Influx

There was a time when products were launched after first being seeded with the cool kids in NYC and LA, but as we know, the world is now post-geographic.

Cool communities no longer exist just in physical spaces, they can be found clustered together virtually.

Geography is the way we tend to orient ourselves around most things- we’ve always thought of traditional media in geographic terms (local cable, local newspapers, radio, OOH, etc) and some people even want to convert digital media to geographic entities.

Peter Warden, the creator of Open Heat Map did a great job in a recent blog post of explaining the rise of Twitter, this phemom that defied the laws of geography and sold itself on the broad appeal of the “Silicon Valley dream”, as Peter explains..

I’d also never thought of Twitter as an aspirational
service, but Neha nailed the atmosphere of the early days. There was an
air of exclusivity, of access to an interesting group of Valley
rockstars, that gave people a reason to check it out. This feels a lot
like the way that Facebook started at Ivy League colleges and then
opened up progressively to lower-status groups with the promise of
mixing with a ‘better class’ of people. That might explain why
companies like Google have such a hard time launching similar services,
catering to the masses they can’t pretend they’re exclusive, but it
bodes well for Quora’s approach.

The reality of its rapid adoption all over the country is hard to
square with its image as an exclusive Valley club, but maybe that
contradiction is the sign of exquisite marketing. Apple gives their
users that same sensation of belonging to an elite, even as they sell
products in malls across the country. Twitter tapped into people whose
dreams were in Silicon Valley, wherever they were in the world.”

The future of media planning depends on a deep and rich understanding of target audiences and communities that exist post-geographically and the secret is finding surprising and interesting ways to bring these communities together to participate as richly as they do in the geographic world.

Posted by Ed Cotton