All aboard!

Google needs to brand itself. For years the search engine has been the main entrance to the Internet, by virtue of being a great product and becoming incredible popular; so much so that the term Google became a verb, a synonym for online search. As big and successful the company turned up to be, it also became invisible, like a commodity service.
But with the advent of Social Media, Google started facing substantial competition. People are now getting access to content on the Internet through peer-to-peer recommendations and mobile apps, negating the exclusive need for Google searches. The search engine stopped being that invisible, almighty entity on the Internet to become another choice in the presence and in contrast to its Social Media competitors. In that context, Google needs to brand itself to compete against new ways of online discovery and to talk about its advantages to users and potential ones. In my opinion, that's why you may bump into one of its ads on a train or on billboards. Once an invisible giant, Google now needs to have a voice and a personality.
The competition is for conquering users who would make sense of the advertising space search engines and social media platforms sell, but ultimately, it's also for converting every single human being into an Internet user, and for that they need to go and look for them where they have always been: on the streets.

Social Media people, look what's on TV

The people at ABC Copywriting blogged about the recent @ShippamsPaste social media case, a company who was delivering tweets 'in an engagingly naïve tone with adventurous spelling and punctuation'. It is a very interesting analysis, worth reading. The piece of thinking that struck me the most was this one:

'The social content that people genuinely respond to is much closer in spirit to a traditional interruptive TV campaign than it is to ‘engagement’ – however that hazy term is defined.'

I think it depends on the case, but it could be true. Creative and disruptive TV commercials work and have been doing so for decades. They have been developing a communication style that proved successful, regardless the lack of interactivity of the medium. Today, the same creative logic still applies to any type of communication platform -TV or online-; the message that manages to get people's attention, wins.

Prepare for change

Digital Life: Today & Tomorrow from Neo Labels on Vimeo.

This infographic about 15 facts about the internet in 2015 made me think about the forecasting of change and how it has become a cultural convention we live by. I wonder, why does everything have to change? Technologically speaking, why the future has to be different?

Gadgets have their own features and programmes, and these are languages. Interactive media changes in relation to how the user uses it, so the language changes all the time and we have to adapt to it. Communication gets broken all the time. Some people adapt and some give up in the process. For example, some good friends I used to communicate via Facebook with have stopped using it because they didn't want to invest time in learning the new rules and our connection broke up. I ended up communicating with those who didn't give up and adapt.

All these constant changes, are they needed? Maybe it's just because information technology has hit the consumer market so then media is treated as a commercial product at the mercy of the laws of competition, and that promotes constant innovation. But at what cost? Changes on the flavour of a soda doesn't affect us much, but changes in the tools and languages we use to communicate online jeopardizes the construction of our identity and our social relations.

Buy and tell?

I recently discovered Payvment, the social ecommerce platform for Facebook, through this article in Fast Company (worth reading to understand how Payvment works). This application is fuel for an issue I've been currently thinking about, which has to do with online identity profiles. For example, it's easy to recognize our Facebook profile as our social profile, and Linkedin as our professional profile - which makes sense for them to be separated in different platforms, as those worlds are made of different rules of behavior, etiquette and content. But what about our profiles as consumers? Does it belong to our social sphere, or it has to be a separated one? Do we want to share everything we buy with others? Are we defined socially by what we buy? The answer seems pretty simple in today's world... but I'm still thinking about it.

I am, therefore I exist

"Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world,a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again."

Goodbye Second Life. We learned how to be ourselves in the cyberspace. We're not scared anymore to show our life on The Internet as it is in real life. What made Facebook outstanding was the fact that it offered a platform that served as a ground for this social experiment and transition, incorporating a golden rule to play the game: you have to be yourself to let others recognize you and interact with you.
Despite all the social goodness that pushes transparency to rule the Internet, I wonder how much of this transforming movement we also owe to the commercial web. e-commerce has been growing stronger and transforming economies over the past years, and as it turns out, you also need your real identity to pay by credit card. It's just that now we're looking at both sides of the coin.