Like any emerging technology, the web has continually reinvented itself, first as sites that simply reproduced printed matter, later as the more interactive environment of Web 2.0. Today the web is increasingly real-time and fluid, moving away from an environment based around pages to become more like a flowing stream of information.
Consumer conversations, of course, can make or break brands – and given the growing power of these streams, brands must understand what the Now Web is about and then jump in.
21 MILLION UNIQUE US VISITORS
Twitter and Facebook currently serve as tools for producing much of the stream. Both have raised their profiles immensely in the past year. Nielsen reports that Twitter went from 1 million unique US visitors in June 2008 to 21 million in June 2009. And Facebook visitors in the US spent an average of 4 hours, 33 minutes on the site in June, a 240 per cent increase over June 2008.
An array of real-time search engines from start-ups including OneRiot (which is partnering with Yahoo), Collecta and Scoopla focus on what's being tweeted and shared around the web. In October, both Google and Microsoft's Bing announced search deals with Twitter.
'This is going to become mainstream very fast,' Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft's search technolgy centre, told USA Today.
'Everybody in the world is going to expect that they can find out anything, anywhere, instantly.'
A new way of living and working online may be ushered in with Google's Wave, an application that runs in a web browser. Groups of people can set up a Wave and collaborate on a document in real time, or trade photos and video, or drag in a widget that allows them to play a game together. Users can show their content from Twitter, Flickr etc in their Wave. There is also chat via live transmission (ie, whatever you're typing is visible to the party on the other end).
The proliferation of smartphones is also driving the trend, enabling realtime connectivity and instant text, photo and video updates. Location-based or location-aware mobile mapping services are helping people to connect with friends on the go and interact with brands in real time.
In college, most of us spent a lot of time in the library but also in a social hub like the campus coffee shop. One was a place for digging up information, the other a more dynamic, conversational setting, where ideas were casually exchanged.
Google has been the web's library: archival, organised and oriented around research. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are coffee shops: instantaneous, conversational and oriented around discovery.
Kevin Kelleher, tech news site, GIgaOM
THE MASS NOW
One implication of the Now Web is the rise of a more mass culture – people around the world experiencing events together, using the web to rally the like-minded, spreading internet memes and sometimes rumours rapidly around the globe.
Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009 was arguably the first mass Now experience. People tweeted about it and watched it together on Facebook, which hosted a live CNN stream and a concurrent scroll of status updates from people watching.
Six months later, global web traffic reportedly surged to 33 per cent above normal during Michael Jackson's memorial. (CNN reported that Jackson's death 'nearly brought the web to a standstill, with several sites buckling under the sheer weight of traffic'.)
'The immediacy of the live web and its ability to let people collaborate and share was better than watching [the memorial] on the tube,' Mark Ghuneim, founder of social media tracking service Trendrr, told the BBC. 'The TV showed itself as a much more isolated experience.'
Many heard about Jackson's death via the Now Web – Facebook status updates and tweets – since there was a significant lag between when TMZ broke the news and when the mainstream media confirmed it.
Word can spread like wildfire through the Now Web, especially via Twitter, where people tend to re-tweet hot items. And in the wake of Jackson's death, the real-time web quickly filled with outpourings of emotion and personal stories, old video clips, favourite-song lists and so on.
Not long before Jackson died the disputed presidential election in Iran vividly demonstrated the power of the Now Web to spark mass action. While the Iranian government blocked access to much of the web, it failed to effectively block Twitter, which served as a key way for anti-government protesters to co-ordinate their actions in a country where the media is tightly controlled.
It was also one of the only ways for Iranians to tell the outside world what was happening in the country (although it's impossible to verify where tweets are coming from, and what's authentic). The darker side of this is the way in which mobs – real or virtual – can quickly form via the Now Web, where often raw emotions don't get a chance to cool off before exploding.
'Today's online communication platforms facilitate mob creation and growth like never before,' argued Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder and co-editor, in a June post.
Real-time sites can serve as the nexus for conflicts, and 'things can get out of control instantly', wrote Arrington, who has himself been the focus of flared tempers.
This hyperactive cycle also works to propagate false rumours. In the wake of Jackson's death, word of the supposed demise of various celebrities raced through Twitter and Facebook.
While the celebrities immediately refuted the rumours, the potential is clearly there for people to spread disinformation that's inflammatory and dangerous.
Such rumours can be classified as internet memes – cultural phenomena that spread quickly through the web. These are nothing new but now they travel faster and further than ever.
In earlier times, it's unlikely the Susan Boyle video would have racked up millions of YouTube views in a matter of days. Boyle's moment became part of the mass Now, a triumph – and eventual breakdown – shared by millions worldwide.
AN ADULT MUSICAL 'POP-UP' BOOK
The weaving of the real-time stream into entertainment has many possible applications. Imagine watching an orchestra playing Beethoven's Symphony No 6 as your mobile device displays tweets with the conductor's programme notes at specifically timed intervals. That happened last summer, when Emil de Cou, the US National Symphony Orchestra conductor, created what he described as 'an adult musical pop-up book' for Twitter members attending a performance at Wolf Trap, an outdoor venue near Washington, DC.
A CAMPAIGN THAT CAPTURES THE NOW
Is there such a thing as a Now ad campaign? Consider what this brand is doing:
Royal Caribbean
Last summer, a team from the agency JWT shot candid footage as well as scripted material on board a cruise ship. The footage was edited at night, then the company emailed the files to land-locked colleagues, who put the finishing touches on the spots.
These 'postcards', as the cruise line calls them, ran on TV for just 24 hours after they were produced. They are posted on the Royal Caribbean site, however, and the footage will be reused as content for more traditional commercials. The brand is planning additional postcard segments from upcoming cruises.
The campaign was in part a response to the more real-time planning that cruise customers have engaged in during the recession. Rather than book well in advance, people are planning shorter holidays more spontaneously, often lured by slashed prices.
The ads are meant to encourage these quick breaks, as Michael Stoopak of JWT New York told the New York Times. Watching a cruise in progress 'makes it feel immediate, urgent and, most importantly, attainable', he said.
NOW ENTERTAINMENT
If the web is helping to enable realtime interactive viewing, television is slowly enabling more live interaction among dispersed viewers. In the US, Verizon started adding Facebook and Twitter widgets to its FiOS (fibre optic) TV service in July, building a layer of engagement for viewers and another platform for marketers and content providers to communicate with them.
Fans can watch a baseball game on a split screen, for example, while monitoring what other viewers are saying about the action (viewers need only select 'current channel' on the widget to see all tweets related to whatever's on). But viewers won't be able, at first, to upload information using TVs.
The widgets include onscreen ads that are akin to banner ads; clicking on one with the remote launches a commercial. FiOS viewers with DVR service will soon also be able to watch web video from several sites (Bip.tv, Dailymotion and Veoh).
NOW MEDIA
The Now Web is changing our perceptions of 'current' – a definition that's already shifted radically from the days when people relied on the evening news and the morning paper to keep up to date.
Increasingly, the public itself is providing that information, re-broadcasting news via social media as soon as it breaks (as happened after Jackson's death) and also serving as on-the-ground reporters, Twittering from the site of news events.
After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, people at the scene broadcast numerous tweets with details.
It went well beyond Twitter though: a man walking the streets with his camera posted a hundred-plus photos to Flickr, a Wikipedia page was quickly created and fleshed out in real time with updates and background context, and local bloggers sent details from their vantage points to Mumbai's Metroblog.
In turn, mainstream media outlets cited some of these reports and showed photo and video images from 'citizen journalists', a pattern that was repeated in June following Iran's presidential election.
Of course, citizen journalism can be unreliable and is hardly a substitute for professional reporting – the future of news will likely integrate the two for a wider perspective, becoming more wiki-like, with eyewitnesses able to contribute reports and an editor assessing how they fit together.
'The two worlds of old media and new media need each other and have for a long time,' observes Jeff Pulver, a co-founder of Vonage who is now working in the realm of 'TV on the net'. He cites as an example the Boyle video – which broadcast media picked up as its popularity grew, further enhancing its profile in the Now Web.
MARKETING WITH A NOW MINDSET
For businesses and brands, the Now Web will make it increasingly easy to get a finger on hot topics and shifting consumer sentiment. The challenge is to also respond in Now time – to take advantage of short-term opportunities and to swat away potential problems before negative word-of-mouth gains momentum.
This requires adding a new set of quick-response skills. Marketers 'are built like battleships for long, sustained warfare, [but] this is guerrilla warfare,' Forrester senior analyst Lisa Bradner told Adweek.
Ernie Mosteller, vice president, interactive creative director for the Brunner Digital agency, uses a different metaphor: 'Advertising creative used to be akin to crafting a novel or a film. Real-time creative is like improv. To be successful, you need both skills on hand.'
The most basic Now behaviour for brands is to tune into real-time conversations and to participate in dialogue through social media platforms. How brands can best adopt social media is a complex topic unto itself, but what's important is that the consumers expect nearimmediate brand response and an ongoing stream of conversation with brands (what's sometimes called social CRM).
Pepsi reacted quickly after Jackson's death, sending out a 'thank you, Michael' tweet to acknowledge the King of Pop's commercials for the brand in the 1980s.
In a Twitter 101 case study published by Twitter, Pepsi brand director Anamaria Irazabal says that with micro-blogging, 'We can move at the speed of culture.
'Twitter means we can react to something that happens and provide a platform for dialogue. That's the key word. It's about engagement and building the relationship.'
Customer service will also increasingly need to be Now. More brands are adopting live help on their sites – a technology that's been available for some time but has improved greatly in the recent past.
SINGING THE COMPANY BLUES ONLINE
Marketers' missteps and problematic products can come almost instantly to light in the Now Web. Last summer, after Dave Carroll failed to get compensation from United Airlines for damaging a guitar he'd checked in, the Canadian musician posted a YouTube video of himself singing about the episode. It went viral, generating mainstream media coverage. This 'shows just how quickly the internet can help a disgruntled customer turn the tables on a company and its efforts to manage its public image', noted USA Today aviation blogger Ben Mutzabaugh.
IF YOU'RE NOT RESPONDING YOU'RE NOT AUTHENTIC
Real-time customer service is also happening through Twitter, with company representatives monitoring tweets and offering advice or help where relevant.
'We're getting to a point where if you're not responding, you're not being seen as an authentic brand,' Adam Brown, head of social media at Coca-Cola, told the Wall Street Journal in August. (Brown, appointed in March, is the first person to take this role at the company.) Rival Pepsi responds to all tweeted complaints; says Irazabal in Twitter 101: 'When we respond quickly, people give us kudos.' By contrast, brands that don't respond in the Now risk a gathering storm of bad PR as complaints, concerns or false rumours get re-tweeted. Much as political protests can be organised quickly and efficiently on the Now Web, so too can protests.
Conversely, the Now Web can be helpful in refuting rumours. Starbucks used Twitter as one of several platforms to dismiss the false story that the company would not send coffee to troops as a protest against the war in Iraq.
Dell and Zappos are among the brands that have best leveraged this technique. The online clothes and accessories retailer Zappos – one of the most popular brands on Twitter with more than a million followers – uses the medium to advertise coupon codes and other promotions.
Dell has been especially successful using Twitter to advertise the refurbished equipment at Dell Outlet, which has close to a million followers.
There may also be a Now way to approach media planning and buying: identify which topics or URLs are heating up, then make relevant spot buys online. Those ads could later theoretically shift over to whatever pages are being re-tweeted the most.
The stream of information that people consume, produce and share online is flowing ever faster. It's no surprise that two tech launches in November were both named Pulse (a Novell software suite for Google Wave and a mobile search app). Brands will need to keep up.
SUMMARY OF THE KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DYNAMIC NOW WEB
1. The Now Web is less static and more dynamic. More emphasis is being placed on real-time search and mobile connectivity. Realtime conversations are giving rise to an increasingly mass culture – people around the globe are experiencing events together, using the web to rally like-minded people, spreading internet memes and sometimes rumours rapidly.
2. The rise of real-time, interactive viewing on the web is also bringing entertainment programming into the now; at the same time, television will increasingly enable more live interaction among viewers. The weaving of the real-time stream into entertainment has many possible applications.
3. As the Now Web shifts our perceptions of 'current', how and where we get news is quickly changing. The real-time stream is a challenge to traditional news media, but the best providers of content, and those most able to leverage networks and relationships within the stream, may gain new audiences.
4. For businesses and brands, the Now Web will make it increasingly easy to get a finger on hot topics and consumer sentiment.
The challenge is to also respond in Now time. Brands must tune into real-time conversations and participate in dialogue through social media; marketers can also inject a measure of Now into brands by making their websites, and even their ad campaigns, more real-time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marian Berelowitz is a New York-based editor and writer for JWT's strategic content and trendspotting department.