With every new year comes a landslide of predictions and trends to guide us into the new year. While the year advances, rarely do such transformative trends or changes take place in alignment with one of the top calendar apps. Not even Y2K could do so 😉 Now with that said, I was asked to present my thoughts on what lies ahead in Vegas during CES at Brand Innovators “Mega Trends” event. By the first week of January, there were…
Brilliance is Distributed Around The World; Opportunity However is Not
The rate at which we progress is defined by the time and energy we invest in ourselves. We can’t do everything alone however. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney famously wrote, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” But not everyone has access to the same resources you and I do. Sometimes those friends aren’t so readily visible or available and thus progress inches along, stalls or sometimes regresses. One of the biggest trends I’ve seen in…
Crossing the Experience Divide: Creating positive, lasting experiences is a crucial mandate for any brand
The Technology of Us I’ve been in the technology business for a long time and what I can tell you is this: Technology enables us to invent new products and services at rates that humans never before experienced. Whatever the next big thing is in tech doesn’t matter as much as the fact that anyone today has the power to disrupt entire industries with a single, smart idea. In fact, resilient companies, whether they’re startups or they merely acting like…
Untethered From Tradition: How I Got Here
I didn’t set out to be an author, speaker or digital analyst/anthropologist. It just happened over the years. When I was younger, I studied economics and journalism. I actively experimented in online marketing. I was also a musician/songwriter. So, how did I get here? I spent some time with my friends over at Onboardly to answer just that. I’d like to share the transcription of our conversation with you here… The Freedom to Experiment 1. You’re a best selling author,…
The Future of Everything? It’s About People Connecting with People
These last few years have been an interesting ride. As fun as it has been, it is the next few years that will be the most telling and also transformative if all goes according to plan. As quickly as time flies, it’s important not to lose sight of the things that remind us of why we’re on this path together. I recently stumbled across a conversation with Eric Jacobson in which I shared what was driving me at the time…and…
Skully Systems is About to Change How We Drive
Skully Systems changed my life and I don’t say that lightly. I’m a motorcycle enthusiast. I’m also a father. Most of the time my bikes stand proudly in my garage showcasing their beauty for an audience of one. I ride on occasion, usually an exceptional opportunity that manifests in the form of weather, stress and guilt. But even then, as I get older, the rides become less frequent, shorter and less ambitious. With the AR-1, Skully is going to change…
The 6 Pillars of Social Commerce [VIDEO]
In April 2012, I wrote a piece that explored online social behavior and its impact on commerce and decision-making. The work was inspired by a series of studies based on the work of Robert Cialdini that identified six universal heuristics that shoppers use to make decisions. The importance of social psychology can not be overstated. This branch of psychology deals with how people think about influence and how individuals relate to one another. The social economy is shaped by how…
Employees are as or More Important Than Customers: Why Ignoring Employee Engagement Hurts Business
In a late 2013 study, Gallup found that only 13% of workers actually feel engaged at their jobs. What’s worse is that 63% of the workforce is not engaged at all. But wait, the news gets even more disheartening. An astounding 24%, one-quarter of the global workforce, is actively disengaged right now. Essentially we have a significant number of workers doing their best impression of corporate zombies who go through the everyday motions to collect a paycheck. So are employees…
Digital Transformation: A Year in Review
When I published the first in a new series of reports exploring the state and future of Digital Transformation, it was almost the antithesis of a typical technology report. It didn’t talk about tech trends for automated marketing. It mentioned zero platforms, software or apps for improving processes, manufacturing or customer or employee engagement. It also didn’t talk about the latest enterprise cloud services to improve marketing or CRM or process big data and the like. Instead, I, along with…
Community is Much More Than Belonging to Something; It’s About Doing Something Together That Makes Belonging Matter
Viginia Coutinho is a dear friend who just released a new book (in Portuguese) that helps strategists think differently about social media. She is also the organizer of Upload Lisboa, a fantastic event in Portugal that focuses on innovation and disruptive technologies. Earlier in the year, she surprised me by asking if I would consider writing the foreword. Even though I don’t write much about social media these days, I couldn’t let her down. Now that her book is available,…
