FOMO & Digital Trends: You Don’t Have To Catch Them All

How do you escape FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out?

The oth­er day, Anne signed up for my mail­ing list. 

After leav­ing her email address, she was taken to a land­ing page where I asked her to share her biggest digit­al mar­ket­ing and com­mu­nic­a­tions chal­lenge. Anne’s biggest chal­lenge was to keep up with digit­al trends in today’s online landscape. 

With poise, Anne wrote:

“Must we become fuck­ing experts on Pokémon Marketing now?”

I feel you, Anne. She shares her frus­tra­tion with hun­dreds of oth­er read­ers who have answered that same ques­tion over the years. 

How can one keep up in today’s wired world? 

Let’s get into it:

The Truth: No One Can Keep Up

No one can keep up with all the new digit­al trends emer­ging all around us. 

You could pick a chan­nel like Youtube and immerse your­self only to real­ise that you must choose a more pre­cise focus. Now, you might try get­ting a handle on Let’s Play walk­throughs, only to learn that you must ded­ic­ate your­self to a par­tic­u­lar gam­ing genre.

Every time you scratch a new shiny digit­al sur­face, an even big­ger online uni­verse opens up. And then—FOMO, again.

As a pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­al who’s been into digit­al com­mu­nic­a­tion for a liv­ing, I would sug­gest anoth­er way of look­ing at it. As I see it, you shouldn’t push your­self to look for everything all at once.

The trick, of course, is to spot the trends that will impact your brand in any mean­ing­ful way.

The Pointless Pokestop

The oth­er day in Stockholm, I walked past a loc­al store for office sup­plies. There was a Pokestop right out­side their store­front, as cir­cum­stance would have it. ³A Pokestop is a vir­tu­al in-game fea­ture of the pop­u­lar mobile game Pokémon Go, a game that blends with real-world loc­a­tions.

In an attempt to grab this mar­ket­ing oppor­tun­ity, they got into Pokémon Go and added lures to the Pokestop — which they advert­ised on a writ­ten sign in one of their win­dow dis­plays. ⁴Again, for those not up to speed with all things Niantic, a lure is a vir­tu­al item and part of the game. By pla­cing your lure at a Pokestop, you attract vir­tu­al creatures for oth­er play­ers to catch. … Continue read­ing

I got curi­ous and found a café across the street. In an hour, two Pokémon Go play­ers, less than 15 years old, stopped by the Pokestop out­side the store­front, but none cared about enter­ing the office sup­ply store.

Boldly, I assumed that Pokémon Go play­ers gen­er­ally aren’t in the mar­ket to stock up on print­er ink. 

It got me thinking.

I checked the office supplier’s web­site, which wasn’t optim­ised for mobile. The web­site couldn’t tell me wheth­er or not they had cer­tain products in stock or not. Wouldn’t their mar­ket­ing efforts have been bet­ter spent jack­ing up their site? 

Let’s ima­gine that the web­site has 500 unique hits every day. What if the office sup­pli­er had aimed their “cre­at­ive ambi­tions” at those 500 daily web vis­it­ors — instead of try­ing to con­vert two young Pokémon Go players?

The FOMO Filter 

Don’t get me wrong:

A part of me cel­eb­rates the office sup­pli­er for tak­ing a chance to try some­thing new. “Fortune favours the bold.”

Still, some­thing must be said about tak­ing unne­ces­sary gambles when there’s plenty of oth­er low-hanging fruit. Marketing and com­mu­nic­a­tions are fiercely com­pet­it­ive simply because we com­pete for one of the world’s rare and most valu­able nat­ur­al resources; people’s attention. 

The ques­tion we should be ask­ing ourselves:

The FOMO fil­ter: Before exper­i­ment­ing with excit­ing online trends, ask your­self: have you exhausted all exist­ing PR- and mar­ket­ing opportunities?

Stay Focused, Stay Sharp

Businesses can’t afford to jump on every online band­wag­on (Clubhouse, any­one? Or per­haps — the Metaverse?) that seems to be in vogue. 

It turns us into fomo-suf­fer­ing neo­phili­acs. We fall prey to our strategies of man­u­fac­tur­ing arti­fi­cial scarcity.

The office sup­ply store’s mar­ket­ing team should be excited about inbound mar­ket­ing, Google AdWords, cus­tom­er loy­alty, mar­ket research, online con­ver­sion, search engine optim­isa­tion, and e‑commerce. Instead of Pokémon Go.

So, Anne and every­one else strug­gling to keep up, you don’t have to catch them all! 

Just. Stay. Business. Relevant.

Update: Since someone asked: