Category Archives: Strategy

Social CEOs run more competitive companies

The way the C-tier of a company behaves, greatly influences its everyday work style. So this should be a no-brainer: when a company’s leadership is engaged with social media, the rest of the business tends to be more flexible and exchanges thoughts freely.

An IBM study confirms that this also translates into a more competitive company. One that is more in touch with customers, able to deal with change and innovate its products and services.

Social CEO study by IBM

Social CEO study by IBM

As a Forbes article put it:

“Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies.  That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.”

Boss Tweeting

So if you can spot your bosses being active on Twitter and LinkedIn, that’s a good sign. If they’re mixing it up on Soundcloud or Last.fm they might be showing there’s more to life than work. But if they start posting their kids’ lunches on Instagram and want to be your friend on Facebook you might see more of them than you really care for.

Is President Obama’s Dashboard the ‘holy grail’ ?

There is much talk about President Obama’s re-election efforts marking a new pinacle of digital marketing. He has wowed the world with his original success of almagamating thousands of online supporters and donors in 2008. Now his team is on the verge of releasing a new milestone in digital grassroots marketing. Simply called ‘Dashboard’ it is the work of statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers and internet advertising experts.
obama

All this was made for the organisers to have a real-time master view of the effect their campaign has. And to predict where more effort is needed and where they can relax. It makes it easier for local organisers to tap into an existing supporter base and it even contains competitive elements (gamification anyone?) to compel supporters to outdo each other. No wonder then that this American election is being called the ‘Facebook vote’ or the ‘data election’. Check out and register for a test run here.

obama2

This ‘dashboard’ makes me draw parallels to software like ‘Spotify’ that can predict a better tour schedule for up-and-coming bands, based on the listening history of fans using the streaming service. And the truth is, the better you can predict how your messaging reverberates and model your efforts accordingly, the more success you will have.

In politics as well as advertising.

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The Future of Filmmaking: Iron Sky

OK, that’s a big statement. But have a look at the well-produced case study of Nazi-SciFi-spoof ‘Iron Sky’ that is hitting cinemas worldwide at the moment.

The German-Finnish-Australian co-production had about 75% traditional funding and manged to rake in the rest via crowd-sourcing and crowd-investing. More interesting from a creative stand point is how listening to the audience and working with the supporters led to a a quicker, yet visually high-quality production  that was going to please the followers. At the same time it minimised the need for traditional film marketing. Now I am already liking the film for actor Udo Kier’s character name: Wolfgang Kortzfleisch. Probably the worst name in the history of film making. Check out one of the teasers below:

Why Agencies should behave like start ups

Probably one of the best panels at SXSW was the one on agency structure and how to bring about a sustainable level of  innovation. And work with talent rather than resources, project based rather than on retainers and hybrid roles rather than high specialisation. See the inspiring sketch notes from the talk featuring among others Rei Inamoto (AKQA) and Kevin Systrom (Instagram). More sketch notes after the jump.

Sketch notes from SXSW panel on 'agencies as start ups'

Sketch notes from SXSW panel on 'agencies as start ups'

Pinterest influences web strategies

America’s TODAY show has borrowed heavily from the usage pattern and structure of Pinterest. Browse to your heart’s content, ideally on a tablet and discover something that you can collect and take away. And because Pinterest is such a mainstream past time already,  many brands should take note. With the rise of tablets and touch sensitive computers in the future, this just feels more human and easily accessible.

TODAY’s digital director, Jen Brown is succinctly quoted with the following.

“There’s something about the mindset of Pinterest that is similar to what [people] love about TODAY.com— and that’s discovery. Sometimes I go to Pinterest and I’m not sure what exactly I want, but I know I’m going to find something fun. That’s really how we try to program our site.”

TODAYshow

See full article on Mashable