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 …
Forget the usual stereotypes of IT and marketing. Start with the assumption that all marketers and all IT people are smart, talented, enthusiastic, and dedicated to the success of the company, above personal preferences or departmental jockeying. They’re each very good at what they do. So why is there such legendary frustration at the intersection of the two? The Problem The gap that is the marketing/IT divide is, in my opinion, not a matter of …
Why IT and marketing are diametrically opposed Continue Reading »
I believe that marketing — as a function, a profession, and an industry — is experiencing transformational changes and disruptive innovation, driven by the evolving capabilities and culture of the Internet and a new generation of marketing technology software. It is becoming more distributed in execution, more personalized in communications, and more fluid across boundaries inside and outside the firm. Its cycle speed is accelerating, its tactical building blocks are fragmenting — from a few …
Reflections on marketing technology for a New Year Continue Reading »
A colleague of mine recently said her New Year’s resolution is to blog, blog, blog. She’s a busy executive, with little time to spare, and always a hundred other things competing for her attention. But she also knows that active participation in the social media sphere — blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. — is increasingly vital to one’s influence. It’s valuable to one’s employer, who needs genuine personalities as emissaries in the social web landscape, …
Just read a great article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, The Secrets of Marketing in a Web 2.0 World. The authors interviewed more than 30 executives and managers in both large and small organizations that are at the forefront of experimenting with Web 2.0 tools in marketing and came up with a set of emerging principles for marketing: Don’t just talk at consumers — work with them throughout the marketing process. Give consumers a …
