How to be an online trendsetter
Posted by Kwai Chi,
May 14, 2012
Following on from our hugely successful Social Media Week seminars, I was invited to speak at an event hosted by Bethany Hogan at Team London Bridge at the charity based Brigade Bar & Bistro on Tooley Street.
Below is a video from the event but be warned – it’s almost an hour in length! If you’d like something a little quicker to consume, then scroll down…
For the event, I talked about what businesses should be doing right now and what was coming up in the next year or so. The next few paragraphs highlight some of the key topics I covered in the event.
Visual aid
The immediate shift in Social media is the movement from text based content to visual content. Facebook Timeline and the popularity of Pinterest have both helped push visual assets into the mainstream. YouTube has converted existing videos to 3D too so it’s vital for companies not to forget about AV content (the video above is available to view in 3D)!
NFC and smart wear
Barclaycard released an NFC sticker to attach to the back of mobile phones to pay for items in the same way as using an Oyster card. With the emergence of Smart wear, it’s likely that we will also begin to see a convergence of products very soon. Cambridge University have been developing a wearable touchpad with Nokia. This kind of technology could form the basis of future smart watches or smart bands that will allow users to pay for goods with a swipe of their wrist.
Social media goes mobile
There is a general movement to move social media to mobile.
This will continue as a trend as the term ‘Social media’ becomes a yesteryear
thing to say in the same way as web 2.0 and new media have vanished. Google
& Facebook have been acquiring multitudes of mobile apps, platforms and
programmers to be at the forefront of this evolution.
My big punts for the future
I made a few big punts during the event including the prediction that the evolution of digital media will become a permanent connection between people and society at large. Wallets will be redundant as the chipsets will get down to nano size allowing us to simply inject our life data into our bloodstream, transmitting via our own natural human magnetic field. I predicted that kids under 3 today will never own a wallet as we move to a completely cashless society. ‘Head up display’ technology will be embedded into our brain sensors to allow us to use robotic artificial intelligence to heal ourselves and store updatable Wikipedia style knowledge.
If you scrolled down from before the video, then here are
the slides from the presentation
About the event
The video was shot and edited by Mickey Lee as were these
photos from the event
http://www.thebiglondon.com/tlb-social
Team London Bridge is an independently funded body that
looks after developing and promoting London Bridge for the companies that fund
it. To find out more, please visit http://www.teamlondonbridge.co.uk
The event was held at the Brigade Bar & Bistro http://www.thebrigade.co.uk which
supports the Beyond Food Foundation, helping disadvantaged young people to
forge a career in the catering industry. To find out more please visit http://www.beyondfoodfoundation.org.uk
Regarding the actual channels that are covering the Olympics, your options are far more limited. The BBC will be covering the event day and night meaning rival broadcasters are preparing themselves for a dip in impacts during July. If Sue barker, Colin Jackson and Michael Johnson don’t cut it for you then you’ll have to switch over to British Eurosport (assuming you’ve paid for the correct Sky or Virgin package). Although this channel normally has a somewhat niche profile, come the Olympics it will be showing an all-encompassing selection of sports. The channel served me well during a summer in Barcelona where I unfortunately spilt Sangria down a customer whilst watching Michael Phelps win his 8th gold medal. However as is the case with most sport on TV the success of the ratings will largely depend upon the performance of our nations athletes, which staggeringly could actually be pretty good. What is more, is that there will be no staying up until 2am or waking up at 6am to watch the live events, this year’s Olympics will be more or less catered to the UK public’s schedule meaning the allure of watching live action should inevitably lead to more ratings.
In terms of viewing the Olympics online the story is a somewhat similar one. The rights around any Olympic content being shown on the internet are impressively strict with the BBC and Eurosport websites being the only UK broadcasters able to show any content. The two websites along with BBC iPlayer will inevitably see significant rises in traffic over the period, however Sky Sports news will most likely see upsurges both in TV ratings and website traffic as its special Olympic report will cater for its loyal consumers seeking extra news. Much like last time around, expect to see clips uploaded onto YouTube, only to be taken down swiftly.
The rise of social media over the last 4 years will clearly add another aspect to the Olympic experience this year. The relationship between sport and social media was fantastically demonstrated in this year’s Super Bowl with the world record for the amount of tweets in a second broken twice. The first came in Madonna’s half time performance and the second at the very end of the match, my own prediction is that #ldn2012 and #ubolt will be breaking similar records. As we have seen before on TV, these social media buzzes will in turn create a drive back to live viewing as people do not wish to miss out on the real time experience of watching and discussing the Games over Social media platforms.
Needless to say if you don’t wish to watch any coverage of the Olympics and are hell bent on avoiding the ahem… “massive waste of tax payers’ money”…. then you will also need to avoid picking up any newspapers as they will have the Olympics story dominating both sides seeing as it’s not often that press has an advantage over TV and online these days.