WHAT ABOUT WORLD WIDE WEB OF FRIENDS
As ever in popular culture, social-media trends and tastes are set by the
young. Over the past several years, social-media platforms were adopted
fi rst by high school and college-age kids, and their appeal then spread to
their elders and also to ever-younger kids.
Gen-Xers and older generations tend to value the selectivity of today ’ s
online networking tools, the ability to manage a social network consisting
of friends, family, colleagues, and known contacts—and keeping the
strangers, spammers, and scammers outside the walls.
But a whole new paradigm for online socializing has arisen, an open
social Web where strangers interact freely and sometimes quite intimately.
It ’ s not just younger generations who now use the Web to meet strangers,
on dating sites, and in multiplayer online games like Second Life, Mafi a
Wars, World of Warcraft, and others.
The notion of meeting random strangers has been taken to new highs (or
lows?) with online text and video chat tools. The leading one, the aptly
named ChatRoulette, pairs users with randomly selected chat partners
worldwide, face-to-face on Webcams. Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17-year-old
high schooler in Moscow, coded ChatRoulette in two days and nights and
came up with the name for his creation after watching the roulette scenes
in The Deer Hunter .
“Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon, Chat-
Roulette,” wrote Nick Biltin in the New York Times , which “drops you into
an unnerving world where you are connected through Webcams to a ran-
dom, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe.” 7
And that
random succession can include naked guys dancing in Denmark, a guy in
a leopard suit, Chinese schoolgirls, skinheads, Spiderman, Darth Vader—
and the real Paris Hilton.
ChatRoulette hardly has the market to itself. Similar tools include Ome-
gle, RandomDorm, Shuffl ePeople, TinyChat Next, 6 Rounds, Anybody
Out There, and Camstumble.
Random video chat with strangers may be merely a fad, or it may signal
a lasting shift in how open-ended our approach to others online will be.
How does this trend apply to businesses participating in social media? My
guess is that especially those companies targeting a younger audience, or
edgier market, may need to embrace the odd thrill of these new and ran-
dom social tools. After all, the appeal of socializing online is not necessar-
ily in replicating all the characteristics of your offl ine social life. Companies
wanting to generate real buzz in social media may have to take some risks.
GOING MOBILE—AND BRIDGING THE ONLINE-OFFLINE
Mark Mosiniak of Best Buy points out that today, while smartphone
visits to their Web sites make up only about 3 percent of all visits, these
mobile customers are 25 percent likelier to convert to buyers. “You have to
engage in mobile. It doesn ’ t really matter where you start—with apps,
with a mobile Web site. It ’ s just really important to engage with the mobile
channel. Anyone who doesn ’ t start now in mobile is going to fi nd things
very diffi cult in the next three years.” 8
Speaking of the role your own employees can now play in social media on
your behalf, Mosiniak urges, “Unleash the power of your people.” Best Buy’s
Home Twelp Force, tweeting and responding to people’s electronics-related
posts, involves literally hundreds of Best Buy employees with tens of thou-
sands of followers. Because of Twitter’s “light weight,” Mosiniak says
Twelpforce is especially appealing to consumers using smartphones.
Mobile is more than a technology platform—it is, of course, a commu-
nications platform. And new developments for data input (2-D bar code
scanning, video, and still photography) and interchange (bumping) mobile
devices are inherently social. And the social platforms are all jumping into
the mobile market. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, and
others all have well-evolved mobile apps and mobile Web sites.
The smartphone is the nexus of our more social, tech-augmented future.
A portable device that is connected 24/7 to the Web, its scanning and video
capture acting as your digital “eyes” and zapping the physical world—be
it bar codes, facial recognition, or video search—and translating that into
data. The data then can receive an instant overlay of GPS, Web-based, and
social information connected to everything around you, everything your
phone sees or bumps or approaches.
Mosiniak of Best Buy sees this as the number one trend of our technology
future. Speaking of his company ’ s use of 2-D barcodes and SMS messaging, he
says, “On the tag it says ‘text this product number’ to SPECIFY a number and
when they do that on any phone, they ’ ll get customer reviews for that product.”
“You have to be transparent. Taking all that online information and mak-
ing it available in the offl ine world is a very big trend.”
MOBILE PLUS SOCIAL
Earlier we talked about Foursquare, the mobile app you can use to fi nd
and review nearby businesses and see what your social network thinks.
them. Chad Capellman of Genuine Interactive describes how a local busi-
ness owner—in this case a doctor ’ s offi ce—can gain advantage by har-
nessing these new technologies:
“Services like Foursquare are still in their infancy. However, maintain-
ing a presence on these new social platforms can provide a powerful, if
subtle, marketing message: You ’ re the type of doctor who ‘gets it,’ who is
open to new approaches and who will be among the fi rst to know about
new treatments and new technologies. It ’ s hard to think of a better message
to convey about your practice.” 9
Foursquare has generated lots of buzz and has really given us the clear-
est look at what a future of socially enabled, local business search engines
will look like. More and more, our phones—and their socially informed,
geograph ically specifi c applications—will be the fi lter through which we
view our world.
PROTOTYPING THE REAL WORLD—IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD
In 2009, Linden Lab, creator of the online game Second Life, launched
its Linden Prize to recognize an “innovative in-world project that improves
the way people work, learn, and communicate in their daily lives outside
of the virtual world. This annual award is intended to align with Linden
Lab ’ s company mission, which is to connect all people to an online world
that advances the human condition.”
Chosen from among 130 nominations and 10 fi nalists worldwide, the
winner was San Jose-based “The Tech Virtual” museum. The winner was
awarded $10,000—and we are talking good, old-fashioned greenbacks
here, not Linden dollars!
Tech Virtual has real-world impacts for modeling and prototyping
ambitious projects in the physical world. It went live in late 2007 with
a mission to bring faster, more collaborative exhibit development to
museums worldwide using an online platform. Typically, says Tech
Virtual, museum professionals in the fi eld develop content alone or in
small isolated teams. With immersive 3-D modeling environments,
museum planners worldwide can collaborate on exhibit design and
prototyping.
The technology also makes it possible for individual museumgoers to
contribute to museum displays in what Tech Virtual calls “participatory
exhibit design.”
Kicking off the project on International Museums Day on May 18,
2009, Tech Virtual ran a 45-day program of online screen-share trainings
for more than 100 museum and educational professionals.
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