Echoer - You Heard It Here

Like every 'social-media' guy, I dream of a world where the noise falls away. For years we've been helping brands and their PR firms kick off conversions about their products. We've created a deafening, hyperworld of mischief that flows ever more quickly towards becoming nonsense.

The fundamental truth is that there are only so many social media tools people can be expected to use and only so many ways they will want to interact with them. The smartphone brought the contact point into our hands. Facebook and Twitter fulfilled the rest. There's little you can't do on those platforms that really adds value to a person's every-day social desires. Or so I thought...

For a long time, I've been forcing a theory onto my clients - social media is only successful when you (person/brand) are sharing something that not only appeals to the lifestyle or needs of the audience but also matters "right now" and "right here". It's fun to get a million likes of your funny photo update but if you can influence the way people actually move through the physical landscape, the decisions they take at street-level, social media moves from being a form of entertainment to being a life-resource with exponential value.

I'm not alone in pushing this movement. Location based apps are two a penny. However it takes one clarity moment, a vision of simplicity and an intelligent mind to make sense of it all in a way everyone can understand and embrace. Meet Echoer - the iPhone app I had thrown at me during a conversation about tech-tools in the travel industry.

Echoer is simple, it's brilliant, it's obvious - the free iPhone app allows users to Echo what they find interesting (discoveries, events, happenings, reviews) about the places they are in at that exact moment. Nothing is out of date (if something doesn't get the approval or 'amplification' of other users, the review dies) and the hottest messages naturally Echo the loudest. It's Twitter but real-world, right-here. 

A huge percentage of what we share online is babble. If you really want to know what everyone thinks of the waitress who was just rude to you at the restaurant (indeed the app was invented during a similar exchange on an aeroplane) or what's happening right now in the bar next door to the one you're bored in...where else would you get it?

It's no longer about friends (so much), it's no longer about likes, it's no longer about the randomness of ReTweeting...it's about Echoes and Amps. The tech industry agree with a flurry of approval I've seen leaking over various blogs and the travel industry seem to be waking up to it to. 

Social media is a funny old world - because it's our world. At the end of the day, nobody cares if something hot is going down in a city 300 miles away (no we don't, not really) and nobody's that excited by your picture of a cat on the wall (it's just cute and we're over it). What we want to know is what's here. What's new. What's now. 

Well, that's what I want anyway because everything else is just unnecessarily loud.

Photo (cc) waltarrrrr