Offline Expectations from Online Engagements are Unrealistic

Posted on October 17, 2014 by marc meyer

Picture this: You’re at a stop light. It seems to be taking forever for it to turn green. You become impatient. You start yelling. You’re wondering why it hasn’t changed. Finally it does change and you peel out. You’re angry because it took entirely too long. It’s been an astounding and unfathomable 3 minutes.

Here’s another scenario: You’re at your computer, you’re on Google and you’re searching for something…The screen freezes, you see the little “thingy” going around so you know it’s “working,” and still nothing. You become impatient, you check your connection, check the cache, check your security settings. finally the page loads…and you think, I’ve got to get a new machine; yet it’s only been an incredible 2 minutes of agony and frustration.

Why are we like this? How has it come to this? Blame it on technology. You see technology has set an unrealistically high bar of expectation for speed and delivery for everything that is not technology related. Whether it’s your toaster, the elevator, the manager at a hotel, the service at the restaurant, the boarding of the airplane, checkout at the grocery store, customer service on the phone or the drive-thru of your favorite restaurant. If we don’t get what we want and need NOW, we have a melt down.

Like the New York Times says, “We need a reset.”

The problem is that we’re armed with so much more information, access and ability so quickly through technology, that it has lead people to expect, demand and want the same type of results from their offline experiences. Is that realistic? Probably not.

Our Global Digital World

Posted on March 14, 2013 by marc meyer

Saw this picture and it so captures the essence of who we are now. We are a global, digitally enabled people. Amazing!

When Does Online Privacy Not Matter Anymore?

Posted on March 12, 2013 by marc meyer

Are we becoming a nation or a society that is devaluing certain aspects of online privacy? As more and more of our lives become intertwined with online networks we become desensitized as to what is private and what is not. Take for example the liberties or assumptions that Live-Hive would like with your personal information.

CtoCloud Application is requesting permission to:

Manage your contacts
Manage your calendars
View basic information about your account
View and manage any of your documents and files in Google Drive
View your email address
Perform these operations when I’m not using the application

What is private? What is personal? What is sharable? Depending on what your beliefs are, the bar for leveraging the usage of a service against what is indeed your personal IP and private data has either been lowered or raised.

Some of you won’t care, others might walk away and still others will click yes like they do a EULA and be done with it. None of us care until it directly affects and impacts us. That’s sad.

On Being Relevant in Digital

Posted on March 30, 2012 by marc meyer

“Social” claims or has been claimed to do everything and it really has become quite the game changer. In fact, did you know that it can actually boil the ocean? OK, so I’m kidding, but the point is this-One thing that social media does and has done, is that it has spurred or enhanced or magnified relevance in everything that online and offline touch now.

Even if you were not relevant before, now you have a chance to be, thanks to digital and social.

But step back from every situation and I mean every situation, and it’s really less about social and more about an age of relevance. Social is just the lipstick. Chew on that a bit. Yes, we definitely live in a digital age now and yes, we definitely live in the age of social media and yes it’s definitely all about the conversation. But, what digital, social and the conversation have definitely done is that they have snapped a piece of relevance onto everything that we now come in to contact with. It’s actually a two way street. Relevance shapes our social and digital engagements and our digital and social engagements become more relevant the more hyper focused they are to what we are all about and what we want and demand.

It surprises me that others have not really focused on this. Until Now.

Accenture Interactive has just come out with a couple of pieces of thought leadership on the “Era of Relevance.” (Full disclosure-Accenture is a client of mine) Though Accenture Interactive is talking about relevance at scale for the enterprise, the underlying theme remains unchanged-when you or I are marketing, conversing, buying, shopping, or selling-relevance is the tipping point in the transaction or transformation.

I would highly recommend reading the pieces from AI because they really do focus on one of the larger straws that stirs the drink.

We all need another set of eyes

Posted on November 8, 2011 by marc meyer

As a business owner, at the end of the day, you’re in business to sell a product or service which means that you may know that product backwards and forwards, but does that mean you know how to market it? Maybe. Does it mean that you know digital marketing/ social media marketing? Does that mean you know e-commerce? Maybe not.

Some SMB’s prefer to do it all. Some can, some can’t. Some try, some fail. Enter the third party.

I’m having a conversation with a friend right at this moment in which he’s saying that the only thing constant in life is change. I agree, especially in social media. His point? People who run companies cannot do it all. But they try, they struggle, they dabble, and thus think they have it under control. Perhaps everyone needs that extra set of eyes on some aspects of what they do. Business owners need to understand that having another set of eyes is not necessarily a bad thing. The key is knowing when you need them and swallowing your pride to admit that you need them.

At the end of the day, you need to do what you do best. If you’re a doctor, asking you to market your product was not part of what you learned in medical school.

Social changes every day, so being an expert is a tall task. Being an expert in what you do takes time, takes effort and takes commitment. Can you be an expert in everything that you do in your business? For digital marketers, being connected to your network at least allows you stay abreast of what changes daily in the space. You take what you learn daily everywhere you go. Translation-How can you run your business and being effective with digital marketing? Especially if you’re a click and mortar business.

Beyond digital and social media and taking a broad lens approach to life, and knowing that we are all in some sort of bubble begs the question. Doesn’t having another set of eyes help you? Well there ya go…

Why Digital Strategies Fail.

Posted on August 5, 2011 by marc meyer

The easy answer on why digital strategies fail is that technology is changing so quickly that once an organization has decided to implement one strategy, it’s time to alter course and develop a new one. And to a certain extent that’s partly true. It is very difficult to stay ahead of the curve, especially now.

But the real reason a lot of digital strategies fail isn’t because of a dearth of good ideas or talent, it’s because of 5 things inherent in a lot of organizations. They are in descending order of importance.

5. Turnover coupled with leadership vacuum.

4. Red Tape/Politics/Hidden agendas

3. Lack of belief or Buy in from Leadership

2. Poor planning and Bad execution

1. Culture

I suppose that we could easily expand this discussion to include other aspects of a business that fail instead of just digital strategies because of the above mentioned bullet points, but these 5 seem to occur moreso than most around aspects of digital.

For example, if we’re to believe the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I do, we’re approximately 2-5 years away from mainstream adoption of social analytics. That’s measuring and monitoring and analyzing the biggest technological and cultuural phenomenon to hit the globe since the internet first came on the scene, and we’re 2-5 years from mainstream adoption. It’s not a technology problem.

It’s tough to stay ahead of the curve when some struggle to just get on the curve. Why is that? Your number one answer? Culture. We have to get out of our own way.

The Age of Digital Enamorment

Posted on June 8, 2011 by marc meyer

I wasn’t the best history student but I do know that we’ve had these periods in our history where there were just huge shifts and advancements in the way things were done. We had The Stone Age, The Bronze age, etc. etc., Each bigger and better than their predecessor; and then there was The Age of Enlightenment which was pretty cool since it was a movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe who were all about trying to reform society and advance knowledge. Kind of an ongoing and consistent theme even up to now don’t you think?

But you know what though? You know what has been consistent throughout all of these “Ages”? They all ended. Everyone moved on, everyone advanced.

Let’s fast forward to the year 2000. That’s when the Dot-Com Age came to an end. And now lets fast forward 11 years later to the “Age of Digital Enamorment”. Or is it the social media bubble? Depends on who you talk to, right? Simply put, we are in a period of time (which will end) that has us so completely fixated on all things digital, all things communications related, all things portable, and all things computer powered, and cloud driven etc.,etc.,, that seeing a 6 year old with a tablet raises nary an eyebrow.

Most will openly admit that they they’re not sure what they would do without a computer, a laptop, a tablet, a cell phone, Facebook or Twitter-They would be helpless and sadly I might be one of them, though it is my job, so maybe that is a slight pass. For others it has, this age of “Digital Enamorment”, weaved it’s way into the fabric of our daily lives, our private lives, out passions, our relationships, our problems, our past and our future so pervasively, that we really don’t know how we could live without them. I saw this term used in a post I had read recently that pretty much sums it up nicely, it’s called Pervasive Connectivity.

Perhaps a better way of looking at is that we live in the age of “Always On“.

And yet, we want more. We want it smaller and we demand it faster. In fact manufacturers and platform providers can’t work any faster in trying to roll out V2, V3, V4 and so on and so forth of their products and services. We will reach a maturation point that is preceded by a saturation point.

Still the question remains though-What will move us from the Age of Digital Enamorment?

We can point to a few things looming on the horizon, but the fact of the matter is, we are in a world that is still moving at light speed towards all digital, all web based, all mobile in nature, all social, and going global in desire and reach. The next movement won’t be us getting away from digital, no there’s going to be a point where we reach a level of intimacy with digital. I already see it happening. It’s that maturation after saturation.

Look no further than calling it the age of “Digital Intimacy”.

We’ll move here because we will have become so accustomed to our devices and our digital lives that we will desire a level of intimacy with these products and platforms that pushes us towards more of a return to the age of the conversation, the age of the relationship and an age of reclaiming our privacy.

Face to Face relationships will be the new black.