In our hyper-connected culture of touch screens, smart phones and ironic fashion, the act of trend-spotting has become a science unlike any other.

Trends pulse through many veins of society, from technology and fashion to financial and dietary—trends inform and perpetuate the taste of the masses.  Having the ability to forecast a trend just before it becomes fashionably popular in a given market can mean big successes for an individual idea or even a whole industry.

Why Waste Time on Trendy?
While it may seem like a clichéd act harkening back to high school years spent trying to be the first kid to wear Nike Air Jordans’ or use ICQ messenger, genuine trend spotting is a valuable tool.   The fact is, trends are more than just accidental explosions of popularity; they are reasonably calculable offshoots of human desire. Once you are able to track and foresee trends, there is no limit to the ideas and avenues of profitable innovation that you can seize.

For instance, when the desire for affordable, fast dining outside the home first appeared in the late 1940’s, a few trend-spotters were quick to respond.  Spawning burger and fried chicken stops across America, the fast food nation trend as we know it was conceived, and those originally inspired trend-setters are still pumping out McProfits today.

How Can Trend Spotters Help You?
It boils down to the pattern whereby tracking trends generates inspiration and insight into consumer culture.  And, if you are able to harvest trends before they become mainstreamed and mass produced, not only will you find yourself ahead of the curve, indeed, you can be the innovator of the next successful IPad, American Appareal, Facebook or something even better.

TrendCity
It is in this haze of trends that the TrendCity project becomes obviously necessary.  Ultimately, TrendCity will become the go-to website for groundbreaking trends pertinent to Canadians.  Our website will act as a hub of inspiration for thought leaders and trendsetters in Canada.

By bringing together leading trendsetters we can create the ultimate online community of Canadians to share their insights on the current trends in their area of expertise.  TrendCity members will be able to maximize their networking potentials and feed off the inspiration of other like-minded “Trendies”, while benefiting from exclusive access to groundbreaking trend reports and guest lectures.

TrendCity is currently a work in progress, but we are actively seeking to grow a team of talented Trendies to populate our community.

If you are always ahead of the curve and constantly forecasting future trends (whether it’s science, the arts, design, business, film, technology, education, etc.), send an email to: andi@agentwildfire.com and brag about your trend-talents.

Great talk by June Cohen from TED on its evolvement from conference to platform to spreading ideas. Here are some of my key LOK takeaways:

- when content was distributed free - ticket prices for events went up 50%

- 700 talks watched 250 million times

- magic in the videography - start strong, multiple cameras

- distribution - 50% of content shared on TED.com, 14% on Youtube, 21% on podcasts

- evoke contagious emotions - elevation/awe/lifted above yourself, touched emotionally - brought to tears of laughter, learned something new “aha moments”

- Hans Rosling makes statistic entertaining and sexy - much like our Measurement is Sexy event

- sponsor of high quality, targeted audience is usually a key direction

- keep it small and nimble 5 to 50 people - growth in staff

- trust wisdom of crowds - 4,000 volunteer translators in 77 languages (Bulgaria is a small but addicted TED audience) - radical openness can work

- Interactive transcripts

- entrepreneurial, local TEDx events - 1,000 events in 70 countries

- TEDx Volcano - awesome improvisation and being where the relevance is

Here’s my keynote presentation from Infopresse I gave last month “Social Media and the Food Industry” .

The toplines:

- 16 insights

- 6 reasons why your company should lead this effort

- 9 Essentials to get this world right

- 20 great food examples

Let me know your thoughts and and other great industry examples or insight.

We’re in Montreal this week with our ever-delightful and engaged friends at Infopresse presenting “The Food Industry and Social Media”.

Always enjoy our trips to Montreal and always impressed with the “lean-forward-ness” of the Infopresse audience. April 14th is the date at the Park Hyatt Regency Montreal.

Hopefully we can parlay some of the leanings from our book Wikibrands alongside our command of great social media done well in Food, to educate and trade conversations with an engaged audience.

I’ll be sharing the stage with other fellow foodie/business potentates - Luc Durand from Ipsos Descarie, Pierre-Bernard Dow Blanchet from Taxi and Patrice Resther from Haussmann Conseil to give a full 360 degree view of how to do business in “alimentation” for 2010 and beyond.

Please feel free to chat with us after the session as we have dedicated the afternoon to meeting some of Montreal’s finest digital players, progressive marketeers and engaged business people.

No, it’s not a social media or marketing book - although they are both in there. We are telling stories about companies that have embraced this new culture of peering and openness and gone much deeper than other content on the subject on how they’re making it work. If you are in an organization, starting a business, knee deep in the digital thickets, love the concept of customer enagagement or have an affinity for the culture of the marketplace, this is the book for you.

We’re elated McGraw Hill has decided to publish us and that Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital is writing the foreword.

It’s personally exciting getting to talk to and meet some of the best in the business and understanding first hand what makes their efforts tick. Our on-shelf date is in December’10 so the insights are coming fast and furious.

Here are the basic tenets of what this book is about and why it will be different:

-          Rigorous discipline - this is not a personal opinion book but substantive opinion developed from investigating hundreds of brand experiences and primary interviews with the architects behind these efforts, distilled through the lenses of the authors who have a combined forty years of experience on the progressive side of strategy, marketing, digital and communications practices

-          A balanced viewpoint - there is no axe to grind or embedded functional bias among the authors. We operate across many different worlds and come in contact with a large web of different resources and opinions.

-          How business practitioners succeed- a higher order challenge exists within companies now, not on “what to do” or “how not to mess up big time” necessarily (although we briefly touch on this) but rather “how to do it” in order to not only move individual opinion but large stakeholder groups to rally behind these efforts. We will investigate these organizations to find out what makes their efforts successful.

-          Some foundational basis on why people need to change - we have primary research and survey information not broadly revealed to the general public yet.

-          A smart way to integrate web 2.0 into their strategies and tactics for growing brands - we provide a structure across chapters, reference guide and ancillary awards, vlog and wiki that will provide role models, success stories, best practices and reference tools to make conclusions instantly translatable.

-          Credibility and support of Don Tapscott and Wikinomics - with a foreword and counsel by Don Tapscott, best selling author and highly credible “father of collaboration” and expert understanding of digital environment, in addition to the affiliated title of this book, we’ll have instant credibility from CEO/CIO/CMO audience and from the much larger business, media, communications and public audience.

-          Outside of the Echo Chamber - although we’re very well-connected, we don’t believe we’re over-exposed our insights or content to the larger community nor do we group oursleves into a number of thought leaders who tend to see the world through a partisan lens.

Join along for the ride at our Facebook group, Twitter page @wikibrands and soon to be launched blog or connect with me personally at @seanmoffitt

Social networks have not diminished the power of the influencer, they have revealed it.

Consider a few stats:

On LinkedIn - people with +$200K income are 7 times more likely to have +150 connections

On Twitter - only 0.7% of twitterers are followed by 1,000 people

On Wikipedia - 1.7% of the audience publishes 70% of the articles, 0.7% of the audience edits 50% of the artcicles

On Digg - the top 100 Digg users post 56% of the content

In the blogosphere - high authority bloggers post 300x more frequently than low authority bloggers

In life - Influencers have 2x as many social connections and get involved in 2x as many social activities

Face facts - some of these people are not like the other.

And as an organization stretched for time and resources, you need to find out who these people are and get them on your side.

From what pulpit does the influencer’s power govern? There’s like many individual reasons why these people are so powerful but people tend to worship them from their 4 core altars of powers (RECS):

Reach - whether it’s because of hard work, a bit of luck, reputation or charming personality (and usually all 4), these people have many many people who like them, respect them, follow them, fan them - don’t ever let anybody tell you that reach or scale isn’t important when you’re trying to get a message started and going and also remember don’t discount real world reach because you can’t see it - remember more than 80% of conversations still happen real world away from their social network dashboard

Exposure - not only is the vast number of people that follow people but it’s also how broadly scattered that counts. The whole idea of “weak ties” suggests that the more different social circles you’re connected to, the better your message will jump across networks - from a digital standpoint that means, that they blog and I see them on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook and perhaps some other niches - noticing a wide range of interests and events attended is also an indicator of exposure-driven influence.

Credibility - so they have a lot of people, they also have a wide variety of people - who cares if no one listens to them? Do they have content that screams read me, do they state opinions people adopt with Oprah-like loyalty? Do they’re content rich posts and tweets get rebroadcasted? Do people go out of their way to get their opinions? Credibility takes shallow influence and makes it real and things like follower counts is one of the biggest mistakes in suggesting credibility (retweets, treackbacks and comments do have some merit though).

Suasion - by some magic force, these people get other people to do what they might not normally do. Do these people host events and people come out? Do these people recommend others and people act on their suggestions? Different than credibility, the force of “suasion” causes people to act.  It can be ambient suasion ( they post creative stuff that people react to) or direct (they make recommendations that curns reaction). As a lifelong beer marketer and word of mouth expert, I always suggested to my promotion teams - don’t sample just anybody - find me the guy/girl who is holding court at their table of 20 and is the one in charge of what pitcher of beer they drink. That’s suasion!

Next time, you are thinking about an influencer or grassroots outreach program, think to the power of RECS. Or simply contact Agent Wildfire about our award-winning influencer outreach programs.

Candidly I’m not surprised. For a good decade, the culture of our agencies have been lagging the culture of our customer.

At Agent Wildfire, we have spent the time to know how to get the world of “word of mouth, social media and effective customer engagement and collaboration” right. We have put the time in, asked the best in the business on how they do it, spent the long nights engaging with our audiences and orchestrated ourselves to be the top services firm in Canada geared to social influence marketing.

We like a lot of agencies, don’t get us wrong. But trust me when I say, the moment a client brief says we need some social media, digital engagement or influencer outreach in this year’s campaign or new launch, most start running for the hills. Sure, we get the phone calls to come in on pitches, but by force of nature, passage of time, greediness and/or arrogance, the agency tries to execute it themselves, leaving the industry of “social media” pockmarked with another failure by an agency that overstretched their experience and knowledge base.

Here’s the big problem - finding good talent in this space is difficult, keeping good talent in this space is difficult, doing it in an environment where the agency culture doesn’t respect the impact that social influence  can have is a Herculean task.  Add on top of that, having senior people who have built their careers on mass advertising trying to consider consider the alternative/the future, changing the closed agency culture that is geared to being the creative savants and strategic wunderkinds for their clients and given their current structures, having agencies pay enough attention to this new media that has less standards, less algorithmic predictability and thus, less ability to monetize is glacial in its slowness to adapt.

That’s why you need us. We’re geared for conversation and hungry to prove we’re the best. We have a simple mission of getting our clients noticed, talked about and advocated. It’s a very different mission than our agency brethren. They want to convince masses of consumers that the product is right, superior or well-differentiated for your appetitites.Some do it very well and it works despite our era of media fragmentation and limited attention spans.

We instead want to get customers to participate in the brand, because we know if they do and have a good experiecne, they will become advocates, evangelists and ambasssadors. It is the new currency of marketing and it’s what makes 2/3rds of our economy tick.

And this evolution - requires markedly different talents and infrastructure for getting it right. We believe we have the right alchemy of people, passion, assets and processes to get it right.

Below, you’ll see our overview of why we’re geared for conversation across all key 9 components of building communities/campaigns/buzz more than any other type of services firm in Canada:

Dare you, give us a shout and we’ll stack our skills and abilities up against any top 10 agency in Canada not in TV, radio or outdoor - they would kill us - but smart, engaged grassroots marketing and media - game on!

Looking for 5 key potential roles to fill given our expected 2010 activity. If you want to create impact on cool projects from day one, work hard and play hard - we want to hear about from you. :

Word of Mouth Project Leader - (Full Time and Part time, contract) you are the hub that turns our community and word of mouth wheel - having a great intellectual curiosity, penchant for above-and-beyond client service with a capacity for overcoming hurdles and conceptualizing, planning and delivering not just good but awesome stuff that gets noticed and talked about. You love variety, are comfortable working in new environments/situations and also have a discipline for getting the job done. Social media savvy for our clients, socially likable for our partners and socially connected to our influencers are essentials.

Trend-savvy, Lead Tastemaker (Intern) - you have an instinct for what’s next, can intelligently identify new breaking and creative stuff and can write conversationally about all of it - more than just fashion, or gadgets or mashing numbers and research - you drink up culture in full gulps - the interesting fads, the seasonal styles, the cultural trends and long range futures (but please no divas or egomaniacs)., You’re comfortable in helping build aesthetically pleasing print and web stuff and hosting an extended community of Canadian tastemakers and trendspotters

Active, Fitness and Sports Sherpa (Intern) - you can’t sit still on the couch, you have a try anything once attitude to fitness, outdoors, health, play, sport, gear, style and adventure - you are a passionate active-ite, word hard/play hard and have experience in social media, building community and building grassroots events/experience and activation programs. Sponsorship, business development and online content management are also key needs. A perfect passion play for somebody that leads this lifestyle and wants to work in an entrepreneurial environment.

Community Portal Web Developer/Producer - you have a clear understanding and history of building good user experience-driven environments, although you understand the tech and are smart at the code, you actually care about the eventual use of the web environment, understand its connection to affiliated social networks and also put a high premium on design. Oh, and deadlines are important to you. If you’re interested in leading some of the best leading edge work in Canada, this is your job.

Wordpress Expert - you not only know how to develop in Wordpress, you know how to integrate into other platforms, effectively content manage it, have a keen design eye to tailor it and can break it in order to provide the functionality our blogs and websites need. Wordpress and guru have been placed next to your name at some point in your life.

If interested, send along a brief cover letter that grabs our attention and a CV or portfolio to match to: spreadtheword@agentwildfire.com

An invite and referral-only gathering of style-conscious tastemakers, innovation brokers, culture-savvy trendspotters & seriously connected ringleaders who live, work, play & think ahead of the mainstream.

the big idea:
The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed yet. Less than 4% of the population are true trailblazers of culture - the people that develop incredibly creative or innovative stuff or the people that spot the best stuff first. They are incredible allies for brands trying to build crowdsourced content and creative, sparks for innovation research and seed ambassadors for new launches. TrendCity is the first Canadian-focused network of thousands of these early-adopting people.

elements:
Email newsletter and Insight Blog - exposure among leading Canadian people, places and things
“Wall of Orange” Trendspotter Network - a database of informed early market movers
“Wall of Purple” Tastemaker Network - a hothouse of creative talent and ideasparks
Trend Reports - periodic and customized reports on marketplace and cultural trends
TrendCity Beta Testers - feedback from informed market tastemakers
TrendCity Launching Pad - twice-yearly live event platform for launching products
TrendCity Consulting - workshops and private events on creative ideas and insight on what’s next

benefits:
- superior concept research
- advance testing group
- seeded tastemaker and trendspotter exposure
- innovation stimulus
- seeded and credible ambassadors
- marketplace insight

scope:
- Geography - Canada - Major Cities
- Timing - All year - April and September events, November professional event
- Scale - 5,000 qualified trendspotters/tastemakers

the right partners:
- New launches
- Buzz industries –i.e. entertainment/fashion
- Tech, gadgets, hardware and wireless
- Innovation and insight chasers
- Premium brands and exclusive products
- User-generated content seekers
- Non-traditional exploratory techniques

contact:
Agent Wildfire - Canada’s Word of Mouth Experts www.agentwildfire.com 416-255-4500