This will impact multiple industries, and is another example of the next wave in digital disruption

Though it applies to other retail, the example in this Huffington Post Article is clothes shopping — specifically, a new approach that will give you back massive amounts of time in your life and make the experience fun, fast and super-personalized.

Gone are the wasted hours in dressing rooms or combing through racks and finding nothing in your preferred size or style.

The five converging technologies are:

• 3D imaging
• Body-motion sensors
• Virtual reality headsets
• Virtual worlds
• Big data & AI

Click here  for the full article

This  quote came across my desk from my colleague Shaji Sethu, and I thought it was quite insightful in the way that people are consuming.

We are already seeing this shift in B2C space eg. automotive, property etc, but now we are seeing it in B2B. As marketing and technology is changing so quickly, businesses are looking for the benefit of the asset/infrastructure, not the infrastructure itself (unless the infrastructure is part of their core business).

Question

How do you get one million likes on Facebook?

Answer

• Pick a subject that polarises people such as politics or religion
• Make an inflammatory statement
• Sit back and let it happen

A Facebook post from “Meanwhile in Australia“, was posted on 8 May calling for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard to resign if they got 1 Million likes. Well they are far from 1 Million, but in less than three weeks they’ve managed to get 91k likes, 3.7K comments and over 4k shares.

I showed this to my wife last night (who leans to the left politically) and she said jokingly, “Well anybody that likes that is an idiot”…Yep as I said polarising!

Well it seems that the Yahoo! Toolbar is still around and through a partnership with Coles Flybuys, might start to get some traction again.

I was interested to receive an eDM from Flybuys today asking me to download the new Flybuys toolbar (a partnership with Yahoo!7) with the incentive that I’ll get up to 100 Flybuys points for searching using the tool.

For most people this would seem like a good way to earn some extra Flybuys points, but think of it from a data point of view.

By asking you to scan your flybuys card with each purchase at Coles owned retailers such as Coles, Liquorland, K-Mart and also Coles partners such as Telstra, AGL, NAB and Webjet; Flybuys is collecting an enormous amount of data on individual customers. Now with Flybuys/Yahoo! browser toolbar, they can collect data on the web browsing habits of these same individual customers.

With this massive amount of data, Coles will be able to target advertising to individuals based on there product preferences, but more importantly they’ll be able to source and create products to meet the needs of their customers.

Details of the Flybuys toolbar can be found here. Details of the Yahoo toolbar can be found here.

Wikipedia describes content strategy as “…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance. A repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process…”

Forbes blogger, Michael Brenner, defines it as “as the mindset, culture and approach to delivering your customer’s information needs in all the places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process. It is a strategic approach to managing content as an asset, with a quantifiable ROI.”

UK based content company Content Amp shared this info-graphic showing the extent of the content marketing landscape in 2013.

In simple terms I see it as a subset of an overall digital strategy that considers content creation and content consumption.

Content Creation

Content Creation is about what content to create and how to create it. Often SEO research strategies will give an insight on what content people are searching for, relevant to your brand or product. This will give you the subjects/topics that content should be created around. An understanding of the online persona’s of your market will then let you determine the type of content to be created e.g. video, audio, copy, interactive tools.

The content also needs to be relevant to where it is going to be consumed (e.g mobile content should be more concise and easily consumed quickly on a handset)

The how to create it question needs to be answered by considering a process to produce this content in a manner that is economical and repeatable so that you can get an ROI out of continually producing content.

Content Consumption

Content Consumption is about providing the content you’ve created in the places where your consumers are looking for it and making it compelling enough so that it is shared to amplify the consumption of this content.

In short, your content has to be amazing, relevant and helpful. It cannot be about you. It has to be about your consumers’ needs and wants.

When considering the places to post your content look at Owned, Earned and Paid channels. Where does it fit in the context of your website, blog, and social assets? Can this content be posted by other third parties, business partners. Can you cross share content with synergistic brands / products? Can this content improve paid advertising that you are doing, e.g. video in display ads or using video exchanges to seed your video content to relevant target segments?

Measure & Improve

Once you publish your content, look at what content is being engaged with the most and what content is being shared the most and adjust your content creation plan to produce more of this content.

This infographic from data management company Alteryx was created from research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It lays out some of the key areas where big data analytics can be applied to allow companies to gain true value from it.

The bottom line? It’s not how much data you have it’s what you do with it.

Key takeouts

1. It’s no good your data only sitting with data scientists and analysts. Relevant data in an easy to consumer format should be accessible by all people in the company. Sharing more data across the company leads to more efficient and effective decision making.
2. The immediate opportunities for big data are
   • Make better management and strategic decisions
   • Identify opportunities that you weren’t aware of quicker and exploit them faster
   • Brand wars are being won not by the best product or the best price, but the best ongoing relationship with consumers. Using big data gives a massive competitive advantage in understanding customers and meeting there needs.
3. Big data should consider much wider sources of data.

• year of social
• year of mobile
• year of big data

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. I think 2009, 2010 and 2011 were going to be the years of mobile before 2012 finally was. So what will 2013 be the year of?

Well I’m not sure if 2013 with be the year of the mobile wallet and mobile payments, but I’m pretty certain we will move a long way towards it, and surely by the end of 2014 the mobile wallet will be commonplace amongst all smart phone users.

Technologies such as Paypal, Google Wallet and Apple’s iTunes are already replacing traditional forms of payment. With consumers increasingly becoming more comfortable making purchases both big and small on their mobile devices, there is no doubt that this trend will continue.

Mobile commerce took great strides in 2012, with Paypal having better integration into the eBay mobile site and app, Google Wallet becoming more user friendly and Apple launching Passbook in it’s release of iOS6.

“A single repository, as long as it is secure, makes a lot more sense than carrying around the typical mess of loyalty cards, credit cards, gift cards, debit cards and ATM cards,” said Wilson Kerr, vice president of business development and sales at Unbound Commerce, Boston.

“Consumers increasingly trust their smartphones and apps will allow consumers to replace payment and store-specific loyalty cards they carry in their traditional wallet or purse,” he said.

Mobile Wallets / Mobile Payments

According to an article in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, 64 per cent of Australians own smartphones and mobile analysts are predicting the mobile payment industry will be worth almost $50 billion worldwide by 2014, with PayPal predicted to earn $10 billion in global mobile transactions this year.

Consumers are using their mobile devices to not only price compare while in-store, but to also make purchases.

Some brands such as Starbucks, McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts are seeing the importance of this and have unveiled their own mobile payment apps.

It is because of companies such as Amazon, PayPal, Google and Starbucks that consumers are getting comfortable using their mobile devices to make purchases.

These companies are providing single-click online checkout services that speed the process for consumers for both mobile and standard Web sites.

This is a key piece to the mobile wallet puzzle.

Banks and credit cards are also racing to the frontline and in 2012 we saw the launch of Commonwealth Bank’s (CBA) Commbank Kaching and Mastercard’s PayPass paving the way for mobile payments in retail as a mainstream payment method.

What apps can’t you live without?

The Essential Mac Apps

Alfred -The most awesomeness mac app ever. Launch any program with a simple short cut. Since installing this I never ever use the launchpad or the applications screen.

Caffeine – This simple app allows you to turn the power saving settings on and off with the simple click of a coffee cup. Handy when you’re at your desk and getting up and down but don’t want your computer to go to sleep.

1Password – Store all your passwords securely in one place and use the handy browser plugins to easily log into websites and applications.

Dropbox – Store all your data and files in your dropbox so you can easily access them on your hard drive, your other devices (laptops, desktops, mobiles and tablets) and know they are also safely backed up in the cloud. Create shared folders to collaborate with your colleagues.

Evernote – Where dropbox is great for files and documents that are a work in progress or being accessed often. Evernote is a great place to drop stuff you might want to access later. It’s worth upgrade to the pro subscription so your PDFs text is scanned with OCR for easy finding later. The latest version for Mac, iPhone and iPad is excellent.

Flip Player – Like it or not, you’ll probably have to play a .wmv file at some time in the future. This is the app for that.

Skype – If you don’t know what Skype is, you’ve been hiding under a rock.

Google Drive – Google docs are fantastic way to create spreadsheets, wordprocessor files and other documents. Google Drive makes it easy to access Google docs as well as providing some of the functionality of Dropbox.

Other Cool Mac Apps You might like

Scrivener – If you’re a wannabe writer or a budding novelist, this app does all the heavy lifting for you to help you get to your first draft. At $50, it an excellent piece of software.

OmniGraffle – If you want to draw diagrams, this is the app for you. At $100 for the base version and $200 for the pro version, it’s a bit expensive, but if you need to do flow charts or any of 20 different types of diagrams, then this is the app for you.

If you are switching to Mac and don’t have this kind of help, here an article with all the useful apps to get you started. Some of them are quite obvious and aren’t really Mac specific (like skype and dropbox) but others like 1Password are essential and only for Macs.

http://www.asianefficiency.com/technology/essential-mac-apps/

The 2 that they don’t have on the list that I also find very useful are

– Caffeine (which allows you to overwrite power saving setting – great for presentations)
– Alfred (which give you quick start to all your apps from a simple 1 or 2 letter command line)

Both of these are available in the app store.

Let me know if you have any others that you’d recommend.