In a presentation I wrote while with JWT during its tenure on Microsoft I came upon an insight I called the “logged and tagged society.” It was intended to be a business insight identifying how employees at larger companies are somewhat interchangeable – with knowledge workers being replaced by armies of freelance soldiers with log-ons and access to tagged assets, information and data. But that was then…a couple of years ago. It’s still true but logged and tagged now is also extends to consumer life.
Facebook yesterday launched a new search tool called Search Graph which does more than count likes, it attempts to get one to personal proclivities faster. I tried to read the story but got a little tangled and bored and twitched away. That said, it is Facebook’s way of trying to improve search results keeping people on “the book” and making more of da monies. Using my logged and tagged lens, it’s their way of fighting through the tags and searchables.
As the searchable words and tags grow in this exponentially data driven world (Can I read any more big data stories before breakfast???), search will continue to become less accurate and in need of improvement. And as communications agents continue to spread the pop marketing fallacy that consumers own brands, this environment will create greater demand for brand planners. Brand planning is about returning control to marketing…not algorithm tweaking.
Peace!