70 Millions Blogs and Growing.. Influencing The New Generation

I used to wonder if i had Attention Deficit Disorder, now i know.. the markerters have given me a label. I'm part of Generation Y (Why?)

I'll be blogging in direct response to this post:

Great, I now have a label to explain everything that's wrong about me, we're Generation Y with short attention spans, we want a balance in life. Work and our careers are everything to us (in that we want to be successful), but it's not everything (in that we want a social life, friends and all the trimmings that life has to offer.)

Great by-product of the generation that grew up on Cable, Video on Demand, Broadband Internet, MTV, Mega Malls, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Designer labels, Ecstacy, Blogs, Review Sites, Amazon, EBay and heaven knows what else.

Can you really blame us for not giving your brand the time of day when you try to reach out to us with your ads, pamphlets, sales promises and emotional brand experience?

How then is the best way to get your message to the people that matter?

I've probably already failed to influence in the length of this particular post. If you've given me the time of day to read this far, then maybe we've arrived at something.

connection
if for some reason, you feel that what i have to say is important, it might be because of a mixture of knowing me, we've interacted in some way, and your life somehow benefited after coming in contact with me.

attention
i still read yongfook.com to this day. his blog has evolved into a well designed lifestream.

he captures my attention with great content, short blurbs and funny videos & monologues. meaning i don't have to spend more than 5 mins on his site to hear what he has to say, and decide for myself if it's important or not.

too many times, important things are lost in a sea of noise, or they're not very popular things to begin with. (take a look at ping.sg and hazard a guess at what the average pingster finds important in the "top 10 posts for the last 24 hours".)

now of course, all great brands want to be popular, and they'd like to be in that top 10 posts of pingsters.

community
but we have to remember that ping.sg is not the only community group there is. it's a sizable community, and they've done some really great things, built on uzyn's API platform to aggregate the most popular posts in their community.

but what about social networks and forums that house already existing brand advocates? how about other separate undiscovered blogs that might serve, 20 - 50 committed readers daily? what can we do as brands to help their lives and connect connect with them?

merely reading information online rarely influences a reader. Gen Y is a bit more savvy to believe everything they read. but i think we will consider the expert opinion of someone we know, close to us or at least in our social circle.

fragments
with this amount of choice and clutter, is it in fact possible to have your message carried by every single one of these different voices? let's remember that when someone tries to tell us something in a language we don't understand, it's garble, noise, meaningless and ultimately spam.

is that how you want Gen Y to remember your brand?

New marketing, but are we ready?

I really should be plugging our blogger social event that just happened last night to launch The Open Room, but i'm just so suitably buzzed up right now about something that i just have to type it down first. Yes, it's that important, but don't worry, The Open Room is somewhere a part off all this.

i'm currently attending the IAS Graduate Diploma in Digital Advertising, it's on every Tuesday from 7pm to 10pm, and it's taken considerable strain. In fact, things weren't going so well because, every body was rehashing the same thing over and over again. New marketing, new media, new advertising, basically everything was X X & X with a 2.0 behind it.

you get my drift, you've heard it all before. we've been telling it to you till no end. 2.0, digital, social and post- become great things to put in your product and service offerings so that clients will bite.

but it just won't work because you're just doing the same crap with a 2.0 stuck to it. so what you get is:

crap2.0
digital crap
social crap
post-crap

crap in, crap out.

and what do i mean by crap?

trying to service, sell products and services that worked on a unified mass media platform on what we see today in mature markets as a increasing fragmented media landscape

here's an illustration. in mature and connected markets like the US, Japan and even Singapore (super high broadband penetration) think about the choices you have:

Cable TV
Broadband (Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Netvibes, RSS)
Magazines
Advertisements
Newspapers
Forums

The list could go on forever, and that's the media fragmentation we see, coupled with the insane amount of choice we have today.

What brand of toothpaste to buy? what type of toothpaste? whitening? more calcium? 12 hr protection? 24 hr protection?

Basically, we as consumers wanted choice? the marketers gave us choices. and i guess in the process, a lot of crappy choices, and we were at their mercy. choice became clutter.

now, with the Internet, we research what is relevant to us, we try to pull the information that is relevant to us, but it's hard work. And the offers and unsolicited information that finds themselves to us, is SPAM. marketers, advertisers and PR practitioners should take a look at the world's spam folder one day. we can only be positive that its digital, for i forsee worldwide deforrestation if spam was still paper.

So my point is this.

The old way of selling doesn't work on the new breed of consumers.

Marketers, PR and Advertising have become complacent in the way we engage consumers. we don't! we expect one way messages to work, or pseudo interactivity disguised as feedback, survey or clicking on a link..??

I used to be scared of this barrier. This barrier into the consumer space, this natural resistance to the things that we try to do.

Today in class, talking with like minded people, i think some of us felt that we had to change the way we did things. We had to find not just a new way to sell things, but genuinely connect with consumers, be their partners that make life better for them, we go down to their level, or we bring them up to us. Either way, don't take it the wrong way.. the idea is that we should all be on the level playing field.

bring back the days when i wanted something, and went to the small independent shop near my place.. rekindle the joy of having a genuine service that served a customer need or want.

what am i talking about?

about the idea of building shelters or sleeping bags for homeless people sponsored by advertisers or clients. perhaps you could do something good with your ad or presence?

how about the food stores that took your grocery list for a party you were organising, and helped you calculate how much each person owes you? and perhaps helped you collect that money?

how about building an online tool that genuinely helped solved information overload problems?

what about that branded shoe that you designed yourself?

what about that computer that you put together yourself, but they built and delivered to you?

what about that mp3 player that you got engraved, for yourself or a loved one?

NOW, all this doesn't just happen overnight, corporations are process driven, and different departments have goals to meet, but slowly.. once people start understanding this key insight on the difference between choice and clutter, something will change.

and change is exactly what i'm talking about. change in the way we as marketers, PR and advertisers do things, in the way we service our clients and our communities.

instead of being the agency, we become their partners, and we help join the dots and form long lasting business relationships with their customers and their brands. in fact, consumers should not be seen as such statistics, but as stakeholders, or business partners who enter a business-client relationship.. you get the idea. VALUE THEM as part of your company!

and that's where The Open Room comes in. i could have started this post telling you all about it, getting myself a media hit for it. but i hope you can see that The Open Room is just a small part of this ecosystem of change. We did it to connect brands and bloggers together, as if they could be business partners or colleagues.. and foster a natural, casual, fun, relationship or transaction. To have each other understand that we're all a part of this, and we'll make our business work together. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and detracters to one brand, will find solace in other. hopefully that other brand will welcome them with open arms.

maybe we'll then see that the pie is big enough for everyone. *shrug* (i sound like a non-profit don't i?)

so in closing, our market has changed gears, we need new marketing to connect with new audiences. why are we hoping and praying to the unseen god of materialism that our old methods will work on a truly different consumer. A consumer just like you and me, and yet.. so intrinsically unique.