Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

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.)

Love what they are up to at Atos. While banning email might seem extreme, it might be the only way to drive change quickly.

“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”