Can there really be a surprise free future? This was one of the questions that Donald Lim, Chief Digital Lead of ABS-CBN, wished to address during his presentation in the Cebu ICT/BPM Conference 2014. Addressing a crowd of the great divide, each also has to identify if one is a digital immigrant or digital native.
Lim, who has worked with multinational advertising agencies in the past and recently joined the network giant, considers social media trending watch and social listening as part of his daily office routine to come up with business decisions in pushing for the network’s celebrity brands.
One fool proof way of identifying one from the other, he said, is to see who would need a user’s manual to use new technology. A digital immigrant, he said, just jumped into the bandwagon as you bitterly accepted the fact that Facebook is not just a passing fad, but one that has changed the world, human behavior and how business is being done in this age of technological advancement.
In fact, Internet may have already been added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—putting Internet at the bottom of everything. So where is the future going? There can only be one way but digital.

A digital Asean Economic Community

“The future is indeed digital,” Lim said, adding that though this may sound scary for digital immigrants, to be able to beat this “monster,” one only needs to understand who and what the monster is all about.
In closely dissecting the Philippine internet, this country who is home to over 97 million people, 29.7 million or 30.3 percent are internet users, Facebook having the widest reach at 91.5 percent from among this group. Facebook is predominantly also the most preferred media channel across 8 other countries in Asia Pacific including Singapore and Australia.
In going towards the era of collaborations and the Asean Economic Community (AEC) convergence facing everybody, Lim cited four digital principles of a digital AEC: (1) technology to power marketing move; (2) businesses anchored on measurements and numbers; (3) customer collaboration is paramount; and (4) bringing people together to succeed.
To illustrate how a digital economic community functions, Lim has presented as a case in point the success of Airbnb, an application that allows homeowners or any available space you have to compete against the hotel industry in attracting global travelers. Internet has, indeed, leveled the playing field and at a global level.

Social listening

Social listening, he said, is also one exercise that business firms can do to help them on what decisions to take. As social media is a hodge-podge of global customers, listening to your potential end users will help you identify what the next trends are that you can watch out for.
Tweet shops, Lim also said, has become the new platform in pushing for your brands. Tweet shops, he explained, is when you get to purchase a product or avail of services by using your tweet as currency.
And why is this critical for business, you ask? In a study made by Business Insider in 2013 that Lim quoted, New Media has outweighed old media in terms of market value having a combined value of over $1,081 billion. The old media, which would include 21^st Century Fox, CBS, Viacom, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Disney, can only pull in a combined value of $480 billion.
One of the most important trends driven by digital technology, and is something that not everybody is happy about (mothers especially), is the use of multiple screens and devices. Evidence to this is that over five years since smartphones were first introduced, global sales of such devices continue to climb up the sales charts. In the third quarter of last year, Business Insider estimates global smartphone shipment to have already reached over 250 million.

Demand for phablets

Specific to Asia, the demand for phablets, or phone tablets, has also continued to increase as data from the International Data Corp. released in August last year, showed a whooping increase of phablet demand at more than 24 million by the end of quarter two last year from just over 12 million the previous quarter of the same year.
All this data, he said in closing, proves the world belongs to the digital natives. “But nothing beats an immigrant gone digital.”
“As the dust settles after 2015, we should not wake up realizing that we are the smallest guy in the pack,” he added.

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