A friend of mine, Arvind Narayanan, pinged me this past week to check out the newest iteration of his pet project watchuwant.tv. It’s a neat little app that lets you input a keyword – using the keyword, the app crawls thru YouTube and pulls up user-submitted entries that contains the keyword, pretty much, Pandora for videos. I am personally in love with this app since for the background noise addicted, like myself, this gives me hours of interesting back chatter without me having to thoughtfully put together a playlist. So a quick shout-out on this blog.
Anyway, enough chit-chat, onto today’s mixer pick-up line.
Today’s Mixer Pick-up Line: “I really feel like we’ve met somewhere before, but I’m not quite sure where…“
Best used: In line waiting for something, like for a drink, or for a book signing, something you can’t get out of. This line give you an excuse to exchange some context clues about each other, seek a little common ground, find out what the target does for a living, where he/she lives, which social circles he/she moves about.
Target: person of comparable age group, someone you’re likely to have met in a previous function somewhere.
Pitfall: you discover that target is dull, and conversation grows boring. (in that case, bring in an interested bystander.)
Escape technique: bump into the person behind you accidentally, then apologize and start a new conversation.
So onto the rest of this blog entry. Wednesday I attended an Randall Munroe book signing for his new XKCD book. “A webcomic of romance,sarcasm, math, and language,” I started following XKCD in 2006. While in-line to get my books signed, the “tech x life” nature of the web-comic caused me to reflect on the change in the cadence and texture of my life in the past 3 years as a result of emerging communication technologies and impact of such technologies to media and life in general — in the form of ubiquitous and ever growing presence of the SocialMediaNetwork (SMN) Everywhere Initiative .
In Malcolm Gladwell‘s 2002 book “Tipping Point,” I was first intro’d to the limitation of human being’s ability to form close relationships. As I allow SMN higher penetration into my life, I am often under the illusion that it helps me form more/deeper relationships. In reality, what I observe is that as the number of SMN increase and incorporates more technological mediums, the radii of my social and professional orbits are quickly shrinking as the contacts along theses orbits beacon out signals with ever increasing frequency and intensity.
As a marketer caught at the intersection of technology and media strategy, I am compelled to filter the ever-present torrent of information into various buckets, and when possible, I aim to understand the nature of the emerging tools and services, and recognize the potential impact of these new objects on the various industries. For example, it is one thing to comprehend that Twitter allows us to live-transcribe the unfolding of our daily events, and another to smoothly introduce this comprehension into the “knowledge reservoir” and have this new piece of knowledge empower the decision-maker, instead of crippling him.
The ongoing irony of the emergence of SMN, and all the technology contemporaries of SMN, is that they are the very tool invented to prevent such crippling; and yet, judging by the research demands I receive each day at my job, marketers are facing more obstacles in becoming empowered decision-makers they strive toward, due in part to the sea of mostly-trivial-but-occasionally-groundbreaking info all being projected at them at the speed of tweets and blogs. They live in a state described in precision by futurist Alvin Toffler’s famous term “future shock” – “too much change in too short a period of time.” *
This phenomenon isn’t limited to decision makers, of course. Recently, in following one of Ted Leonsis’s tweets, I was introduced to “The Best Part of Everything,” a short film on the subject of the Empty Nest Syndrome. Part of the film examines the trajectory of the Boomer generation and overlays the timing of their major life decisions with that of their children. I think perhaps the most impactful moment for me occurred when one of the parents being interviewed admitted that for the first time in her life, she is having a hard time seeing where her future will hold for her in the next 10 years.
Our lives have always been complex and complicated, and yet, in an age where the social orbits are set up to provide real-time responses and instant feedbacks, we find ourselves in a state of reality shell-shock, as the blitzkrieg of new technology rages on with no end insight, tech companies scramble to absorb them into the existing suite of services, communication mediums rush to incorporate them as standard, and consumers immerse and adopt in panic, or face the prospect of becoming redundant.
Recently thru the magic of Reddit, I was introduced to a strip of webcomic that compared and contrasted Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s view of the future as represented in A Brave New World and 1984, their most famous work, respectively. The most memorable comparison the comic made was this:
“Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us… Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
No doubt, we live in an age of trivial irrelevance now.
This quote underscores the importance and necessity of the modern day marketing strategists. Recently, Faris Yakob, EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson, made the connection that brands are the myths of our days. If that is the case, then allow me to equate the role of market strategists to that of the traveling bard. True, the stars and signs which inspire these myths are visible to everyone, and yet, only the wandering bard can weave lasting and impactful tales from that which shines one moment and diminishes the next.
*Note: This reference to Alvin Toffler should be credited to my boss at work, who pretty much inspired the seed-thought behind this entire post by reminding me of the concept of future shock, which in the past I’ve only associated with economics and industrial revolution.
