Autumn 2014

I was going to deconstruct the Evernote story for you. Combine it with Twitter and few others to explore the pro and cons of the Freemium marketing model.

It was going to be another deep dive into the numbers. The big data. In search of small insights.

But on my travels across the hyper reality I stumbled across this diagram created by Nate Weiner but attributed to Evernote's Phil Libin.

It explains the Evernote advantage - as expressed by value over time.

Nice simple idea.

So let's use it as a template to explore some deeper insights into the challenge of making the big connection (i.e. marketing) in the network age.

We'll begin by making a simple observation. Reality is less linear more a curved. Zipf Curved to be precise. Meanwhile networked media is better understood as a vertical list to be scrolled than as a horizontal timeline. Timelines are, after all, so yesterday. Why think about yesterday or tomorrow when you can immerse yourself in the perpetual now?

There is no beginning middle and end just the experience of the moment at hand. Just a list of options. Messages on demand. 24/7. In this context both the experience and the memory of the experience are a collection of moments.

Which is to say what appears at first glance to be three different types of experience is in effect a single wave of movement viewed from a different perspective.

Move far enough away and watch the activity over time and you will see the waves in motion.

Which brings us to the insight.

In the networked economy we need to understand marketing as wave theory. Dare I say the future of marketing expressed as music?

A concerto in three movement. Attack, Sustain, Decay.

And yes, for those who recall the long forgotten music of the network is in the harmonics, we have been here before. The idea of the networked sharing economy expressed as a wave of cicadas chirping, nay clicking on the like button, in unison. Amping up the volume. Or to use a nautical term. All boats rise with the tide.

The name of the game being fast attack, a lengthy sustain and a slow decay.

The weakness with Freemium as a marketing strategy is slow attack runs the risk of disruption as the next wave crashes through.

This is why the market leader (think Facebook) is faced with the prospect of acquiring each new wave at a premium prior to it becoming disruptive.

Understand this and you'll also understand the fundamental flaw in how we think about big data today. We mine for insights when we should be looking for waves. Momentum. Movement. Just like the murmuration of starlings.

But you already knew that... didn't you?

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