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What Do the Top Web Searches of 2006 Tell Us About Us?

With social media dominating the buzz among the web intelligentsia, it is interesting to sift for meaning through the list of most-searched web terms from the past 12 months. 

Yahoo
1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Shakira
4. Jessica Simpson
5. Paris Hilton
6. American Idol
7. Beyonce Knowles
8. Chris Brown
9. Pamela Anderson
10. Lindsay Lohan

MSN
1. Ronaldinho
2. Shakira
3. Paris Hilton
4. Britney Spears
5. Harry Potter
6. Eminem
7. Pamela Anderson
8. Hilary Duff
9. Rebelde
10. Angelina Jolie

Google
1. Bebo
2. Myspace
3. World Cup
4. Metacafe
5. Radioblog
6. Wikipedia
7. Video
8. Rebelde
9. Mininova
10. Wiki

Apparently, gossip still rules the human experience and the web is a major tool for propagating gossip (the pictures of a panty-less Britney Spears may have been the most-viewed snappies of the year).  There are plenty of implications here, for Bubble Generation consumers and beyond.  Most importantly, in 2007 we can expect citizen journalism to grow in importance, we can expect more search engines to acquire gossip aggregators ( TMZ, The Smoking Gun, etc.), video will still be the viral medium of choice, and interruption and contextual ads will still see a slow steady decline.

Some Marketing Standouts from the Holidays

In the world of online holiday marketing, particularly to the Bubble Generation, engagement and interactivity have ruled the days.  One of the year's best was the Coca-Cola mini site on YouTube which allowed visitors to generate unique holiday video greetings.  This was a fun solution.

 

On the other hand, Sony's screwy, borderline racist foibles in marketing the PSP game console, stood out as among the lamer ways to go to market.

The Coming Battle for Alpha Consumers will be Intense

Social media and shopcasting sites are changing the way people discover and buy products.  Advertising, particularly annoying interruption or contextual advertising, is increasingly ineffective with the Bubble Generation consumer. For BubbleGen shoppers, nothing is more powerful than the wisdom of crowds and the opinions of people they trust.  They prefer to skirt the cloying clatter of self-interested pitches and want to see how products rate with people who've already taken one for the team, so to speak. 

I've talked about sites like Wists and ThisNext before: a couple of noteworthy new sites that aim at this reality are iliketotallyloveit and Dealigg.  Both sites work in the Digg and Reddit models, where users vote and influence page ranking of products, with some differences of emphasis.

While still in beta, iliketotallyloveit, promises to be a big hit with Bubble Generation consumers, ages 15 to 25.  Produced by a young team of entrepreneurs, its upbeat energy and focus on smart categories and just as importantly, price ranges, gives the site home run potential.

For its part, Dealigg has smartly carved out a differentiation as a shopcasting site for bargain hunters where users submit the best deals they've found around the net, including freebies and free-after rebate deals.

Both sites are worth your time.  The bigger question raised by the rise of social shopping services like these, is what happens when influential and opinionated alpha shoppers disproportionately drive the buying process?  As Silke Jahn, one of the founders of iliketotallyloveit recently expressed to me, today's new consumers don't trust advertisers, they trust each other.  So, when people ignore producer advertising in favor of user critiques, the power shifts to a vocal and articulate minority that can make or break a new product.  The battlefield now shifts to these new market-makers.  Expect an avalanche of reward schemes, new revenue sharing deals, and favor-making gifts to the lead-dog consumers.  Are you ready?

Jaxtr Extends Social Media to Real World

They may spend, on average, a dozen hours per week rambling around online communities, but your typical BubbleGen consumer does have a real life you know.  Soon, however, lives on and off-line are about to intersect in a whole new way.  Launching in beta this week, is a cool new widget called Jaxtr that allows your social media personality to follow you around all day.  Planted on your online space or blog, Jaxtr lets you assign the widget a specific call number which visitors can call--in real-time--to reach your cell phone.  Calls are free from Jaxtr but local rates apply. 

From Techcrunch:

When a caller sees that widget, they can click it and Jaxtr will ask them for their own phone number. The caller’s phone will ring, and when the caller picks up, Jaxtr will ring the recipient who originated the widget. If the recipient was not available, Jaxtr will notify them that they have a voicemail that they can access by calling into their Jaxtr service. Fortunately, Jaxtr never discloses the call recipient’s phone number so you can install a widget without ever exposing personal information.

So what are the implications for marketers?  Well, first you have to navigate the obvious privacy and safety concerns, especially regarding the younger BubbleGen crowd.  You've got a lot of loons out there prowling kid's communities, so we have to beware of them piercing the veil.  But by and large, Jaxtr is further proof of the power of Web 2.0 to change more than the Internet.  Community-building is a major and still-developing theme with the Bubble Generation consumer.  A service like Jaxtr can extend the reach of social media and shopcasting from the online screen to the store floor.  While Jaxtr may and probably should be acquired by a Skype, it is a game-changing idea.  Better buckle up.

Web 2.0 Endgame: In The Future, Everyone Will Be A Celebrity

The trends don't lie.  One day, each of us will be a celebrity. 

Web 2.0 well may be remembered as the Great Awakening of human self-expression.  After all, humankind has never had greater opportunities to communicate, connect and collaborate.  The Internet itself is mashing into one big nexus space for the sharing of ideas, opinions and dress sizes.  And, it is no longer mimicking old media by granting elevated position to intermediaries and experts.  Today, it is user- and community-driven content that fascinates and compels.  It is the promise of reaching out and being heard, of making a human linkage, of standing for something, of proving that you lived.

The trends don't lie.  User-driven content is exploding.  About 30% of the pageviews on the fast-growing new-media newspaper company Topix.net come from community comments, not professional journalists.  What's hot on YouTube?  Not commercial work, but the everyday stuff, our stuff.  Look at the startling growth trajectories at MySpace and YouTube and Flickr.

It's not aggregated or licensed content, or even original content that's king anymore. You-generated content is king.

What will this turn of events mean for the Bubble Generation and beyond?  Soon we each will be the most celebrated entertainers, story-tellers, musicians, funnymen, and artists of our day.  And there will be no strangers.  Everyone will be known by everyone.

As a marketer or businessperson, you have some things to think about, you celebrity you. 

For example: How will you sell to fellow celebrities?  How will you hire celebrities to work for you? More critically, how will you manage a celebrity and her expanded sense of self (not too mention his lengthy contract rider)?  At a personal level, where will you rank in the "nine circles of celebrity" that will undoubtedly be devised to help us make sense of universal celebrity-hood?  Will you base your personal happiness on your most recent Technorati, Digg or Reddit scores?  Philosophically, will you live the John Battelle way or the Roger Simon system?  How will you handle the celebrity-sized jealousies you will face within your network and at the office? 

No, my famous-faced friend, you'd be well advised to rethink a future where all of us are celebrities.

China, very soon home to more celebrities per square foot than anywhere else on the planet, has a great old bromide applicable for these times: "Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it."

Teens Are Shopping Sherpas for Their Parents

This week JupiterResearch issued its latest report on teen online shopping. The report figures that teens represent three percent--or $3 billion--of the online shopping market.  But reading between the lines, it is clear that this critical demographic wields more influence than those numbers reveal.  If the plethora of new shopping sites geared for the Bubble Generation headspace tells us anything, it suggests that while parents may lay down the plastic, they are getting more than a little counsel from their kids.  And when fashionista kids and their brand-conscious parents shop online together, as this item from the LA Times indicates, you get a double dip--twice the average ticket.  So, I would venture that bringing in the highly leveraged BubbleGen to your shopping site is a good way to pry open a few stubborn wallets.

Here Comes the Bubble Generation Workforce

One thing's for sure, the Bubble Generation will bring a different kind of workforce.  You will value them for their passion and unboxed thinking, and the ease at which they adopt and employ new technologies. You’ll have to excuse their short attention spans and tangential tendencies: they have grown up on the Internet, after all, and don’t know any other frame of reference. They use hyperlink logic and think in texting-length “idealets.” 

But, they can be highly motivated. They are not nearly as self-absorbed or entitled as their Generation X colleagues who you are struggling with right now.  No, they are willing to work hard, but for a company or product they can believe in.  They don’t think as far out as a career (and retention will be an issue), and with their command of communications and self-expression, they cannot imagine being a faceless, nameless cog in a dreary corporate wheel. They will probably revolutionize your company with their workstyles. Think high impact assignments, dynamic teams and short campaigns.

Despite being difficult to attract, difficult to retain, even harder to manage, you need to make room for the BubbleGen employee.  He or she is the key to a huge new market demographic—a cohort nearly the size of the Baby Boom generation, likely to eclipse its financial clout. 

A couple of new sites that are helping companies gear up for the realities of the BubbleGen workforce are worth checking out, among them are Jobster, Hirevue and Jobberwiki.

The New Advertising Mantra: Location, Location, Location

At a great panel discussion on WiMax this week, Bin Shen, Vice President of Broadband, at Sprint Nextel made a few comments that got me thinking some more about the future of advertising to the Bubble Generation.

WiMAX is a term coined to describe standard implementations of IEEE 802.16 wireless networks.  In other words, a means to increasing bandwidth for a variety of data-intensive applications--like full Monty video on your mobile handset.  To its credit, Sprint Nextel is investing $3 billion in a WiMAX technology build-out over the next few years.  According to Shen, they will have a substantial lead time to the future in this very interesting technology.  The ultimate idea is to deliver full Internet capability to your mobile device.  That payload is the holy grail of connected mobility today.

But then Shen mentioned the potential convergence of WiMax with GPS and I got excited--as I always do on this topic.  I believe WiMax (as one path) and GPS converged can deliver location-based communications that are a legitimate, value-adding way to make advertising relevant to the BubbleGen consumer.

Here's how it might work:

Imagine you are walking down a busy street, passing a Circuit City electronics store, when your mobile phone jingles with a video message bearing a $50 discount coupon for an iPod if used at that Circuit City in front of you within the next 30 minutes.  This proposition has two advantages: relevance and utility.  A random iPod ad may or may not be compelling--it'd probably would be a bother, but an actionable offer with real pocketbook appeal is no imposition.  It might be welcomed.  That value proposition will make sense to the practical, pragmatic BubbleGen consumer. 

Now we've heard promise of location-based ads before, but even the skeptic in me believes we are closer now.  And, of course, there will be some hand-wringing about privacy concerns, but if we just make the program of receiving location-based ads opt-in, you erase those worries.  So, as means to achieving envertising over old school, in-your-face advertising, I guess location is everything. 

Now, if you add digital wallet capabilities to the phone to which the discount is given automatically at the register, you've got a real gamebreaker.

Hey, Procter & Gamble: Email is the New Snail Mail

Instant messaging, RSS, SMS, search, podcasting, social networking, user-generated content, who has time to wait for email? 

It says a lot about these urgent, mercurial times when email is too slow to satisfy our need to communicate.  Yes, where once a box-full of electronic missives screamed for immediate attention, chances are these are not the really important messages of the day any more.  And that acceleration of the now, is the prevailing reality of the Bubble Generation.   

How are marketers coping?  They are changing our relationship with email.  It has now been devalued as junk snail mail.

At a summit of marketers this week, Denis McGrath, international marketing manager at Procter & Gamble, asked "How do you create a marketing message around low-involvement brands? For instance, do you really want to receive a weekly marketing message on toilet paper? How about batteries?"

The answer he says is aggregation. P&G has dozens of well-known brands that fall into the category of low-involvement brands. None of them have messages that you'd want to get every week--or even every month. But you may want to hear from them once or twice a year. So, he says P&G sends out email.  Maybe with coupons.  A few helpful hints, perhaps.  And if it sounds to you like email has become the postal "circular" of the Bubble Generation, you'd be right.  Email is rapidly becoming junk mail and that demands a new paradigm.  Are you ready?

Gap, Target and Nokia: The Bubble Generation is Two Clicks Ahead of You

Despite the fact that they reject traditional taste makers, eschew TV, radio and newspapers, and can't easily be reached by mainstream marketers, don't think for a minute that the Bubble Generation is out of synch with major pop trends.  The truth is, they are two clicks ahead.

While they may be largely unaffected by what I call "dead tree media," BubbleGen consumers are remarkably plugged in to the bleeding edge of new currents. If anything, they are moving so quickly, their tastes morphing so nimbly, their brand preferences evolving so rapidly that it is the marketers themselves who are falling behind.  This has several important implications.

First, the new connected consumer is hard to manipulate.  By nature, the Bubble Generation is pragmatic, worldly, materialistic, driven by technology and optimistic about its future.  There are very few chinks in their collective armor.  They have a heightened sense of authenticity and intrinsic truth; what Hemingway used to call a built-in B.S. detector.  To that end, they have a hard-wired mistrust of major brands, resent obvious ad campaigns targeting their generational zeitgeist, and on the whole, would rather not be bothered with imposition marketing.  And, they have a secret handshake.

Propelled by email, IMS, texts and shopcasts, the BubbleGen consumers are able to detect emerging trends at the speed of light.  Moreover, their ability to viralize new trends among themselves means that fads will soon come, grow and disappear in a highly time-compressed lifecycle.  This puts enormous pressure on even the fastest manufacturers and retailers.  Where once a Gap could spin inventory in eight or nine weeks, or Target could dabble in mass-niches and Nokia could issue a new mobile phone a couple of times a year, the emerging reality calls for the acceleration of everything.  Nothing is fast enough for the new connected consumer. 

What does this mean for mainstream marketers?  Simply put: you are too slow.  You have to rethink the consumer experience from a time-to-gratification standpoint.  That means speeding up the entire ecosystem, from product development to distribution.  After all, when you get used to discovering, test-driving and downloading what you want in a T1 instant, the analog world is just dumbed-down dial up by comparison.

A good example of using the web's inherent strengths to speed things up is BitTorrent.  It allows for peer-to-peer movie downloads from many users as opposed to the hub and spoke model of say, Apple.  That means movies can be downloaded in a fraction of the time.  Message: use the unique properties of the web to deliver the goods faster than the next guy and you win.  Remember, your customers are two clicks ahead of you already.