The landscape keeps changing, but accept it and roll with the punches. The payoff could be big for your firm.
In media, the only constant is change, and here’s what we’ve got our eyes on for the coming year at Zweig Group and across the AEC industry.
Live video:
- What started out as a handful of piggybacked apps (Meerkat, Periscope, etc.), tied to various other systems has become a native functionality on almost all major platforms. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all carry this feature and it’s gaining the attention of marketers, subject matter experts, and an ever-broadening viewership.
- Our own Mark Zweig has been known to make an appearance on the Zweig Group Facebook Livecam, talking about everything from A/E industry news to inspirational ideas. The greatest thing about Facebook Live is that once completed, the video can be made available on your page indefinitely.
Social commerce:
- Your customers are already there. Why make them leave their favorite platform to buy your product? An increasing number of services are becoming available across many of the major apps to expand the reach of your e-commerce campaign. Zweig Group is currently testing this on Facebook with a few of our AEC industry books and guides. While I’d like to make the store more prevalent on the page, this entry into social commerce is nice. You can even set up your store within Facebook if you don’t have a provider.
Real-time data:
- The gap between data collection and delivery is shrinking daily. We want immediate access to real-time information. When major news breaks, consider how quickly Twitter picks up on it versus the major news outlets. Everyone is a reporter, editor, and broadcaster in real time. Our access to live content is unprecedented but that brings up major considerations on quality, truth, and spin, so tread skeptically and search many sources.
Topic based information delivery:
- The sanctity of the major media outlets has been lost with the advent of the #hashtag. Hashtags and keywords tie various subjects together by way of content rather than source. Google, Twitter, and Facebook users search the internet at large for a particular subject and pull content from various news sources, blogs, social comments, and scholarly sources. Marketers use hashtags and keywords to tie content from multiple platforms to a single source or provider. In the coming months you might find yourself searching #infrastructure #trump #maga.
These are only a few of the latest trends we’ve been working on and experimenting with in Zweig R&D. I’d love to hear your experience with any of these or others. Find me socially @jaythornton000.
Jay Thornton is Zweig Group’s director of IT and e-commerce. He can be reached at jthornton@zweiggroup.com.
This article is from issue 1197 of The Zweig Letter. Interested in more management advice every week from Mark Zweig, the Zweig Group team, and a talented list of other guest writers? Click here to subscribe or get a free trial of The Zweig Letter.
