Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I was excited to sit down at the IBM Global Summit in Nashville with Jeremy Gutsche, an innovation expert, award-winning author, “one of the most sought-after keynote speakers on the planet, and the founder of TrendHunter.com, the world’s #1 largest, most popular trend spotting website. In this interview we discuss how Jeremy looks at building communities around the world that helps to spot and translate the largest trends around the globe.

The following interview has also been transcribed below...

The rising popularity of the image in social media has further transformed the way we share our lives with one another.

...

“This is a watershed time where we are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing a past moment,” said Robin Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, and we are “turning photography into a communication medium.”

Not surprisingly, the largest social networking companies are spending billions of dollars to be the place where consumers latch onto these visual nods. They know the stakes. While it might seem that Yahoo’s Flickr, Facebook, which also owns Instagram, and Twitter are fighting to become the ultimate online photo album or video vault, these companies are really fighting to provide the service for the newest way to communicate. If they miss that shift, they risk irrelevancy....

Communication plays a role in all information exchanged between living species. Technically speaking, even plants and fungi communicate with each other.

What sets us humans apart ...

is the speed at which our means of communication develops and innovates. Technology has been helping us to communicate easier, faster and more often. We’re now at a point where we’re “always on” and panic sets in when we temporarily lose the ability to communicate – for example when we lose the data connection our mobile phone....

We asked 6 experts from different fields to share their view on the future of communication....

[Good read for trend spotters - JD]