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There’s this funny little stat that came out recently and if you haven’t heard it yet, it's important that you do. The average human today has an attention span smaller than a goldfish. Yep, that’s right, the goldfish’s measly nine-second attention span is now greater than that of the average human’s, which comes in at an astonishing eight seconds.
A case could be made that our shrinking attention spans are caused by the plethora of social media platforms constantly competing for those eight seconds. It’s almost as if users can’t move quickly enough to keep up with all the platforms available.
This is a problem that Markr co-founders Josh Basinger and serial-entrepreneur Joseph Collins are hoping to solve with the “visual hashtag.”
Basinger and Collins first saw the opportunity to introduce their product during the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign. Thousands were demonstrating their support by literally writing down #bringbackourgirls with pen and paper and posting pictures of themselves with these signs to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
This led Basinger and Collins to their idea for Markr, which allows you to choose from trending hashtags on Twitter, overlay that hashtag on top of a picture you’ve taken, and immediately upload it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr.
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“This allows users to add context to their photos at the ‘Speed of Social’." Collins and Basinger believe that social media, or at least our consumption of social media, moves so rapidly that it's important to provide users with the ability to add said context just as quickly in the hopes of grabbing a slice of those eight seconds. "The virtual hashtag adds context and what we like to call visual literacy," Basinger explains.
Beyond providing context to users, Markr hopes to solicit major brands with an attractive use case. Continuing down the same vein as the visual hashtag, the step towards giving companies like Nike or Coca-Cola the option to offer Markr users the ability overlay their photos with branding is a natural one.
Basinger explains this is a win-win scenario. "Users can use Nike’s high quality branding and logos with the hashtag '#justdoit' to improve their content and the brand gets to benefit from them advocating for their company." This offers major brands an easy way to get their hands on the holy grail of user generated content.
The founders are excited to announce they also just released the visual hashtag for video, but the more looming goal is indisputably a round of funding. Although Markr has raised a “bootstrap/angel round,” as Collins puts it, they hope to raise a larger round so they can bring on their developers full time and begin to grow their team.
With the trajectory Markr is on, it seems as though the days of holding up paper signs in your photos will soon be a thing of the past.
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