The Importance of Rank

This is a post about an interesting presentation from slideshare.net about rank and the importance of it in business, marketing and every day decisions.

This presentation looks at the importance of RANK in everyday decision making (we use it as a fast heuristic for decision making – evolution baked this into us) and in the context of business.

Gamification marketing

As a follow-up to my last post about gamification here, here is a post about marketing gamification

What is marketing gamification (from here):

Gamification for a digital marketing context may be defined as the process of using game mechanincs in an initially non-game environment for marketing purposes and better ROI.

This is a very interesting presentation from slideshare.net on this subject:

The Evolution of Advertising

This post is about an interesting presentation from slideshare.net about the history and evolution of advertising.

You’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad. Crazy, right? Consumers have learned to tune out advertising, but believe it or not, there was a time when products weren’t branded, ad agencies didn’t exist, and advertising as a profession was unheard of.

In this epic, must-see presentation, we explore the ENTIRE history and evolution of advertising to unveil how a comprehensive (yet digestible) timeline of advertising milestones led to an epidemic of consumer indifference, as well as what marketers can do about it to reach consumers in the years ahead.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing Coversourcing (Photo credit: tsevis)

Here it is an interesting article from socialmediatoday.com about crowdsourcing.

What crowdsourcing needs, according to the author (Maryanne Conlin) is :

Come up with an idea for your crowdsourced project

Check it against your objectives

Wander over to your colleagues and run it by them

Rewrite

Take it home and email it to your closest marketing buddies (all those friends from your college marketing classes can come in handy)

Rewrite

Test it on your target market.

More information and full article with conclusions at http://socialmediatoday.com/maryanneconlin/1564691/crowdsourcing-needs-expert-opinion.

The 5 Secrets of Networking

What are the top secrets of networking?

I. PREPARATION
II. WORK THE ROOM
III. NETWORKING TOOLS
IV. BUILD MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS
V. BUILD AND MAINTAIN CONNECTIONS

On-demand Marketing

This post is about an interesting article about a new age in marketing, that is accessible also on-demand, from McKinsey & Company website (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/the_coming_era_of_on-demand_marketing).

As a result of new technologies, the consumer wants more.

As these digital capabilities multiply, consumer demands will rise in four areas:

1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time.

2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them.

3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience.

4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy.

The next picture shows a possible future of the year 2020, using technologies like NFC or smart phones that uses the concept of on-demand marketing.

Scenes from the future of on-demand marketing (image source McKinsey & Company)

The guidance on how to survive this challenges (from the same article) are:

The forces enabling consumers to expect fulfillment on demand are unstoppable. Across the entire consumer decision journey, every touch is a brand experience, and those touches just keep multiplying in number. To mobilize for the on-demand challenges ahead, companies must:

• bring managers together from across the business to understand consumers’ decision journeys, to speculate about where they may lead, and to design experiences that will meet the consumer’s demands (Now, Can I, For me, and Simply)
• align the executive team around an explicit end-to-end data strategy across trends, performance, and people
• challenge the delivery processes behind every touch point—are the processes making the best use of your data and interaction opportunities and are they appropriately tailored to the speed required and to expectations about your brand?

Executive recruiters tell us that corporate boards are looking for more people who can challenge and improve a company’s approach to social media, big data, and the customer experience. Staying ahead of the design, data, and delivery requirements of on-demand customers is much more than a marketing issue—it will be a crucial basis for future competitive advantage.

Check the full article here.

How We Can Predict The Next Financial Crisis

In this interesting TED video we learn about the financial crisis and more data on how to predict it.

The 2007-2008 financial crisis, you might think, was an unpredictable one-time crash. But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment when any bubble is about to pop. (And he’s seeing it happen again, right now.)

How I Made an Impossible Film

This is a video about interesting ideas and turning those into films.

Filmmaker Martin Villeneuve talks about “Mars et Avril,” the Canadian sci-fi spectacular he made with virtually no money.

In a charming talk, he explains the various ways he overcame financial and logistical constraints to produce his unique and inventive vision of the future.

The Future of Search

This is an interesting presentation from slideshare.net about the future of search engines and understanding search queries, not just indexing pages.

What’s the future of search? And does it mean that the future of search marketing is just “good marketing”?

Generation Tomorrow

As a follow-up to my last post here, here it is an interesting video about the future and how can we prepare for it, also from Eddie Obeng.

It’s mindset, not age, that determines who will shape the future