Accidentally digital

Impossible to ignore and fun to embrace. This blog started with how I have grown to enjoy technology, digital and social media in spite of myself. It has now grown to encompass how it is changing the landscape of how we connect with, and promote to, the audiences we need to reach.

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Does anyone listen to podcasts?

They went away for a bit with the huge rise of video and now they are creeping back. In America I understand that this is to do with the massive number of car drivers and access to better in-car tech than in the UK. In addition there isn't the same breath of radio stations available. I have always listened to the Guardian Tech weekly podcast on my occasional walk to work and recently found the motivation to walk to work more regularly when I was introduced to podcast 'Serial'. It makes me want to walk because it's the only time I get uninterrupted listening time and you really want to find out what happens next. I also noticed that Paul Boag's has decided to make his Boagworld newsletter available in video and podcast form. This is great. I don't watch video much, I simply don't have the time to dedicate an uninterrupted 3 minutes to something I want to watch but listening is another matter. I can listen in the car, on a walk or whilst I'm doing stuff in the house - listening does not exclude all other activity in the way that watching and listening does. It may just be me as I have a radio in every room and if I had to make a choice would give up TV before radio - it may be a medium that suits me better. I just wondered what everyone else thought.

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This is why I love working in digital - it's constantly changing and keeps you always thinking about how to reach the customer in the best way for them and stops us getting complacent.

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Can't go to a digital conference without coming across a funnel!

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Purposefully digital

When I started this blog it was my first real forage into the world of all things digital. I kept coming across new things, rediscovering old things and wondering what was coming next. This is why I called the blog accidentally digital and it was a helpful place to store stuff, log ideas in between the other bits of my life.

In the past 18 months my engagement with digital has changed beyond all recognition from those first, tiny, information-gathering forages. Now it is what I think about, talk about, evangelise about everyday. It has seeped into my everyday life at work and at home. Today I sat in a parents induction session for my children's infant school (yep they even have to induct us!). I found myself scribbling on the back of a piece of paper ‘excellent example of giving the customer the information they need at a time when they need it.' We had covered school uniforms, what happens at lunch, where to go to drop them off, what happens on the first day and more. 'We won’t tell you about the learning styles and the curriculum now’ they said, 'you don’t want to know that now you'll want to know about that in the autumn’.

I never expected my best example of knowing your customers and catering to their needs to come from an infant school and there it was. Not so digital but so simple. Digital is just another way of getting a message across and ultimately the people we are trying to communicate with are the most important element in the process.

I have gone way past feeling accidentally digital and am very much purposefully digital I can’t change the name of the blog though that would be a big no no in this digital world of ours!

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A good round up of some of the skills we have/need in the digital marketing sphere.

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Are we limiting our own boundaries and closing our worlds down?

I wanted to bring up something that has been playing on my mind when it comes to the personalised aspect of the information we now receive in terms of advertising, news, suggested purchases, etc.

The point first came to me when I went to the Stories Well Told conference run by McCann in Birmingham. When the speakers started talking about the value of being able to give people the news that they want to read because they are like stories they are already reading, suggestions for clothes they might want to buy because they have bought similar clothes before, places they might eat because they have previously eaten in those types of restaurants my first thought was – how do we broaden people’s horizons if we are giving them more of the same all the time?

I have noticed it myself – I don’t buy a paper at the weekend as regularly as I used to because I ‘get all my news via social media’. However I realised I was kinda missing out on those headlines that would catch my eye as I was flicking through the paper and I read stories in the paper that I probably wouldn't come across in my news feeds.

I have just returned from a conference in Brighton (CASE: Social Media and Community). The excellent Tracy Playle from Pickle Jar Communications was talking about examples of possible ways in the future that we could use personal data. Her example was in a Higher Education context about something simple like a campus tour. You could, theoretically, assign people to certain campus tour groups with people that have similar interests which would lead to a more engaging experience and therefore build an affinity with that particular university more easily. I was pleased when Tracy added the caveat that the question isn't whether you can do it but whether ethically it is something that we want to be doing. Surely an education institution should be broadening people’s horizons not shutting them down.

So the question is – When people personalise everything including news are we creating a world of people that live in very limited boundaries?

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This is a great diagram.

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Do you find behavioural/personalised advertising useful or creepy. This great infographic from dotrising gives an idea of what your customers might think.

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The Rise Of The Unicorns -- Why Marketing Technologists Will Rule Modern Marketing

This week in Boston the first MarTech conference was held to encourage and support the increasingly important but still rare professionals — those who are equally adept at marketing and technology. Sometimes labeled chief marketing technology officers (CMTO), and affectionately referred to as unicorns because they are so difficult to [...]

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When I asked 'what new skills does marketer need that they didn't need ten years ago?' at the Stories Well Told Conference run by McCann today in Birmingham these words were in the answer: Data skills, strategic, planning skills, collaborative skills, tech skills. Hybrids are great but will also need core skills. Intuition.

The speaker that answered spoke of an article she had read that talked of this person as a mythical unicorn. McCann's team created this 'mythical unicorn'.

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the marketoonist

These are great, particularly the QR code one!

http://tomfishburne.com/2015/02/media.html

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So in my previous post 'Realigning digital in our lives' I talk very briefly about exactly what this article expands on. I hadn't read the article beforehand before but am always pleased when I find I'm not the only person thinking something!

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This is an issue that's coming up more and more and it's good to see something is being done about it.

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Realigning digital in our lives

I'm not pretending it's not here to stay and I'm not pretending I have not been a part of it but I am finding that parts of my life that I digitalised pretty quickly are now going back a little to how they used to be. I love my kindle for its portability, space saving abilities and the fact that it's encouraged me to read new books rather than re read old ones but the joy of listening to my toddlers picking up my big fat historical fiction book and making up stories as they flicked through the pages based on the pictures on the front was not something a Kindle would have achieved. I was stupidly pleased at how much better I felt once I had got a noticeboard at work. Sometimes you have to see things in front of you rather than hidden behind stuff on your desktop (PC not actual desk) or having to open an app (probably called 'Noticeboard'). I have been agonising over the best way to back up photos until I decided that the old-fashioned idea of 'printing them out' was probably a good one as photos seem to have lasted for 100's of years. There is also the added bonus that you may actually look at them from time to time. And yes I will also be backing them up on an external drive! I think I finally pulled all these thoughts together when a colleague was chuffed that he had found a way to print projects off Trello so as to be able to annotate, check, tick off, put up on a noticeboard. It was then that I realised the new technologies have begun to coexist alongside the old ones rather than take them over and we just have more to choose from.