We’ve found three fundamental strategies that can be used in isolation or integrated. I speak about these strategies in some detail in the video below and will also share an excerpt below the video of the original article on my digital marketing blog.

Inbound Marketing

This is a tried and tested strategy that has been adopted across many industries and businesses. Hubspot marketing have probably done the best work at making this a popular marketing strategy.

In essence, inbound marketing techniques aim to drive interested people to your website through interesting and informative content. Read more…

Social by Design

A big part of digital campaigns is designing social concepts that build communities of interest around the work you’re doing. Understanding Social by Design is key to designing social media strategies.

A strategy becomes social when it leverages the social aspect of life rather than merely using a social network. There are three primary social elements that we should be thinking about when we develop a social strategy. Read more…

Mobile First

When asked to look at the future of mobile I believe that you need at look at three main aspects:

1. The internet of things
2. Social Disruption
3. Infrastructure

In my last post I presented the concept of “The internet of things,” a look into how mobile technology is being use to enable machine to machine communication.

Today I will explore Social Disruption. The impact of social technology on a mobile consumer market and employee base.

Social Disruption

Roughly seven years ago social media thrust our world into a brand new digital dynamic. I believe that this technology helped us break into a new era, out of the information era and into the connection economy.

In the information era data helps us build competitive edge providing better value to our customers with custom solutions to custom problems. Data enables us to act quickly with the right information to meet a customers needs. Many industries have been working hard to make this a reality and this ‘data service’ in many cases has almost become the norm. Ecommerce is a great example of tracking purchases to provide customised future purchasing suggestions. Retail data has been used extensively to take the stock management power away from the supplier and place it firmly in the hands of the retailer. A better understanding of purchase patterns has helped retail outlets stock correctly and branch out into diversified services that help entrench loyalty with the customer. A great example here is how Tesco used the Club Card to become a world leading retailer.

So what happens when everyone in your industry is using data in this way. In South Africa we have seen Discovery, Pick n Pay, Woolworths and many other consumer driven services putting data to very good use to gain an edge on the market. When all the competitors ‘catch up’ where will we find our edge?

In the connection economy, the edge comes from ‘relationship.’ Building a social relationship with customers.

Prioritising relationship

When social media exploded many business jumped in an began to ‘socialise’ with their customise. In other words they set up a facebook page and asked people to become fans, then we tailored beautiful content strategies to speak to our new fanbase. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking content marketing and social media marketing. The principles are correct and they do work in creating a better connection with customers. Couple this with the fact that customers are choosing social mediums to communicate to and about companies, products and services, we can see a definite need to include social media strategy into our communication strategy.

I do believe that ‘social strategy‘ is more than social media strategy. Its the process of looking at our business, our products and services and seeing how we can build a more social experience at every level. Its about leveraging this social disruption to better your customer experience to include a relationship component.

Leveraging Social Disruption in Mobile

So what does this look like in the world of Mobile Marketing.

Mobile is personal

There are few objects that people posess that are more personal than a mobile phone. It contains in it the ability to store personal information, share information to personal networks and converse in one on one conversations. The personal nature of these devices means that they become a perfect platform to connect in a personal and social way with our customers.

One of the biggest learnings here at the moment is that all social communication should be mobile device friendly. If its not, you’re not touching the market with the right technology that makes a difference.

Another simple learning is that in certian circumstances you may be able to provide a more personal service by allow your business to be utilised through mobile. A classic example of this is how FNB claimed more customers simply because they offered a mobile banking app as part of their service (I was one of those people who moved banks for this reason.)

Mobile is immediate

Certian conversations require immediate action. Mobile is the device that people use to requets that immediate action.

Utilising apps or mobile sites that can assist customers with immediate queries and concerns is a good medium to divert negative sentiment away from public channels. Utilising apps to provide actual services are one of the most important avenues you should be considering on mobile strategy. Utlising social disruption in the delivery of these services would mean eansuring a personal experience that is sharable and connect the person with a community that they trust.

The immediacy of mobile means that if people are provided the correct socialised channels they may use your products whilst simultaneously sharing them with trusted networks (word of mouth marketing).

Mobile is social

A persons mobile device is a primary source of their socialisation with people. SMS, Whatsapp, BBM, MXit, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and many more tools are used on a daily basis to help people socialise with each other.

This is important to understand because although people hate spam communication, they will be used to social communication.

Key Drivers

One of our key drivers in mobile strategy should be to ustilise social disruption to provide a more personal, sharable and community driven experience for our customers.

When asked to look at the future of mobile I believe that you need at look at three main aspects:

1. The internet of things
2. Social Disruption
3. Infrastructure

Over the next three weeks I will take a look at each of these aspects. To start lets take a look at ‘the internet of things.’

The internet of things

Wikipedia says it best “Today computers—and, therefore, the Internet—are almost wholly dependent on human beings for information. Nearly all of the roughly 50 petabytes (a petabyte is 1,024 terabytes) of data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. Conventional diagrams of the Internet … leave out the most numerous and important routers of all – people. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. And that’s a big deal. We’re physical, and so is our environment … You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more. Yet today’s information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.”

In simpler terms, if we could find a way for inanimate objects to capture data to the internet we would be able to create databases of information of extreme value. In addition if we could create systems that initiated processes based on this data collected we could manage simple important processes better, with less human error.

A move to wearable tech

Nokia Eye Tracking Glasses

Finally we need to understand that the applications we use on our phones may find more convenient homes inside devices that we wear.

Google is about to launch Google Glasses which takes its services to eye where and Nokia are looking at similar technology to make the telecommunications experience more natural.

A collegue of mine just ordered his pebble watch which will control his andriod phone, making it easier to see whose calling, accept calls, use music applications and a host of other services that we like to have quick access to.

Shoes could become better objects to track our running and send that data to the cloud which will in turn send it back to our phones with a summary of our performance.

As we consider the future of mobile we really need to break out the box of the mobile phone and explore every single mobile device.

Smart Metering

A simple idea with big impact. Utilising the internet of things you are able to monitor how water is used, petrol is consumed, the temperature of fridges and many other aspects that normally are difficult to monitor in real time.

A great example of this in the health sector managing the temperature of blood from donors. This blood needs to be kept at a specific temperature. A change by one degree either way may cause that blood to be unusable. As blood is in short supply it makes sense to do everything we can to ensure nothing goes wrong with the temperature.

M2M communication can monitor the temperature of the fridge and then make necessary adjustments in real time to accommodate any changes taking place.

Working towards a smarter city

Vodafone have been taking big strides forward in this arena and have been working with Venice to create a ‘Smart City.’

Traffic is managed by machines talking to each other, sending data back and forth, (known as machine to machine communication or m2m) and finally collected in a central location. The data collected in this location has been able to provide insight into better traffic management to allow for higher security, environmental improvements and a decrease in traffic congestion.

Parking in payzones is now managed by sms by allowing people to sms their starting and ending parking times and allowing them to pay through a ‘phone call.’ Meanwhile the administration of parked vehicles by officials can be done with a tablet with online access or any mobile phone.

Local citizens can subscribe to notification services about election news, changes in bus routes, council meetings and a variety of other notice based servcies.

These are just a few ways that Venice has been using the internet of things to create a smarter city.

To close off this post here is a very interesting video from the smart people at IBM on the internet of things.

Hundreds of companies entered the awards that celebrate all things digital, rewarding excellence in digital publishing, advertising, and marketing.

DigitLab has been nominated for the following awards:

1. Special Honours – Best Brand/Company: KPMG
2. Special Honours – Best Individual Contribution to SA Digital Marketing and Media: Mike Saunders
3. Special Honours – Best Agency: DigitLab

It’s truly an honour to be nominated as Best Agency next to industry leaders like Cerebra, Quirk, World Wide Creative, Gloo, NATIVE, DigiVOX, and Liquorice Africa Advertising.

Great work for great people

As a social media and digital marketing agency, our focus has always been to ‘do great work for great people’, and it’s immensely gratifying to see KPMG shortlisted for the Best Brand/Company award, celebrating investment, innovation, and courage in digital.

Our team has grown a lot in the past year, doubling the size of our team and launching our mobile division, but one thing hasn’t changed – our promise to consistently achieve more, create more, drive more, and deliver more for our clients.

Congratulations and a huge thank you must go to every person at DigitLab, all of whom have been an integral part of the great work that we’ve been able to do, and especially to all of our clients, who make working in this industry so rewarding.

The Bookmark Award winners will be announced at a Hollywood Glam event at the Artscape Theatre on the 1st of November 2012. Hold thumbs!

Customers exposed to online media are wanting more from publishers

The online consumer is changing because of the value the internet offers. Their expectations in the digital medium are much higher than in print and its simply because they have been exposed to richer media online than offline.

Digital publishers need to begin to focus on how to create rich media experiences in the digital realm. These experiences would need to transcend social connections, personalising content, combining image and video content, and should not be device dependent.

New digital publications are already seeing good retention rates from smart phone users. The Wall Street Journal has this to say:

While print circulation continues to decline, news publishers have some good news in the Localytics report. News apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal saw the highest retention rate, with 44% of users. Gaming (e.g., Angry Birds), Entertainment (e.g., Netflix) and Sports (e.g., ESPN ScoreCenter) all had retention rates between 33% and 36%. Lifestyle apps, which include both e-commerce and life event planning tools, had the worst user retention, with just 15% opening an app 11 times or more and 30% opening an app just once.

So with rich media digital publishers outperforming gaming and entertainment apps it is becoming more and more apparent that digital publishing will be the avenue to find to beloved customers that stopped reading your magazine.

Digital Publishing offers new avenues to market for brands

Recently Flipboard, a digital publishing company that combines content curation and access to digital publishers, has shown real innovation by launching the first “in-magazine store”.

Flipboard calls this move a “social catalog,” and it’s especially telling given how monotonous online shopping has become, where long pages of visually-uninteresting grids are standard. Additionally, it looks like Flipboard has found an extremely easy and relevant way to display ads to users…that aren’t really ads at all.

With a move like this is seems that digital publishing services are able to reinvent the e-tailing model in the future. Bring e-commerce stores straight to the public through rich digital media experiences.

One of the biggest challenges I have seen has been the lack of infrastructure in Africa to support existing westernised business systems and processes. An example of this is if you would like to distribute in Africa, you will need to build the road to your customer in many cases.

I have also noticed that the digital engagement in Africa, especially in mobile is growing stronger and stinger everyday. In February this year I spoke at a conference win Nigeria and received one of the best twitter responses I have ever received. More people followed , engaged in conversation, retweeted and promoted my presentation on twitter than any South African conference I had spoken at. This fascinates me and suggests that a keenness and desire to adopt mobile digital technologies could mean that Africans will be ready for digital distribution way before we think.

So often a market takes time to mature into one ready to purchase online. It takes a consumer time to trust the reliability of a digital product and the company providing it. I believe that Africa will be ready far sooner than its western counterparts.

This has already been explored in mobile banking but could be explored in many other business avenues. I would suggest that anyone entering Africa needs to dig deep into their organisational strategy and rethink their business models to build on a digital business framework. They need to re-imagine their business, services, customers and products in order to really meet new market opportunities in Africa.

Applying the right strategy and product/service with the correct digital infrastructure could mean your business becomes a major part of the economic growth that Africa will experience over the next 20 years.

In our experience mobile has opened the door to real personal engagement with customers, align this with a social strategy and these customers will take your company to the rest of Africa. The key will be ensuring you provide the right value, to the right people, with the right communication and delivery channels.

Such an exciting opportunity awaits any business looking to take this challenge on. I would love to hear any thoughts around the role of digital, social and mobile in Africa. Please comment below.

I have however upgraded my iPhone three times since then and every time I get a little less impressed and a little more bored by the latest iPhone technology.

I believe that this experience I have is not unique. I think many people, when they upgrade their iPhone will feel the same. What makes the iPhone great on a technical aspect could become its customer experience downfall. I am talking about the ever-so-smooth back-up and restore function between iTunes and the iPhone.

Let me explain. When you get your new iPhone you follow this simple process:

1. Back-up your old phone to iTunes
2. Take your sim card out the old iPhone and slide it into your new iPhone
3. Ask iTunes to restore the new phone from the old back-up
4. The iPhone is then restored to the new iPhone exactly the way you had it on your old iPhone. Personal setting and all.

This is seriously a fantastic feature because managing my data as an iPhone user has become so easy and there is almost no risk in losing information. In addition the setup time of my new iPhone is an hour or so instead of a few days as I come to grips with a new phone and it’s new logic.

Great experience! Or is it? You see now that my new phone feels and looks the same as my old iPhone I lose the ‘new iPhone’ feeling very quickly. Which make the validation of my new iPhone more difficult to justify. I know it is a higher spec’d, faster, leaner and meaner machine but it Los and feels the same. In fact the upgrade experience can almost seem a bit boring.

My suggestion to Apple would be simple. Find a way to create an exciting upgrade experience to a new iPhone. Not everyone cares (in fact most don’t care) about the technology, they care about how it feels! The feeling comes from the experience of change and the elation of a validated purchase due to the perceived value I am receiving.

Something needs to change in the upgrade. A newer interface, a sexier iPhone design, a new Colour. In other words, with the world getting saturated with iPhones it’s getting harder to stand apart from my peers and colleagues with my new iPhone because it looks, feels and is exactly the same phone as theirs. I think Apple could take a lesson from the cup cake business and customise their user experience a bit more.

Social Technology makes your employees more productive

This means that these people are spending 61% of their days emersed in activities that can be improved though the use of social technology. The main benefit is clear social technology can help these people save time on these activities and therefore improve their productivity.

Think about how social technology improved our social lives. Facebook helps people to keep in touch with their friends and family in a more productive way. Instead of waiting for social gatherings people are now able to catch up on social news in the “dead pockets” of the daily routiunes. Waiting for meetings to start, sitting at petrol stations and standing in queues have now become opportunities to socialise, making our social life more productive.

The same is true in business. Socialising collaboration, knowledge management and internal communications will improve productivity by reducing email strain, improving the relevancy of information, personalising the knowledge management experience and allowing collaboration to break past the meeting room and into the mobile space.

Social Technology and Operations

As we dive more into the strategy in fusing social technology and business together it is becoming abundantly clear that social technology needs to form a part of our business operations. Social media and business tools facilitate communications that should be integral in our operational conversations. The same technology should form part of our customer research activities that inform our product design and innovation operations. Further more, social business technology can have a micro and macro effect on business efficiency.

In his article “The future is podular” Dave Gray suggest that business needs to move towards a ‘podular’ networked business instead of remaining a ‘chain’ driven organisation. This means that the ‘chain of command’ shifts and our current communication styles in business will fail inside a networked culture. I would like to suggest at this juncture that social business is the operational solution to create a communication and accountability structure for a ‘networked/podular’ business. In this case, social business technology is an imperative to successfully achieving the suggested model.

In more “chain and command” driven organisations, the operations can survive without social business technology but will inevitably need to change their process as Generation Y moves in and demands more productive communication systems and more intuitive collaborative structures. Chain and Command organisations (hierarchical) will struggle to remain relevant and agile in the future of business and Generation Y are well aware of this. Over time, our employees, future management and customers will naturally more towards a podular structure, but by then it will be too late to create a competitive advantage.

Understanding this concept is key to designing social media strategies. A strategy becomes social when it leverages the social aspect of life rather than uses a social network.

There are three primary social elements that we should be thinking about when we develop a social strategy.

1) Personalisation

A social strategy will look to customize a campaign with a personalized interface for the user that enhances their experience by highlighting what’s important to them.

The users identity then defines a large part of what their experience becomes. This is easily achieved by integrating with existing social networks, and by designing space on your online platforms for personalised content.

2) The reason to share

Viral campaigns become viral because they have something that people want to share. The trouble is that people don’t always share content in the same way all the time. People are more complex than that. Sharing is dependent on the content, the emotional context of consuming that content and so many other uncontrollable factors.

When designing for social, we should not ‘hope’ that people share content. We should design the strategy to encourage the sharing action.

I recently consulted a company who was showing me their ‘social’ application on Facebook. Yes, it was on Facebook. Well done. The app however never utilized, encouraged or designed any reason for people to share the content of the app. Therefore no-one will share it. There is no incentive to do so. A good example of an app that is ‘in social, but not social.

3) Connecting Community

Just because you have a community does not mean that people want to be a part of it. So many companies are pursuing the numbers game in social media strategy. I would suggest that this metric will only decrease your opportunity to connect with people and their communities.

Remember that a social strategy aims to connect your company or brand to the community of people who ‘like’ you. In other words, a focus on your community is important but needs to be balanced with a serious focus on connecting into the communities of your fans.

Sharing content often introduces you to your fans community but there needs to be a strategy design to connect their community to yours.

This is a complex idea. I am not suggesting that you need to own the community. I am suggesting that you need to find ways to influence it. Remember that the bigger the community the lower the engagement levels. Social works best in smaller, tighter and more interesting communities.

Connecting community has more to do with empowering ambassadors to build new communities than to add people to your database

Email is a great communication tool, partly because its simple enough to use and partly because everyone uses it. Just because everyone is using it does not mean that it will work for every type of business communication. Email is perfect for communication an idea in a single direction and getting feedback, for handling official conversations and to forward our friends inane humour (please note my sarcasm in the last point)

The challenge is that email is so often used to distribute and store useful information. This is where email fails, it does not have an organisation structure, or search tool flexible and intuitive enough to manage this information correctly.

Have you ever wondered what happened to that link you were sent on email, or to the proposal your agency sent through a few weeks ago? What about the first concept business plan that has changed so many time your entire team is using multiple versions of the wrong document and no one knows where the correct final document is.

Somehow email tends to get lost or in some cases ‘never arrive’ at its intended recipients. This phenomenon has become a way of life. We have come to accept it because we had no alternative, at least we thought we had no alternative.

Social technology, opens up the door to a knowledge management process that is the right tool for the job. Infusing information sources (links, documents, videos, images, podcast, news and any other form of media) with social engagement can help sift out the information that is valuable and turn it into a knowledge base that adds to the growth and bottom line of the firm.

The following needs to happen to a piece of information before it can have a major impact in a business as a solution to a strategic or operational challenge.

1. Information must be accessible in a central repository that is easy to access and use.
2. The repository should include information tracking to highlight information that is attracting attention by people in the organisation
3. Conversation needs to take place around the information. This conversation will challenge the information, apply it hypothetically, add new information to the conversation and finally upgrade the information into a state of knowledge. Knowledge comes about when people organise their thoughts around the information and develop a point of view.
4. The knowledge impacts decisions in the business.
5. The experiences we gain from acting in decisions add to our knowledge based and often graduates that knowledge to wisdom in the organisation which can be shared in the conversations in the knowledge management system.

Everybody draws on the knowledge base when making decisions in business. By socializing the knowledge management process above you can build a culture of storing and engaging with information and validating it within the organisation. Validated information rises to the top of the information pool and sparks conversations that lead to knowledge development, impact on business decisions. The results of those decisions are also added back into the system to develop the thinking towards wisdom.

Social opens up the opportunity for you to create a business culture that promotes learning, rewards it and retains it.