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Dion Chang on doing business in a hyper-visual era
19 Oct 2017
BSH Home Appliances Group invited trends-expert, Dion Chang from Flux Trends to host an exclusive event where he shed light on the art of communicating and doing business in a hyper-visual era. The event was hosted in association with Bosch, Siemens and Gaggenau Home Appliances at their Brand Experience Centre in Cape Town on Thursday, 12 October 2017.
Trends-expert, Dion Chang from Flux Trends.
“Our visual social media platforms have changed the way we connect, interact and communicate, spawning not only a new emoji language, but pushing us closer, one transient Snapchat at a time, to a parallel universe where virtual and augmented realities meet.”Chang calls this phenomenon, the metaverse, a mixed reality universe. It's made up of a little bit of real world, a little bit of augmented reality and a whole lot of virtual reality, he says.
According to Chang, this concept is merely the beginning of a digital journey that now sees other technological advances within the digital and social space bursting with innovation. It's about to revolutionise industries from architectural, real estate, interior design and home décor to health care and education and the impact is vast and real. To illustrate how companies are already making use of this, Chang proceded to show us a clip of how an Irish beer brand is using VR to advertise their product:
But why is it so important for companies to start looking at ways of doing business in this hyper-visual era? Because brands and people from all over the world is starting to embrace visual social media. Chang listed a few facts about social media platforms that prove this:
The rise of visual social media
- Facebook: nearly 1.6 billion monthly Facebook users. About 1 trillion page views a month. Almost 3 billion people like something daily on Facebook.
- Instagram: About 600 million active users taking about an average of 70 million photos a day. We share about 30 million of those.
- Pinterest: Slightly smaller. It's got about 100 million users but 1 billion cyber pin boards have been created.
- YouTube: Over 1 billion viewers. There are 1 million advertisers on YouTube. Over 300 hours of video uploaded every 60 seconds.
In 2014 the word of the year, for the first time ever, was an emoji. And following that, a whole range of different emojis emerged. The emoji boom has affected our social etiquette and the way we communicate online. We've reached the tipping point of social media commerce. It's not just about food and cats anymore. Globally businesses are also starting to implement this concept. It has led us to asking the question. "Is our business Instagrammable?"
An example of a business successfully embracing visual social media is that of a mall in Culver City, Los Angeles that was completely created around the idea of being Instagrammable and as a result of this business is booming. From the huge mural at the entrance, painted by L.A. artist Jen Stark, to the food the restaurants serve, “this place has got good lighting, good location and everything that looks good on Instagram,” says Chang.
The way we consume content has changed
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilisation through 2003, but that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing." Chang says that by 2020 it would take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks every single month. And every second nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the networks. The way we consume content has changed drastically and thus the way we do business has to adjust accordingly.
He reiterated that if a company is not speaking visually, they should realise that they are missing out on a variety of opportunities such as the mantra of the “see, click, buy” concept that is being integrated for social media sales through visually compelling content. The future is here and we need to start thinking about how we can use this visual revolution to our advantage so we can engage more effectively with our audiences.
Click here for Chang's MyBiz profile and interact with him on the following social media platforms: Twitter | Instagram. You can also click here for more information on the BSH Home Appliances Group.
