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Recent Posts
- Reflecting on 2012 and looking forward to the year ahead
- Facebook’s inability to stay focused and be original
- Achieving exponential user growth: Marketing in the new age
- Twitter’s walls are going up! And soon.
- Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
- The Social Enterprise is here in full force! Profiling 3 Toronto startups in the space
- Reminder on why Business Blogging is essential
- The iPad2 and my Top 5 native iPad apps
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Category Archives: Media
Facebook’s inability to stay focused and be original
As the Randi Zuckerberg story continues to blow up on the interwebs, I suddenly realized that in fact the bigger story lay in that Facebook was about the release a massive feature/ app called Poke. I say massive – because … 
Posted in Media, Social, Startups
Tagged facebook, mark zuckerberg, poke, randi zuckerberg, snapchat, social software, startup
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Twitter’s walls are going up! And soon.
I was perplexed earlier this month when my tweets wouldn’t post to my LinkedIn profile. Sure I had changed my settings to post only those tweets with the hashtag #in, but that should’nt have caused any issues. Upon repeated attempts …
Posted in Media, Social
Tagged facebook, flipboard, linkedin, revenue, tweets, twitter, walled garden
3 Comments
Technology Trends and Disruptions in 2012
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.
In a nutshell, Apple is first in line (and likely soon to become the leader) to completely changing the face of education by allowing students to access textbooks on their iPad, textbooks that are a lot more fun, interactive and engaging. And probably more impactful, by partnerning up with more schools than ever to release even more free classes on iTunes University from leading educational institutes like Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. These free classes while intended for students and teachers in those schools and programs, can also be accesses for free by anybody with an iTunes account.
Almost unbelievable. I mean who wouldn’t want to take a 2 hour class at Stanford, for FREE, while sitting in their living room, right?
Posted in Funding, Innovation, Media, Social, Startups
Tagged apple, deal flow, dealflow, disrupt, education, enterprise software, iBooks, iTunes U, learning, pay it forward, reading, social media, startups, technology, trends, venture capital
3 Comments
The iPad2 and my Top 5 native iPad apps
Folks, I had recorded this back in August during my road trip to Philadelphia and Atlantic City and completely forgot to post it here! Take a look at the video, after which you can check out the top 10 list of my most-loved, most-used “productivity” iPad Apps.
Google Pluses and Minuses – What Works & What’s Missing with Google+
Google’s latest offering in the social networking arena – Google Plus (Google+) has now been out for over a month. Google Plus has already surpassed 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 well, 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.
Below are my thoughts on some of the less obvious features that are awesome and some comments on what might be missing:
Posted in Innovation, Media, Product, Social, UX/ UI
Tagged apple, comscore, facebook, google, kevin rose, privacy, social media, social networking
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Why Social Media Is Not Working For You: A Wake-up Call
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 take up 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):
Posted in Corporate Culture, Marketing, Media, Social
Tagged community, marketing, Marketing ROI, social media
2 Comments
Using Influence as a Marketing Metric to Measure ROI
Marketing ROI can be one of those arbitrary phrases that sometimes has no real meaning. It is kind of like trying to put a finger on what corporate culture means. How does one define it? Measure it?
Does the term only exist so that us marketers could prove our existence… our worth to the rest of the organization? Or does it even matter what the organization feels about marketing; since every other organization in the world seems to have some sort of marketing department? And so, often I would find marketing would mean creating flyers. Or worse, doing support tasks for sales teams.
Due to scenarios such as these, Marketing ROI quickly became the de facto standard for proving the value and worth of certain marketing activities. It became a quantifiable way to prove that what we did as marketers – mattered.
The problem however was that no one really knew what exact numbers and metrics to look at! What’s lacking, even to this day, is a good understanding of what metrics work for a business and what don’t.
Having been in B2B marketing for many years, I have come to understand that some activities can be tangibly measured and some cannot. I also believe that some things do not need to be measured at all.
Einstein knew what he was talking about when he said “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Media
Tagged B2B, buying process, Einstein, Influence, marketing, Marketing ROI, marketing strategy, metrics, ROI, trust economy
11 Comments
The End of Communication As We Know It – part I
Gartner says that in about 5 years, social networking services will replace email as the primary channel for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users.
Well, this has happened across many businesses and brands already. In fact, several large brands already use social networks to communicate with their customers, prospects and partners.
Think Air Canada’s new twist on customer service, Dunkin Donuts taking complaints and Dell computers giving out deals through Twitter. Not to mention the massive number of business and product pages on Facebook and the benefits that brands associate with being a fan of those pages. Theres a lot of communication happening through those. And more importantly, it is a two-way conversation, not just one-way communication like in email.
Posted in Innovation, Marketing, Media
Tagged Communication technologies, facebook, Gartner, Social paradigms, twitter
7 Comments
Using Facebook Comments For Your Business or Blog
I want to open with the fact that TechCrunch’s decision to use Facebook for comments is both short-sighted and paranoiac on their part.
I can certainly see the appeal of using Facebook comments – I think that given the number of people that are on Facebook as well as the number of people that use Facebook as their digital/ online identity – certainly makes a case for inclusion. However a decision to move exclusively to Facebook comments and Yahoo is extremely limiting.
In a nutshell, Facebook Comments does not solve the problem of anonymity.
Posted in Marketing, Media, Social
10 Comments
Value proposition in commercials – favorites of 2010
In the spirit of traditional advertising still having merit and the beginning of another great new year, I have put together my top 3 favourite commercials of 2010. The criteria for this short-list was simple: commercials should have articulated value proposition simply and succinctly while capturing the attention of the intended audience.
Posted in Marketing, Media
Tagged advertising, commercials, marketing, media, value proposition
1 Comment