#TrendingTopics For Digital Media: What is in for 2020?
People don’t want to be supported by technology. People want to be supported by other people through technology.
Written by Isabelle Bedê, Social Media and Communications Manager at RYDE.
[Berlin, July 2019]
In the last couple of days, I have attended Tech Open Air (TOA), the leading tech festival in Europe, hosted at Funkhaus in Berlin. The conference brings together over 20,000 attendees and 150+ speakers who are thought-leaders in their fields — art, tech, media, and science. For instance, for the event this year, they gathered Steve Huffman (Reddit CEO), Alesia Braga (Quandoo CTO), Barbara Soalheiro (MESA Founder) and Ben Bradlee Jr. (Journalist and Writer, a former editor at The Boston Globe and part of the team on the Pulitzer Prize winner Spotlight case — yes ). In simple words: TOA is quite a big thing and a good place to check trends out.
During the conference, apart from the chilling and the mandatory networking, I took the time to confirm some of the trends that seem to be taking over communication in the digital sphere. To summarize the general feeling of what I’ve been paying attention to and that I could verify there, I can say this: people want to matter and want to build trustworthy relationships — being it with other living creatures, with things or with brands.
What does it mean for us, media professionals? We have to inhale and comprehend that. Most importantly, we have to communicate that we truly understand.
Here is what I spotted in a considerable fashion:
- Emotional Intelligence is important. Use it.
The popularization of Social Media and “share- everything mode” that we live in has enabled amazing things to happen, but it also has brought many other bad ones, such as social digital anxiety and depression. People want to talk to real people with real problems and feel that is okay to be “flawful”. At the conference, the creator of the hashtag Chris Messina has given a talk on The Technology of Better Humans, discussing how important it is for founders and entrepreneurs to use their emotional intelligence and influence to create better social media products, truly from people to people. As an example, he mentioned Instagram’s effort on adding features to support people with their mental health and to combat bullying.
At the conference, there were also many talks on mental health for creatives and digitalization anxiety, once more enhancing the need for preoccupation with emotional wellbeing (wherever and however it is portraited).
Naturally, the importance of this topic and trend reflects in media strategies, since we communicate and mediate it to everyone. We should use 100% from our emotional intelligence to content that connects with people in a more meaningful way — after all, it is made by people to people.
2. Build trust, build communities.
Following the emotional intelligence trend, building strong communities are a must if you want to create a loyal relationship between your brand and its audience, for example. I was already seeing a boom in the creation of Facebook groups, with people sharing valuable content and information among each other — not only general “life support groups”, but also professional and branded, like forums to improve knowledge and relations. I even saw that Facebook is hiring people to manage Facebook groups about Facebook (yes, a real actual job). I also saw that people are adding in their social media profiles that they manage groups on Facebook, and this ends up improving their professional value. Plus, there is a growth of job offers for Community Managers.
At TOA19, the term “community” was repeated many times among the most different talks, not only the ones focused specifically on branding or media.
All this is actually quite obvious: if you are a communicator, create communities!
3. Nano-Influencers, instead of “million followers” influencers.
These trends are consistent with each other. If people want to want to feel that it is okay and normal to be flawful, they will be influenced by someone that they can relate to. If a person seems more reachable and has a life more similar to ours, we tend to trust them more. For that matter, nano-influencers can communicate with your brand’s target group much better by creating a trust relationship.
People that create relevant content or that form opinions in a certain field are much more likely to spread what you want to spread, even if they have fewer followers. One million followers not necessarily mean better engagement.
Once, while promoting an influencer marketing campaign for a very popular app, I have used big influencers and nano-ones. They had to make their audience use a promotional code to publicize the brand and to generate money for them afterward. At the end of the campaign, the Top 3 most-successful actions (meaning, that received more money) were with influencers with up to 5k followers. The ones with more than 100k followers had about half of it.
4. Go visual or go home!
I suppose you know this already, but just a reminder: create visual content. People want dynamic media, and consumers are much more likely to understand and remember stuff if it is imagetic. Emojis are everywhere. Instagram is the fastest growing social media. Your little sister only watches youtubers. Generation Z rather communicate with images than texts.
So, peeps: create visual content. It is easy and facilitates storytelling.
5. JOURNALISM IS NOT DEAD!
This is the most exciting topic for me. At the Tech Open Air this years, there were quite a few topics on journalism and with journalists — something I don’t remember seeing it last year that much.
After the fake news phenomenon during the US elections in 2016, researches show that people got very skeptical with social media and are actually turning back to qualified journalism for relevant news. Again, people want things they can trust — in this case, content they can trust.
Conducting the interviews for my master thesis (which I am currently writing), I had a talk with Mateus Camillo, journalist and social media editor of Folha de São Paulo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil. He gave me a very valuable insight: after the intense Brazilian election this year, they actually got more subscribers to their online newspaper (even after the new President Bolsonaro attacked Folha in his first presidential speech).
To solve the generalized trust issue regarding information on the web, we need credibility. And for that, we turn back to professional journalism and qualified content creation.
Seeing talks on journalism during a tech and innovation conference confirms that these are exciting times for journalism, with new opportunities. As the journalist, Cal Fussman said in his How To Tell A Story talk at TOA, “the essence of a good story is always the truth”.
But of course, it is not exactly the same journalism as before — has to be digital native news-making.
Trying to summarize it…
People don’t want to be supported by technology. People want to be supported by other people through technology.
