Stay aHead: Super

Keen on making goofy statements? Well there’s an app for that.

Introducing Super, the latest effort by none other than Biz Stone (of Twitter fame) that aims to bring more colour and fun to mobile content creation.

How it works is super incredibly easy. As with any social platform, you can assign yourself a name, profile picture and bio, as well as create rich posts by mixing text and images. You can also follow people and be followed by others, search for popular messages and even filter them by location.

That being said, the final results of what you see in your feed will vary. Allow me to explain this in Super terms.

In a nutshell, Super is all about not taking yourself too seriously, but from a broader perspective I think it reflects some of the values that drive the work we do with our clients every single day. Which are…

1. BE PASSIONATE

Super is by default a passion-first platform, in the sense that it’s meant to be incredibly fun to use. That passion should transcend everything we do, especially if we want to constantly explore new exciting ways to communicate our clients’ brands, products and services. I think that’s why quite a few of us got hooked on Super once we installed it.

2. LIVE IN TOMORROW

Emerging platforms are a dime a dozen. Regardless, it’s important we keep track of them because they might be where future opportunities lie. This doesn’t mean everything that’s new is interesting or relevant, but rather that interesting and relevant things can often come out of what’s new.

3. BE BOLD, BE BRAVE

A platform like Super, and many others, often carries the double-edged sword of sheer novelty with unclear return on investment. However, the point of exploring innovative platforms and features is just that: to explore and see where it leads. If we were to launch a campaign on Super it might be challenging to nail down what the exact KPIs for success would be, but that shouldn’t stop us from diving in and figuring that out as we go along.

4. DO THE RIGHT THING

Thinking about exciting new ways and platforms in which our clients can make a difference is important, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of relevance. Some brands will naturally fit a platform like Super fairly easily, while others won’t. That’s fine. It’s important to know which battles to choose before making smart decisions about where to invest our time (and our clients’). Often the path to make truly exciting work offers little guarantee as to its effectiveness, but by mixing the right amount of sensitivity and trust we will definitely be in a much better place to make that difference.

As with any new platform, it’s hard to pin down Super’s relevance in these upcoming months. But personally, I think that’s beyond the point right now: what matters is that innovation on the social space is continuous, and it’s upon us to keep track of what’s out there, distill what matters, and act upon it.

Perhaps most importantly, it shows that there are always new twists we can do to apparently “worn out” concepts. If social media somehow appeared to have lost its ingenuity, Super is here to prove us wrong.