EMG 30-Second Rundown: The pace at which technology is accelerating is exaggerating the differences in culture, expectations, and mindsets among different generations of today’s children, teenagers, and young adults. It’s essentially creating mini-generation gaps. Kids only years apart might have vastly different communication preferences, and even mental capabilities such as multi-tasking.
Key Quote: “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology…College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”
The EMG Takeaway: Perhaps the notion of the “18-25 year old” marketing segment loses a bit of relevancy as the difference of only a couple years displays itself in exaggerated ways. The article is also resounding endorsement of the discovery process, truly understanding who you are trying to reach, their expectations and needs, and why that knowledge might alter your tactical approach. It’s a phenomenal reminder too for us to step outside of our own expectations for how we want products marketed to us. While one generation might find receiving a text message upon entry to a grocery store utterly intrusive, another generation (or sub-generation) might expect the interaction and find the experience odd or disappointing without it.
Final Words: An article interesting for the insight it provides, and the reminder that it serves.
Three Questions from EMG to Continue the Discussion:
1. How do you stay actively in touch with the expectations of those outside your own generation?
2. Have you observed instances of this mini-generational gap in your own life?
3. Kids have always had the attitude that their parents are hopelessly out of touch; is this any different, or is the contrast of the divide starker than ever?
With all of the recent buzz surrounding Sarah Palin’s new book “Going Rogue” I thought I would post a little something about the importance of ALIGNMENT within an organization. This is NOT a post about my thoughts on the book…or my thoughts about Mrs. Palin (although I am sure I could post something VERY interesting)…it is really about the nature of preventing rogue behavior within an organization improve communication and overall results.
Recently I went kayaking in the Long Beach marina and while I was paddling around I admired the row-boats that passed me by with about a dozen or so “rowers” listening to the captain of their ship calling out when to row. It was clear with each stroke the team intently LISTENED and followed in synchronization with their row propelling their boat faster and faster. This is a clear example that alignment within an organization takes a leader, listeners, and a common goal. If you want to go faster everyone must all row in one direction toward a common purpose, listen to their leader, and look to the finish line with purpose!
Alignment is more than just rowing in the same direction. For example, I have personally experienced great things happening when emotion is paired with intellect. I like to call this alignment of the right brain and the left brain. When creativity and passion are aligned with business and strategy one can be unstoppable. Sometimes this type of alignment occurs within a group or even better within one person.
Alignment is critical to success and it is what I strive for each day within myself and with my teams and company!
Basically, someone goes out and hides something in public and posts the coordinates online. You are then supposed to go to that website, get the coordinates and put them into your GPS (hand-held GPS, not your car navigation).
The coordinates get you pretty close to the item (or “cache” as it is called) and you have to use the clues they post online to find it.
The caches ranges in size from a small matchbook to a big ammo box. Inside you’ll always find a log where you can put your name, and in the bigger ones people leave little knickknacks and toys. It’s great for kids because they can trade one of their old toys for a toy that is inside. Some caches even have stuff for grown ups like movies (my buddy got a Willow DVD out of one).
Geocaching is a great hobby for technical geeks like me who like to “figure things out” and for families who want to spend time together outdoors.
So far, me and my family have found 48 caches in and around our city. How about you? Are there any other geocachers out there?
If you live in Southern California, then you’ve probably heard about the Orange County Great Park which is being built on the former El Toro marine base in the Irvine/Lake Forest area. This park is going to be huge at about 2x the size of Central Park in New York.
The OC Great Park is going to be eco-friendly, which we love to hear at EMG. They will be recycling materials from the demolition of the old marine base to build new roads (concrete from runways), bridges (redwood from old hangers) and more. Other green initiatives include recycling water, renewable energy (solar power), habitat restoration and energy efficient transportation options throughout the park.
Phase One has just been announced and is going to be completed sometime in 2011 with many features available in 2010. The best part for us EMGers is that this phase is going to include part of the sports complex which includes soccer fields, as well as a bigger field for general use (football anyone?). Future phases will include tennis courts, baseball fields, skate park, and even a bowling green. This will be a great place to spend our lunches.
I even read an LA Times blog post that said that next year will be Wild River’s last season (for real this time) and that a new water park might open in the great park in 2011.
The preview park is currently open where you can take free rides in one of the world’s largest tethered helium balloons. It’s definitely worth a trip if you haven’t been yet.
I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now. In case you somehow haven’t heard of Google Wave before, here is a description from the website:
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
In simple terms, I see it as a dynamic message board. It’s an interesting idea, but I haven’t been hooked on it yet. It doesn’t feel conducive for everyday use. I definitely do not see it replacing email or IMing anytime soon, like some suggest will happen. Seems more for specific group projects or interest groups.
Even then, you have to be able to wrap your head around the concept and features in order to be able to use it and I think the general public might be turned off to it before they get past the learning curve.
One of the hardest things at first is that you don’t have any friends when you first join. Two things to help:
1) When you join Google Wave, you should get a wave in your inbox from Google that allows you to invite some friends.
2) In the search box, type “with: public” without quotes so you can browse and join public waves. (see below)
I just got a bunch of invites and sent it out to a few people here at EMG. Maybe I’ll have a change of heart once I start using it in a business setting.
This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Day Ignite 2009 Customer Summit in Chicago (10/28 - 10/29) as a Day Partner, care of Earthbound Media Group (my employer and Day Partner). Topics covered ranged from the upcoming Communiqué (CQ5) 5.3 preview (which I’ll comment on momentarily) to running CQ5 in a Cloud environment to the new Microsoft Sharepoint Connector - and much much more! At the conclusion of the conference, we were treated to dinner and a show at the Chicago House of Blues - Foreigner! It was pretty neat!
The first thing that I want to share is the David Nuescheler’s Top 10 list of new features in CQ 5.3:
I have been involved in content migrations for EMG and its clients and a few in my earlier jobs as well. Some of them wanted to migrate from a database driven custom CMS to a ECMS product, Some wanted to migrate from a Database driven CMS to another Database driven CMS tool and some others were not sure of which way to go except for the fact that they wanted to move from their current CMS. Bottomline for all these migration scenarios is the client wants a better Website or Intranet (as the case may be) that gives the client more mileage.
Whatever the case maybe there are some common factors for content migration that will determine the complexity of the entire process.
1. Origin of Content / Content Repositories - The simplest scenario will be to migrate from a well defined relational database to the new system. But, this is never the case. There are always multiple systems from where the content originates – it could be a combination of one or more of the following : database systems, flat file, legacy systems, another content management system etc. The complexity of the migration process increases with the number of content sources.
2. Content Quality – One of our clients had their navigation system in imagemaps, thankfully, they did not want to migrate the existing navigation system as-is. In another instance, when we were automating a migration from flat files, we found that the HTML files did not follow any template and some of them were missing values for fields that were mandatory on the new system. So, we had to do a partially automated migration.
3. Content Types and Amount of content– Content Type could be text, Documents, Media etc. In a manual migration, Amount of content to be migrated will play a major factor.
4. Upgrade existing system – So far, I have not come across a scenario where the client wanted to do an as-is migration. There has been a substantial upgrade – either by defining additional fields, additional value add by implementing Search Engine Optimization, Information Rearchitecture, content cleanup etc. The complexity of migration will obviously increase with more value adds to the existing system.
5. Users, Roles and Business workflows - Mapping the users, roles and business workflows from the as-is system to the new system is a time consuming process. Sometimes we may have to redefine the mapping if the new system does not support the working of the as-is system.
Method of migration – Based on the above factors, we should be able to figure out if we can do a completely automated migration, completely manual migration or a combination of automated and manual migration.
The entire process will be successful only if we keep the actual “freeze” time (change over from the old system to the new system) within acceptable limits.
I recently received an ‘IT Insights’ mailer from a placement company I once worked for. Included in that letter was a section on Developer Skills and what to focus on over the next 5 years. I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out, comment on, and add my own two cents to the topics in this article.
The main topics of this article were:
The big three languages
People/soft skills
Web development and services
RIA (Rich Internet Applications)
Mobile
Let me review these topics, but in a slightly different order…
I think it’s important for us to get a clear understanding of the playing field as it relates to digital marketing today in order to prepare for the challenges we most definitely will face tomorrow. My hope is to provide context for the ideas and direction EMG is heading.
I begin with a few questions that I ask myself every day.
What ideas should we lead with? – The one’s with the best or most compelling creative, relevant strategy, newest technology, most popular or that shows the most promising return on investment? Is it all of the above or something much more complex, integrated and visceral?
How do we measure or benchmark success? Monetize social media? Break through barriers? How do we adapt faster and test quicker? Who are we influenced by? Who do we want to influence?
We now know that digital marketing can at times become the single backbone to success or failure – that it is no longer for simply marketing to youth, Millennials and soccer moms.
We have a continuous flood of information and intelligence resources to help us monitor, uncover and identify common campaign curses, unforeseen pitfalls, potential market penetration opportunities, unique engagement challenges, unconventional strategies and user experience best-practices.
Thought Leaders, must now work together to quickly take advantage of the ever changing digital landscape in order to continue to meet and surpass audience expectations; to not become stale; to determine what to embrace and what to ignore.
Digital marketing has now moved well beyond its infancy of simple electronic press kit sites and landing pages, search marketing, widgets, apps, online promotions and mobile contests, display advertising and even alternate reality games.
Think about the ground-breaking campaigns that are showing success with non-competing partnerships; campaigns that are reaching unbeknownst audiences via aggregated and unique content, popularity rankings, social evangelism and innovative creative; that are creating a personalized story and connection with our audiences outside the boundaries of the previous conventional digital campaign.
How much risk do we take, however?
Regardless of the complexity, all of our goals are singular, simple and historical. Identify the audience, both the core and the fringe, find the best way of delivering our content to them, learn from our success and failures, and risk just enough to stand out and be different.
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