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In my book “Click” one of the things that we did which was really fascinating was we
did this early adopter analysis. So we had this thought. That if, with this massive set
of data, information on ten million Internet users and what they're doing, we could take
a site that’s exploded in growth and roll our data back to before that site was popular.
So, as an example, we went to Youtube, October, 2005, before most of us had even heard of
what Youtube was. And we looked at the psychographic segmentation of users of Youtube that month,
in October, 2005. And we found that there are three segments that popped within our
psychographic segmentation system. There were groups like the Junga Jarati [?]and the Bohemian
Mix, and another group called money and brains.
What was interesting is we then went to a bunch of other 2.0 sites and we did the same
thing: rolled the data back before it was popular. And those same three segments came
up time and time again. So, what we could do now is take those three segments, put them
together, and reverse search our data backwards to see what’s hot today. So we’ve done
that – I did that just recently, just a few months ago, to see what are the trends.
And one of the overarching trends that I saw in the data which I found very interesting,
is this movement of those individuals, those early adopters, away from crowd sourcing and
back to curation. Especially when we talk about online multimedia.
So these guys, it looks like they're telling us that there’s so much content out there,
they're seeking an editorial layer to tell them what to watch. It wasn’t good enough
just going with what’s most popular on a website or using a site where it’s more
of a social bookmarking methodology. They were looking for the editor to tell them:
these are the top things to watch. So I think that’s gonna be interesting going forward.
Because now we still talk so much about crowd sourcing, and we’ve almost sounded the death
knell of curation or editorial content. I think there’s still a place for it. So as
marketers, we're gonna have to look towards that interplay and how we can adjust our marketing
plans accordingly.