Held over the weekend of 30-31 May, we’ve been working with Qantas to host a hackathon that brings together teams of developers from across the country. How will these innovations play out? What will the teams deliver? Only time – 24 hours to be exact – will tell. Here’s the wrap of the first day.
Month: May 2015
The Cheating Strategist’s Guide to Mary Meeker’s Digital Trends
Each year around this time, the web goes into a slow motion melt down over the much anticipated Meeker Report into internet trends.
This year is no different. And as I did last year, I will encourage you to reflect on your own business and priorities before diving head first into the report. I call it the “Three What’’s and a Why”. Consider:
- What mattered in mid 2014?
- What matters now?
- What are you measuring?
- Why are these things important?
And if you’re time poor or just bone lazy and don’t want to click through the hundreds of slides in the report, you’ll love Michael Goldstein’s summary for cheating strategists. It’s 10 times the punch at 1/10th of the effort. Now that’s what I call a good strategy.
Why Digital Marketing Transformation is Important
I recently spent time with IBM travelling as part of their IBM Connect conference series in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne. At each location, I hosted a panel discussion that centred on the “voice of the customer” – drawing out the experience and knowledge of panels that included ADMA’s CEO, Jodie Sangster, CIO of Tennis Australia, Samir Mahir, City of Melbourne’s Executive Manager, Commercial and Marketing, Lucan Creamer, Think Global Research’s Mark Tyler, and Twitter’s Head of Data Sales, Fred Funke.
I spent a few minutes with the IBM team to share my thoughts on why digital marketing transformation is important – and how you can use the “Marketing PANDA” to focus your efforts around customer centricity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebQX6bMVEgM
Social: The Present is Mobile. The Future is Wearable
There was a time when the battle for social media was simply one of recognition. For some time, brands and businesses held out. Restricting firewall access to social networks. Directing marketing spend to broadcast. Ignoring the trending shift to digital across a range of categories – from marketing to HR, supply chain to finance.
Now, this pent up force has been loosed and it is transforming the way that we work, why we work and how we work faster than we could have anticipated. As a result, we are seeing disruption almost everywhere we look:
- Who – this is not just about “digital natives” or “digital immigrants”. We now have no choice but to adopt a “digital nomad” perspective. We need to move with the digital times, building and refining skills, networks, and connections. It’s touching every one of us in profound ways.
- What – we used to be able to cordon off “home” and “work”. These days, there is only what Nina Simosko calls a life continuum. What we consider work is no longer restricted to what we do and is becoming more closely aligned to “what and who we are”. This is having an enormous impact on the nature of work, the workplace and what it means to have “purposeful work”.
- Where – the disruption began at home, in our palms and quickly spread through the networks. But as we know, culture eats location, and that means our “where of working” is infinitely more mobile, flexible and time-shifted. This is challenging workplace structure, services and cohesion.
- Why – We are paid to work but businesses continue to struggle with motivation, morale, and engagement. As our Baby Boomer generations retire, we will be left with a massive experience and capability gap within our organisations. To attract the best talent, we’ll need a much better understanding of the needs and expectations of our employees.
- How – this is where the most obvious disruption and transformation is taking place. The “tools of our trades” are increasingly digital, data driven and mobile.
Kate Carruthers brings this together elegantly in this presentation made at the recent CeBIT conference in Sydney. She makes the point that we need to keep looking towards the horizon – for while the present of social is mobile. The future is wearable and the internet of things. And that future is not far away. In fact, it’s already in your pocket.
Live a Rewarding Life – Pay it Forward with Annie Parker
“We rise by lifting others”
Do you ever wonder what you want to be when you grow up? Have you asked this at age 20? 30? 40? 50? Beyond?
Do you look at your career, your choices and your reflection in the mirror and wonder how you have arrived where you have found yourself?
Too often we find that our choices are made for us and that we find ourselves swept along on the path of someone else’s life. How do we change this? Regain our sense of purpose? Annie Parker, co-founder of Telstra incubator, Muru-D shares her story of what it takes to live a rewarding life. It’s a talk given as part of the Do Lectures and she suggests there are four things you can do:
- Say no to something as a catalysing decision for a new awesome beginning
- …
- Pay it forward by helping others
- …
You’ll need to watch the video to learn the other two insights. It’s 16 minutes well spent on changing your life.
Don’t Throw Out Marketing Skills with the Digital Bathwater
The marketing skills gap is a hot topic right now. No matter how many clients, colleagues or competitors that I speak with, it’s clear that the marketing industry is facing a skills crisis. And the questions and discussions are often the same:
- Do we have the right people?
- How do we understand data and put it to work?
- Do we have the right technology?
- What do we do with the technology we’ve already got?
- How do we plug the gaps?
But it is NOT all doom and gloom. Many of the marketing skills and processes that have been developed over the last few decades are still eminently useful in the digital world. They just need some retraining, cross-training. As I explain on the newly revamped Telstra Exchange blog – marketing is from mars, digital is from venus:
In the traditional world of marketing, we’d think about this as media. We’d break it into paid media, owned and earned. It’s media that is created from a central point and pushed out, interrupting the lives of our audiences with its urgency. Even where that media is “earned” or “social”, it’s still created with a particular focus and intention. And from the inside of our marketing command centre we run the sums. Counting, measuring, assessing and reporting.
Read the full article here.
Voice of the Customer @ #IBMconnect
The IBM Connect roadshow moves from Auckland to Sydney and then to Melbourne over the next few days. Come along and learn how you can turn data into business value.