To me the clear trend in marketing in 2010 to watch is mobile... everything. Most mobile phones sold in the US in last several years have either cell tower or GPS location capability. With that there has been a significant rise in the number of geo-location enabled cell phone applications. And now with the iPhone the most popular phone on the market and Blackberry having three in the top ten, smartphones are enabling mobile location enabled mapping, gaming, social networking, and of course advertising.
Over the last several months I’ve given presentations at a number of industry events, all of which had Social Media as part of the agenda. Here is the most important thing for everyone to know… Social Media is not new; it’s just media; albeit different than broadcast media. At Trekk, we simply look at social media platforms as another cross-media channel.
Comedian Ron White has done well with the tag line “You Can't Fix Stupid ”. While funny on the surface, what stupid is he referring to? Is he referring to people? Processes? Actions? In business, this is an all too familiar and frustrating sentiment. That is why I was excited by a refreshing blog called “It’s Time to Embrace Stupidity” by the Chairman of Razerfish, Clark Kokich.
Trekk learned last week that a new website produced for Kerry Ingredients & Flavours has won a 2009 W3 Award. The awards are sponsored by the International Academy of the Visual Arts, and the Kerry site took silver in the manufacturing category. We’re very happy because we think the site is beautiful and intuitive, but it also makes interesting use of technology to help solve Kerry’s marketing challenges.
This is my last post in a series of pontifications on subjects from my presentations this year on technologies changing print. The last area that I would like to dive a bit deeper into is Cloud Computing. Recently I presented at Marketing Innovations Summit put on by QuantumDigitial in Austin. When I brought up the term the audience asked the logical question, what does that mean? What a great place to start!
For the past year and half we’ve hardly had a discussion with clients and prospects without questions about social media being asked. This trend is for good reasons. Social media technology and online media in general, is changing every aspect of human communications and thus commerce. But I think the bigger question for marketers are not how we use social media, but why we use social media. From our perspective, the answer lies in the term Influence Marketing.
I’ve posted about XML a number of times in the past. But this time I want to discuss not just what the technology does, but why it is an imperative tool to deliver the promise of cross-media for meeting business objectives. Marketing communications, advertising messages and public relations process heavily influence customer experiences (good and bad). XML and related transformation technologies provide the linkage between managed digital content and these deliverables. And with the ability for these technologies to be automated and/or mechanized… automated formatting
I attended and presented at this weekend’s Social Media Bootcamp held in Rockford. It turned to be an excellent mix of presenters and attendees form the Northern Illinois and Chicagoland areas. The sessions covered many areas of interest. See for yourself on the website at http://www.social-media-bootcamp.com/. You can also view a lot of the online discussion during the event on Twitter by going to http://search.twitter.com and searching for the hash tag #socialmediabc as the search term. You can follow my comments at @JeffreyAStewart.
My last post talked about XML repositories and content management in terms of separating content from format. The idea is that XML content can easily be reformed and reused. But in order to reuse content, you must first refind it (a word?). Thus another important feature of CMS is structuring content for search in a variety of ways.
We are closing in on twenty years since the creation of the World Wide Web and forty years since the core innovations that are the Internet. In the last ten years however, these technologies have spurred the digitization of virtually everything. So with such huge volumes of information, how does one manage them? CMS and DAM systems are available for this and they are impacting the way media is managed and deployed.
I recently got back from the XMPie UGC held in Las Vegas. What impressed me was the rate at which technology at these conferences has changed and how high speed ubiquitously available broadband has impacted all of our lives. Several presenters were demonstrating live applications that seamlessly connected to servers, desktops, devices and cloud computing assets from as near as California to as far away as Florida, Australia, United Kingdom and Israel. These capabilities are astounding as compared to even five years ago. To me this shows that innovation and future economic vitality for most organization is tied to speed and availability of high speed low cost Internet connectivity.
I just returned from a week in Lisbon Portugal for the IPN Global Spring Meeting. IPN Global is a group of member companies in the print and graphic communication industry. IPN believes in global business through global friendship. For this meeting I was asked to present to the group and the presentation I gave was called “Technologies that are Transforming Print Today”.
Several of us where in Philadelphia last for the On Demand Conference and Exposition. With the current economic conditions being reported by the media and contacts in the industry, I was very interested to see how successful this show would be. It turns out that even though attendance was down, the people who came are serious. They are looking for real solutions for real needs. Trekk came to attend and to discuss some of our successes with other attendees. We also saw many in the digital print industry begin to see the other avenues for them, including in the areas of asset and content management and the use social media for business.
A few weeks ago I received my new Kindle 2 from Amazon. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a gadget freak and need the latest of everything. But by the time version 2 comes around for new and innovative devices, I’m ready to try it. That is why I didn’t run out and buy the first Kindle. But I do read a lot and buy a lot of books. Could this be the new way for me to get my fix? Well, so far so good!
A number of years ago Trekk ran a review of the CueCat device in a newsletter. The CueCat was a barcode reader that tied to an Internet service. The idea is that the barcode contain a unique number that the service associated to a web URL. The devicecame in two forms; a tethered device, similar to a mouse and a wireless reader, physically similar to a pen, which would store barcode for later upload into a workstation. Our review had doubts about the future of the device, because of the clunky nature of the interaction vs. the value it presented. For instance why not just type the barcode number into a website?
