How geolocation, local social networks, and mobile-on-hand tools move the game to the audience’s own place
Once the internet and mobile blooming got past, the insane merger of the largest multinational corporations and the massive acquisition of small agencies by the huge international groups in the early 2000′s, everyone thought that commercial communication would consolidate as the solo-voice that globalization criticisms predicted. It means, a global rhetoric, an only style, predefined formats and a standard distribution in the media, yielded by a few voices. The risk was extended by the standard nature of technology. Everyone used Nokia, the ‘dotcoms’ flew from Cupertino to every single home, and we spent hours watching the loading page of Hotmail.
Times doesn’t seem to be different now. Google is the father of everything (if not the big brother) and iPhone is getting drunk in every corner-bar going Dutch with his friend Android.
But the real change doesn’t come from technology, neither from the networks; the web and applications had to evolve from a broadcast message to a full collaborating environment. It’s the popular Social Media and we don’t need to talk about any longer.
Think globally, act locally.
There are two big agents who use this historic expression summing up their daily work. The first one comes from the system itself; the second one comes from the opposite direction, the main system criticism.
Nestlé International was accused many times of being an extremely huge company to be able to respect local markets and small communities, bringing the only thinking of western way of life and capitalism methods to unprotected areas. However, Nestlé’s executives have always defended the corporation showing that at least 40% of the company’s revenues come from local brands, both produced and distributed over every country or community they work in. They said to work globally but every single step they take is local, that is their interpretation, in their own words, of the mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’.
On the other hand, the second agent to use hold belief is the anti-globalization community itself. The term was coined by the activist David Brower in 1969 referring ecologist roots. Years later, the anti-globalization movement extended the meaning of the same idea; we can not change the world if we don’t start the fight in every little community first.
A real change in today’s context
This historical account is just a nice point to start. Not too long ago, the information interchange in the internet was one-way: from brand to costumer. Now, the fight is not in the mainland but in the little streets instead; users are interchanging information passing over the brands.
Anyway this is not the main issue. The point is the result of these tools: everything is more local than ever: social networks connect people who are near, no one wants to find transcontinental couples but persons in their own town in online dating services, people are leaving nicknames to take real names instead (see Facebook, Xing), the audience wants to show their real photo in profiles, 3G networks are concentrating applications involving local services, bloggers are putting maps of their physical locations in their posts, technology is helping the local political debate, and local events are taking power through the same social networks.
Not enough? We are missing the most important point, which has a wide future that we’ll meet soon: Local advertising is not only possible but really powerful as well, through services like Adwords, where advisers can segment messages geographically, and contact the right person in the right place they need.
This atricle keeps it real, no doubt.