Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Digital Strategy Sessions And What Happens When I'm Wrong

Over the past few years, I've designed and delivered a fair number (two hundred-ish) of what I now, slightly grandiosely, call Digital Strategy Sessions.  These are for clients who want to get to grips with some aspect of digital and networked media and how they, their company, brand or organisation are affected.  The background to these sessions is, as you’d imagine, varied ranging from: a need to react to a competitor’s online advantage; an unforeseen event; input for planning; context for a tricky issue; cultural change; thirst for new ideas; chairman’s missive; personal missions or just to kick around some new plans. However, one constant is that the people who attend the sessions range from the wildly enthusiastic to the deeply sceptical - and occasionally cynical. I recently ran a session where the feedback was simply – ‘more please,’ and, clearly, I work hard to encourage such sensible and insightful reactions!  However, I have learnt to pay a lot of attention to the less glowing commentary too, much of which comes in the moment, rather than on feedback forms that may be read later by management.  For example, last year, I was five minutes into a full-day session when one of the participants, told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was ‘wrong’ and...

When Will It End?

Last week I was chatting to a Grand Fromage in private equity and he asked me what I do. I explained that my professional role is helping companies with challenges, in all their guises, arising from the ongoing march of networked media.  The GF in question said he found the area exciting and clearly had a sophisticated view so his next questions were very interesting. He asked, 'when will it end?', and will there be a, ‘Y2K moment’?  By which I think he meant will all this techy stuff just stop and leave us sitting around wondering why on earth we’d spent half of our lives typing updates into Twitter.  I know exactly what he means.  I frequently find myself wondering if technology has, finally, hit some plateau and that everything will just calm down a bit; whether Silicon Valley will lay off the macchiatos for a while so we can all take a breath. These questions may be down to the basic human desire for a stable, predictable world.  As they say, no one really likes change.  But change, it would appear, is what we've got. Furthermore, the type of change that can seemingly arrive from nowhere.  Strange new digital gubbins build up a head-of-steam under the radar and then evidently pop-up fully-formed, driving people into odd new Alice-In-Wonderland behaviours.  For example, normal folk become determined to be ‘Mayor’ of their local coffee shop.  But not really - only virtually!  Others start having conversations with, rather than on, their phones.  Or, more fundamentally, strange...