LOL cats, Justin Bieber, the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We love our memes. We repeat them, tweet them and watch them go viral on YouTube. There’s so much useless chatter about memes, we often forget that they’re profoundly important.
The US constitution is a meme, as is celibacy in priests and the concept suicide bombing. These might not be as cute, but they are memes nonetheless and they are serious business.
Just as genes are the elemental unit of biological fitness, memes are the building blocks of cultural fitness. Some, like bell-bottom jeans and prohibition, have their day and then die out. Others, like kosher diet restrictions and democracy last for millennia. People will die for them. To understand why, we need to start thinking more seriously about memes.
Just over a year ago, Mary Meeker laid out her vision for SoLoMo, a new paradigm that where social, local and mobile media are at the fore. Meeker has developed a reputation over the years for capturing digital trends and this time was no different.
Since that time, SoLoMo has become more than a buzzword, but the new reality. We’ve come to expect that our media goes where we go, adapts to our location and allows us to share.
The next frontier, however, will be the creation of immersive experiences at home and in-store. Rapid advancement in base technologies, heavy investment by major players and serious interest from marketers are combining to transform the way will experience media. That’s the new digital battlefield. Here’s what’s driving the change.
We’ve recently seen Facebook go public with a $100 billion valuation and General Motors, formerly the world’s biggest company, go effectively bankrupt and need to be bailed out by the US government.
Meanwhile, the new web darlings, Instagram and Pinterest, have built communities of millions of people in a matter of months, not years and they have done it with a staff that can fit in my living room (which, I might add, is not that big).
What’s amazing is that we have come to take things like these in stride. Such events have become not exactly the rule, but not the exception either. In short, we have witnessed the complete transformation of business as we knew it. The scale economy has become the semantic economy, where value chains have been subsumed by value networks.
Go ahead. Call Steve Ballmer a buffoon. Many people do. When he jumps up and down and waves his arms he can look a little bit like a monkey and under his reign as CEO, Microsoft has gone from being feared by rivals and loved by investors to being pitied by both.
Yet look a little closer and a different story emerges. Microsoft is quietly coming back. In ways large and small, they are gaining ground and may be ready to return to dominance. I realize that’s not a popular view, but after analyzing their business it’s become clear that they have important advantages that will help them prosper in coming years.
“How do you expect to make money?” There is probably no more important question in business. If you can’t answer that, you’re not likely to get very far or, in fact, anywhere at all.
Of course, conditions can change and very quickly, so the question is a fluid one. A highly competitive approach ten years ago might not be viable today and companies that are barley five years old are commanding valuations in the billions.
That’s why there’s so much talk about business models. Somebody claims to have new one, while another says that an old one is defunct. But what is a business model really? As innovation researcher Tim Kastelle points out, there a multitude of definitions representing different points of view. That can be confusing. It’s time to clear things up.
Sun Tzu, the legendary chinese military thinker, wrote that “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
The fundamental problem of strategy is developing a coherent logic for making choices. To achieve that logic, strategists need to not only understand the objectives to be achieved, but the tactics that will get them there. You can’t, as many would have us believe, separate strategy from implementation.
Nowhere is that burden as heavy as in digital marketing strategy. Practitioners need to master an incredibly diverse amount of activity. From creating a message that resonates, to reaching the right people at the right time in the right amounts to the technology that will deliver the message, digital strategists must integrate skills that have long been siloed.
How much are you willing to bare? Chances are, you don’t think about it too much. Privacy is something we don’t think about constantly, we just expect it to be there when we need it.
We can, of course, consent to waive our right to privacy and often do. We share our address so that goods can be delivered, our financial information to be afforded credit, our medical information so that we can be cured and details of our life to friends to establish intimacy.
In other words, we draw lines. We share some things with some people and other things with others. We compartmentalize data according to its purpose. However, technology is breaking down those containers and the repercussions will be wide ranging and pervasive. As a society, we have hardly begun to grasp the issues, much less deal with them.
Brand engagement, much like a distinguished jurist once said about pornography, is easy to recognize but hard to define. Marketers have been talking about it for a long time, but nobody can really say what it is.
I think that’s because when people speak about definitions in marketing circles, what they really mean is metrics. Engagement comes in many forms and simply doesn’t doesn’t lend itself to simple quantitative measures. What it does represent is a value exchange.
Consumers engage with a brand they see as providing superior value. That has been, historically, derived mainly through product performance. More recently, however, marketers have been able to provide superior value in creative ways that go beyond product specifications. And that, is where it gets really interesting.
People often say that “nothing succeeds like success,” and, to a certain extent, that’s true. Successful companies get good press, find it easier to win new business as well as procure and retain top talent.
However, with success also comes growth and that brings its own set of challenges, especially for young companies. Often, it sends promising new stars into a tailspin from which they never recover.
There’s lots out there to advise companies on how to be successful, but very little about how to manage the growth success brings. I’ve spent most of my career building entrepreneurial companies, done several turnarounds after things went awry and uncovered some common problems as well as some successful solutions.
Just a few years ago, some people were ready to write publishing off. Social media, crowdsourcing, content farms, wherever you looked there was somebody aiming to put traditional publishers out of business.
People were understandably scared. Red ink spewed everywhere. Layoffs at major media companies were rampant. Yet today, publishing is becoming a hotbed of innovation.
Major publishers like Conde Nast, Hearst and Time Inc. are transforming themselves while upstarts like BuzzMedia, Say Media and Glam Media are building new models altogether. There are significant challenges ahead and, inevitably, some will falter. Nevertheless, the future of publishing is brighter than ever.
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