So who says you can’t go to Cambridge or Harvard?
Cambridge University
This changes the way we look at education, especially tertiary education.
There is no reason why the standard academic textbook cannot be replaced by electronic versions constantly updated in a wikipedia type process by teams of academics (after all its all the same stuff and doesn’t need to be reinvented over and over again – Maths 101 is much the same in Cambridge, Harvard as at WITS), and made available to students for free, academic books are very expensive. Just think the best lecturers on specific topics writing their chapter and delivering lectures via services such as iTunes university.
It also changes the role of the traditional academic, doesn’t it? Allowing them to spend more time on research and more time tutoring, mentoring and guiding and less time preparing lectures and notes. It must also mean that the average quality of teaching will improve as the best teachers can spread their influence over millions of students around the world, instead of only those in their own classrooms.
So how will Schools, universities and colleges adapt? maybe their new role is to add value, student support instead of reinventing the academic wheel?
Textbooks available for free, lectures from the best and available to everyone also for free, now that is equality of opportunity.
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Fight Mediocrity
- Image via Wikipedia
Good is the enemy of great.
Seth Godin published a very short but very powerful post on his blog today. He called it “On the road to mediocrity”
We all face the opportunity so often. To settle for good enough, when actually nothing is really good enough we settle for it so often in our life’s, in our jobs in our relationships and in our lives.
My hugest disappointments as an academic (which I only very recently became) has been the number of students who expect to be spoon fed to their qualifications. Those who resist the opportunity to learn while working in the richness of the real world as they are taken through real live projects and I attempt to mentor, rather than tell them what to do. Those who look no further than their notes and their lecturers (let alone the text book) in order to harvest the marks required, surely its knowledge and skills they need instead.
I am reminded of a creative director with whom I worked with at The White House, a top advertising agency, and who often said “how can you fly with eagles if you are scratching with fowl” and he was correct. We need to decide what our standards are and not accept anything less. If we catch ourselves scratching, we owe it to ourselves to shake the dirt out of our feathers and fly.
Jim Collins wrote a book about it “Good to Great“ in which he explores why most organisations settle for the ordinary. Every day we make the choice over and over again, and we are the losers when we settle for ok instead of the best, when instead of being remarkable we are merely competent.
As Godin say’s “the only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.”
Are these social media fails or just marketing fails?
At the digital marketing academy we discused an article on the 9 worst social media fails of the year.
Its an interesting anaylsis, but really it sees social media really very much through an advertisisng lens. Social media is really about conversations not promotion. This quote kind of sums it up:
Businesses who jump into the conversation and broadcast a message but fail to interact are failing miserably at the art of marketing within social media. It is important to realize the potential of what David Armano calls micro-interactions where you the brand are responding only after you have listened to what your customers are communicating.Kyle Lacy, Social Media – Indianapolis, May 2009
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, social media
To understand the new marketing follow the crazy ones.
h.koppdelaney's photo stream on flickr
I think a lot about marketing, about advertising and about the internet. I have started to see people forming in three distinct groups.
The first are the technology people, developers etc. They understand the tools and can construct them into solutions, build beautiful websites, optimise the websites for search engine rankings and actually understand the algorithms that drive those rankings. I criticised the DA for this in an earlier post. These are the internet engineers.
Second are the traditional marketers who see the internet as a medium. A highly effective tool for delivering advertising and awareness to consumers at the right time in the purchasing cycle. Advertising more targeted and relevant than what was ever possible before, these are the internet media moguls. I heard that P&G in the UK drive 80% of their media budget into Adwords. Google is the biggest media owner in the UK. It no wonder too that much of the internet entrepreneurial activity is here.
Then there is a third group whom I think may be in the distinct minority, who see a shift in the way that society is functioning and restructuring, who notice a new dispensation of power, a new democracy if you will, the crazy ones who see the internet not as a technology but as catalyst driving a new society, a totally different dynamic. These people think that classic marketing, a concept only invented in the 1960s, may have passed its own sell by date, that there is a vacuum now that nobody yet really understands.
I spoke about this briefly on Reuben Goldberg’s showThe Internet Economy on Classic FM this week.
None of these groups are wrong, but if we are seeing a fundamental shift in the way people behave, how people communicate with each other, how influence is applied and how word of mouth is the currency of marketing, then maybe its the crazy ones who actually hold the key?
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Advertising, AdWords, Business, Google, Internet marketing, Marketing, Web search engine, Word of mouth
The internet is not an important medium in South Africa
photo credit: regeniabrabham
I was at the APEX awards this evening. Its an award given for Advertising effectiveness.
I was told once again by a senior advertising person that South Africans don’t use the internet, and its the fault of our bad and expensive broadband.
Oh so the 13 million MXit users who send 330 million messages a day, and of whom around 75% have accessed the internet from their phone. (Extrapolated form other data) are not using the internet, nor the 2.3 million unique visitors at month on vodaphone live nor the 5 million of the most economically active in the country, who have computer access are not either.
Ostriches stick their heads in the sand as well.
A Digital Tour of Cape Town.
photo credit: Glen Bowman
I am sitting on the plane on the way from Cape Town to Lanseria. Just completed a grueling round of speaking engagements.
I was struck by a number of things.
Firstly. That many of our “trainee communications experts have no clue of digital. I find it extraordinary that I could actually find only 3 bloggers and one twitter member in a third year advertising and communications class (marketers, art directors, copywriters and designers.)
We really need to push awareness with them. You have to understand the space to be able to advise others.
Secondly. That there are two distinct approaches to online marketing. The technology approach approaches it from the point of view of teh available technologies and how to deploy them. The interruption marketing POV that sees it from the traditional marketing and advertising point of view. how to use the channel to push marketing messages.
Then the third group who are in the distinct majority. The communicators who really understand the effects of the technology on society and how that is changing how they interact and need to be interacted with.
Finally at the mobile marketing conference it struck me how both of these approaches affected how people thought about one of the most important windows on the internet namely Mobile, Its impossible to think that a mobile network like MXIT which carries 330 million IM messages a day can not be regarded as the most important channel to reach 16 – 25 year olds in South Africa. Mxit boasts 12 million members growing at a rate of 12 000 a day. Extraordinary.
What I learned is that the digital reality is slowly dawning though and for the mobile marketing workshop to be oversubscribed double is a good indication of that. Maybe most in the room were already converts but so what, they want to touch the space – they become missionaries.
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Cape Town, Internet marketing, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, South Africa
Is this the big BLOCK to understanding new marketing?
Understanding shifts in power may be fundamental in understanding the new marketing. In Powershift Alvin Tofler describes the generic sources of power as violence, wealth and knowledge. He sees power moving along a continuum Starting with violence which can only being able to be used negatively, wealth which is potentially both positive and negative and knowledge which is empowering and therefore positive.
During the Industrial Revolution, power shifted from the nobility which relied on violence to industrialists and financiers who acted through wealth although often used negatively. Power derived from wealth is now being overtaken by power derived from knowledge.
20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. In this video he talks about linking data and making a more powerful and more equal sharing of knowledge.
Our business education teaches us about power and control, we learn about planning, implementing and controlling. We manage all our business processes by measuring and adjusting them in order to keep them in control. When we study the top marketing texts we learn from prominent authors such as Kotler and Keller who talk about the process of marketing and the process of branding and the management of brands, in which marketers exercise control.
It’s a discussion about power.
The underlying assumption is that organisations have branding power because largely they have control over the information that the consumer gets. Certainly the information available in store and in the media.
But more and more research is showing that there is a gap between the way organisations value brands and the way consumers value brands, this thought is explored by John Gerzema in The Brand Bubble. He regards it as potentially catastrophic.
So what is this all telling us?
The power shift process that Tofler was telling us about is a fact and it is the most fundamental societal change that we will experience during our lifetime. This change has been accelerated by the process that Sir Tim describes in his talk at TED. It will be future accelerated by the windows that all of mankind will soon have to the machine that is the World Wide Web, access through computers, notebooks but ALSO through cheap $100 cloudbook or netbook computers, but maybe even more importantly through the window to the www provided by the ubiquitous cell or mobile phone.
The marketing and business challenge.
We must learn that we have to give up the illusion of control that we have over our brands. I say illusion because the force that I describe is irresistible, its take up in the rural areas of Kwa Zulu Natal may be still a way off, but not that long a while.
We have to understand how this new world citizen lives, how he interacts, and how he uses this knowledge. We need to understand very quickly how he or she transforms and shares the knowledge and the communications instruments he or she cheap editing software through blogs, vlogs, twitter and online sharing sites such as YouTube, and how quickly this information spreads around the world.
We need to understand that brand will no longer be in our control, because we don’t control the information. The brand is in the control of our customers because they have the knowledge, the access to data and the ability to share that data through the Internet.
What business, Ad Agencies and everyone in marketing needs to understand is how to let go, how to let consumers co-create our brands.
We have to give our customers, our fans, the tools to allow them to use those tools to build our brands with us.
This is not as scary as you think.
Photo from tattoodjj’s stream on Flickr
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Advertising, consumer power, internet, Marketing, social media
The Carnival Nude and Brand Control
One of the assumptions underlying traditional brand management is that you can control the brand. That through advertising, brand associations and other brand tools you can manage perceptions. It was probably always a tenuous assumption at any time, but in digital marketing even more so.
Firstly Brands exist only in the minds of customers and are influenced by many forces, this has always been true and is in the final analysis determined by the customer experience, the actual interaction between the brand and its customers.
The lady in the picture Viviane Castro certainly had no permission to have President Obama’s likeness on her left thigh at the Rio Carnival this year.
What did that do to his brand?
When you put your brand into the hands of the customer you have to accept that they will interpret it in the way they want to, do you find that scary?
Not at all that’s what they have always done – brands only exist in the minds of customers. Customers control the brand you don’t.
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Brand, brand building, Viviane Castro
Building a South African Digital Marketing Capability
The AAA Digital Marketing Academy is set to prepare and up-skill the marketing and communication industry for the growth in the use of digital media.
Worldwide trends are telling the story:
- The consumer’s trust in traditional advertising and PR is declining.
- Control of brands is shifting to the costumer.
- Customers are more likely to seek product advice online than from advertisements and corporate brochures.
- Over 50’s are the fastest growing group of social media users.
South Africa has been relatively insulated because of the poor connectivity and a static internet population. Over 5 million experienced internet users in the higher LSMs is a significant market. Mobile is already a major factor and the imminent bringing on stream of the new undersea cables and increased and probably cheaper bandwidth, should dramatically push up broadband usage.
At 38% year on year growth digital advertising was the fastest growing media type in South Africa during 2008 and advertising is only a part of a complete digital strategy.
Presidential no hoper Barack Obama was elected to the most powerful job in the world on the back of a digital marketing campaign.
In tough economic times marketers are looking for more measurable results.
I have no doubt that as a marketer you appreciate all this, but can you make it work and who are you going to turn to help, guidance and advice, who are you going get to plan our strategy and how are you going to implement it, and how qualified are the internet and social media marketing gurus?
AAA Digital Marketing Academy is designed to fill that gap. We intend to develop a corps of digital savvy strategists and marketers who don’t only understand the technology but more importantly how to deploy it in integrated communications campaigns.
I am privileged to be the initiator and director of the Academy.
We are initially offering two courses, but will continuously roll out more.
The foundation course is on Digital Strategy which covers the latest thinking on digital and social marketing and a knowledge of the tools available. This is a practical course which will provide an understanding of the field. We will then take each topic and cover it in more detail in a series of verticals courses designed to cover topics covered in the strategy course in depth and providing actionable skills, graduates will be well equipped to implement campaigns.
The Google Adwords course is the first of the verticals to be rolled out, under the guidance of an industry expert who works with Adwords every day the participant will qualify for the theoretical part of Google GAP qualification. Other verticals will follow.
Nobody in advertising or marketing can afford not to know this stuff, and this is how to get the knowledge you need.
For more information go to AAA Digital Marketing Academy.
Pic from mushon on Flickr
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: Digital Marketing, Education, South Africa
Keep Calm and Carry on – The DA Debate
I must take responsibility for asking the question re the DA’s use of Social Media.
The responses have been very interesting. The DA has retreated behind the laager. Other Bloggers have taken up the debate, and comments on blogs are flying some very good others very emotional. See for examples Nic’s blog and on Vincent’s blog. We don’t all agree on stuff and that’s great because its healthy, but really none of the “social media experts” are all so far up our own arses to quote Nic as he thinks. Maybe in fact they are interested and critical learners.
What happens if the DA attempt at Social Media is great opportunity for a debate, what if it’s high profile and right in front of us happening every day and something we can all watch.
Maybe all the people who have tried to turn it into a personal thing should just take a huge step back and debate the issues, learning from what is happening so that we move forward with a greater knowledge than what we had before.
Maybe we can use the debate to educate and alert the market.
Maybe we should watch and analyse every move, not for the sake of democracy, or politics or personal self interest but because out of debate comes learning.
There are very few Social Media experts in the world and those who think that they “know it all” are delusional. Those who question are not insecure as one commentator puts it but the opposite secure enough to know that there is a lot to learn.
Looking forward to the debate and looking forward to the Case Study that’s coming out of this and by the way interesting reading on Getting Social Media from top blog Mashable to be found at the link.
Photo from cromacom’s photostream on Flickr
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: DA, politics, social media, South Africa
