FOR SUCCESS IN SOCIAL, CONVERSATION IS NOT ENOUGH

a brand’s tweet ‘breaks the internet.’ so what? in social, a paradigm shift is needed: from conversation to narrative. in a short time, marketing has gone from the need to consider person-as-viewer, to person-as-participant, to person-as-content-creator, to person-as-channel. people today want to be the secret to success in social media is not simply entering a conversation, but entering into people’s narrative. the task now is not so much how a brand or product tells its story, but how it becomes part of an ongoing narrative a person embodies already. being just informative and entertaining is not enough. the base coin of success in social media is empathy.

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WELCOME TO THE NEW TEMPLES OF PLEASURE

it’s a vision of biblical proportions -- tens of thousands of people weeping, whooping, and chanting in unison. if sport were a religion, then the stadium would surely be its place of worship. inside these temples to physical feats, language evokes the divine -- fearful fans ‘pray for a miracle,’ while losing prompts serious ‘soul-searching.’ so much so that architects these days must create much more than a stage for human endurance. their task, now, is constructing an arena to elevate the senses, capture the spirit of a community, and become an icon for a city long after the last fan has passed through the turnstiles.

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DON’T COUNT AM/FM RADIO OUT YET

everyone’s loving podcasts right now -- between Serial and the launch of Alex Blumberg’s Gimlet Media, podcasts are getting bigger and bigger. but it’s a bit premature to count AM/FM radio out just yet. according to Pew’s State of the Media Report, in 2013 a full 91% of Americans 12 and up listened to traditional radio at least once a week. those of us that live on the internet might scoff at terrestrial radio, but we don’t necessarily reflect the actual state of the marketplace. to be sure, the industry still faces profound, looming problems. and in all reality, the Internet will eventually win out. but for now? Americans are still tuning in.

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I’M A DIGITAL HOARDER

hoarding has always conjured nightmare scenarios of impassible rooms filled to the brim. but in the digital age, we’re at risk of a new type of hoarding that is equally problematic. obsessive digital collecting is also known as ‘infomania,’ which is more subtly crippling than its physical counterpart. with access to the web’s infinite amount of information and limitless supply of storage, digital hoarders are less inclined to think they have a problem. when there’s a compulsion to collect and be the keeper of information, the real problem lies in managing that information. obsessing over how you catalogue emails or sort pocket-worthy articles may seem like small things, but when you look at the time spent, they’re anything but.

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PLATFORMS AS CULTURES

our pre-digital ancestors used material artifacts, architectures, and objects to understand their own cultures. now, the medium has changed but the sentiment remains. the internet is not a place or a material; it’s a context -- and the things we make exist in, respond to, and evolve in that context. what’s harder today, though, is actually *seeing* that materialization. how can we see or tell others to see digital cultures? in advertising, we often talk about making content that’s ‘platform-agnostic.’ but we might be doing ourselves a disservice: looking at platforms as unique cultures themselves opens up the possibility for what we make to be situated within and in dialogue with culture.

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TECH NEEDS A HUG

remember when we had retailers, news organizations, and taxi companies? when the way a company described itself provided some insight into what it actually did? now everything is a tech company. and it’s not because they make or sell technology, but rather because they want a way to align themselves with the future, innovation, and higher valuations. it’s semantics. unfortunately, our obsession with tech often means that we ignore the implications of the sudden and dramatic transformation it creates in people’s lives. we don’t need to stop using technology. what we is to keep in mind that, ultimately, it’s human beings who are making, using, and being affected by the work of ‘tech companies.’

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PREDICTIONS FOR JOURNALISM IN 2015

the Nieman Lab for Journalism has recently started publishing a great series where top media minds make predictions for the coming year. full of great insights that speak beyond journalism (and are especially applicable when we think about social media and branded content), we’ve decided to highlight a few of our favorites. in ‘Authenticity, Enterprise, and Intimacy,’ S. Mitra Kalita surmises that we’ll get a lot more comfortable with our passions, obsessions, biases, confusion, sordid pasts, and tense futures. Amy Webb explores the idea of being both consumer-aware and context-aware. and in line with platforms as cultures, Nick Diakopoulos examines a new trend: platforming the news.

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LUMBERSEXUALITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

you may have heard the word ‘lumbersexual’ tossed out recently and dismissed it as someone’s ridiculous terminology for a given segment of consumers. well we’re here to tell you that lumbersexuals are officially a thing. wondering whether you have a lumbersexual in your life? think work boots, flannel, tattooed biceps, woodworking, and trips to artisanal butchers. the lumberjack seems like a startlingly apt symbols for hipsters to appropriate, but there’s much more to the symbol than another glib comment on urban white culture. what links the mythic lumberjack to his modern-day incarnations is a pervasive sense -- in his time and ours -- that masculinity is ‘in crisis.’

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