Check out this informative article written by DMConfidential – Internet Marketing Newsletter. It provides good digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-09 05:00:00

While it might seem anachronistic to spend millions of dollars on 30 seconds of air time, and while it might seem completely illogical to do so in this internet era, the big investments and big bucks continue. We’re talking about the Super Bowl of course, and whether illogical or…

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This is a good post called Valentine’s Day Shoppers Plan for a Budget Holiday:

Published on: 2012-02-08 23:55:34

It’s February. Love is in the air and the chocolates are piling up in the stores. Valentine’s Day is less than a week away but folks are still planning on how they’ll honor their partners without going over budget. A new survey from PriceGrabber shows that 68% of shoppers will spend under $100 on Valentine’s Day, most spending between $25 and $50. For most shoppers, this is about the same as last year. 4% of loved ones are going to be in for a shock when their partner comes home empty handed. In addition to buying for their spouse, 36% of shoppers said they’ll be buying for other relatives, including their kids. Only 17% said they’d be forking out for the boyfriend or girlfriend. What’s up with that? How Do I Love Thee? 35% thought a greeting card would best express their thoughts of love. 32% are preparing for a romantic evening out. Candy beat out flowers 19% to 17% and 11% said they planned to buy clothing. Brave souls. Only 9% planned to wrap up jewelry this Valentine’s Day. A number much lower than I expected. Not that jewelers are crying over it, since it takes 500 greeting card sales to equal one diamond bracelet. The majority of shoppers said they would be done buying a week before the holiday, but 22% are still open to suggestions.  Brick-and-mortar stores have a better chance of getting that dollar at this point, but onliners aren’t out yet. A whopping 42% of shoppers said they’d be watching the daily deal sites for a gift idea. And what a great way to get more for their money. If you’re marketing to the Valentine’s Day crowd, hone in on those last minute men who have had the Super Bowl on their mind. Push low priced gift items with overnight shipping. (They’ll pay rather than get caught out, I promise.) Digital items also make the perfect last minute gift, be it romantic ebooks, The Best of Barry White mp3 or a gift certificate for spa services. All your customers need is a nudge, so get those Valentine’s Day emails out, set up a holiday page on your website and tell your customers what their loved ones would love to have on February 14th. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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Valentine’s Day Shoppers Plan for a Budget Holiday

This is an interesting post called Thiel, Zuck, Conway To Select $100K TechFellow Awards Winners:

Published on: 2012-02-08 17:25:58

The TechFellow Awards is the Oscars of high-tech entrepreneurship. As selection committee member Sean Parker puts it “We’re shining a spotlight on individuals who are on the cusp of bringing us something revolutionary.” On February 22nd at the SFMOMA, 20 innovators will be presented with $100,000 grants to invest in startups of their choice. Nominations are open through February 17th at the  TechFellows website . Today, the TechFellow Awards announced that Emmy-winning nerd hero Jim Parsons, star of hit tv show The Bing Bang Theory, will host the awards ceremony. Marissa Mayer, Dave McClure, and Terry Semel will also join the all-star selection committee, which includes Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway. The TechFellow Awards are presented by Founders Fund , TechCrunch, and  New Enterprise Associates (NEA)  to honor visionary technology leaders with the opportunity to support the next generation of innovators. 5 winners will be selected in each category –  Engineering Leadership ,  Product Design and Marketing ,  General Management , and  Disruptive Innovation . Along with the $100,000 grant , the winners will join an elite technology community think tank of past winners including Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; Maria Thomas, former CEO of Etsy, Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora and former CTO of Facebook, and Paul Graham, co-founder and Partner at Y Combinator. They’ll attend quarterly dinners, livestream events, and Q&A sessions where they’ll receive expertise and insight to help them shape the future through investment and their own projects. Visit the TechFellows website now to nominate who you think are the most disruptive figures in tech, and check back on February 22nd for live coverage and interviews from the awards ceremony. Here’s the full list of selection committee members for this year’s awards: Marc Andreessen (Co-Founder, Andreeseen Horowitz, Netscape) Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch) John Battelle (Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media) Ron Conway (Managing Partner, SV Angel) Chris DeWolfe (Co-Founder, Myspace) Esther Dyson (Chairman, EDventure) Caterina Fake (Co-Founder, Flickr, Hunch) Shawn Fanning (Founder, Napster, SNOCAP, Rupture, Airtime) Reid Hoffman (Co-Founder, LinkedIn) Joi Ito (Director, MIT Media Lab; Chairman of the board, Creative Commons) Max Levchin (Founder/CEO, Slide; Co-Founder, PayPal) Marisa Mayer (VP Location & Local Services, Google) Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups & Partner, Founders Fund) John McKinley (Founder/CEO, OurParents) Jonathan Miller (CEO Digital Media, News Corp) Tim O’Reilly (Founder, O’Reilly Media) Sean Parker (Co-Founder, Napster, Plaxo, Causes, Airtime; Founding President, Facebook; Managing Partner, Founders Fund) Geoff Ralston (Former Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!; Former CEO, Lala) Terry Semel (Chairman/CEO, Windsor Media; Former Chairman/CEO, Yahoo!) Danny Sullivan (Founder, Search Engine Land) Peter Thiel (Managing Partner, Founders Fund; Chairman & Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies; Former Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, PayPal) Jeff Weiner (CEO, LinkedIn) Michael Yanover (Business Development, Creative Artists Agency) Mark Zuckerberg (Founder/CEO, Facebook)

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Thiel, Zuck, Conway To Select $100K TechFellow Awards Winners

Published on: 2012-02-08 17:00:37

I thought you would like this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform

In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet has become a content fire hose. There’s a lot of junk floating around out there (my posts not included, of course), and, as a result, a spate of digital readers and aggregators have popped up to offer our blood-shot eyes improved filtering mechanisms that channel the noise into signal. Some of them even get snatched up by Twitter, a la Summify . One of these startups, the Summify competitor and Utah-based XYDO , launched in May of last year, followed shortly thereafter by closing a $1.25 million round of series A financing from EPIC Ventures and a host of angels. But, in case you’re unfamiliar, XYDO’s value proposition has essentially been that it creates a social news platform that combines the best parts of Digg and, say, Hacker News, on the back of technology that combs a swath of content to serve you with relevant, curated news from trustworthy sources. Initially, XYDO (pronounced “zy-doo”) focused on offering its socially curated, personalized news streams through a consumer-facing web platform. It quickly followed that up with XYDO Brief , which capitalized on this renaissance of email newsletters by delivering the same news it curated based on users’ social interactions, networks, and foot prints on its web platform — via your inbox. XYDO co-founder Cameron Brain, who, besides having a great last name and holding three patents for his innovations in the delivery and display of video on mobile devices, told us that XYDO Brief was launched as a kind of side project — after all, curated email newsletters were nothing new. But, to the team’s surprise, XYDO Brief quickly became the most popular aspect of the service, with a bunch of tech industry honchos signing on. (TC’s Erick Schonfeld is a subscriber.) In addition, XYDO’s curated content sources found a foothold among businesses looking to offer relevant, popular content to supplement their existing marketing services. As has always been true, content is king, but many businesses, blogs — really any service with a web presence — struggle to create engaging content, generate and convert leads, and establish themselves as viable (or at least interesting) content producers. Due to flagging interest in its web platform, XYDO is officially announcing today that it’s pivoting to a business-to-business (B2B) approach. For those familiar, you may have noticed that the startup’s homepage looks a bit different today. That’s because the team is doing away with its existing social news platform (though it will continue to offer XYDO Brief to the public), and is instead taking a semi-PaaS approach, launching an email marketing solution for businesses. The company has already signed on a roster of companies, including the Utah Jazz, Lendio.com, Interbank, and BYU Athletics — to name a few. Most of them are Utah-based, as the co-founders are of the mindset that, if you can’t get adoption in your own backyard, then you might as well call it quits. To that end, XYDO sent over 12 million of its curated emails on behalf of its customers. Again, most businesses have a story to tell, and a brand to hawk along with that story, but many find more than a little difficulty in sharing that message in a way that is authentic, relevant, and drives engagement. Typically, when businesses look to bolster their content production, they employ bloggers, try their hand at blogging themselves, or hire a team of awkward interns to produce that content. Businesses have also been saturated with the “you have to get social, or perish” message, and try to create content for social networks to boot, but that usually just means they manually copy-and-paste their stories into social feeds. Some even outsource content production to foreign lands, paying a sweat shop of quasi-bloggers $10K a pop to create content for their Facebook brand pages. All in all, it’s an expensive, time-consuming, and messy process. Thus, XYDO has developed a white-label email solution that goes out to sources like Reddit or Drudge Report, finds the hottest, freshest content (piping hot), and includes it businesses’ Twitter streams, on their sites, etc. That’s really XYDO’s secret sauce: It’s not just about finding content that’s relevant to the business and their audience, but within those topics, locating a small subset of content that’s accelerating on the Web — just starting to become popular. Using the same tech behind XYDO Brief, which analyzes up to 300K articles per day, and then matches it against some three million influential, social media taste-makers, keeping score of what’s being shared, accelerating the velocity metric associated with that content. You want 10 articles on startups or banks and loans? XYDO wants to give you stories on those topics that are just starting to take off, in near-realtime. Not unlike a Hootsuite for email, XYDO’s platform offers the ability to produce these weekly curated content reports, personalizing content feeds by category, schedule email newsletters, and so on. The new XYDO will do all the curation for businesses, and let them control it from a single dashboard. The startup is also offering re-targeting services via Google in addition to their own analytics, which analyze and present data (on a per subscriber basis), like what links subscribers are clicking, how they’re sharing and interacting with the content, etc. The goal is, simply put, to try and limit the amount of spam businesses send to their customers, while giving them share-able content and the tools to measure its share-ability. Another result of the startup’s pivot? It’s becoming a paid service, with pricing being dependent on the size of a company’s subscriber list. On the bottom end, the co-founder says, businesses would pay about $250 a month, while larger list customers can pay up to $1K. ( More on pricing here .) While some XYDO fans won’t be thrilled with losing its consumer-facing social news platform, the truth is, many entrepreneurs and startups are catching on to the value of creating B2B services. It’s difficult to resist the urge to build for the consumer web, what with the funding available, and the hopes of millions of users, but the B2B and B2B2C spaces, generally have lower barriers for entry, and business models are more defined. As I wrote here , there are lots of B2B companies out there that don’t have millions of users and may not be sexy at first glance, but they have solid, sustainable customer bases, and enough revenue to continue building. XYDO is hoping that by taking a B2B approach, it can ride the growing wave of content marketing and businesses demand for smart solutions to the marketing and content engagement issues — to glory. The XYDO co-founder said that email is just the beginning, next they’ll look to implement additional publishing tools, further extend functionality in social media, likely in the form of designing tools to help businesses automate content publishing in their Facebook feeds, etc. I think it’s a smart move. XYDO wasn’t seeing the kind of user adoption they wanted from their web platform, so they’ve pivoted to focus on bringing their email service to businesses. They’re currently in the process of inking deals with companies that have 3 million+ sized subscriber lists, and with that, they are able to gain a ready-made audience. No more having to fight tooth and nail for one subscriber. For more, check out the startup at home here . What do you think, readers? A smart pivot?

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Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform

Published on: 2012-02-08 04:38:42

You have to love the accelerated development cycle that spins so fast in the tech industry’s echo chamber. Just as most Americans are starting to get comfortable with this whole “social revolution,” the tech industry has already exhausted every inch of “Social” (and social networking) to the degree that most are now tired of hearing about social. Case-in-point: A startup launching today, called Uniiverse , begins its pitch with this simple message, “Uniiverse is not a social network.” I advised co-CEOs Craig Follett and Ben Raffi to put that bit in caplocks going forward. That’s part of the reason Uniiverse is resistant to being lumped in with social networks, as the Canadian startup is building an online platform that focuses on bringing value to our offline lives. Uniiverse is brushing aside status updates and virtual friends, tagging itself as a “platform for collaborative living.” While that may sound equivocal, Uniiverse’s mission is to become a service that allows anyone to share any kind of real-life activity or service — for free. It’s a move aimed at the “sharing economy,” a better, utopian future where we share and share alike. (But not only the social media kind of sharing.) Users can specify what they’re offering, the price they charge for that service (though of course it could be free), and when that event or service is taking place. Users can then instantly discover, book, and pay for the listing. Follett says that the platform’s mission is essentially to turn anyone into an entrepreneur, while at the same time, facilitating offline meetups, interactions, and hopefully encouraging people to live smarter, happier lives. Uniiverse wants to get people out of their eat/sleep/work grinds, out of their virtual worlds, virtual games, and out into that harsh, harsh sunlight. Silicon Valley and the tech industry is all about big data, but Uniiverse co-founder Ben Raffi rhetorically asks if that’s really making our lives more social? The more data online and mobile applications and services collect about our habits, interests, schedules, etc., the more personalized they become, making our lives easier, more serendipitous and so on. So the prevailing psychology goes. Of course, the more data our apps and platforms accrue, the more they know about us, the more our interest, health, and social graphs follow us around online, the potential for our digital privacies to go out the window skyrockets. Hence, Uniiverse wants to offer the requisite social layer on top of its platform, while remaining determined to look forward to the next step, as Follett says that the next decade will be all about the engagement layer, or that which facilitates an easy connection for people’s real-life interactions. Of course, the biggest issue here, one encountered by craigslisters is trust between users. Somewhat ironically (in light of what I’ve just said), Uniiverse needs some of our data to build this trust. In other words, the platform shows social proximity (like mutual friends, previous interactions), ratings, reviews, and participation across a number of verticals. If someone is looking to rent your drill, for example, you’ll want to be able to get a sense of who they are by seeing what they’ve hosted on the Uniiverse platform — cooking classes with great reviews, or perhaps they go running with one of your close friends every week. Uniiverse is also an online store front for collaboration for people looking to share their time, interests, belongings, space, and skills. As a marketplace, Follett says that the intention is to disrupt traditional classified sites like craigslist — in the sense that you probably aren’t likely to search for a babysitter on the site — and unify the fragmented sharing economy represented by services like Airbnb, Skillshare, Zimrides, and so on. “There’s currently no transport of trust across verticals and categories,” the CEO says, “and, as a result, the value of the sharing economy really isn’t fully tapped yet.” Users are thus encouraged to rate and review each other’s shared experiences in order to add an extra layer of trustworthiness in an attempt to facilitate that offline engagement. As such, Uniiverse is tapping into the sharing economy, which values access and experiences over ownership, a movement that could have a positive effect on the environment, finance, and community. As to the startup’s business model: While it’s free for anyone to post a listing (if a user decides to charge $20 per ticket, they will receive $20 from each person, for example), Uniiverse adds a variable transaction fee to the listing’s price, which is charged to the buyer. Part of this transaction fee goes towards covering credit card processing costs to make the platform possible, Follett says, and part helps support the viability of the company. That being said, the CEO said that they are strongly encouraging free listings on the site. To further support its lofty goal and still-nascent revenue models, Uniiverse is also announcing today that it has raised $750K in seed funding for its online p2p marketplace for offline services and activities. The startup will use the capital to beef up product development, design, and to offset the marketing costs it will incur as it scales. For more on Uniiverse, check out Uniiverse at home here , or watch the video below:

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With Funding In Tow, Uniiverse Launches A Platform For Collaborative Living

This is a new post called PrettyVacant: The New New Gadget Marketing:

Published on: 2012-02-07 20:02:22

An interesting thing is happening in hardware marketing these days and I think Devin noticed it yesterday when he pointed out that Samsung, in their marketing of the Samsung Galaxy Note, is changing the script when it comes to gadget advertising, a tendency that is becoming more and more apparent in newer ads from many big players. First, let’s look at the history of CE advertising. For most of the 1980s, computer marketing didn’t really exist. Take a look at this gem from a 1984 issue of Analog: This is a true classic: an advertisement that tells nearly everything about the product in 10 point type. Similarly, you had games advertisements like this: Here the “renders” (really acrylic on cardboard) take center stage while the actual game screens appear amazingly small in the lower left corner. The sale was about the sizzle because the customers knew that they weren’t getting much steak. This continued for most of the 1980s and then into the 1990s. Let’s call this “nerd-to-nerd” advertising. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but if you were reading Analog in 1984, you probably were hurting for a prom date. Suddenly, in 1996, however, Sony created a parallel message to their standard advertising by featuring futuristic scenes of models walking into cyberspace while holding Vaio computers. This was, to the best of my recollection, the first time that CE marketing was aspirational (I could be wrong, but this is the first time in my memory that a CE manufacturer didn’t talk at a demographic and instead suggested you could attain a demographic through their products.) Nerds, it seemed, were suddenly cool. Thus was born a dual marketing message. The first message appeared in the trade press – in PC Magazine and Laptop and the like – the advertisements were a step removed from the two ads above: for geeks, by geeks. I remember, for example, the Laptop magazine ad sales team marketing the magazine as the one title that will ensure an advertiser that the reader will come out of the issue ready to buy a laptop or accessory. Interestingly, this sort of advertising has actually been supplanted by the gadget blogs who, in fact, do a lot of the nerd-to-nerd dialogue in their reviews. Who needs to buy ad space when someone will write a 2,000 word article about your product and you can expect thousands of people to read it in a famished frenzy? The second message appeared in the glossy magazines and on TV. This was a lifestyle message, a message that swept much of the technology under the rug and instead focused on how the technology would fit in your home. For example: Nintendo was selling “fun” and not hardware. Or take a look at this oddly prescient Lisa ad: Or this downright embarrassing iPod ad: The message here was one of utility. It said “You will have fun/work better/be able to rip music” with this product. In short it was “You can do X very well and we know you absolutely love doing X.” For years you had two synchronous marketing plants. The script was simple in most cases: speeds, feeds, an image of the product. Aside from a few odd examples like the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials, most nerd-to-nerd CE advertising focused on hard claims. This sort of marketing appeared in magazines and newspapers and was focused on a crowd that, upon seeing a specific item, would immediately grasp its utility. The other side of the coin was the more esoteric lifestyle ad focused on non-adopters who knew they probably needed a computer but didn’t want to get bogged down. Thus was born an amalgam of the two, the “speeds and feeds” ad, allowing manufacturers to compete on nebulous claims of speed and memory sizes. For example, check out: What do you notice? Numbers, numbers, numbers. You have prices, you have screen sizes, you have (in the Macs’ case) a clock speed. More is better, right? In fact, this style of advertising offered a false sense of safety for confused buyers. The Speed and Megapixel Wars drove manufacturers to crow mostly meaningless numbers until recently when the chip industry essentially flatlined. In the days when 800MHz vs. 1GHz meant something, it was fine to share those numbers. Now, when many more aspects of a PC are considerably more important, they don’t mean much at all. In terms of television ads the focus was on “Us vs. Them:” Mac vs. PC, PC Hunters, iPhone vs. Everyone else. For example, you could argue that the recent Samsung ads maintained this nerds-to-nerds messaging but with a soupçon of ridiculousness, culminating in Superbowl Sunday’s wildly aspirational street party ad: Additionally, marketers have gone in a very weird direction when trying to differentiate multiple Android products. When everything is a tablet, how do you stand out? Last spring there was a short push to grab the “early adopter” with tactics familiar with the speeds and feeds consumer yet with a bit of tongue in cheek. The best example of this? A nice little Verizon fantasy made for the Xoom last May. As markets converge, there is less need to worry that the audience won’t understand a particular product. The fact that Verizon used the words “Tegra processor” on national TV points to the assumption that the watcher a) knows what a processor is at all and b) is aware that there is something called a Tegra. Intel pull off brand awareness with a cute jingle. Nvidia has a long way to go before “Tegra Inside” is a household name. So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in the enviable position of being talked to like intelligent consumers and it leaves marketers grasping at how to market their products to a less sophisticated consumer. One solution is luxury branding. Take, for example, the above photo of Edward Norton and some woman holding a Prada phone by LG. Now, to be clear, the only people I know who own Prada phones are my niece and sister-in-law who bought them because they were on sale. LG knows that the hard-core geek wouldn’t look twice at a Prada phone in the wild. Therefore, they need to add a bit of glamor. In fact, Norton(‘s PR representative) writes in the press release : Mr Norton also added: “It was a pleasure collaborating with PRADA and LG, both Global brands with impeccable reputations for being the most innovative and respected in their fields.” Amen, guy who played a skinhead in American History X and a schizophrenic sociopath in Fight Club ! See also: Lady Gaga working as creative director of Polaroid (a position that didn’t last past the duration of CES 2011 , but at least she got benefits), Ashton Kutcher: And so on. I also saw a move towards luxury branding at CES when Tumi (the luxury bag brand) show some iPad cases and other junk behind a red velvet rope. Tumi gear, to be clear, is actually made by Jasco, the same guys that license the GE brand to sell cut-rate electronic components. Rather than just show their wares, they kept things behind a roped off door, suggesting an exclusivity that is, in truth, quite alien at CES. Their booth was more similar to one of the booths I visit expensive wristwatch events than anything at CES I’ve ever seen. This sense of exclusivity is quite disheartening, especially in an industry that revels in open dialogue. CE marketing is constantly in flux but recently it has been trending towards the vacuous. While I don’t long for the days of full page ads featuring reams of techspeak, I think that, as Devin noted, these marketers are trying too hard. Our generation has been raised on marketing and intense pressure rarely works anymore. Just because you can hire Ashton or Ed doesn’t mean you should and just because The Darkness wasn’t doing much this year doesn’t mean they should represent a product that is, at its heart, a very complex piece of machinery. Respect us, CE manufacturers, and we’ll respect you.

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Excerpt from:
PrettyVacant: The New New Gadget Marketing

Published on: 2012-02-06 19:52:04

Facebook has a dirty little secret. They don’t know how to make money with their mobile app. That may sound like no big deal, or even a little humorous, but its actually pretty scary. Facebook has one of the biggest user pools around and if they can’t find a way to make their smartphone users convert, then what hope is there for the rest of us? The trouble stems from the fact that Facebook’s mobile app is a highly stripped down version of the real site. It’s about giving users a quick overview of what’s happening and a way to post an update while on the go. It’s not designed to handle the interconnected series of links, likes and lookarounds that keep people on the web version for 18 to 38 minutes per visit. Facebook ads? They’re no space for them on mobile dashboard. According to the Facebook IPO filing (via the New York Times) [Facebook] expected its mobile users to “exceed the growth rate of our overall monthly active users for the foreseeable future.” And if executives are not able to chart a path to profitability on mobile platforms, the filing indicated, the company’s “revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.” Poor Facebook! I feel bad for them. Okay, not really. Because here’s the thing about the internet and social media in particular – like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, they always find a way. In this case, it could mean inserting sponsored posts into mobile newsfeeds. Maybe giving Facebook credits for those who visit a special mobile ad page? Or, heaven forbid, a banner ad that covers part of the screen. I’m sure Facebook has thought of all of these options and they probably worry that people will object. But people object to every change Facebook makes. They objected to photo tagging and timelines and newsfeed filtering. They object and they object and they still show up to the party, because if they don’t, then they’re missing out. As the Times points out, we’ve had 15 years to get used to banner ads on our computers. Imagine where we’ll be with mobile 15 years from now. It’s likely we’ll have gotten used to small ads on the small screen. Or maybe by then mobile phones will pick up on your pulse and respiration then deliver a suitable ad that supersedes whatever you’re doing. “You appear to be hungry? May I suggest you stop playing Angry Birds and visit Wacko’s Tacos for lunch? They have a Buy 1 Get 1 deal today only!” The only reason mobile isn’t paying off yet is because we’re still stuck in the banner / search web advertising mode. Mobile is a different animal and soon we’ll have new advertising options that suit. Then Facebook will make more money and hopefully, the rest of us will, too. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

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Mobile Marketing is Hot, But for Facebook it’s Not

Check out this informative post written by TechCrunch. It provides interesting digital marketing information. To see all new blog posts featuring great marketing info, click here

Published on: 2012-02-04 19:00:56

Editor’s note: Alan S. Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Nicira . A 20-year IT veteran, Alan has held executive positions at Cisco, Airespace, Tahoe Networks, IBM, US WEST, Coopers & Lybrand, and the Department of Energy. Change in the air. It’s palpable. Those of us in the technology world are witnessing a transformation: A buyer-led revolution in how information technology is both produced and consumed. Smartphones and tablets are upsetting the PC order; social applications are impinging on traditional “workforce productivity” and communications applications. And the infrastructure, the underlying electronic “institutions” that make all of this happen, are also undergoing a transformation that promises to reshape the boundary conditions of all the participations. The wave of disruption powered by virtualization, and now, cloud, is rapidly and dramatically reshaping how companies and organizations of all sizes purchase IT and who sells it to us. Said simply, for the first time in a generation, information technology’s supply chain is in the state of serious disruption. It truly is an “Arab Spring” for the IT world and when it’s over, there will be a host of new companies driving enterprise technology. Don’t believe me? Let’s establish some historical context. Most revolutions take time. There are always early revolutionaries who pave the way for the change in the system. Although we chart the Arab Spring to events in Tunisia just over a year ago, the underlying currents driving change in the Middle East are decades in the making. In our industry, the antecedents are also more than a decade old. VMware, the early power player in compute virtualization, was founded in 1998. Salesforce, the first big SaaS player, was founded in 1999. The iPod, the progenitor of the contemporary smartphone, was revealed publicly in 2001. For those tuned in to IT’s golden oldies channel, there was a transformative revolution in the 1970s. It was called the PC. At the center of these revolutions and disruptions, you will find end users who have a simple mantra: “We want what we want, when we want it, to get our jobs done.” Employers have to meet these goals. Yet their job can be doubly difficult: Companies and organizations are frequently locked into existing IT approaches and are now told to do more with less. Business leaders around the world are demanding that the current model of IT, one that has led to a multi-trillion dollar per year industry, become more responsive to their twin goals of business velocity and efficiency. But today, at the beginning of what historians will someday call the “as-a-service” era of technology, there is a new mantra for Enterprise IT: Faster, cheaper, and pay only for what you use. If IT providers do not supply what the end users want, the latter, like the brave individuals who took the streets of Cairo, Tunis, and Tripoli, will take matters into their own hands. Most often, the initial transformation happens as “shadow” IT. Bring your own device is shadow IT. Most SaaS applications start by bypassing IT and going directly to functional groups (managing sales through Salesforce or sharing through Box.net). Think about it: Less than five years ago, people were questioning whether the iPhone was ready for the enterprise . In 2012, Apple is expected to sell $19 billion worth of iPhones and iPads to the enterprise, making iot the 25th largest IT vendor in the world. How’s that for a shadow IT movement? Now it’s time for infrastructure. If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need, the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like Rackspace or Amazon. All you need is a credit card and no approval from IT. What is powering this change? Software. Software will be the new hardware. Like the Arab Spring, traditional powers in IT clearly know about the change that is underway. However, as with so many Middle Eastern heads of state, half-measures toward meeting end user requirements will not be enough. Adding a cool interface to onerous applications or a software stub to a piece of stubborn “iron” will not appease the end users. In our world, it’s change or lose your franchise. Maybe that’s why Andy Grove knew only the paranoid survive . Embracing rapid change is not the usual modus operandi for many IT superpowers. The need for top and bottom line growth, and the scrutiny of public markets, does not make changing your business model on-the-fly the easiest task. If you are a multi-billion dollar IT player, how do you explain to your installed base, “Guess what, everything is going to change?” But if you are in IT, you have to ask yourself: What side of history will you wind up on?

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An Arab Spring For IT

Published on: 2012-02-04 05:30:50

Last week I talked about how marketers should leverage culture to promote brands. Today I would like to talk about why we also can (and should) change culture. As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Is marketing changing culture? Or is culture changing marketing?” Or in other words, are these ads changing our perception of beauty or is our perception of beauty changing the ads? I still don’t have the answer, but maybe it;s a little bit of both. In the end it doesn’t really matter, the bottom line is that the concept of “ideal beauty” has been around for a very long time. However, that doesn’t mean that it has to continue, and as marketers we have a unique ability to make a difference. Because as marketers we, in part, define culture. How To Change Culture With Marketing Develop Icons – Cultures love a good icon. For example take a look at Donald Duck in Germany, they love him. A strong icon can be a powerful force with in a culture. And who creates icons? Marketers do, that’s who! If we want to change our culture’s obsession with ideal body types we need to work to develop more icons that embody realistic and diverse forms of beauty. Change The Narrative – Maybe with the help of some of our new icons we can start telling some new stories. How about a story about a fully figured woman that men fight over. Or perhaps a movie about a funny young guy in a wheelchair that hordes of women lust after ( wink ). Stories shape our collective conscience and define the way we view the world. They also help define our own personal narrative, which gives us courage to be different and try new things. Make A Profit – Remember that marketing is still all about generating wealth. With out wealth we can’t elevate icons or tell new stories. So we need to use the power of marketing to create consumer demands that redefine cultural norms. We need to start building brands that target individuals that deviate from the prevailing cultural narrative. We need fashion brands that market directly to consumers with wrinkles and body weight. We need to grow these brand’s revenue streams and make wrinkles profitable. Quit Being Lazy – As I watched the video above I couldn’t help but think how unimaginative and uncreative the ads pictured were. Smart marketing is never easy. To redefine culture we have to be creative and try many different things and be willing to fail. Sometimes, it’s hard selling failure to our clients, which is why we need to demand and expect more courage from the companies and brands we work with. Most of you that work with large brands know that they are run by good people that want to do the right thing, they just often times lack the needed courage to do what needs to be done. In the 21st century marketers are one of the most influential elements on our culture. We have the power to redefine ideas and conscientiousness and it’s our job to wield that power responsibly. This does not mean simply abstaining from the types of ads in the video, it also means taking an active role in the development of new trends that shape our collective identity. If we can effectively do that, we can use marketing to make the world a better place while generating wealth. And, to me that sounds beautiful.

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Cup of Joe: Changing Culture

This is a new article called Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab:

Published on: 2012-02-02 16:51:26

Bad taste. Is nothing off-limits anymore? I’m always up for a good satire but this Action Electronics’ video promo airing on Taiwanese for the Action Pad misses the mark. It’s not the turtle neck, stage, or even the premise. For me it’s the angel wings and halo. The little props takes the ad from a tasteless parody to an absurd stunt. But personal feelings aside, this company won. Their ad spot went viral and the Action Pad won’t go unnoticed. PC World spoke with an Action Electronics’ spokesperson who indicated they’re not trying to “use his death.” She added “This is not meant to make fun of Jobs.” The tablet in question is just another budget 7-inch Android tablet . It runs Android 2.3.3 and costs 6990 yuan ($236 USD) — nothing special besides the marketing. The commercial started airing on Taiwanese TV late last month. The company even held a mock press conference with the impersonator, which is slightly less offensive because of the lack of angel wings and halo. Apple is known to aggressively defend its image and Steve Jobs likeness and generally quickly releases the legal hounds. But this is a slightly different case. This isn’t a Steve Jobs action figure. This is some company, desperate to sell their wares, turning to a dirty tactic that they knew would go viral. It’s hard to hate on swaggering bravado even if the result is fucking ridiculous and rude.

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Steve Jobs Impersonator With Angel Wings And Halo Used To Hawk A Worthless Android Tab