Open Files: Nine Digital Trends for the Future

Every day a new social network is born and yet another dies. This makes spotting digital trends and tracking them to be challenging at times. However, I have found a system that works really well called Open Files. It was developed by George Stalk at the Boston Consulting Group (an Edelman client). It's become the framework for my latest talk, which I have been giving around the world.

Stalk tracks trends by breaking them down into three distinct buckets - faint signals that are here and now trends with real consumer movement and business models, a watch list - new directions that are emerging but may not be ready for primetime, and hallucinations, flashes that, if you squint, might vanish.

You can read a description of the nine big trends in my Open Files and peruse my deck over on Authentcities, the Edelman Digital blog. The trends include:

Faint Signals: The Cut and Paste Web, The Attention Crash, Digital Curators, Super Crunching and Collaboration

Watch List: Living Room 2.0. and Geek Markterers

Hallucinations: Digital Nomads and Data Leaking

Comments

[kraloyun]

Good news

Thank you for the informations.

[Oliver]

Hello Steve, it was a pleasure hearing your presentation and especially discussing the attention crash you brought up . Although already experienced with e-mail we are now entering a new quality of (over)flow. I think there'll be 3 ways to get through this:
1. ingnoring (which can't be an option)
2. social media processing (somehow the David Allen on interactivity)
3. stay with the flow (and wait until the messages reach you several times, thus being important - Stowe Boyd's notion)
However, it very much depends on how you channel all these infos - a renaissance for 'e-mail' based inboxes?