Archive for December, 2011

Neal Stephenson says it so well..

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to see happen,” he said, and began discussing what the future was supposed to have looked like, back in his 1960s childhood. He ticked off the tropes of what he called “techno-optimistic science fiction,” including flying cars and jetpacks. And then computers went from being things that filled a room to things that could fit on a desk, and the economy and industries changed. “The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison.”

Again, a beat. A consideration, perhaps, that he is talking about the core readership for his best sellers. No matter. He’s rolling. He presses on.

“What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along.’ ”

He said people should say, “Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.”

Thanks to John for the pointer. Here is the longer piece on Innovation Starvation.

For me the big question is how and when will we pause?

Amex Open Forum continues to do a great job on content. This piece caught my eye. Social plays a massive role in brand building today.

Loved these stats from Anthill Magazine.

• Facebook clocked 10,659,580 Australian users in November (and 13 million unique Australian views). In other words, more than half of Australia’s population now use Facebook.
• The oldest members of turned 31 (bringing their ‘digital native’ customs into the mainstream), while Baby-Boomers finally earned the nickname ‘silver surfers’.
• Five billion apps were downloaded.video views exceeded two billion… per day. An average 600 tweets were posted… per second!

We’ve launched our Idea Bank providing a place for customers to give and vote on ideas related to financial services and banking. Look forward to your thoughts and ideas.

John has clearly been very busy. In his latest post on the big five he gets at why reach and engagement matter. I’m often shocked by how much emphasis is placed exclusively on reach without looking at engagement.

Second, the companies must have scale in terms of direct reach to consumers. By this I mean their brands are used as meaningful platforms by hundreds of millions of people on a frequent basis.

Third, the companies must have deep engagement with those consumers, the kind of engagement that builds brand and creates massive stores of useful data. The relationship between the brand and its customer has to be meaningful and consistent (therefore creating permission to extract a premium and offer new products and services). It takes an ongoing service relationship for such engagement to occur – Microsoft with Xbox or Windows, for example, or Facebook with its core service. On the chart, I’ve ranked engagement and data on a scale of one to ten, based in part on my work on the Web 2 map earlier this year, and partly on my own experiences. (As with other parts of this chart, I ask for your help in codifying this metric, should you be so inclined.)