In this video blog post I talk about technology trends and disruptions I see coming in 2012. Some key themes include – enterprise software making a comeback, how there is a true globalization of startups and VC money, how social is changing for the better and lastly how reading and education are being disrupted.
Whats funny though is that I recorded this video over the weekend and Apple’s iBooks 2.0 and iTunes University announcements came out on Jan 19th (yesterday) and focused exactly on the last point I make — about education, learning and reading needing to be disrupted.
In any case, you must watch the recorded live stream of the Apple educational event if you haven’t already. Do it for your kids if not for yourself, because it will be their new reality very soon.
Weaving a social context into your business is quickly becoming a prerequisite for success.
Fortune 500 companies are already investing in what is now known as the ‘Social Enterprise’, wherein employees easily collaborate with one another and use social media to connect with partners and customers like never before.
The Social Enterprise promises to connect companies with their customers and employees in a whole new way. In this post, I talk about what it means for a business to be social.
I also profile three Toronto startups – Viafoura, realSociable and Rypple – that are shaping the Social Enterprise pie, one slice at a time.
I am a huge fan of blogging for numerous reasons. Content marketing is one of the most critical components of online marketing because it can be leveraged across all mediums.
A blog post isn’t limited to existing solely on that blog. It can be passed around via email, shared on social networking sites, submitted to social bookmarking sites, included in newsletters our clients produce for our users and much more.
Still not convinced a company blog is valuable? Here are a few reasons why:
These are the words uttered by Steve Jobs – at the Stanford Commencement speech in 2005 – who just stepped down today on Wednesday, August 23rd 2011, as the CEO of Apple Inc., the world’s most valuable company.
Steve Jobs, with Steve Wozniak, essentially created the personal computer as it is known today. Many years hence, Jobs managed to turn a dying company into a profitable one, introduced a new operating system, a beautiful designed cutting-edge line of computers that evolve faster than the competition’s and basically revolutionized the digital music industry. He did all of this while disrupting the saturated mobile market by introducing a new breed of smart phones and touch technology.
Google’s latest offering in the social networking arena – Google+ (also known as Google Plus) has now been out for over a month and already they have surpassed over 25 million registered users! To put this in perspective, know that Facebook took 3 years to reach this goal.
Google’s failure to effectively launch Google Buzz and Google Wave a few years ago, made this new foray into social networking seem like a monumental task, but it looks like this is one of their best efforts yet.
The company may have finally figured out how to do social right; their key mantra being: you don’t have to share your content with everyone. Instead they expect content to be targetted to specific contacts and groups of people.
If you don’t already have Google+, you can use this invite link. You can also keep in touch me, here is my Google+ profile.
The @Jonathanscard story is taking the world by storm. TechCrunch, the Globe&Mail etc have already written about it. (Yeah I know what you’re thinking – even credible “news” sites are nothing more than link grabbers these days).
Anyhow, I myself tried it today to see if it works. And it did!
I walked over to a Starbucks this afternoon and ordered a $3.23 grande ice-tea lemonade – and quelle surprise – a quick scan of the photo image of the loaded Starbucks card on my phone, rang the order through!
(The cashier was pretty impressed by my “tech skills” too. Poor guy had no idea it was simply a photo image of the barcoded back of the Starbucks card…)
In any case, of course I was happy to get my poison of choice, free of charge to me. But the question remains: is JonathansCard a thoughtful gesture/ social experiment or a genius marketing campaign?
Hi folks, I thought I’d post this note here as I’ve had many people ask me why I haven’t posted anything in some time, why they haven’t been able to reach me, get face-time with me etc.
Well the short answer is: I recently started a new job as the Director of Marketing at a local Toronto SaaS solutions company called PriceMetrix, prominent in the wealth management and practice intelligence space.
Often businesses get overwhelmed by the hype around social media and jump right into it to avoid getting left behind. This tends to lead to a circumstance where a company expects to start seeing traction, but end up only burning rubber – simply because they haven’t thought things through properly.
They then tend look for issues with their quality of content or frequency of posting (which do contribute to uptake in some capacity) without really looking at the big picture of why progress hasn’t been made.
Below are some common reasons why social media may not be working for your organization (apart from the fact that you sound like a corporate robot and not a real person):
If you’re a marketer and have ever been tasked with thought-leadership for your organization, you will know what a lonely place it can be. Becoming a thought-leader in a particular sector/ subject matter does not happen overnight. It takes much effort, consistency and reputation building to churn out stellar content that will get you to that place.
One common oversight that organizations make when deliberating over their thought-leadership strategy is that they fail to leverage the skills, influence and deep insight of their employees; in the interest of maintaining control.
So what happens? Well, everything gets funneled through “corporate accounts” and the puck ends up stopping at marketing.
This is a common problem, especially with large organizations that don’t have the same flexibility and nimbleness that smaller businesses might have. This is exactly where small B2B companies can really thrive and empower their employees to solve their content problems.
