Brian Boigon | Web Directions East 2010

Brian Boigon

Brian Boigon is a leading edge Social Media strategist and thought leader and skillfully straddles the corporate, media and academic worlds. He is currently at the University of Toronto John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, where he is full time faculty in Design and Cultural Theory. He has lectured at MIT, Princeton and other leading universities and has been a key strategic consultant for Levis, Motorola, Jockey, Sony Music, NTT and other blue chip firms. He is the author of Speed Reading Tokyo and is currently completing a new book on Social Networks.

Keynote: Cultivating the Follow Me Generation

Brian will illustrate how consumer-producer culture has transformed the way in which we work and play, through the use of mobile technologies that have given rise to a zero-gravity world of interaction. The new social world is one based almost entirely on movement (dynamical systems), and any company who wants to reach and touch the new consumer-producer will need to subscribe to a reverse marketing model to which the so-called “Follow Me Generation” may pay passing attention to. This generation is no longer stationary, but rather moving along motion pathways which are constantly being guided by the cursor or touch screen, from which the follow-me world shifts from one track of data transfer to another.

Our world has changed. It has gone back to the hunting-and-gathering modes of social community that preceded the advancement of our sedentary society. We urgently need to understand that while our world has become networked and capable of mass global interaction, there are a host of pivotal devices which have established this mobile protocol. Brian refers to these as portable consumer-producer based appliances, and their attendant interactive systems are controlled by consumers not retailers.

Brian will show practical examples of how corporations have succeeded in reaching out to the “follow me” generation, and give advice for marketers looking to stay relevant to this new, always connected, strongly social group.

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