Pre-Christmas Brad Libby posted a collection of “buzzwords that are treated as if they represent an entirely new concept” under the heading New Wine in Old Bottles. In the list there is Personal Brand, Memes,Viral Marketing, Mindshare and an old favorite of mine in The Long Tail.
Are they Fauxionary ideas (i.e. Faux Revolution or Visionary Ideas)? Go read Brad’s post and make up your own mind.
The thing about Brad’s post is it left me wondering: What was the most Fauxionary idea or, better still, Fauxionary product of 2010?
Let’s start by saying this will not be an easy question to answer. After all there are so many of them. So here are three just to get the discussion started.
- The Social Graph – The fauxionary idea that the potential value of a social network can be measured by the number of nodes and the number of connections between those nodes. This of course is little more than a bastardisation of Metcalfe’s Law mashed up with Database Marketing. The simple fact is the Telcos already have access to an even richer source of this data mapping the ”six degrees of separation” in their network data and call records.
- The iPad Magazine – The fauxionary idea that the iPad magazine was going to revolutionize the magazine and newspaper publishing industry and finally deliver a digital product that could replace the advertising revenue engines of the old paper based economy. After all eZines and WebZines had failed before so why was the “iZine” going to be any different?
- F-Commerce – The fauxionary idea that social commerce and Facebook in particular is set to revolutionize the way we shop. Shopping online has been an integral part of the web portal strategy since the birth if the web (e.g. Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Commerce, MSN Shopping (now called Bing Shopping), AOL Shopping and even good old CompuServe offered a shopping platform). With the launch of F-Commerce Facebook continues with its proven strategy of presenting the old wine of the web portal in the new SoMe bottle of Social Media.
In the end though there could only be one winner and that was the Nexus One. That iconic “late to market” Google iClone that proved to be a salutary lesson in why Google isn’t necessarily the best advertising platform for launching new products into the market. After all if Google can’t successfully leverage the Google Search Engine and convert all that traffic into customers what chance do you or I have?
For all the hype generated in the Blogosphere prior to the launch the Nexus One was the much-anticipated smart phone revolution that never got started and – when you think about it – you really can’t get more Fauxionary than that.
Posted on December 31, 2010
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