About Josh Spear
Josh Spear is an entrepreneur, blogger and one of the youngest marketing and communication strategists in the world. He’s a founding partner at Undercurrent, a digital think-tank based in NYC that provides planning, strategy and ideation services to global brands looking to engage a new generation of human beings that were Born Digital. Undercurrent clients include some of the world’s most respected brands like Pepsi, Ford, BMW and CNN.
In addition to Undercurrent, Josh is the Publisher of the trend-spotting blog joshspear.com which has a network of writers across the world unearthing trends in art, design, eco-sustainability, consumer products and the future of digital media and advertising. Josh was also recently nominated by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.
Presentation Notes
In his presentation at the Pow Wow, Josh started by introducing the concept of a generation born digital and what this means. It means this generation is always connected, always on and knows no other way. This generation does not know what it’s like to live without a laptop and a cell phone. They rely on the internet for information, community, shopping and sharing.
Josh focused on the opportunity within our industry. In his opinion, no one in the snowsports industry is truly doing anything remarkable when it comes to social media. Josh mentioned The North Face and their weather iphone app as something that stood out and that was launched early on.
Overall Messages
It’s not the recession, you just suck. Stop blaming the economy and start looking at new ways to reach your audience and to convey your brand message. See the post referred to here: http://outspokenmedia.com/online-marketing/you-just-suck/
Play by the rules of social media. Authenticity is key.
The way to stay relevant: REINVENTION.
Cool findings
Technological advancements presented include augmented reality. We looked at the following example of an interactive digital hologram:
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality
There are incredible opportunities for the snowsport industry to use this technology in product hangtags and trail maps, for example.
http://labs.digg.com/
Digg ( http://digg.com) is an immensely popular social media website that ranks news links based on votes from registered users.
It’s a place for people to discover and share content across the web, from the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog. Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. Every article submitted to Digg has a count of how many Diggs the story has received. For every registered user that clicks “Digg it” the count goes up one. If a story reaches the tipping point, then it gets promoted to the homepage.
The labs provide a broader (and deeper) view of Digg. A lot of stuff gets submitted to Digg every day, Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities.
http://www.threadless.com/
A community-based t-shirt company with an ongoing, open call for design submissions. No t-shirt gets produced unless it gets a minimum number of users committed to buying it. Threadless churns out dozens of new items a month — with no advertising, no professional designers, no sales force and no retail distribution. And it’s never produced a flop. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million — with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Though the exact revenue number is not disclosed — it seems fair to assume that Threadless sold more than $30 million in T-shirts last year.
http://www.omgpop.com/
OMGPOP (formerly known as iminlikewithyou) is a free online multiplayer game site that specializes in social games. The Company started in 2006 as iminlikewithyou, a place for people to play games to meet each other and in 2009 changed its name to the shorter OMGPOP. The site has generated over 50 million plays for popular games like blockles, draw my thing and balloono. As of today, 1,122,274 hours «wasted».
http://icanhascheezburger.com/
A hugely popular site dedicated to lolcat. A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English—a dialect which is known as ” lol kitteh,” or “kitty pidgin” and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. Josh showed how this seemingly random internet language is immensely popular and how thousands of people are dedicated to its practice.
http://www.4chan.org/
4chan is a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images. 4chan’s collaborative-community format is copied from one of the most popular forums in Japan, Futaba Channel. Different boards are dedicated to different topics, from Japanese anime, manga, and culture to videogames, music, and photography. Users do not need to register a username before participating in the community. As a result, this site has content that is EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE but is where many trends begin. The World’s Most Influential Person Is…
The winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World’s Most Influential Person is moot. The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey.
Since moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world. All details here: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1883644,00.html?iid=redirect-time100
Other links referenced:
http://www.umbrellatoday.com/
Sends you a text message telling you if you need to take an umbrella with you today. Why did an umbrella company not think of that?
http://hitmelater.com/
This is a snooze button for your email. When you’re too busy to respond to an email right away, just forward it to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll resend it to you 24 hours later. Would be a perfect sponsorship for KIT KAT or some other brand that is associated with taking a break.
http://diaroogle.com/
The premiere toilet search engine! Diaroogle helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone. A P+G toilet paper brand later developped a similar concept.
http://playfoursquare.com/
A site dedicated to helping you find new ways to explore the city.
http://remix.nin.com/
Example of a super niche site with a huge following. Thousands of members online at any given point to remix nin songs.
For more on Josh Spear, visit his blog: http://joshspear.com/
