Tag: Google+

My 30 day challenges, day 11 – by Philip Dodson

Posted on by philipdodson

So over a third of the way through my 30 day challenges and already I am doing more, losing weight, getting healthier, apart from a cold this week!!!

Today’s thoughts are about email and whether or not it will exist in 5 years time? Will I be pressing the ‘delete account’ button?

pic11

Email has been a revolution in the transferring and sharing of information/data and has enabled people to be connected in ways that were previously impossible to do. Email has lead to many advances in technology, in fact it is probably one of the main drivers for phones evolving in to smart phones.

However, like most successes, they often have a shelf-life and become victims of their own success. Email enhanced productivity and made our working lives easier. Then it started to become an easy way of pushing things of our to-do list on to someone else’s. Then it got used to externally market your business and the age email marketing started. In my opinion, email is now more of a burden than a benefit.

Now we are bombarded endlessly on a daily basis with email form colleagues, customers, friends, people selling us stuff, in fact the list could go on. We’ve now setup filters, blocks, rules, and so on to stop email, the very thing 15-20 years ago we so desperately craved.

With the arrival of social media, I now see for the first time a world without email. I now find that I am sending less and less email. I’m deleting more and more without reading it. When I do use email, I find that it is slow, as you write your message in a more formal, long winded way, simply as it is an email versus a tweet.

Social media enables you to communicate more succinctly and instantly than email, it’s easier to block stuff you don’t want, as you choose who to receive from. You create your own network and people choose you.

You can easily share documents with others through Dropbox or Google, so the need for sending attachments via email is no longer there.

So like most things in life, things move on, I for one believe email will disappear and I am not sure I will shed a tear about the demise of it.

It’s the shared experience that matters – are you in Gen C?

Posted on by philipdodson

It’s the shared experience that matters – are you in Gen C? – by Philip Dodson

@briansolis What's The Future

Influenced and inspired by @briansolis author of ‘What’s the Future of Business’ #WTF & principal (American speak for top bloke) at Altimeter, I have sat & reflected on a number of elements in my marketing strategies, in fact deeper, my whole business strategy.

Strategy is a dangerous word to be honest, more my business thinking. Strategies, like oil tankers, take a long time to change course, I’m in a world where agility and adaptability are paramount.

I talked previously about saying ‘goodbye to the old school world’, however, that’s becoming increasingly more difficult as things change so rapidly. The old school might not be thinking from 20 years ago, but it could be last year’s thoughts.

@briansolis talks about digital Darwinism – a brilliant phrase to describe the evolution of consumer behaviour, when society & technology evolve faster than our ability to adapt.

How consumers, yours & mine customers, decide to buy has changed enormously, he describes a new generation – Generation C.

What is Generation C? We’ve all heard of the Generation Y, well Generation C is not about age, income, background, in fact kiss goodbye to the old school ABCDE demographics, Generation C is about behaviour and influence of shared experiences. It’s is the connected generation.

An ever increasing number of your potential customers will make their decisions about your product or service based on shared experiences they find through social media channels.

It’s all about a fantastic, exceptional experience. As @briansolis says ‘why make your customers cope with ordinary?’

Ask, as I have, is your service/product providing great experiences? It is not good enough anymore to simply tick boxes and have a website, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc, etc. it’s about creating exceptional experiences so that people share them.

You can’t just have great marketing, now at every touch point the experience has to be great, something that you want shared. Just by using social media will not make your business fantastic and something people want to share, the experience across all aspects of it will, if it’s truly exceptional. Otherwise you risk them sharing a bad experience.

Generation C will trust the shared experience, good or bad, from strangers in their connected social media sphere before anything you will put on your website or newsletter or other marketing communications.

As @briansolis points out word of mouth evolves from one-to-one to one-to-many conversations. An audience with an audience of its own.

They will do all their research through social media not through the more traditional methods that we think they do. They will look at your website on a smart phone or tablet, how does your site look on them?

As Oscar Levent said “happiness is not something you experience, it’s something you remember”

The behaviour of the future customers of all our organisations has changed forever and will continue to change. So it’s not just about exceptional & engaging content, it’s about the experience. So look across all aspects of your business – design and create exceptional experiences for your Gen C customers to share.

Finally, the thing that stood out for me reading @briansolis ‘s book was, I am reading a hardware book not a software ebook.

It’s great to read, as it’s laid out in a way for the connected generation, with short snapshots of concise text, easy to read, infographics, a virtual slider that is more common to online content and it’s an exceptional experience that I’m sharing with my connected audience.