After publishing the slideshow Seven actionable marketing trends about a month ago, I asked if there was an interest in an expanded version of the slideshow. Elaborating on each trend and including some references and quotes from the insights behind them.

Unfortunately it has taken me some time to put this together, and I do apologize for the delay. But now the deck has been published via slideshare.net.

I would like to state that the goal of the document is not to work as a coherent presentation, but rather using the slideshare format to comprise and present a collection of valuable ideas that I felt was/is relevant in regards to each trend.

I hope you find the presentation useful, and that there are stuff/slides in there that proves to be inspirational.

As always, if there are any questions or comments, please contact me and I will do my best to reply.

Also, find most of the individual slides available under CC license on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation below, or here:

Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

The relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant: They share a couple of the same letters, but they are not in the same taxonomy.” – Kevin Slavin, Area/Code

This post is an exploration of a quote by Kevin Slavin from the Storytelling Throwdown panel at the CaT conference in 2009. The reason being that I find the comment so insightful and interesting I felt it deserved some increased attention. (video below)

Traditional media is a battle between stories. Where the reader, viewer or listener is already engaged in a story, the main story, the content. And the goal of the advertising is to create an even more interesting story so that the engagement switches focus. It’s a story competition.

In social media we are not engaging in stories, we are engaging in the exchange of ideas. Be that a conversation between friends, or the need to define ones identity or role in a group by sharing something. Social media is not a competition of stories, it’s a competition for the attention to each other.

In social media the relationships aren’t short, superficial, cliched or stereotypical, quite the opposite. People spend more and more time, delving deeper and deeper in into each other, connecting more and more.

This setting is very difficult to displace with storytelling in its conventional sense. What we need are narratives and systems that engage and work within this context of attention between people. Stories that accelerate or facilitate increased exchange of ideas, increased connections.

Our stories need to increase the social fabric between people, understanding the systems and drivers that come in to play when people connect to each other and help them continue strengthening their relationships.

“One way to think about it. It’s like the relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share just a couple of letters but they’re not in the same taxonomy. That it’s a fundamentally different experience.

And that it used to be when you where storytelling, that what you were competing for attention against where other stories. It’s sort of a story competition.

And the attention we are competing for now is the attention to each other.

That basically what we are doing during the day these days is spending more and more time, deeper and deeper connected to each other. And that’s very difficult to displace through storytelling in the conventional sense of storytelling. And I think its important to figure out how to think about narratives as systems that can engage that, and can sort of work within that type of attention rather than to pull away from that exclusively.”

- Kevin Slavin, Storytelling Throwdown at CaT

(I’m having trouble with displaying the video due to a security error, please find it here.)

In an epic quote by Clay Shirky there is a missing link; how do we get from one state to the other?

“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

So the question begs: How do we move from things being “a technology“ to being something changing our behavior? The solution could be both interesting (most these things are :o) but also very tangible and applicable for the stuff we do.

Jeffrey Cole of USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future presented some ideas on broadband a couple of years ago. Saying that the effect of broadband has nothing to do with the bandwidth speed, but is related to people being “always on” and with a fixed cost. In other words, our accessibility.

Now broadband was an important enabler for how we changed our use of the Internet, others where wifi, laptops, portable networks. All of them having one thing in common: increased accessibility.

Increasing accessibility to stuff helps us fit it into our everyday life, either by having the opportunity to use it when we want, where we want or how we want. Or by removing a host of rational or irrational barriers to its use (like the sound of a dial-up modem, but not speed).

Putting this into a micro perspective you can say that if you are trying to change the behavior of your customers:

Say you want to ad something to the context surrounding the product in which you wanted the customer to adopt this new service as a part of their behavior and thereby increasing the value the brand is creating.

Then accessibility is a driver for this.

Meaning that hiding stuff away inside “browsered” websites isn’t a god idea, but porting solutions to a range of different platforms, handsets or objects might be a better and smarter way.

The goal would be to make the service so easily accessible that it as a technology becomes invisible but contextually becomes valuable. (Also borrowed and slightly adopted from Shirky).

As long as the standards for measuring value belongs the old Attention Web mindset, the ability to prove new value and need for new strategies will become increasingly difficult. Fortunately the solutions are right under our noses.

Explanation of Attention Web and Everyday Life mindset.

In this presentation, held at the INMA conference Wednesday, I asked if the numbers generated by web analytics software are generating the right kind of value? And to which degree the simplicity and accessibility of these numbers are moving our focus away from what’s really important, (creating “situational” value), to something that’s important for something else (understanding movement patterns).

It’s an idea I picked up from Adrian Ho a couple of months ago, which rings stronger and stronger as I see that the Everyday Life mindset demands us to understand that our solutions, even our brand foundations, might be built around a completely new set of values as both peoples behaviors, and their accessibility to companies change.

Slideshow below, or here.

We seem to be looking for universal principles, when we should be looking for fragmentation.

It’s quite common when trying to understand something that we try to simplify it, searching for consistencies and core principals. The problem is when we apply the find to other stuff as well as a universal principal for everything similar.

Even though universal laws or guidelines might seem like a good idea, it is often the complete opposite of something useful.

Take the Music Industry as an example. These days they are trying to find the ONE law to rule them all, to solve the problem for both universal, international, national or independent artists and bands – but is there ONE undiscovered answer? Or should there be many?

As we become more insightful and smarter regarding a subject, our articulation of it increases which leads us to discover details that we didn’t know existed to begin with. As a subject gets bigger we also find minute differences and details that make what seemed similar quite opposite.

Ignoring the nuances and fragmentation’s inside a subject as we try to make our ideas accessible to other people through graphs and sound bites :o), makes it easier to get understood, but demands the reader to ask more questions. (which is a good thing)

I hope the people reading this blog understand that I’m not trying to find universal answers. I’m exploring a landscape, square inch by square inch. And one answer might be a good solution to one problem, but might not give a full and complete answer to a lot of other stuff, or even be downright terrible.

Malcolm Gladwell inspired me to start thinking of this whole thing as a giant puzzle:

“We are all collecting small pieces of the same puzzle. One day maybe we’ll get so far that it starts making sense.”

Jeff Jarvis in this video, from the Nokia Ideas Project, states that since the Internet is a connection machine, anything creating artificial middle men, preventing companies from connecting directly with their participants, will become problematic.

All that is true for the old Attention Web, but the whole problem seems to be turned into an opportunity when we change to the Everyday Life mindset: In which digital media companies become partners with their clients in order to supply a direct relationship with the readers and participants.

As Geoff Northcott of *supercollider pointed out very clearly in his post “visualizing the decline of the destination web, the rise of the social web”, the destination web is on the decline. And if Jaap Favier of Forrester is correct, then the Media Companies that will survive are the ones that create and facilitate arenas for brands to connect with their customers on.

This would give, that in the new perspective of digital media, what Jarvis points out is not a problem, it’s an opportunity. In the Every Day Life mindset, digital media is in the “Creating Direct Relations” business, not in the “messaging” or “middle men” business.

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

Our new digital abilities has opened up a whole new kind of marketing. I’ve previously called this both content marketing, situation marketing and even activity based advertising. But have after a rummage through my mac dictionary ended up with the slightly inexplanatory term Context marketing.

Context marketing is two directions of marketing: Collaboration and Utilities, and the convergence of them – which is where all the really juicy stuff happens :o)

I want to try to explain this by adding this slideshow, I find it incredibly difficult to not go into this mumbo jumbo kind of merry go round, so I kept it as short and precise as I could.

To sum it up in one sentence:

“it’s about earning ownership of the experience where your products are used and brands are shaped.”

Hopefully it it presents some valuable ideas, and inspire some new ones. Please let me know.

I wanted to try something different. Having “experimented” a bit with slideshare as a tool for communication and inspiration I thought I’d try something new.

In the context of “ideas in Mobile” I published a slideshow introducing this concept:

1. The browser is still the most important point of contact between a company and their participants.
2. But the browser is inaccessible in almost all situations where the brand is relevant.
3. The mobile on the other hand has become an integrated part of our everyday life. – Always at arms length, always on.

The only thing it lacks is ideas. Ideas treating mobile as something different, something unique, not just a smaller version of the internet.

The concept of the slideshow is that each slide carries a link back to a related post on my blog. So each slide becomes an idea. And the slideshow presents 20 ideas I’d hope could inspire and invite to new and interesting ideas.

I really haven’t got a clue how or if this will provide any value for anybody, but I hope it does. Anyhow, since it’s an experiment, if anyone has any feeback, it would be much appreciated, comment, tweet or email me. :o)

View it below, or on slideshare.net.