By Alison Readings, Renegade Media
Today, we welcome a host of speakers to the Mermaid Exhibition and Conference Centre in Blackfriars for Engage 2010 who will share their thoughts on 2010’s theme, “Supercharge Your Brand online”.
Once CEO Guy Philipson had powered down his jet pack he welcomed opening speaker, researcher and journalist, Dr Aleks Krotoski. Aleks shared herscientific view of the social space versus what the web was originally built for, starting with telling us we are all breaking it by using social media. Of course what she means is that the web’s pioneers started it because we are all lazy and we needed a lazy form of communication. However, the more content we produce she believes, the more we break it.
Not literally of course. With so much content our navigation is determined by what we want to know and want to hear, our vision is narrowed and we coagulate into the community which best fits our attitudes and ideas.
This has become an epidemic, we’ve become addicted and use it every day, all the time. As Guy pointed out, people are now spending 23% of their time online using social networks and blogs.
We’re so used to joining groups and communities populated by people who we perceive to have common interests with us, we’ve forgotten to think for ourselves. Do but they really share our interests? Are we all too easily influenced by people we think have similar attitudes to us? This social trust happens so fast we forget consequence and believe we feel true and honest to ourselves.
This leads me to think about how social media is changing, now we have it and can use it, what can we do next? Aleks concluded her presentation by encouraging marketers to stop and think about serendipity when it comes to the next service they should deliver. This means, consider what surprises and allows users to suddenly discover something. In other words, find ways to create elements of randomness to intentionally bring people together who may never normally ‘bump’ into each other on the social web.
In doing this will inspire new interactions which will be more significant for the consumer to encourage stories and new ways of learning. That way, the chain of offline and online relationship bonds, which normally overlap, can expand and link further, influencing a wider audience and ultimately optimising the campaign. This, Aleks said will be the revolution of the internet.
Aleks speaking at IAB Engage 2010 'Supercharge Your Brand'
