The Root Trend: What is Social Mood?

From a September 2008 post...

The definition of social mood: social mood is the aggregated representation of how a society responds to uncertainty. It hinges upon a shared emotional state where people collectively respond to the future's constant uncertainty with a varying sense of either optimism or pessimism. All our rational thinking is filtered through this emotional state and it especially affects us in the social units we belong to. We join together to create businesses and all kinds of social associations exchanging our shared emotive outlooks until the combination becomes a societal moving average known as social mood. When our creations are seen from this perspective and then chunked up, they can be (in many cases) tracked as trends by identifying the behavioral least common denominator. Social trends, imo, reflect some degree of the developing social mood, and in this broad light, business can use this perspective to see markets, supply and demand in them, and business opportunity more purposefully during times of social change. Like right now.

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Older versions of what is social mood...maybe you like more detail. As I have reached for simplicity the detail below is anchored firmly and anything with loose ends either gets answered or dropped. The slides (thumbnail images - click on them) offer sociological detail and unless you have time to slow down and think, they seem like too much...Dave

What is Below: is an older version of how I began describing social mood a long time ago as this learning began. The diagram and descriptions evolved as I incorporated this into my thinking and apply it to a marketing mindset. For the purposes of the Root Trend, social mood is best defined as how we behave (in our groups) in response to our collective perception of uncertain future events. Social mood is an idea best visualized in how groups create/behave in response to a shared perception of uncertainty. And while individuals in a free society and in free markets will always demonstrate variations on developing themes, the aggregated averages of these actions of groups express the waxing and waning of both optimism and pessimism toward uncertainty over periods of time. Social mood describes the progress of a society and is not mean reverting but best seen to grow in additive patterns over time. This general quality known as fractal design suggests how many trending patterns extend over multiple generations. The implications in this last idea confirm other perspectives on on cycles and seasons in history.

Marketers are uniquely positioned to see these perspectives as an unparalleled frontier of opportunity. The tools of the digital age will prove remarkably beneficial as this is acknowledged.

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The following slides are intended to offer a very general perspective. The term social mood has an intuitive feel but it is important to understand just how specific and basic it really is. There is a lot of room to stretch these ideas and extrapolate more from the data marketers see on a regular basis. As always, I encourage reading of the books (links provided) that explore the basics better than I can here.

Here are the first two slides(thumbnails), you have to click on them from left to right.