I'm sitting back in the office, day after New Years. Honestly, wishing I could be at home, still asleep, hanging out with my family. But nobody pays me if I do that, so I have to head out into the digital mine and dig up some gold nuggets in the Internetz.
I spent a lot of my time this holiday break hanging with my family, going to a couple of museums in New York, and a local one. I'm lucky like that, having some disposable time and income. And, like many of the people I see out and about on a daily basis, I take photos and videos with my iPhone. In fact, I only take photos and videos with my iPhone.
I'm one of those geeks who also uses Instagram to capture, modify, and share a lot of my photos. I've also recently put my toe back into the PodCasting field by doing some short pieces on Audioboo. And all this got me to thinking.
How much of of the lives of a lot of us are now based on geo-location based digital media?
Then I geeked down for a second and asked, how much of our lives are now being created and shared in digital media?
Upside, it's easy. We can snap a photo, share it with our friends, and voila, a thousand or so words saved. We can record a quick audio thought, and voila, I don't have to make sure I spelled reciprocity correctly, and quite frankly, I could never describe exactly how loud those fire engines were anyway.
Then I got to thinking about what I do for a living, Social Media for a Big Pharma company. And I thought, Downside. Almost every big company relies on these text based Social Media listening reports to tell us what people are saying. Heck, most companies who provide the service are just now getting to the point that they can tell if the words people are using are a good or bad thing. Try finding a definition of bad that encompasses both the Webster and Slang versions, and you'll see what I mean.
Now, try applying that sentiment analysis to place, context, time, voice intonation, position in conversation, facial and body language cues, and anything else that can be conveyed in audio or video. And you'll see that there's a whole other set of layers. Or what about photos or videos with no text or audio... silent films are still powerfully used, as was seen in a Novartis video contest in 2010.
I'm not offering a solution here, I'm just pointing out that the human element of Social Media is becoming more and more important. That nut we thought we were all going to crack through language and sentiment analysis? It turns out that was just the soft, leafy seed pod surrounding some other casing that may ultimately contain a nut we need to crack.
Don't you hate it when somebody throws out an idea, and then doesn't sell you the solution that comes with it?
