The top influencers of CMOs are a combination of C-level executives, authors, and professional speakers. The methods used to create impact vary across the influencers. As Carter Hostelley, CEO of Leadtail indicates, there are four general paths that top influencers use: 1) leverage insight gained from their position (e.g., @BrianSolis is a principal analyst at a Prophet company), 2) leverage domain expertise about a specific topic…, 3) create and curate compelling content…, and 4) build influence through engaging everyone…. Typically, the most influential use some combination of these different approaches.

Brian Solis published a slide show on the state of autonomous vehicles as of today, where he cites analyst predictions that by 2021 self-driving cars will be at stage 5…

“Right now the most expensive house sold in San Francisco in 2016 belongs to Kyle Vogt, a 30-year-old co-founder of Cruise, an autonomous technology startup recently acquired by GM. The reality is that Detroit was sleeping at the wheel and startups all around the world started to not only dream about science fiction, but turn the future of self-driving cars into fiction today.”

The move from the industrial revolution to globalisation 3.0 has been a wake-up call to those brands needing and wanting to adapt to this new era – the era of the customer. Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, stated that “over 40% of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010”

In their book, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, Charlene Li and Brian Solis surveyed 700 social media professionals and executives. They discovered that 34% of businesses surveyed felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes. The authors recognized that there are two kinds of social strategies: a social media strategy and a social business strategy.

A social media strategy enables a company to plan out the channels, platforms, and tactics used for publishing, listening, and engagement.

Nacido en California, EE.UU., Brian Solis es analista digital, escritor, antropólogo y futurista, además de uno de los oradores más reconocidos en todo el mundo.

Ha estudiado los efectos de las tecnologías emergentes de los negocios y la sociedad, y sus investigaciones y libros ayudan a los ejecutivos o a la gente común a entender mejor la relación entre la evolución de la tecnología y su impacto en la vida cotidiana.

Solis ha escrito activamente sobre tecnología de punta, los modelos de negocio emergentes y el nuevo marketing desde mediados de los años 90, con el fin de documentar el impacto de los medios de comunicación, el comercio y la cultura en el futuro.

In the wise words of Brian Solis – our favourite thought leader in Digital who we interviewed in November – “in a post-PC era, mobile is no longer a strategy or technology; it’s a lifestyle”.

He is so right. We can’t ignore the fact that consumers are now using mobile more than ever to engage with brands and make purchases. In his latest eBook, “Mobile is Eating the World”, Brian emphasises just how engaged mobile consumers have become. For instance, did you know that they spend on average 177 minutes on their phone every day? Their phones are their first go-to resource; the shiny toys that they love to use whenever possible. And the more they use them, the more they learn about mobile technology, actively or intuitively.

Brian challenged the convention of what a book should be. He did research into how our brains process long-form content, given the short attention spans of today. After all of his research, Brian determined how the reader could have a very different kind of book experience. Besides creating a book that is rich with content, he also built in experiences with joys and pleasures, resulting in a book that you not only want to read, but also experience. As a result, Shep Hyken places X: The Experience when Business Meets Design on his list of the all-time top 10 business books.

Solis knows his stuff, so the irony of writing a book about the digital experience was not lost on him when he started the process. What did catch him unawares, though, was how quickly the reading experience was changing. People now approach reading books like they do using an app, he said, with the most obvious end result being a very short attention span.

When he started the book, the average attention span for reading was six minutes. Six minutes to capture someone’s attention before they turned to their smartphone. When he finished the first draft, that had dropped to 60 seconds.

Brian Solis (principal analyst bij Altimeter Group en schrijver/spreker over customer experience) legt het goed uit in zijn onvolprezen laatste boek X: The Experience When Business Meets Design (2016, aff.): ‘Experiences are more important than products now. In fact, experiences are products. […] People increasingly share their experiences with companies and products in our connected economy, and we can either be active participants in creating and nurturing desired experiences or spend more and more time in trying tot react or make up for bad experiences’. De eisen die klanten aan organisaties stellen nemen alleen maar toe: ‘We’re just getting started.’