Welcome back to the world of the living my friends. Thought it’s going to take me at least six weeks to remember to write 2020, it’s officially here and has been for about a week.
As we all shake off the rust and look at ahead to the year to what might change with social data and where our customers are going to force us all to just simply get better and move faster.
Here are a few things that we think and feel will quickly move into normalization and a few things that may catch us off guard.
Demand on tools increases
As we’ve continued to watch the market change via mergers, acquisitions, end of life of a product or simply going out of business we’ve seen more and more demands from brands and agencies on analytics platforms to simply do it all better. May it be a better usage of AI to discover insights that would traditionally take days for analysts to find needs to be found in moments. It could be a complete view of media & social versus licensing a media monitoring, social listening, competitive benchmarking and publishing platforms to ensure there isn’t a gap in their protective shield or simply taking all discovery in house and managing their data via a centralized process and distributing with a governance process. It’s great to see it’s all finally maturing but much like the web analytics industry in the late 00’ and early 10’, end users just want it to work and work well.
Reddit takes it's seat at the table
With most insiders, we’ve all see stories break and spread and sadly Reddit never got it’s right due on being the home and birthplace to these stories. I’ve seen Buzzfeed, Business Insider, Vox and others just troll Reddit for stories and never credit them back in the same way that would happen with a twitter. With platforms standing up we feel that Reddit has its chance to be the home of discovering that twitter & Facebook was previously.
Facebook's downward slide
This is a personal take of mine. In my circles, I’ve seen fewer and fewer people want to post on Facebook platforms due to general fears around inter-personal relationship impact as well as just creep platform behavior. May it be an oddly timed ad or too much political tension Facebook feels like it’s truly hit its myspace tipping point and its relevancy will be targeting boomers. That being said, can someone please explain how to use TikTok to me? My daughter says it’s really cool and I have no idea how to use it.
Continued Polarization of Media & Marketing
Being a child of the internet and using my first message board in the ’80s, the earliest promise of the internet as a platform to bring us all closer together. Today we have it :), there is a subreddit, a YouTube channel or a blog out there for everything you’d ever dream for. Are you interest in fairy houses? steampunk cosplay or mid 20’s home decor trust me there is a place on the internet for you. We never really thought of the flip side though. Like Bernays focused on smoking in the early ’30s, marketers, and media want you emotionally engaged and clicking constantly so that love of a random topic or political opinion will continue to pull us on opposite sides of a topic versus using the internet for good.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these and what you're seeing as larger trends out there for 2020.
