5 homework assignments from my PRSA keynote
Plus, the darkside of frictionless technology, making a digital twin of my office, and some hard truths about 2022
This week I shared the opening keynote at the PRSA Midwest District Conference featuring 200 attendees from 7+ states on the topic of “Social-First.” We talked about how humans aren’t great at predicting the future, but we can train ourselves to see the signals, give them context, and get in front of trends to help shape them for the better.
This is a topic I’ve been evangelizing for some time (even this newsletter is called Social Signals, right?), and I dug up a video interview from the 2009 PRSA Professional Practices Conference — where I suggested that social media was going to be the next big thing that folks in our industry need to pay attention to — and then paired it with the drastic rise in social media adoption and budget increases we’re seeing in social media in 2022.
I love helping folks look back to look forward. Because looking forward is the only way to lead.
In that spirit, I shared a framework we’ve developed at The Social Lights (psst —> work with us | open jobs ) for giving context to signals. It’s not enough to read about or hear about a new thing; you have to do something about it. Then we applied that framework to three trending areas — TikTok as the new Google, The Rise of BeReal, and Web3.
And I finished with a call to action on the future of socialand the role we all serve. We don’t have to be at the mercy of the trends and what happens next. Rather, we have a responsiblity to educate ourselves on where things are at today, diagnose where they’re headed tomorrow, and then help shape and guide them to make the future of social media better for us all.
If you were there and signed up for this newsletter as a result - HI! 👋🏻 If you missed the talk and want The Social Lights to come share what we’re doing in social-first marketing and how it can bolster your brand’s social media efforts, hit me up.
Meanwhile, here are some pieces of homework I highly suggest everyone should consider investing some time in:
Join BeReal. I’ll be your friend! Add me at @gregswan.
Join a brand’s Discord server and study how the community engages in the platform. Starbucks is a great one to start with: INVITATION LINK.
Download Sweet and get your first (free) NFT. Look into how brands are using it for tokens and access beyond just collectibles or investment.
Sign up for NFL All Day and get a free NFL collectible NFT. Study how collectors are using this new technology.
Join a simulacra.io Metaverse Meetup: 2nd and 4th Wednesday from 2-3PM CST. Note: no headset is needed and you can join from a Chrome browser on your laptop.
🚀 Social Signals
This week I absolutely loved this read about The Darkside of Frictionless Technology by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic on how the lack of education of how technology works today can impact creativity in these new mediums.
Key quotes:
“… Creativity is actually “a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice… [Creativity] seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra)… To speak fluently through a guitar, you have to submit to the rote practice of training your fingers to find each note of a given scale and its various positions, which is its own separate challenge and set of rigid rules. But even after you’ve locked in the muscle memorization, you must contend with the realities of a song and its chord progression. To make the instrument sing, you have to work within its constraints. Real, genuine musical expression is possible only when you’re innately familiar with the math and geometry of the instrument, and use its rules as a road map to get to where you want to go…”
“…I’m ashamed of occasionally acting like a huge baby when a tool of mine doesn’t work properly. On a recent trip to a new city, my phone could not precisely pin down my GPS location, and I cursed and blamed my phone for its failure in escorting me seamlessly to my destination. I could’ve taken a moment or two to learn about my new surroundings before arriving, thus generally participating a bit more in the physical world around me. But I didn’t, because I had an app for that. At their worst, our tools cultivate a relationship to the world around us where we are the main characters and what surrounds us—from people to things to our geography—are props or scenery.”
Beyond trademarks, one of our big recos for clients in building a future proof social strategy for Web3 is investing in digital twins. There were some big moves from Lowe's in that space this week worth noting:
…this digital twin showcases a future in which store associates can visualize and interact with nearly all of a store's digital data, giving them superpowers to optimize operations and localize plans to better serve customer needs. Also, in the coming weeks, Lowe's will open up part of its virtual 3D product catalog – used to populate its digital twin – to Omniverse users, to help them create new possibilities in their applications for retail and beyond.
This news comes soon after Google outlined a new process for creating 3D models from 2D pictures I would explore a bit. Bonus: it’s called LOLNeRF.
Yesterday I used the Polycam app to create digital twins of my living room, home office, and the TSL office space in Minneapolis. It took less than 3 minutes using ust my phone! All of these signals are small, next steps toward unlocking the digital layer on the physical world we’ll be interacting with in the long-term.
Also of note this week (and in a big move toward driving mainstream awareness of the metaverse via branded integrations), The Tonight Show launched a game in Fortnite via Samsung. You can go check it out for yourself here.
And… this week I will leave you with this good tweet:
See you on the internet!
Greg
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