On a recent trip on Metro-North to New York City, I happened to glance at the people sitting across the aisle from me. In one form or another, they were all digitally connected to the world. From reading on a Kindle, to texting, to sharing files on a laptop, they were all deeply immersed in some aspect of the digital world. It really made me pause and think about how interconnected we are with the world and how flat it has become.
I started talking with the woman across the seat from me. She was a fifth-grade teacher in Chappaqua. We began discussing how connected her students were, with several of them already being conversant on Facebook. She also mentioned how most of them could now use Powerpoint with some proficiency.
My son is 19 years old and constantly uses Facebook. When he broke up with his girlfriend, the first thing he (and she) did was to change their (respective) Facebook status. The way that students use Facebook is very different from how we use it as adults. Maybe that”™s the power of Facebook ”“ its flexibility and adaptability to its audience. While as adults, we constantly access fan pages and comment on various posts, students pay markedly less attention to fan pages and are constantly bouncing back and forth on each other”™s walls. Their willingness to share their thoughts and pictures about all aspects of their lives is indicative of their openness toward social sharing.
When my company does a Facebook-based campaign for a client, one of the key parameters in the planning of that campaign is defining the target audience. Almost all aspects of a campaign differ when it”™s directed toward a younger, rather than an older audience. Generally, the most pronounced areas of differences involve visuals, Timeline and content.
What”™s particularly notable is that more than 350 million Facebook users regularly access the application via a mobile device ”“ a potentially huge source of revenue for Facebook. This is a significant subset of the entire mobile market, which is expected to exceed 1.7 billion users by 2016, making it a place of enormous potential.
Mobile strategies require the delivery of quality content that”™s concise and easy to understand. When this content evokes an emotional response ”“ particularly sharing and encouraging friends to participate, it can be incredibly effective. The social aspect is arguably the primary reason why mobile commerce and location-based marketing have grown so quickly.
Showrooming is a new and rapidly growing practice in which consumers visit a retailer, examine the product(s) in person, often photographing them for later reference and then making their purchases online ”“ sometimes with a rival retailer. It”™s a practice that stores have to increasingly grapple with and one that is expected to rapidly grow. It can be quite serious for the retailers who spend much time, effort and money to bring shoppers into their stores only to see them buy a product from another vendor ”“ one who is usually online. Since many of these online vendors don”™t have to contend with the overhead of a brick and mortar store, they can consistently sell their products for less money. Essentially, the stores are in danger of becoming showrooms for the online vendors.
Some chains like Target, Best Buy and Walmart are actively seeking to combat showrooming. One solution Target is considering provides special discounts to buyers of certain products. This is readily possible since it actively tracks the purchases of most of its regular customers. RetailMeNot just released an iPhone app designed to “keep highly motivated customers ready to make a purchase within their retail stores” by utilizing a smart mobile coupon strategy. These retailer responses fly in the face of the numerous mobile price-checking apps including the one developed by Amazon (who also has the resources to withstand this counterattack).
At this point, no one knows who will win this rapidly evolving situation, only that changes will rapidly be forthcoming in the retail market. What we can be sure of, however, is that social media will continue to play an increasingly important role in both our interconnected digital world and the real world ”“ even while riding on a train to the city.
Bruce Newman is the vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel. He is also a social media strategist and the designer of a new service, wwWebevents.com. Follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the Productivity Institute blog. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
