Mike Shaver, Director of Engineering at Facebook, was recently interviewed by Robert Scoble about some of the things they’ve been working on over there. In one exchange:
“We talk about relevance, but we also talk about impact. How can we make the next five seconds of looking at Facebook the most valuable? How do we make the next five seconds of the things you could see of your friends most valuable? I say sometimes that Facebook is built on the like button in that it is a very good way to give a piece of feedback that says, “I enjoyed the thing that you put up, I appreciate it, I saw it.” You don’t have to think about how to say, “I liked it.”
This is really interesting, and indicative of a few larger trends coming together:
- Social media and the speed at which information and actions happen on platforms like Facebook or Twitter. In any given five seconds, the amount of “things” going on in front of people’s eyes is huge, and it comes in many forms - friends’ actions, ads, brand photos, etc.
- There are now multiple opportunities (or missed opportunities!) to capture the attention of your audience.
- High levels of data allow us insight into customer behavior level at a granular level.
I’m going to go ahead and call this “Instant Marketing” for now.
Social Media = Speed + Volume
Social Media + Data = Continual, In-the-Moment Marketing Opportunities = “Instant Marketing”
Just throwing that out there.
