sustainability over a generation has shown quite sharp peaks and troughs in consumer engagement. There are real risks for organizations in deciding to wait until the next crisis before taking decisive action on sustainability issues. If they do, they may find that the severity of both the expectations and the necessary speed of response will be far more expensive and disruptive than taking the lead today on sustainability issues – regardless of the current environmental ennui in the US marketplace.
The image at the top of this post is from Carbon Rally, and is used here with thanks.
Customers of the future
Alex Oliver writes: At the Marketforce conference I spoke at last week, I may have unwittingly cast a further cloud over my audience on a gloomy Wimbledon June day. The conference was on Operational Efficiency in Financial Services, and my topic was Customers of the Future. I chose to focus on the behaviours and attitudes of two distinct generation cohorts – the 45-54 younger boomers and their 16-24 year old children. Both groups are facing significant challenges in terms of personal finance and long term financial security. But their responses are very different.
The older cohort is savvy and technologically competent, easily able to navigate their way through a range of online tools to find the best products and deals. But they face an uncertain future with huge financial pressures resulting from changing family structures as well as the economic context. The prospect of higher tuition fees and levels of youth unemployment at 20% mean that their children will struggle to repay debts and start to buy housing, often enforcing a longer term dependency which neither they nor their children want. And with the spending cuts only just starting to bite, they are well aware that they cannot rely on the state to support their own future pension, health and social care needs – nor those of their aging parents.
So, what of the kids? Interestingly, our research shows that the 16-24 cohort is one of the last still to be financially optimistic, even insouciant, which may be more driven by ignorance and naivety than realism. Despite some anxiety about finding a job (half of them say they are worried), a staggering 62% of them believe things are going well or fairly well with their financial situation. And unlike other groups across the population who are actively seeking out ways to save money, this group still wants to spend, with almost half of them saying they like to ‘splash out’. But when it comes to financial management, their interest is very low indeed. They prefer to delegate decision making and reveal a worrying confidence in their friends and family to provide answers.
The conversations I later had with the conference delegates revealed the extent to which these findings rang true from personal experience. Could it be that we are raising a generation of young people which assumes that we can ‘bail them out’? If so, with their parents under financial pressure, we could be staring at an inter-generational flashpoint.
Walk this way
Lindsay Kunkle writes: According to Google, it takes more than 6 days, non-stop, to walk 500 miles, which is also the distance from our Chapel Hill office to the office in New York. We’re not doing it non-stop, and we’re not going to end up in new York, but as a group The Chapel Hill office is planning to walk the equivalent of 500 miles over the course of eight weeks. If everyone participates, we’ll each be walking between 1.5 and 2 miles each week.
The obvious benefit of incorporating these walks into our weekly routine is physical—burning calories and becoming more fit. There is also the benefit of that post-walk re-energized feeling which exercise should give, getting some blood flowing, giving your eyes a break from the computer screen, mentally changing pace, and according to a growing amount of research, improving mental cognition and memory.
But the benefit of our walking initiative I have been most passionate about is the building and strengthening of connections across the office. For instance, our talented group of summer interns who just weeks ago were complete strangers now excitingly gather for the daily walk, indulging one another with stories—some work-related, some not. Maybe their closeness is not a direct result of walking, but it is at least a factor. For those who’ve been here longer, I’ve seen an incredible business benefit from these walks. We might all know one another, but learning more about your co-workers personally leads to greater understanding of one another and compassion in the workplace. And ideally, these conversations can lead to creative collaboration and new ideas or even just lending a hand when needed.
So, while walking may not be the single secret of business success, spending 30 minutes to get some fresh air and engage in conversation with co-workers outside the office has been advantageous for us. So now I challenge you: go and walk— get fit, re-focus, grow your brain, and learn something new about a co-worker!
