A Video From the HP Input Output Series

With John Battelle, Peter Hopkins cofounder of BigThink.com, discuss how technology has changed the dynamic between consumers and corporations – and learn how social media is empowering individuals and forcing companies to relearn how to talk to their customers.

Interview Transcript

Peter Hopkins: Hello and welcome to our ongoing series on the new normal. I'm Peter Hopkins; I am cofounder of BigThink.com. Today it is a pleasure to welcome John Battelle with us. He is a true new media guru of every sort; he has played every role one can play from entrepreneur to analyst, to commentator, to author, to scholar. And I think his perspectives are perhaps as rich and as diverse as anyone's. So it's great to have him here.

For a little background on John, he is the founder, chair and CEO of Federated Media Publishing. Federated Media happens to be partners with Big Think, and I think this will be a very interesting conversation because we've been very much in this new age together and has been great to learn from them and to work with you guys. I should also give a little bit of praise on some of the other things you have done, as I was saying before we started—what an incredible and varied background.

Currently, you are also executive producer, program chair of the Web II Summit; you're "band manager" with BoingBoing.net; you maintain your own blog—search blog, which focuses on search engines and that universe. You were the Bloomberg Chair in Business Journalism at UC Berkeley's Journalism School, and you were also one of the founders of Wired magazine, among awards in all manners of other projects. So a truly great background, and it is a pleasure to have you here, John.

John Battelle: Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Peter Hopkins: So let's start and think about this new normal when it comes to marketing. Let's start with perspective from the consumer, orient us to how the consumer has changed their approach, to how they relate to and engage with companies.

John Battelle: I think this began—in terms of being able to put a pin on the map, if you will—I think it started about a decade ago with Search. That's, you know, a little minor obsession of mine. I wrote a book about the rise of Google and its impact on culture. But what Search offered the consumer at scale was the ability to declare an intent and have the world organize around that intent in a fraction of a second. That changed the expectations of all of us in terms of how responsive we expect a brand to be. And it turns out that most companies, large or small—we're not that responsive as Google, which created a gap between an expectation and a reality that I think is starting to be filled now. And I think that the new marketing is all about figuring out how to fill that gap, how to be in conversation with a customer at scale. It is a very difficult thing to do, but the tools that are coming up now on the Web are starting to allow marketers to do it.

Peter Hopkins: Now you used a very interesting analogy when we were speaking before we started. You were saying this can kind of almost be analogized or summed up around the experience of a consumer entering the store with their personal device, be it the iPhone or the Droid or whatever they are using right now. Walk us through, give us a sense of, okay, they've come into this store, they've got this device, they're there to buy something, and I think the example you used was The Gap. Excuse the pun. What happens? Orient us to that.

John Battelle: So the scenario which seemed five years or so ago as quite science fiction is very real now. You see in almost any retail establishment, particularly one where someone is standing in line, the people are staring at their phones, right? So if they're waiting at Starbucks, they're staring at their phone. If they're in a large retail establishment, like The Gap, they may be looking at their phone trying to figure something out, seeing what their friends think of this shirt, or texting someone and saying, "Have you bought these pants?" Or so on. So taking a picture of something and sending it to their wife, "Do you want this?" You know. So we're already now in the mode of using our connected devices to give a sort of ambient layer around our physical interaction in a retail location.

What I think is going to be quite likely in the very near future, and when I say near future, I'm thinking one to five years—in that time, right? Is that when you walk into a store, you will have on your person a connected device as you do now. This device will be instrumented in a certain way where you have told the device, when I come into a zone where I like the place where I am, say on Facebook I liked Gap, right? I have therefore given that place permission to essentially consider my walking through the door the equivalent of a search query. So you walk through the door, you may as well have put a search query into a search engine and now you expect a response. So now you expect a response.

So I walk through the door, and a response is going to come to my phone. If I look at my phone, the screen's going to say, "Welcome to Gap, John. We see here you were here two months ago and you bought—how are those two pairs of pants working out? You know, you haven't bought anything for your daughter, and she is now 12. Why don't you consider these? Your friend Mary was here two days ago, and she bought these things. Would you consider those for your wife, Michelle?" Because of all the things that the store and the brand knows about you, it can start to respond in a way that is holistic to who you are as a person. That goes well beyond that. Right? It knows your whole purchase history. It may have a recommendation, a deal with Amazon in terms of sharing data where it can suggest other things that you've bought outside of Gap. Right?

It will possibly create an offer for you based on sophisticated algorithms that understand who you are and what you might respond to. And, by the way, all this information should be in the mobile devices of everyone who works at the store. So when they interact with you, they know who you are, they know what you might be interested in; and you will know that they know and that will be okay with you. Right?

So you're coming in, everyone knows who you are. You're interacting in a sphere of information and data that is pertinent to you. And all of this comes together because of the things that right now we're starting to do. We've created as a culture a set of signals that are very, very powerful that live online, and they live there forever. And I think the first and most important of them was Search. But there's purchase intent; there's who I am; there's who I know; there's certainly where I am right now, my location. And there's what's happening, what's going on, right? And there are very important companies in each of those spaces that have popped up in the last ten years. And we know their players; they are Twitter, Facebook, Google, and now the newer players like Looped and Gowalla and Foursquare.

But it's very interesting to watch all of those signals start to come together to change how marketing works.