This morning at Nerve 2014, we heard advice from Gary Vaynerchuk about the power of the social media in the “new industrial revolution”. If you couldn’t make it, we put together a few themes and inspiring takeaways to bring to your own marketing practice:

Everyone is underestimating the power of the internet and the new industrial revolution.
In practice: use the technology that people are using right now (until marketers ruin it) but keep changing with the times. Move fast and don’t worry about doing it wrong. Follow your users and the traffic.

Know your platforms.
In practice: social media is a platform for storytelling (not distribution!) and creative storytelling is variable that makes the difference. We’re in an age of the two cents with too many pundits and not enough practicioners. Practitioners know that each platform has a different psychology. Create contextual content tailored to your platform.

Adapt to the youthification of society.
In practice: consider all of your audiences, including their influencers when you’re developing your communications strategy. Data shows that buying habits of parents are increasingly influenced by what their teenagers think is cool. You may need to develop strategies targeted to an influencer group in order to persuade your target audience.

Priorities and behaviors are constantly changing.
In practice: Netflix put Blockbuster out of business by anticipating a shift in the way we consume movies. In the same vein, Our attention supply and free time is shrinking while our amount of stuff goes up. Most people’s priorities are health, money and time not your ads. Your communications strategy should consider this and adapt accordingly.

Test, test, test your content.
In practice: Facebook’s dark posts can be used to test different strategies for engagement without publishing experimental content to your whole audience. The results of these experiments can be used to determine best practices for your campaigns.

What else have you learned at Nerve 2014? Let us know on Twitter @bureaublank with hashtag #Nerve2014!

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Photo by Jason A. Howie.