10 Things I Thought About in 2016 that Will Still Matter in 2017

Posted on December 16, 2016 by marc meyer

Today I was thinking about a website that I go to, from time to time called Quotes on Design. What’s cool is that you can constantly refresh the page for a new quote on design. That thinking posed a question internally… ‘How about a site on things I said? I quickly shut that thought down. But…

Instead, here are things I’ve written in my Moleskine over the past 12 months. I just plucked the relevant stuff as it was written on the pages. It’s rather interesting in that you can track my thinking in the tech industry in 2016 and see how much we might be thinking about it in 2017. Hell, we might not be thinking these things at all. You decide.

January 2016

I noticed the term Smart Cities starting to show up a lot in what I was reading, sharing, tweeting and talking about.
Not a day went by where I did not talk about The Internet of Things.
Paid social, ugh…
Snackable Content-That’s all we want!

I wrote a lot about customer focus and for good reason, a lot of the data coming out, basically says, either focus on the customer NOW or you’re gonna lose them

Trust issues were a common thing on some of my pages when it came to privacy, the customer and brands.

I wrote this:

Being innovation led is as equally vexing a goal, as it is a deficiency.

I wrote a lot of words that started with “i:”

Insights
Intensity
Insensitivity
Interactions
Integrations
Indecisions
Innovations
Inertias

And one word that can blow it all up. Culture.

Customer Journey quotes and thoughts start to become the center of the universe of my notebook.Why?

February and March of 2016 Digital Transformation

Here’s an interesting page. On it are the names:

Dynamic Signal
Radian Six
Basecamp
Blab
Periscope
Lotus Notes and then at the bottom is the word/term…

Smart Cities, Again

I wrote: “All anyone wants to talk and write about is…

“All anyone wants to talk and write about is digital strategy, except no-one really wants to share solutions.” If they do, it’s been done.”

#SXSW

Search Analytics

Keyword Frequency

Crowdsourcing

LiveStream

Boost/Program

Visibility plus Credibility =Profitability

April 2016

What is your strategy/vision?

What do you need to succeed? (I love this question)

My mantra? Make it right. Do it right. Make it cool. Do it cool. Happy People.

May/June 2016

Google analytics

Optimization

Inbound/Outbound

Linking Strategy

Killer copy

New Pages

“Performance issue with previous agency.”

Compliance

“Context and message can be 2 ships passing in the night or better yet, going on a cruise together on a really big boat and getting separated from the beginning.” -Me

Create amazing experiences

Designers need to think about people

#peoplefirst

“What are we solving for? Who are we solving for?”

July /August 2016

The true nature of design? #CX? or #UX

(iot) + (streaming) x (mobile) figure out delivery

Humanize the strategy

Influencers? what gets shared?

When did influenceing the influencers become a thing?

There’s content, and then there’s our content

What are we using social media for?

What works? who is the competition?

September/October 2016

What’s more important a resource or a utility? app?

Whats the game plan?

Where does social fit in a brands mobile strategy?

Customer loyalty and disruption

Digital transformation, yea, yea, yea….

Disruption in mobile

Has the mobile imperative disrupted the design imperative?

How do you spell digital transformation?

Why are we valuable?

When you get marginalized.

IFTTT

November/December 2016

Word or term os the year? Digital transformation

Digital Transformation
Digital Disruption
IoT
VR
AI
AR
Design
Customer Experience
Mobile UI

Global Focus Local Thinking

What does digital ________actually mean anymore? Isn’t everything virtual?

CX is the new black

Mobile analytics is so crucial.

data

Which takes me to December 16th 2016.

These are the things I thought in 2016.

Four Areas that Digital Marketers Need to Continue to Focus On

Posted on March 19, 2012 by marc meyer

Should we be amazed anymore at how fast digital is moving? Honestly no. But what should we be thinking about as we watch it go by? When I was a kid and I would see a train go by, I always wanted to be on that train. I didn’t really care where it was going, I just wanted to be on it. With a little foresight and hindsight you can be on that train that we’re calling digital right now-and know where it came from and where it’s going. We sort of know where it came from, but here’s 4 stops on that journey.

Figure out Big Data- Mark it down. Big data is going to be big business. It makes sense though, you have these large organizations collecting terabytes of customer data but not knowing how or what to do with it. Enter the age of Big Data and marketers finally doing something with that data.. IDC predicts that the market for Big Data technology and services will reach $16.9 billion by 2015 up from $3.2 billion in 2010.
Focus on the Customer. If you think you’re doing enough with your customers, then chances are, you are not. Some recent Accenture research reveals that retailers can respond with mobile capabilities designed to create value for both customers and themselves if they understand who is shopping in their stores, how they shop, and how mobile influences their shopping behaviors.
Go Get a Tablet– It’s hard to ignore the mobile and tablet markets. If you don’t own a tablet, you probably have it on your wish list of things to get. That’s a good decision. Why? It’s where your customers, clients and colleagues are going. Need the data to prove it? After less than two years, U.S. mobile subscribers were using almost 40 million tablets, according to ComScore. In contrast, it took smartphones seven years to reach that level of adoption.
Twitter ain’t going anywhere-From cars that tweet, to marketers figuring out newfound ways to leverage the power of microblogging and actually driving awareness and making money-Twitter is hitting some good times. Need more proof? Twitter didn’t buy Posterous just to spend money and collect a toy. They have plans. Big one’s.

We could have added more, but the point here is not to inundate you with all the things that occur every day in the tech world, it’s too much and can be overwhelming. The point is to help you focus on the areas that continue to mature and evolve-For marketers large and small, we need to learn how can we adapt and adopt to things that will be around in 6 months to a year. We have to get away from our fixation on the new and shiny and focus on the smart and profitable.

The Evolution of Our Data Fixation in Social Media

Posted on February 21, 2012 by marc meyer

Six years ago, we were talking about the growth of blogging and MySpace. In 2006, Radian6 was founded by Chris Newton (@cdnewt) and Chris Ramsey (@chrisramsey) Back then monitoring and listening were a novel concept, but they knew that social wasn’t a fluke.

Five years ago, hundreds of millions of people around the world were starting to visit social networking sites each month and many were doing so out of curiosity on a daily basis. Clearly,social networking is not a fad but rather an activity that is being woven into the very fabric of the global Internet.

However, we could have cared less about measuring our engagements…yet. We were all about doing first and thinking second. Case in point Wal-Marting Across America uses a real journalist and real photographer, and sets them up as your average Wal-Mart fans, who travel across America, park their RV at Wal-Mart parking lots and hang and blog.

4 years ago, we were still fixated by the numbers, and the bulk of measurement questions still consisted of “how many”, but “who and why” are starting to become more of a focus in social.

3 years ago, the numbers bordered on the ridiculous but some trends were starting to take shape.

But underneath that astounding growth trend, was a disturbing stat. One that will do 2 things. First, it freaks people out and then, it spurs people into action.

2 years ago, We stopped blowing on the reflection of our social media selves in the mirror and wanted to get serious about measuring social. Consider this blurb from 10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010

“Return on investment on social media activities has been challenging to most companies in 2009. Surveys show only 18% of companies say they saw meaningful return on investment from their social media activities while the other 72% report modest, no return or inability to measure the return on their investment in social media. While the definition of ROI is evolving to better fit the world of relationships and networks, the ability to demonstrate ROI in hard numbers — not in followers or fans — will become a baseline business requirement in 2010. Already, both traditional firms and startups are working feverishly to demonstrate they can turn hype into science. But, only those companies who will be able to analyze and predict hard returns on investments will last”

The funny thing is, if you bother to try and search on the number of articles or blog posts about data, data measurement, monitoring, listening and engagement in the last 6 years, you can see that as social has evolved, so has the need to become less fixated on quantity and more concerned with what one does with the numbers. The number of blog posts and articles in the past 6 years reflect this sea change in doing something with the numbers, yet we still aren’t there yet. Consider this post in Gigaom, 3 accurate metrics for ROI on social media campaigns. Here is the opening sentence:

Businesses are struggling with how to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media campaigns.

Yes, we’re becoming enamored with the data and analytics of social, and we’re becoming really good at collecting it, but we still need a primer in what to do with it and how to turn it into Action. Look at how long it has taken us to get over big numbers! So when does this change? How long will it take us to get there?