The adoption of technology is often limited by the skills required to operate it. As these become less and less, more and more people can begin feeling its benefits. Therefore the primary consideration of my predictions isn’t technical or business developments, but rather what will continue to aid the internet’s ever growing ubiquity, main stream crossover and human experience.
Even More Frictionless Sharing
The majority of the developed world consumes content via the internet. A small majority chooses to share this. How do you close this canyon between consumption and sharing? Make the experience as frictionless as possible.
Introduced at their F8 Conference in September, Facebook announced that users who browsed content within their platform would automatically have this information posted to their new ‘Ticker’ feature. Although met with uproar from the privacy brigade, like many of their other new features, the initial cries fizzled out when people discovered it’s not actually all that bad.
Twitter has also begun making steps into broadcasting your social activity to your followers. Their aptly named ‘Activity’ tab now includes a lot more than tweets, but now when someone you follow has favourited a tweet, followed someone or retweeted something.
But where this trend will really find it’s feet is location. Imagine not having to pull out your phone to check-in to your favourite store, but still receive a discount because you’ve been highlighted on their in-store social CRM system as an influencer? They’ll head over to the checkout, swipe their phone and ‘Hello Mr Smith, for the good words you’ve said about us on Twitter have a lager on the house’. The business potential this offers will mean there’s a vast deal of thought and resource put into making this dream a reality.
Besides social media, businesses will realise that metrics such as time on site are no longer important as people revolt against wasting their time on inefficient retail experiences. People don’t want to waste their time on a website or in a shop when they could be out with their friends, sharing experiences with their family or consuming meaningful content. The more frictionless the commerce experience, the better the brand perception. Ever wonder why Apple now lets you walk in and out of their stores with a product without even talking to any of their staff?
Twitter Activities
Geoloqi App
Connected Things
Creating, sharing and amplifying real life experiences. Driven by the adoption of engineering platforms like Ardunio, the process of connecting appliances to internet APIs will become effortless and widespread.
Different to the quantified self in that the things aren’t particularly interacting with yourself but rather with each other, connected things offer the opportunity to bring the benefits of digital to the real world.
Poke, the London based agency set up by the now W+K director Iain Tait, recognised that whilst the real-time nature of Twitter would be the perfect place to announce fresh-out-of-the-oven bread, the dough riddled hands of a baker wouldn’t fair too well with a keyboard. Connected appliances offer the chance for interactions with the internet that wouldn’t have been possible before, but not only with the internet, but with each other too. Check out this infographic by Cisco that does a brilliant job explaining its potential.
The Conveniently Quantified Self
To me, the idea of gamification never really resonated. I can see how playing a branded game increases the exposure of your brand but 99% of the time, much like TV advertising, they fall short of their non-commercial counterpart. Ultimately, this leaves you with an experience that hasn’t quite fulfilled your appetite. I do, however, see the desire humans have to track their conquests and the potential digital applications have to supplement this. Ranging from finance tracking applications to a retailers barcode scanning app that tracks the amount of money saved by shopping with them, to more complex applications like Jawbone’s Up. Saying you’re a retailer that saves someone money is one thing, but being able to display this dynamically would hold much more weight in the mind of the customer. And this, my friends, is how advertising must adapt. With increasing customer savviness, messaging is no longer enough to get someone to buy into your brand.
Despite the Quantified Self movement having been around for some time, like most things, it won’t see widespread adoption until practicality issues are resolved. Smartphones have done much resolve this, but you’re still required to pull out your phone and input some data every time you do something that may seem trivial, yet it’s vital towards providing the data applications need to offer life-improving solutions.
Expect to see a host of periphery products entering the market designed to pair up with your mobile phone and optimise your life.
The Re-emergence of Broadcast Media
One way broadcast media is social in a way demand media isn’t in that it provides a simultaneous experience. Twitter becomes a hot bed of activity when shows such as The X-Factor and The Apprentice are showing on TV, and whilst people may be isolated in their living room, they can be sharing their predictions with friends across the world. After all, where’s the fun in wanting to speak about something no one else has any opinion on or the interest has already been and gone?
Facebook has unsurprisingly been one of the first social networks to try and harness this trend but their implementation is still someway off. The simplicity of watching TV whilst tweeting from your iPad is an experience hard to beat. Whilst TV will remain, devices like AppleTV are going to bring it even closer to the internet and I’ll eat my hat if social isn’t baked in at the very core. Eventually, I’d expect communities to schedule, watch and comment on media simultaneously, providing the benefits of both broadcast and on-demand. Imagine inviting your brother in Australia to watch the next episode of The Apprentice at a time that suits both of you.
