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By Meredith Bunche and Brian Lau
Consumerism: the social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts.
If you’ve been listening to what our country is trying to tell you, consumer is on its way out. Sure, there will always be those of us who cannot help but to want (we’re not talking about want for food or necessities, but for MORE, for BIGGER cars and houses, excess). But what we’re hearing is the national collective consciousness choosing what used to be an “alternative” lifestyle that is becoming mainstream: that of less is more. Simple living as it’s also called. Eco-conscious. Buy local. Meatless Mondays. The terms for the choice of many to stop the cycle of simply buying because they can or buying because they feel like they should are increasing as fast as the movement itself. All of the aforementioned movements contribute to what is hopefully just the beginning of a re-awakening of appreciation…of making MORE out of less.
EMG is rooted in this very belief—from our 9/80 Fridays* to our work with the Ecology Center to our approach to client work. At EMG, making more out of less isn’t just practical, it’s a no-brainer—it’s smart. As we’ve evolved over the years and as the web continues to evolve, we’ve honed our skills to be able to take the most strategic and streamlined approach to our clients’ business needs and craft solutions that are versatile, sustainable and efficient. Efficiency doesn’t just mean impactful (which of course our campaigns are!), it means a solution that maximizes internal and external resources and works holistically and intrinsically within an organization, eliminating the need for extra time, money and resources.
EMG is taking this moment in time as an opportunity to focus on what is important in any marketing: the message and the story, backed by utility. We’ve seen tons of campaigns out there that sparkle and cause oohs and aaaahs, cost a million bucks and barely returned half of that. EMG believes that spending too much money is tantamount to wasting money, which is something by which we can simply not abide. We move forward with the goal of conservation, of everything, which we believe leads to conservation of relationships!
As a business, one would think that EMG would like consumerism, that we’d want customers to buy our goods and services in huge amounts, but we say NO WAY to consumerism , we don’t need it. Consumerism is defined as “the social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in ever greater amounts.” The past decade of excessive consumption followed by the major global economic collapse has proven this to be unsustainable. The world is coming to the realization that consumption has to be tempered to a moderate and sustainable level. We want our clients to think about maximization and cost-effectiveness and to those challenges we say “bring it on.” Who knows, maybe the pennies we help a client save could be the seed of something great.
Here’s some additional reading on the subject:
Let’s Discuss:
There are many online social networking sites out there and there are many avid subscribers and users of these networks. As popularity increases, so does the number of new social networking sites. Will these survive on Eyeballs alone?
EMG 30-Second Rundown:
In the television heyday there were 3 major networks which split to four with Fox’s move into the market in 1986. Less competition = more eyeballs. More eyeballs = bigger ad spends. The 4 major networks had an airwave monopoly controlling a popular medium that allowed advertisers to reach into living rooms. In the late ’90s through today, cable and satellite television providers have been adding more channels and splitting those audiences between an ever growing list of channels. More competition=fewer eyeballs. Fewer eyeballs=less revenue per network because advertisers have to split their spends across multiple networks to reach the same number of people. Are we currently witnessing a similar event in the online market space?
Google recently released Google Buzz as a social media platform to cut into twitter’s market share, and all before twitter has released a revenue generation model. Smart business move or is Google diluting their product offerings? We know how Google has monetized their search model. They have a whole slew of services around serving up ads on specific key word searches. Twitter on the other hand does not have a proven revenue model, so how will they endure?
EMG Takeaway:
What are the ways that twitter can make money based around their platform?
- In page ad serve. Ok, one of the easiest to come up with off the top of my head is serving ads on twitter pages or inter tweet ads. Simple, easy, but questionable in effectiveness. They could serve relevant ads based around tweets, but would you click on inter tweet ads or learn to tune them out after you get used to the format? I would liken these to display ad traffic. Not necessarily the highest converting traffic or the best bang for your buck, but with large volume users, they could probably generate revenue from this model.
- http://search.twitter.com - Follow a Google model and serve up ads based on search terms on their search feature. This is starting to look a little more promising, but still lacks the wide spread value that Google has. This is because twitter searches tweets and there aren’t as many people searching for products through a twitter search. This approach lacks that critical tie in like the pay per click campaigns have on a Google search where people are actually looking for general products and services.
- http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation - Twitter has an api that developers can tap into and pull feeds, but more importantly, set up interfaces to search twitter which makes it one of the biggest and arguably the most powerful social barometers around. It could be an invaluable tool for businesses and marketing agencies to interface with this api to research what the general population is tweeting about. This information becomes more and more valuable as the number of Tweeters goes up.
I have searched around and found many proposed revenue models for twitter and similar social networking sites. There is no way for us to tell exactly how they are going to make money until they actually do, but in the meantime we can use them for entertainment, staying connected, meeting new people and those of us in Marketing can use them as valuable tools in our day to day.
Final words:
The next time you are tweeting or reading someone else’s tweets, jump over to http://search.twitter.com and type in the first thing that comes to mind. Now start searching for terms relating to your business, your clients, your industry. At the very least it is extremely entertaining, but quite possibly a very powerful tool to help you shape your business and product offerings.
Questions for Discussion:
- Have twitter, and now Google, figured out a secret way to capitalize on people boasting their current state of mind and they are just waiting to unleash it on as at a later time, or are we going through dot com boom v2.0?
- Will Google’s Buzz cut into twitter’s market share, pulling people away from twitter and diluting the results of their “societal/cultural barometer”?
- What do you think will happen to the online social networking space as more and more ventures release social networking sites? Will people expand the networks they use, will the strong survive and the rest fail or will interest in social networks dwindle as people become over socialized?
- Will these social networks lose the critical mass that they needed to sell products or assemble the collective conscience that is needed to shape a marketing campaign?
…Only time will tell.
Culture is defined as - the art and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. Technology is changing the recording and dissemination of collective information. There is no better representation of this than the online Enterprise Content Management System. Because of the collaborative nature of these systems it is much easier to update content and keep your message current and valid; but it is also much easier to have conflicting content and incorrect versions of your content.
As a project manager I orchestrate the implementation of Enterprise Content Management Systems for a living. I have managed builds from the ground up and I have managed implementations of third party solutions. Every system out there is unique and each have strengths and weaknesses but there are certain issues that run across all of them. These issues aren’t necessarily flaws in the application but rather, they have to do with the intricacies of deploying information about an organization on a company-wide scale.
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