In a cyber-friendly world, be careful what you wish for — you just might get it on sale.
This week at Social Media Week New York, Huffington Post’s Bianca Bosker moderated Reading Is No Longer Fundamental: The Shift To Visual Vocabulary (hosted by JWT) by engaging industry leaders from JWT, Nokia, and Curalate. Among the various topics surrounding the visual vocabulary discussion was a new model of marketing utilizing visual social media images procured from Instagram, Pinterest, and Buzzfeed.
Apu Gupta, CEO and Co-founder from Curalate, stated that “the shift from people and places to networks about things” is now here. According to the Pew Research Center, the social media users behind the “networks about things” have been classified into three categories: the creators, curators, and online image creators. Creators take pictures of themselves, curators post pictures found online and post to sites used for sharing images with others, an online image creators are a little of both. Which one are you?
The endless surge of social media “exhaust” allows companies, such as Brandwatch, to work with more than 700 leading brands and agencies in monitoring and identifying key insights from text-driven social media. Indeed, the current visual images created by curators and creators presents additional opportunities for businesses to partner with social media. Target and Nordstrom have utilized specific consumer-driven images displayed on Pinterest. Nordstrom has effectively created store merchandizing displays based on those most frequently “pinned” items.
Simply put, brands now know exactly what you want because you have told them! This, of course, is based on the assumption that all the ‘pinned’ items are analogous to a Facebook ‘Like,’ as opposed to a snarky “OMG” or the elusive “dislike.”
Craig Hepburn, Global Head of Digital & Social at Nokia, observed, “The biggest challenge is managing the images themselves.”
Hepburn also asserted that even news articles are being written entirely around images, while Gupta added that that is now a necessary to restore ”context to content.” Will Palley, Trends Strategist at JWT offered this advice, “Brands need to be judicious about the images they use.”
It is evident that we live in a transparent world — even President Obama was busted taking a selfie. So the next time you pin, post, tweet, your fabulousness consider what you have released to the cyber universe. In a final comment, Hepburn conceded, the “Biggest challenge is going to be around reputation management and privacy.”
Allison Heaps is corporate wellness advocate living in New York. In her spare time, she practices yoga, runs marathons, and sings jazz. She is a master’s candidate at NYU with a concentration is organizational effectiveness. Contact her here.
