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According to a new survey of technology experts, teens and young adults brought up from childhood with a continuous connection to each other and to information will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders.

Many of the experts surveyed by Elon University’s (@elonuniversity) Imagining the Internet Center and The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet) say the effects of hyperconnectivity and the always-on lifestyles of young people will be mostly positive between now and 2020.

But the experts also predict this generation will exhibit a thirst for instant gratification and quick fixes, a loss of patience, and a lack of deep-thinking ability due to what one referred to as “fast-twitch wiring.”

Survey respondents say it’s vital to reform education and emphasize digital literacy. And a notable number say trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, in danger of mirroring George Orwell’s 1984 of control by powerful interests in an age of entertaining distractions.

Read this report in full.

Also see our previous blogpost “Introducing Generation C: Americans 18-34 Are the Most Connected.”

How does this research and these predictions help you determine the future needs of your consumers and the ways you can publish life-changing content to meet those needs? Write your comments below.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you identify blue ocean strategy for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Born sometime between the launch of the VCR and the commercialization of the Internet, Americans 18-34 are redefining media consumption with their unique embrace of all things digital. According to Nielsen (@NielsenWire) and NM Incite’s (@nmincite) US Digital Consumer Report, this group — dubbed “Generation C” by Nielsen — is taking their personal connection — with each other and content — to new levels, new devices, and new experiences like no other age group.

The latest Census reports that Americans 18-34 make up 23% of the US population, yet they represent an outsized portion of consumers watching online video (27%), visiting social networking/blog sites (27%), owning tablets (33%) and using a smartphone (39%). Their ownership and use of connected devices makes them incredibly unique consumers, representing both a challenge and opportunity for marketers and content providers alike. Generation C is engaging in new ways and there are more touch points for marketers to reach them.

Access the report (registration required).

Also see our blogpost "Millennials Will Benefit & Suffer Due to Their Hyperconnected Lives."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the changing demographics in today’s publishing world.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.

The American demographic landscape has changed significantly, as reflected in the 2010 US Census compiled by the US Census Bureau (@uscensusbureau). The shifts related to race, age, gender, ethnicity, geography, income, and other key marketing drivers profoundly impact the USA and how brands communicate their messages to target audiences. Adweek (@Adweek) has partnered with Draftfcb (@Draftfcb), to present The New America (@The_New_America), a website “dedicated to providing timely and topical news and insights on what the metrics mean for marketers, ad agencies, publishers, and technology companies.”

A few articles of interest:

·         Higher Numbers for Higher Education: More than 30% of adults now have bachelor’s degrees

·         Multigenerational Households: Number of children living with a grandparent increases

·         Coming of Age in the Down Economy: Pew finds young Americans are underemployed but optimistic

·         Man Down: The future isn’t rosy for American males

·         An Unmarried Boomer: The growing number of middle-ages singles has significant implications

·         5 Discoveries from the 2010 Decennial Census That Advertisers Should Know:

     1.    The US population is an older one.

     2.    We are an ethnic soup spread throughout the country.

     3.    The growth of the Latino population is substantial.

     4.    Multiracial identification is growing.

     5.    Internal migration from the North and East to the South and West continues.

See The New America.

How will these changes influence your publishing agenda in the coming months and years? Write your comments below.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you analyze demographics to maximize your brand’s marketing communication strategy.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily our SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.

Business Insider SAI’s (@SAI) Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday) above depicts book popularity on Goodreads (@goodreads) by members listing the books they’re reading or would like to read, and the spike a book receives after it's mentioned by NPR (@NPR) or The New York Times (@nytimes).

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help your brand’s publicity.

And bookmark our SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially see the Marketing/PR tab.

It turns out that consumers who are physically touched in stores judge products more harshly, leave more quickly, and are less willing to spend than those who aren’t, especially if they’re touched by a man.

Implication: Although retailers try to drive as many customers to their stores as possible, overcrowding may drive them away as well.

Read this article in full.

Read the study in full.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard designed specifically for professionals in the book trade.

Infographics by go-globe.com

Smartphone-toting consumers are embracing a world in which they can find out about (and potentially buy) anything they see or hear, even if they don’t know what it is or can’t describe it in words. According to trendwatching.com (@trendwatching), the concept of “Point—Know—Buy” will reshape consumers’ info-expectations (“infolust”), search behavior, and purchasing patterns. Here are some of the drivers trendwatching identifies:

·         QR Codes

·         Augmented Reality

·         Tagging

·         Visual Search

Available online services that accommodate those drivers include WordLens (@wordlens), leafsnap (@leafsnap), Skymap (@googleskymap), Shazam (@Shazam), Aurasma (@aurasma), Blippar (@blippar), and others.

Read this in full.

See the PDF report.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you track and act on trends that impact your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The popularity and sustainability of technology depends to some degree on its favorable use by consumers. Often the “next new shiny thing” bursts onto our radar and we get excited, which feeds the hype, creating momentum, until we drop it for the next new shiny thing. Unless we judge it to be valuable and necessary. So it is with social media. And marketers today must understand this technology cycle if we are to properly and efficiently communicate our marketing messages.

Analyst firm Gartner Inc. (@Gartner_inc) describes this process as The Hype Cycle. It identifies peak points in visibility over time for technologies, highlighting the common pattern of over-enthusiasm, disillusionment, and eventual realism that accompanies each new technology and innovation:

·         The technology trigger

·         Peak of inflated expectations

·         Trough of disillusionment

·         Slope of enlightenment

·         Plateau of productivity

It’s a useful chart to understand both the trajectory of technology and the actions of consumer behavior.

In the 2011 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle, activity streams, wireless power, Internet TV, NFC payment, and private cloud computing are some of the technologies that have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations. And ebook readers are moving up the Slope of Enlightenment. (Compare the 2011 Cycle with 2010 and 2009 above.) Gartner dissects 4 themes in current technology trends:

The connected world: Advances in embedded sensors, processing and wireless connectivity are bringing the power of the digital world to objects and places in the physical world….

Interface trends: User interfaces are slow-moving areas with significant recent activity. Speech recognition was on the original 1995 Hype Cycle and has still not reached maturity, and computer-brain interfaces will evolve for at least another 10 years before moving out of research and niche status. However, a new entry for natural language question answering recognizes the impressive and highly visible achievement of IBM's Watson computer in winning TV's Jeopardy! general knowledge quiz against champion human opponents. Gesture recognition has also been launched into the mainstream through Microsoft's Kinect gaming systems, which is now being hacked by third parties to create a range of application interfaces….

Analytical advances: Supporting the storage and manipulation of raw data to derive greater value and insight, these technologies continue to grow in capability and applicability....

New digital frontiers: Crossing the traditional boundaries of IT, new capabilities are reaching levels of performance and pricing that will fundamentally reshape processes and even industries. Examples on this year's Hype Cycle include 3D printing and bioprinting (of human tissue), and mobile robots….

Read the news release in full.

Read the Hype Cycle Special Report.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help your brand take publishing and marketing advantage of today’s developing technologically.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

How do people discover books in the digital age? Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) reports that, according to a survey presented at the Digital Book World conference (#dbw12) in New York last month, nearly half of readers discover new books through the recommendations of family and friends, and nearly a third discover them at bookstores.

·         49% - Family and friends’ recommendations

·         30% - Bookstore staff recommendations

·         24% - Online and print advertising

How will readers discover, buy, and read new books as e-reader and tablet ownership increase and traditional books sales channels are challenged?

See this article in full.

A new service that wants to help in this regard is Small Demons (@smalldemons). It takes all of the meaningful data from all favorite books and puts it in one place. Small Demons collects and catalogs the music, movies, people, and objects mentioned in books and makes those details searchable, creating a universe of book details, or as the service calls it, a storyverse.

Book Baby (@BookBaby) says Small Demons CEO Valla Vakili was so intrigued by the description of Marseilles in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos that he replaced the Paris leg of his trip with Marseilles, an experience so inspiring that the concept of Small Demons was born.

In a recent interview with GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), Small Demons VP of content and community Richard Nash explained: “If you are an author, we are going to create verified author pages. You’re going to be able to add biographical information, information about your own books and other features. You will also get access to the editing tools that we are using to fix the computer’s mistakes. We know algorithms can’t get everything right and even when they get something right, they can’t necessarily provide the nuance that a human being can.”

Nash continued: “A computer can tell us how many times a song appears in a book. But it can’t tell us that it is the song that the couple dances to at the wedding reception or the song the jilted lover plays after being dumped. It can’t tell you the emotional resonance of it. So we are going to be relying on librarians and authors and gifted amateurs to come in and help us fix and add and weight and evaluate all the data we are generating. Individual authors will have that ability over an extended period of time.”

Read this in full.

Other services that aids in discovering new books are Rethink Books (@RethinkBooks) and its FirstChapters (@first_chapters) platform, and Findings (@findings), a tool for sharing clips while using Amazon Kindle.

Other articles about the challenge of finding books:

Enhanced Editions (@enhancededition), “On Book Discoverability, Discovery, and Good Marketing.”

Austin American Statesman (@statesman), “‘Discoverability’ key in publishing industry's transformation.”

AARdvark (@digitaar), “The Key to Saving Publishing and New Writers — Branding the Publisher to the Consumer.”

GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), “Amazon's Book Search Visualized: Check out this nifty, homemade book recommendation engine.”

The Digital Shift (@ShiftTheDigital), "Libraries Still an Important Discovery Source for Kids' Books, Says Study."

Also see our previous blogposts, “BookRiff (@BookRiff): A Marketplace for Curators” and "How Ebook Buyers Discover Books."

Along these same lines, you’ll want to read StumbleUpon’s (@PaidDiscovery) “Creating an Infectious Brand” and “Recapping the 5 Keys to Brand Discovery.”

Stay current with publishing news when you bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard., especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Internet users in Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the UK, and US were surveyed, representing more than half of the world's online population and more than 60% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).

For the first time on the survey, Canada reports that the Internet is now more influential overall in purchasing decisions than family and friends. Comparatively, in the US, the Internet rates about equal in importance (46% compared with 47% for family and friends). The Internet's greatest sway is in Asia, where the gap between the influence of the Internet and that of family and friends is 9% in China (79% to 70%) and nearly twice that in India (79% to 60%).

Overall

·         66% of contributors say the Web has an impact on their purchase choices

·         61% for guidance from friends, family and colleagues

·         51% for email

·         43% for newspapers

·         42% for television

·         37% for direct mail

·         28% for magazines and radio.

When looking online for information about products

·         89% use search engines

·         60% visit brand websites

·         50% access user-review platforms

·         24% post a question on a forum

·         18% turn to the brand's Facebook page

·         14% go to the corresponding feed on Twitter

·         12% search Twitter for comments in this area.

The average participant of the survey spends 13.7 hours per week using the Web, vs. 9.8 hours watching TV and 4.7 hours on a mobile device.

Regarding social media, 42% of the sample have “liked” a brand on these services.

·         79% became “fans” to learn more about a brand

·         76% were seeking discounts

·         73% sought exclusive information

·         69% wanted to give positive feedback.

·         67% hoped to share opinions

·         59% had ideas to submit

·         58% wished to “display an affiliation”

·         57% liked being part of a community.

Read the survey in full (pdf).

Read the facts and figures ebook (pdf).

Bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) free online dashboard SomersaultNOW; especially the Research tab.