Media Singularity The Future Of Marketing Communication, Persuasion and Mass Influence

I think everyone realizes now that one of the biggest challenges in marketing is that there is simply too much noise. There are too many outlets blasting too many (irrelevant) messages into an already over communicated marketplace. And interestingly enough I think that the ultimate solution to the problem will come from buyers not marketers.

Please note that what follows is an idea in progress.

In this post I'm going to steal a very big word, singularity. In 1965, I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", he believed that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers. The first improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent. That increasing ability to become more intelligent might lead to an exponential increase in intelligence. In 1983, Vernor Vinge called this event "the Singularity." Futurist Ray Kurzweil has probably been the most visible proponent of the idea. This brief and less than complete description of Technological Singularity is important because studying The Singularity is what brought me to this idea around messaging, marketing, and mass influence in the future.

Currently in media there is massive fragmentation. Social media is making a big move and is facilitating over communication. Fundamentally everyone has a megaphone with which to shout into the noisy marketplace with ideas that may or may not be relevant or even right, but they are heard at some level by some people and increasingly, a lot of people.

So as I studied The Singularity it occurred to me that the answer to how do you get your message to the masses and have it be heard most likely won't be answered by us, it is much more likely to be answered by the individuals collectively that we hope to communicate to. In fact, it is my belief that another form of singularity will occur, in which potential customers will become evermore sophisticated in their ability to filter and consolidate information. As they become more sophisticated, they create individual influence streams from which they get all of their information, information that is highly personalized and highly selected. Rather than trying to increase the number of people they follow they become increasingly selective about who they receive information from ultimately reducing the noise while becoming much more connected to the channel through which they receive information. RSS was the first glimpse and promise of the idea that you could consolidate the information that you wanted into one single feed. In social media FriendFeed is trying to do that. And overall web wide Twine is also trying to do it. But for most consumers they don't go far enough.

I don't think that either of them will get it fully right either. As broadband gets better and video tools get better, video will play an increasing role as the medium of choice. And individuals will look to those they trust to tell them where and what they should look at with increasing regularity. The result will be micro stations if you will that are consolidated feeds of interactive video that allow the person in 5-7 minutes two or three times a day to get a view of what is happening in the world that they care about. This will also result in a sort of digital protectionism that restricts information. Outwardly, people will still identify with groups, they'll be Republicans or Democrats or hunters or opportunity seekers but they won't want to hear from the pundits, they'll want to hear from THEIR pundits and the people those people recommend and they'll want it delivered concisely through video in one single easy to swallow fashion in under 10 minutes. Video will have to be interactive so that they can see and gather the information that is being discussed. People will be expected to communicate their important of ideas rather than in 140 characters like Twitter, maybe in 45 seconds or less.

What all this means for marketers and for salespeople is that they must be able to develop into real thought leaders and trusted consolidators of information. If they are not they will lose their voice and their ability to broadcast. The singularity of the media distribution channel and the consumer will result in a highly efficient, super knowledgeable consumer of information. One created by over marketing and over communicated who through overwhelm creates and evolves a single superior source of information based on self selection and intense specialization of interest combined with strong source prejudice.

Right now each of us must become the most visible, most credible, most important communicator we can to develop a real following of people who want to hear what we have to say. We have to be extremely careful what we filter and allow into the aggregate because once we let something in that feels like the old style of marketing or noise, we are not only tuned out but shut out of the channel altogether.

The goal of all of this by the listener is to shut out all attempts at unwanted outside influence and rely more internally on the recommendations of what is important from those that matter to them. It is a sort of "small but focused" crowd source for information they care about.

Social media is your tool and your chance to get known and develop your following and to perfect your messaging and presentation skills. I doubt you have more than five years before you see this massive shift in how people consume information simply because it is unlikely that we can continue to take in the amounts of information we do and filter it all without focus and consolidation of they information into only what we want to hear.

This thought is not complete yet and as I keep thinking about it and unraveling what I'm seeing, I'll clean up the idea, but I'd love your thoughts.

Comments

[Ramin]

Interesting, I never thought about it that way, and it's a completely new idea to me.
The scenario you talk about seems kind of sectarian to me, with people only getting their information only from the sources that reflect their own views.
Or tribealization (I know that's not a word), kind of what Seth Godin wrote about in his book.
My main takeaway from this is that whatever you really want to do with your life, there`s no better time to be vocal about it and talk about it.

What I don`t quiet agree with is:
"We have to be extremely careful what we filter and allow into the aggregate because once we let something in that feels like the old style of marketing or noise, we are not only tuned out but shut out of the channel altogether."

I don't think that if you generally provide good value and share relevant knowledge, then why some old style marketing should shut you out?

[Linda]

Dave,

I think you're on the right track with this. I find that in my own buying, I'm doing that already. I'm paying more attention to the people who are evolving as "thought leaders" and find myself much more interested in what they have to say.

On the other hand, I've found in my personal connections that aside from Facebook, most people in my daily life don't interact with social networking at all. They have no idea what a teleclass is, have heard of Twitter, but never used it and think YouTube is for kids or, at best, to find a Saturday Night Live skit.

How long do you think till video becomes even more mainstream? And how will the general population (who's not yet THAT into social networking) find their way there?

Love how you're thinking and how you're sharing your ideas and vision - you are one of the thought leaders I'm following!

[Rena Bernstein]

Dave,

You have certainly made me think.

While I do agree completely with the premise that the way we personally collect information is changing and will continue to do so, I feel that your theory may have gone too far.

I have said many times that I think in many ways Twitter is sort of a microcosm of social media itself. That's what's so amazing about it. Many of the answers about how people relate to social media as a whole can be found right there.

Twitter is a free flowing stream of ideas and thoughts that is different for every participant. As we choose to follow and unfollow people, we maintain control over our own communication, but only to the point of WHO we follow, not what they say.

If I narrowed my friends list down to eliminate all of those that I have ever disagreed with, leaving only the people I agree with all of the time, I would be left with only the echo of my own heartbeat.

The theoretical consolodated feeds that you mentioned are basically larger more involved versions of Twitter with more sources, media forms and more information streaming, all under our individual control. There would no longer be collective "schools of thought" because everything would all be based on individual prefrences.

I think that adding additional sources of information and threads to select from and filter through will not cause users to embrace selective information streaming, but rather recoil from it leaving them with only two choices: Nothing at all or giving control back to someone else to have them filter the info. That basically, would put us back to listening to the 10 o'clock news on one channel.

In this case, I dont think that more choices would be better. So many people are already frustrated by the NEED and confusion in filtering their own information that they abondon their Twitter accounts after only a month or two.

In my vision of future communication, I would like to see a "accountablity filter". One that would somehow prove or disprove information and automatically identify outright lies and scams. Sort of like a auto-Snoopes.com. You could set it on a sliding scale that would measure the contents against your tolerance for other peoples opinion and truth-streaching. It would measure the validity of a site the way search engines look at inbound links to measure authority.

All content below your setting on the "truthiness" scale (borrowed from Stephen Colbert)would be filtered out, like the get-rich-quick, opinionated political pundents and "add-4000-followers-a-day-automatically" stuff.

I dont think that any of this will happen any time soon, but I do think that SMM will continue to grow until people dont want to be in control anymore. And that may be sooner than you think.

BTW, I think these ideas would make an awesome Sci-Fi book!!

[Jerry Burkeen]

Dave,

Interesting toughts. I have been researching the concept of social media since I read your book , How to Sell When Nobody's Buying.

As I've looked at Twitter and Face Book, I'm finding that the people who use it at this point, put silly messages on it. "I'm taking the Kids to schoo." or "my spouse is sick today," things that are personal that have no importance to me or anyone outside their family. To invest the time to participate in this type of networking, when I'm trying to hit sales goals, seem wasteful.

I agree that we will need to be able to pick and choose our information sources, as we're bombarded by over 4,000 new bit of information daily. How that will develop seems to be coming from our personal cell phones. I have already picked out the type of news updates I find helpful, to be delivered directly to me.

When I meet with business owners, I find similar behavior. They get their news from a web-site, follow the news on 24 hour news stations, and have little to no time to communicate on twitter, or play on facebook.

Until the non-tech generation, however you want to define it, expires, we'll always find individuals who are resistant to communicating this way.