You have to admit, the social dynamics of Twitter are worth a chuckle, especially when you try to explain them to people who aren’t into it: You overhear something someone says. For some random reason, it intrigues you. So you start following them. And listening in on their conversations. And repeating what they say, verbatim, to your friends. You even start following their friends too. Until some minor thing they do annoys you. (“Oh, come …
I’ve been thinking about quintessential marketing skills and how they’re evolving. Skills can be very specific, such as “mastery of ExactTarget for newsletter email marketing”. But I’m more interested in broader skills that transcend individual projects and programs. For instance, in marketing, I’ve found that the following skills have perpetual value: empathy with customers, seeing through their eyes; a good ear for authentic, persuasive language; a good eye for compelling visual design; open-minded creativity and …
I recently read an excellent post by Randall Rothenberg on the IAB blog, A Manifesto on Interactive Advertising. It’s a passionate argument for a renaissance of creativity in interactive advertising — especially in the agency world. Randall decries that online advertising, while pervasive, is rarely iconic. How many people have felt good about search ads or banners? In contrast to the great campaigns of TV and print, which have deeply affected people and culture — …
Creative technologists in brand advertising Continue Reading »
With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, I thought I’d wax a little poetic with my top 10 reasons why the semantic web is a lot like love: 10. It means different things to different people. 9. Those in it can bore everyone else to death talking about it. 8. Cynics insist there’s no such thing. 7. It’s straightforward in theory, messy in practice. 6. A few misinterpreted words can really screw things up. 5. You …
Top 10 reasons the semantic web is a lot like love Continue Reading »
If you’ll forgive me for a little promotion of my company — usually I try to keep my posts here as agnostic as possible — I’d like to share with you a book, a story, and a dream. If you’re a marketing technologist, I think you’ll find this relevant on a number of levels, especially if you have an entrepreneurial slant. Let’s start with the story. The Background Story My company, ion interactive, was launched …
“Life happens while you’re making other plans.” The same may be said about the semantic web. While waiting for mainstream adoption of proper semantic web standards — such as RDF metadata embedded in web pages — the drive for organized structure and meaning in the great sea of web content is being addressed in perhaps the most unexpected of places: Twitter. Technology adoption, like water, follows the path of least resistance. The explosion of hashtags …
From a recent interview with Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and professor of information sciences, business, and economics at the University of California at Berkeley: We’re in the middle of a period that I refer to as a period of “combinatorial innovation.” So if you look historically, you’ll find periods in history where there would be the availability of a different component parts that innovators could combine or recombine to create new inventions. In …
At the most abstract level, your organization is a single entity. At the most detailed level, each of your customers is an individual, unique and special. Perhaps the greatest challenge in marketing is reconciling these two forces: the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience. You want to speak to people as specifically as you can, addressing their particular wants and needs, related in a way that resonates best with their perspective …
The most important strategic choice in online marketing Continue Reading »
The law of propinquity states that the greater physical (or psychological) proximity between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships. Other things being equal, the more we see people and interact with them, the more probable we are to like them. The classic example of propinquity is that two people living on the same floor of a building have a higher propinquity than those living on different floors. MIT …
This was a fascinating week for social media and disruptive innovation in marketing. Take these 4 stories: Yesterday, eMarketer reported that people all over the world are spending more and more leisure time online, on both a daily and weekly basis. A study by TNS Global found that in 2008, US adults spent 30% of their leisure time on the Internet (in China, that number is actually 44%). In the US, the amount of time …
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