There were plenty of insightful moments in 2018, those little and sometimes not-so-little indicators that give us a glimpse of what’s to come.
Consider the demise of Toys ‘R’ Us followed by the resurrection of FAO Schwarz. Or the weird missteps like Sephora’s Halloween “Witch Kits” or Asos’s tiny crop tops for men. But those are just blips on the cultural radar compared with Amazon’s bold moves into brick-and-mortar — even if their Amazon 4-Star stores look like a cross between a warehouse and a dollar store.
Which is why Amazon tops our list of predictions because like it or not, they have the muscle and money to make a dramatic impact on the retail landscape in 2019.
Fall ’18 was all about Amazon Go and Amazon 4 Star. While neither was groundbreaking in design, the concepts continued Amazon’s relentless marketing message: we will dominate. 2019 will see even more Amazon Go stores with a projected 3,000 locations by 2021. The goal for Amazon is to be able to meet their customer anywhere, anytime, whether online or at the corner. My only plea: hire someone to design stores that don’t look like a warehouse.
The time is ripe for social media platforms to begin offering native payment integration for e-commerce. Think of it: Instagram’s 1 billion active monthly users and WhatsApp’s 1.5 billion already gives them unparalled access to shoppers. Imagine how native payment capabilities on these platforms could transform traditional e-commerce platforms.
Forget ordinary market data. The growth of Artificial Intelligence means marketing as we know it will become even more data-driven. Ad campaigns enriched with AI will be smarter and more relevant to a target audience. AI will also be better able to track what type of content registers with consumers, which means a website will feel highly curated for each and every visitor, resulting in increased conversion rates.
Grocery stores have never had space for dynamic content, but now all that will change. video, virtual reality, and augmented reality will make product aisles interactive, with targeted information about products available throughout the store. This also means that stores will no longer be so wholly dependent on misinformed or poorly informed sales associates. Interactive content will fill in the blanks for consumers who just don’t have the time to find a knowledgeable store staffer.
With looming trade wars raising the prices of ordinary goods, more and more stores will invest in programs that allow customers to buy online and pickup in-store. Click-and-Collect will give retailers the ability to price compete by shaving off last-mile shipping. Target has already ramped its Click-and-Collect programs to virtually every store, and Walmart has curbside pickup at over 1,800 stores.
2018 was the year of category expansion, as legal marijuana and cannabis related products soared into the food and wellness sector. 2019 will see a surge in subscription clubs, specialty drinks featuring cannabis, and boutique hotels built around cannabis culture. With the increasing number of states legalizing marijuana means even major brands will be looking to cash in – even big tobacco, which worries that weed will replace cigarettes and beer.
Let’s face it, food delivery apps like DoorDash or UberEats are strictly linear experiences that are only about convenience – and nothing else. The playing field is too crowded and no one stands out for quality or service. We predict that 2019 will force some players off the field and that the winner will be an app that offers elevated content and contributes to the growing “foodie” culture.
Glossier, plain and simple, is emotional commerce, and in a relatively short time, has managed to write the playbook for digitally native content that resonates with women. How? It’s a connected end-to-end approach to commerce by making the customers the brand. The customer essentially builds the brand and determine which products and services deserve to be part of Glossier. 2019 is when Glossier will explode the retail category with more SKUs and more physical store rollouts modeled off their New York flagship.
What started as a novelty concept earlier this year is now a bona fide retail model: tiny but upscale convenience stores delivering those last-minute essentials as well as luxury impulse items. According to a 2017 study by market researcher Maru/Matchbox, 68% of US millennials will pay more for organic food and 66% will pay extra for sustainable food. Startup store models in In New York, Los Angeles, and Denver have proven that elevated convenience is a sustainable model that can easily be rolled out like 7-11 stores, and deliver a better experience.
There is a flurry of job postings for copywriters, and for good reason. Startup companies of all stripes are realizing what abysmal content they have on their websites and that great copy keeps consumers online and drinking your brand’s Kool-Aid. Emails, ad campaigns, and product pages will begin to change thanks to a greater emphasis on meaningful content that drives conversion rates and brand loyalty.
The past several months have been a revolving door of creative directors moving from one label to another, with major fashion houses trading designers like stock options. The designer who stands alone without the control of a luxury conglomerate, does so at their own risk.
That isn’t the case with Derek Lam, who has managed to avoid the high stakes drama of late and after nearly fifteen years, continues to work quite happily on his eponymous line and a bridge collection called, Derek Lam 10 Crosby.
While he does have investors, they are minority shareholders.
His perfectly edited collections deliver a restrained modernism that consistently resonates with his loyal customer base.
As a designer, Derek is a rare bird. He is warm and instantly approachable, with not an ounce of the pretense that is so common with other designers. He also doesn’t court celebrities or go overboard on social media, which in this day and age, is practically sacrilegious.
He has been with his domestic partner, Jan Hendrik-Schlottmann, for nearly twenty years and together, they launched the company that bears Derek’s name.
Other than the occasional party – like tonight’s at Barneys New York — they live quietly at their home in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park. He took time away from the event to explain the strategy behind the brand.
BERTRAND PELLEGRIN: When you first launched your own label, to what extent was the idea of “branding” a part of your vision? Did you really think to yourself, “what is my brand”?
DEREK LAM: Yeah absolutely, when I started with my partner, we thought about building a brand rather than, “I want to be a fashion designer.” It was more about how do we create a company that talks about values that are interpreted through product. So it was very important to think about the brand and what we stood for and what we believed in. At that time it was a moment when fashion for American designers was very much a “personality” kind of game, big personalities and I felt that product was secondary to all that. I wanted to move towards what I loved which is creating beautiful product and dialing back this celebrity persona kind of thing.
Which is hard to do, even at the time when you started, people want to put you in this box of “the Derek Lam brand.”
I don’t think people think of Derek Lam the brand as being about a particular personality – me – or about me being a celebrity, it’s really about my work and that’s really kind of what we wanted to concentrate on.
You started in 2003, as the brand developed did you find yourself needing to create certain reference points in order for the customer to understand what the brand was about?
Absolutely. I create clothes that are very much about a lifestyle and understanding and addressing how a woman lives her life. It’s rooted in American Sportswear that to me is still the most modern philosophy of clothing. What does that mean? It means creating pieces for her wardrobe that she doesn’t have to think about, like “Oh, I’m going to save that for a special occasion” or “I need to save that for this moment in my life” it’s really about reaching into her wardrobe and finding pieces and saying “I can wear this through my life, through my day.”
It’s a concept that has transferred now to European designers, hasn’t it? They call it ready-to-wear but that’s essentially what it is. When you look at Yves Saint Laurent, that’s really what he was making a nod to, it was the idea of American Sportswear.
Absolutely. It’s about versatility.
Still, you wear two hats: you’re not only Derek Lam the designer, you’re also the businessman, along with your partner. That’s not something that all designers have done very successfully. Do you find that hard?
It can be challenging. because as you said, you have to wear two hats and know when to take one off and put the other one on, sometimes when you want to wear the creative hat, you really have to be paying more attention to the business side of it. For me it goes back to the philosophy that I want to dress not just one specific woman but many women, and in order for me to know that I’m reaching her, it’s to know that people are buying the clothes. It isn’t something that where I want to be in the store, it’s really something I believe in.
What was the impetus to create Derek Lam 10 Crosby?
At that time there was a huge discussion about, fashion not being democratic enough, because of the price point and this old-fashioned style of distribution – this is before online business.
So there was this idea of injecting this youthful spirit with a lower price point into the collections and I tried that but I didn’t feel like I was reaching that woman, the woman who is looking for that might not go to a designer floor, or they might be intimidated by a designer floor, so it was really important that I create a contemporary collection that can stand on its own and is more approachable both in style and price.
How do your two brands intersect, how do the two collections speak to each other?
I think the Derek Lam collection is more of those rarefied pieces that you might want to collect, but with 10 Crosby, it’s a little bit more casual, it’s what you grab day in and day out to wear.
Back when you started, in 2003, it was still the very early days of the Internet and social media, Today, all that has changed and social media plays a huge role. How do you address that?
I love the reach of the Internet and I can’t imagine not being involved in it, I think a lot of times designers aren’t the greatest communicators because we believe our work should communicate for us but that’s not enough for us anymore. We not only need to be out and about at events like tonight’s Barneys event, but we also need to create a story that can come alive online and attract people to the brand.
Nevertheless, there are designers out there who make themselves so much a part of the story and use social media and celebrities to such an extreme that it almost borders on the obscene. At a certain point, you must have made a decision and said: that’s not who I am.
Well I don’t really tap into celebrity because it’s not really relevant to what I do nor how I want to present my work. It’s a slippery slope. I’m 50, so I’m a different generation than a lot of those Millenials where social media is their third arm. I’m still navigating what’s right for me and what’s right for our brand. And I guess so far, I haven’t been wrong, so I feel very happy with where we are.
>> Click here to see Derek’s collection available at Barneys New York.
Some of the world’s top retailers may be investing heavily in e-commerce but they’re still skeptical when it comes to social media. And while only about two percent of overall web traffic for department stores comes from social media, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t potential for it to have a greater role in a brand’s strategy.
This and other insights were recently published in a recent study from L2, New York University’s Luxury Lab. It’s Nordstrom that stands out from the rest with its overall digital strategy adding over 100 new features to Nordstrom.com, but surprisingly, only Saks and Lord & Taylor use auto-detect to identify a user’s location via their IP address. Location identification is increasingly becoming key in aggregating a consumer’s needs and purchase intent. So why are so many brick-and-mortar retailers still late to the party? More on that later.
“We’re finally waking up and realizing that the world is a different place, one where the customer is empowered, connected — and distracted.”
That’s Ron Rogowski from Forrester Research, who was one of dozens of presenters at this year’s SDL Innovate conference on global customer experience management held in San Jose, California. For some, this and other revelations on the state of customer experience in the digital space only underscores the fact that many brands still aren’t listening enough to what customers are saying – nor are they using the right tools to measure and analyze what they’re saying.
SDL is a technology services network that specializes in customer experience management (CXM) and has helped over 1,500 companies mine their customer data. Firms like Sprint, Exxon Mobil, LG, and the Mandarin Oriental.
“The customer journey process is not linear, it’s circular,” says Rogowski. “There are other sources that are influencing the customer journey, which means you have to know how to stay with that customer and give them the information they need, no matter where they are on that journey.”
Tracking and measuring that journey is precisely what SDL and it’s partners came together to discuss and demonstrate throughout several halls and ballrooms at San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel. However it’s SDL’s proprietary dashboard technology that specifically allows firms to closely monitor their brand health in the face of the competition, and turn social media into a key insight tool.
“A luxury brand, for instance, can have a very masterful marketing strategy, but its the social conversations which are ultimately driving what people will decide to think about your brand, in turn, influence others to think,” says Mark Lancaster, SDL’s CEO. “Brands are essentially powerless unless they begin using the right tools to listen more carefully to what people are saying and then turn that insight into actionable strategies.”
Increasingly, the customer journey towards a purchase or purchase-intent is becoming circular rather than linear, with pieces of information gathered along the way from social conversations happening in the digital space. SDL Technologies has championed tools which allow metrics to be applied to social media’s influence.
Typically, customer experience has been the domain of the CMO, but that’s changing.
Now, it’s the CIO who is in the hot seat, with some organizations specifically hiring “hyphenated” CMO’s who are well versed in state-of-the-art information technology. Where once a CMO tracked a campaign’s success through traditional marketing programs and sales conversions, the tools are now not only more precise, but more insightful.
“It basically finds the buying patterns and distills the meaning behind the behavior,” says Lancaster. “It bypasses the classically segmentation and focuses on the number of people who are following a specific process in their customer journey.”
“They’re crossing multiple streams of information,” adds Rogowski. “The sequence of touchpoints, whether from a PC, mobile, or tablet means they are beginning the experience one place and finishing it somewhere else.”
That’s an important point, especially when considering the ever-powerful and ever-fickle millennial customer. Retailers still struggle with being able to understand what this important target customer thinks.
Can they delay any longer when social media in particular, has become such an instrumental KPI?
“Companies have mainly used social media data for listening, tracking overall sentiment, brand mentions, volumes, and other social media measures that are not directly connected to addressing the issues that matter most to their customers,” says Dave Clark, vice president of marketing for SDL.
“In today’s marketplace, where a brand’s customers and prospective customers are more connected than ever, companies can no longer simply address the 4Ps [pricing, promotion, product, and placement] to remain competitive. Instead brands must focus on enhancing the experiences that raise awareness, convert shoppers into customers, and customers into advocates.”
In 2010, Gatorade made waves with a “mission control center” which engaged millions of consumers with the brand through social media.
Customer insight technology doesn’t replace other kinds of metrics; rather, it enhances existing KPI’s in order to get a deeper understanding of a customer’s needs, motivations, and critically, their future intentions. In an ideal world, the smart brand is able to cull insights, turn those insights into company-wide actions, resulting in highly contextual customer experiences.
Rogowski agrees, and says most companies are still woefully behind, with websites, mobile apps, and facebook pages that don’t necessarily offer a seamless brand experience, nor the meaningful information for the time and place in which the customer needs it.
“The smart, contextual interaction is what will define the successful customer experience. Understanding their history and what people do. Using analytics, we have to find the behavior patterns. This is why mobile is such a great delivery mechanism for this kind of information.”
According to the L2 study, 58-percent of department store sites are actually mobile-optimized, with an additional 18-percent having built-in HTML5. Considering that mobile influence on in-store sales is estimated to grow from $158 billion in 2012 to $689 billion in 2016, it’s no wonder that optimizing a brand’s mobile presence is no longer an option or “nice to have.”
Which is why the hyphenated CMO/CIO is increasingly, a retailer’s most strategic hire, those with a fluency in all things digital. A recent piece in Women’s Wear Daily only underscored that fact, saying that, “gone are the days when CMO’s focused mainly on booking space for TV or print ads and promotional flyers. Now their reach stretches across all aspects of a brand, from marketing to digital platforms to in-store technologies” (“The CMO’s Changing Role,” WWD 6/17/13.)
Guy Kawasaki, author, entrepreneur, and advisor, is perhaps Silicon Valley’s most famous motivational speaker, traveling the world to evangelize about the power of brand “enchantment.” At this year’s Innovate conference, he made it clear that today’s marketing is deeper and more complex than ever before, and social media continues to be paramount.
“Today, Marketing 2.0 is bottom up, it’s social media. ‘Lonelyboy15’ could be the person who makes your brand a success. You have to spread a lot of seeds and remember that even the nobodies are somebodies in digital marketing. Everyone is an influencer on some level.”
With mobile applications growing exponentially, and a customer even more savvy and mysterious in how, why, and when they make buying decisions, it’s clear that customer experience management tools will only become more critical as a marketers most important tool for monitoring the health and relevance of their brand.
>> Read more on L2’s Digital IQ Index: Department Stores.
>> Read “The CMO’s Changing World” in WWD.
>> Learn about SDL and Global Customer Experience Management.
The world of social media has forever altered how people and businesses interact with one another. Today, virtually everybody and anybody can either sing your praises or worse, put a target on your back.
So how does one manage what people are saying about your business and to what extent do Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and all those other outposts designed to gripe about a bad experience (say hello to PISSEDCONSUMER.COM) really matter?
That question came up recently with a client we’re working with who was faced with an online tirade from an unhappy customer who had decided to air their discontent on Yelp. “The thing that’s frustrating is that we actually know the guy, so I guess that’s why this bothers me so much that he’d do that without talking to us,” says my client.
It’s estimated that Yelp receives over 78 million visitors to its site, and the lion’s share of reviews revolve around customer service. Yelp’s power has resulted in an angry backlash towards hostile reviewers who can seem determined to muddy a company’s reputation (a tumblr site called F*CK YOU YELPERS, hilariously roasts some of those individuals.) Yelp’s research claims that customers who praise a business’ customer service is more than five times as likely to give a 5-star review than a 1-star review.
On the other hand almost 70% of those who trash a business’ customer service wind up giving a 1-star review. So the short answer is: it pays to pay attention to what people are saying, but more important is to have the right strategy in place so that you’re a more active participant in what’s being said.
What’s the best way to manage a situation of an unhappy customer spouting off, whether true or not?
Rule #1: Let your customers know they can talk to you – and that you’re listening.
The fact is there are some people out there who are always going to be difficult to please. That’s just the nature of doing business. Nevertheless it’s safe to say that there is often a grain of truth in what people are saying about you online and it pays to listen.
A great customer service strategy includes letting customer’s know that their satisfaction is key, and if there’s something wrong, to address the issue at the time of service – not later when they’ve left the store. If you’re a restaurant, either you or your server should always perform a “closer” and ask if there were any problems at all with the meal or the service. If there’s a problem then the manager should pay a visit to the table and acknowledge the problem.
Encourage the guest to come again and give another honest evaluation. By no means is this a guarantee that they won’t go home and yelp about it, but it will make the customer think twice.
Rule #2: Cherish your cheerleaders and encourage loyal customers to join the team.
While you can’t make a negative review go away, you can certainly lessen its impact by overwhelming the negative reviews with positive ones. Unfortunately, most happy customers don’t feel the need to share that with the world. Let your loyalists know that you appreciate them and ask them to speak up on your behalf. Notice a customer coming in for a second time in less than two weeks? Acknowledge them and invite them to share their experience with their friends and followers.
Rule #3: Don’t fight fire with fire.
Some business owners think that following a negative review with a rebuttal will somehow sway readers in their favor. The fact is, it can come off as denial and can even lead to an ongoing tit-for-tat.
Instead, revert to Rule #2 and get those cheerleaders to make that negative reviewer look like one bad apple. Still, that one bad apple – like the person who wrote about my client – can sometimes cut deeply into customer perception and it can be worth taking an altogether different approach. Contact the reviewer directly and invite them to meet for coffee. Allow them to make their case directly to you and use Rule #1 as your guide: Acknowledge. Invite them to come in again and make sure they know that they can always speak to you first before complaining about it online.
Customer service is a juggling act that is dependent on great people, great training, and great managers. The goal is not just to serve but to listen and respond to how the customer perceives the quality of your service.
When Oprah shut down her show on May 25, 2011, there was a mad scramble to try to replace her. At first, nobody dared threaten her considerable success at making audiences feel like she was their own personal guru.
The fact is, just about anyone with a modicum of intelligence can host a show but remarkably few can do it charismatically and insightfully. Whether you liked her or not, that was indeed Oprah’s gift.
She methodically and almost imperceptible made herself the reason we watched. As Britain’s Independent eulogized at the close of her reign as the Queen of Talk:
“Over the years, fans have watched Oprah come to turns with her impoverished and abusive childhood. They have seen her confront taboos such as sex abuse, addiction and infidelity, and reunite with long-lost family members. They have watched her waistline expand and contract. And they have heard her spout endless psycho-babble in an effort to show viewers how to ‘Live your best life’.”
There is O.B. (Oprah Before) and O.A. Before, she delivered standard tabloid fare, but that concept of living your best life became Oprah’s “New Brand.” She had at last found her way out of the increasingly vulgar and sensationalistic daytime world of talk TV (Hello, Geraldo and Maury), and created a new and very profitable brand of talk where she was pastor in the Church of the Aha Moment.
That’s a tough act to follow, which is why this coming Monday, September 10 at 3PM, all eyes are on Ricki Lake and Katie Couric who each will premiere their own “real talk” programs. They are followed by Survivor’s Jeff Probst (same day and time) and Steve Harvey, whose show launched last Tuesday.
Hot on their heels but hardly any threat at all is Marie Osmond, whose second attempt at talk, Marie! will replace Martha Stewart on the Hallmark Channel come October 1.
“Shows are launched every year and shows fail every year, because they’re done the same way,” says Stephen Brown, 20th Century Fox head of programming and development. “It really comes down to a cult of personality. If you think of the different talent on air, at their heart if they are successful, they’re a brand or experience.”
Television is always hungry for new brands — or new ways to position old brands, and people brands are always hot. Even a Reality TV person like Bethenny Frankel can be hot (and she is, her show’s been renewed.) Furthermore talk is cheap, certainly cheaper than producing a drama or comedy series.
Lake is in old brand with some compelling potential as a new brand. Similarly, Couric is an old(er) brand with a great pedigree but perhaps more questionable potential as a talk show host, regardless of her work on Today. Her bailiwick has always been the hard-hitting one-on-one interview. Couric’s experience interacting with an audience has been limited to shaking hands with tourists at Rockefeller Plaza on Today.
“I have questions about whether Katie still has that ‘girl next door’ ability,” says Donna Somerville, a former talk show producer who worked on Donahue and the Joan Rivers Show. “She’s far from the girl next door these days, and more of a celebrity.”
The secret to a successful talk show brand is that the host appears to be Everyman (or woman, as the case may be.) It’s what made Oprah seem so “real” and what made Ricki Lake seem like the approachable “home girl.” The fact that both have struggled with weight issues more than likely helped make them less threatening to their female target audience seeking a television “companion.”
In the early 1990’s, Ricki Lake’s magic was that she filled the void for a burgeoning youth audience, taking on subjects like “Mom You Think I Look Like A Sideshow Freak” as seriously as Couric (who at that time was on the Today Show) took wild guesses at what the word, “internet” meant (worth watching, by the way.)
Interestingly, men have largely been unsuccessful in the role of daytime confidant except for Phil Donahue, whose cult of personality is legendary and who pioneered the concept of “confessional” television.
“Phil’s success was almost entirely based on his personality,” says Donna Somerville, a former Donahue producer and veteran of other shows including the Joan Rivers Show. “Phil is innately curious about people, and he had a heart for his audience, at a time when women at home didn’t feel like they were heard. He just knew how to relate to people on a very human level.”
20th Century Fox is banking on Lake’s old (and now older) audience being able to reconnect with her and her evolved brand story — while picking up a new audience tired of Ellen Degeneres’ now tedious variety show. “Before, Ricki was 24. Now she’s 43, been through a divorce, did online dating, is remarried, has two kids and a blended family – in other words she’s had this very accessible, relatable life that everybody else has had.”
Relatable. The cult of personality is as much about the branded persona as it is about an audience being able to relate – or believe they can relate – with the host.
It was certainly a point that both Ricki Lake and Katie Couric underscored at last July’s LA press tour.
“I’ve experienced a lot of things in my own life that I think we’ll be talking about,” said Couric, in answer to a reporter’s query. “Having gone through losing a spouse at an early age and having to learn all about cancer, and having to navigate dating in your 40s and 50s. Right now, I am caring for my mother who’s 89, after my dad passed away last summer. So I feel like a lot of the things that I am going through in my life are relatable.”
Lake similarly summons life’s hardships as the core of her qualifications. “I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been 260 pounds. I’ve been 120 pounds. But I do think there’s a relatability and there’s a trust that I’ve built with the work I’ve done.”
Lake’s competitive advantage may just be her relative ordinariness in comparison with Couric’s hard news and serious journalist pretensions. Lake and her team are also making innovative (for television) use of new media and grassroots organizing with which to further extend the Ricki Lake brand.
“They can get together under this ‘Friends of Ricki’ umbrella and become more committed to the brand and the experience. The offline community becomes a natural extension of the online community,” says Brown, who was instrumental in the development of the new show.
All this emphasis on the hosts might make you think the content takes a backseat. For her first show, Couric’s pulling out the big guns and bringing on Jessica Simpson and Sheryl Crow, while Lake is doing an entire program featuring born-again virgins. “It sparks your interest, doesn’t it?” asked Lake to a roomful of journalists,“… a little?”
“At the end of the day, who do you want to spend the hour with,” says Brown. “I think viewers will make that decision, certainly within the first month of the show.”
It’s hard not to notice the slight smirk on people’s faces when facebook’s struggling IPO comes up.
The fact is, we had all begun to believe that the juggernaut was like the Oprah of internet startups: everything little thing she did was magic.
However, like Oprah, facebook began to get a little creepy and talk as if they had discovered the formula for world peace.
In a recent interview with Charlie Rose, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg tried to explain their business model, and it didn’t seem like anyone — least of all they themselves – could understand it.
(transcript courtesy, Charlie Rose Show)
Charlie Rose: Is your sense that the future belongs to social networking, that that’s the future?
Mark Zuckerberg: I think that a big piece of it is –
Charlie Rose: Finish that.
Mark Zuckerberg: It’s not everything.
Sheryl Sandberg: Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg: I mean, if you think about it, in your own life, right, with all the things that you do, how much — how many of the things that you do are better when you’re doing them with other people or with your friends? Probably a lot. But not everything, but a big piece of that.
Charlie Rose: Almost everything.
Mark Zuckerberg: And I think that we can help power that. But for all of those things, then, you know, some of them we’re going to build ourselves, right, so the core experience where I can go learn stuff about you, right, based on what you’ve shared, we’re going to build that piece, right. The core piece where you can see all of the stuff that’s going on with all of your friends that they wanted to share. We’ll build that piece.
Charlie Rose: Yeah.
Mark Zuckerberg: But the piece where, you know, you go to try to consume a specific type of content, right, I want to see what news my friends are reading. There will be newspapers.
Sheryl Sandberg: This is why this matters, right, because we can win along with lots of other people winning.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.
Sheryl Sandberg: And that is totally different, I think about the strategy of what we’re trying to build.
Charlie Rose: What don’t you want — go ahead, finish.
Sheryl Sandberg: So we can — if — if news becomes more social, that’s great for Facebook if it happens with our technology. But –
Charlie Rose: Because you’re the great connector of the world.
Sheryl Sandberg: — it is great for the Washington Post and the New York Times and the Huffington Post and anyone who chooses to use our technology which we make available to every news service out there. We’re not trying to replace everyone or do everything. We want to enable everyone — everything to be more social for everyone else.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah, I think — it’s actually — it’s a lot more extreme even than you’re saying. I mean, take —
Sheryl Sandberg: It’s always more extreme.
What’s always “more extreme”? What “it” is seems to vary for Zuckerberg and Sandberg:” it’s” the brand, “it’s” what the brand is doing, “it’s” where the brand is going. Nevertheless, how is that going to change how facebook remains relevant into the future? Was facebook’s stock over-valued because we had all somehow believed that its ubiquity, the very fact that so many people are addicted to it has made it so invaluable? There are plenty of tech companies that believed that about themselves and lost.
If anything, facebook has perhaps only just discovered that what began as a college computer experiment has lost a considerable amount of traction. Zuckerberg and Sandberg’s wide-eyed optimism only underscores that there’s a frightening lack of vision and introspection with facebook.
Facebook, in the jargon of the industry, is “people-centric,” but an increasing number of people are realizing that they’re kind of getting sick of people and want to begin organizing their information diet with more “topic-centric” networks.
Yes, facebook does let you explore topics through your friends and their links. But Pinterest, which facebook conveniently absorbed, is very much in that category, which would lead one to believe that they saw the writing on the wall with their existing model. Pinterest lets you look intelligent and artistic – without words.
The fact is facebook is ripe to become a direct marketers dream, with all the up-to-the-second updates of people’s daily lives. They have more information about everyone than can ever be imagined, all because most people can’t keep their mouths shut.
Advertisers are still on the fence regarding the benefits of facebook advertising. General Motors pulled ads from facebook (the day before their IPO, no less) insisting that the strategy simply didn’t pay off. In another crushing blow to facebook’s ego, sources indicate that GM cited better results from Google’s AdSense.
So if facebook really wants to prove they can stay relevant and pull those stocks up, they would be wise to start talking strategy – like, now. Never mind that their users will feel duped. Just what did you think facebook was doing this for – as a public service?
That may be just be the problem.
Last Monday was a virtual bloodbath.
I “unfriended” first twenty people, then another fifteen, until altogether I killed off seventy people from my list of facebook friends. What at first felt daring began to feel strangely thrilling.
Less thrilling, however, was the recent news that, unbeknownst to anyone, facebook had been spying on our browsing history. Furthermore, a study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology revealed that a large number of human resources professionals say they find facebook to be a useful way to evaluate potential candidates for employment.
Is our facebook page really a representation of who we are?
When Thoreau wrote that he had “never found a companion more companionable than solitude,” he more than likely did not mean one in which we are texting and tweeting, or sifting through status updates.
It was while contemplating this that I began to take a closer look at my list of facebook friends. I discovered that I didn’t actually know many of them while others were the classic, “let’s reconnect” friends who then vanish. So I did exactly what late night host Jimmy Kimmel does every year as a quasi-national event: the giddy deletion of all those empty connections on facebook. Who really needs 500 friends anyway, especially if they never talk to you?
B.F. – Before Facebook — we had a just a few friends who we saw regularly. We talked to on the phone (texting didn’t exist) or we exchanged hand-written letters. They were letters written just for you.
That is all distant memory now – au revoir U.S. Postal Service. Now we get the US Weekly version of our friends’ lives with status updates meant for hundreds to see, a veritable smorgasbord of the esoteric and random; Of rants and raves. Of boasts and boorishness.
The status update has essentially become shorthand for saying, “I’m alive and I am actually doing/thinking something that (I hope) you’ll find interesting.” That “something” becomes something by virtue of it being posted to facebook. The minutiae of our lives is now recorded and archived forever.
What once was forgotten is now unforgettable, no matter how great or how insignificant.
Every night on my bus commute home, over half of the passengers are women and many are reading status updates and images of people’s Saturday night exploits with the utmost concentration — what has now been termed “creeping.” Women, it seems, are preternaturally fascinated by what everybody else is doing.
So is it wrong for me to say “I like you a lot but I don’t need to know what you’re doing everyday?” Does that in fact make me less of a friend? More importantly, are you less of a person if you don’t post anything at all?
Of course, our facebook identity is nothing more than the “face” we want the world to see. We generally don’t see the loneliness, loss, or heartbreak but when we do, it feels more like a hollow plea that begs the question: why the hell are you putting it here?
It may be almost impossible in an age where everyone is clamoring to to be heard above the din of everyone else talking about themselves. But in the end, all that communication is like whip cream: sweet but empty. The status update becomes little more than an arrow, one that points at us.
In the end, all that communication is like whip cream: sweet but empty. The status update becomes little more than an arrow — one that points at us.
It beckons to us saying, “Here I am. Over here.”
And so, seventy fewer friends later, I am left to wonder: is it too late to go back to not knowing what my friends are feeling or doing until they tell me — and only me? Like the “slow food” movement, can we go back to a slower time of friendship?
When Thoreau wrote that he had “never found a companion more companionable than solitude,” he more than likely did not mean one in which we are texting and tweeting, or sifting through status updates. Rather, he meant that now almost quaint notion of completely private and unselfconscious musings on life’s inexorable passage, the experiences which occur with no one ever knowing or needing to know.
And is that OK, can we survive without life’s rich pageant ever being posted to facebook?
Of course we can, and hopefully we can discover what that means without feeling the need to chronicle our every role in that pageant. Besides, I’m not so sure I really want to remember everything that happened to me, and more than likely you’ll be far better off without me telling you about it — even on facebook.