The third session at Nexus 2007, “The Future of the Web”, was led by a fascinating presentation by Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com. He spoke about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Wired magazine, Oct 2004) as well as the following futures:
Future of the individual – From e-business to me-business, and from eco-system to ego-system.
Recently tackled as part of Nexus 2007, “Crowdsourcing the Media” looked at how citizen journalism was changing the dynamics of the media landscape. It saw social media provocateur Kevin Lim moderating a session with online media luminaries Kathy Teo of CNET Networks, Jennifer Lewis of SPH‘s STOMP, and James Seng, Editor extraordinaire of tomorrow.sg (Left to right above).
Discussions centred around citizen journalism and its various forms (youtube, wikipedia etc) and included fascinating insights into how CNET and STOMP operated. As Jennifer puts it, there tend to be more “loser-generated” rather than “user-generated” content, and she does get her fair share of junk being MMS-ed and SMS-ed to her via 75557.
Nat Torkington doing his 2.0-ish thang
At the recent Nexus 2007, Nathan Torkington, crowd favourite and Perl guru from O’Reilly Media, spoke about Disruption, Change, and Opportunity. In case you do not know, its founder Tim O’ Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 and have been in the business of technology trendspotting for quite a number of years. Nat cited key developments in the technology landscape over the decades:
1988 – X Windows Documentation
After hearing my fellow media socialists Kevin, Benjamin, Ivan, Siva, Coleman, Preetam and Vanessa talk about Nexus 2007, I decided that I simply had to check it out for myself. And boy was it a blast!
Before going into the heavy stuff, let me share some photos and tongue-in-cheek observations about what Nexus 2007 is all about.
Word of Mouse in Action!
I am currently reading the Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, a book by George Silverman, which I borrowed from the National Library. Fascinating stuff in there with some explanation of how one can make Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing work.
Let me highlight two key learning points. First is the Buying Decision Process. Those who studied Marketing 101 may be familiar with this. The stages are as follows:
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Two out of three in my family wears specs!
I’ve never revealed it before, but I am a closet consultant. I love to provide business and marketing advice to people. After so many years working with entrepreneurs, media, lifestyle and tourism businesses, I do have some thoughts welling in my head. Whether they take it or not is another thing altogether of course.
Let’s start with the optical business. It is a booming business, with 80% of adult Singaporeans being shortsighted and us having one of the highest myopia rates in the world. What can opticians (like eastcoastlife‘s hubby Chris) do to make themselves stand out clearly from the competition?
Lately, I have been reading a little more than usual. Have only just picked up Purple Cow by Seth Godin.
It isn’t exactly brand new but some of its insights are still worth considering.
Sprite Shower – a great example of experiential marketing (courtesy of Exact Drive)
How do you market a theme park, museum, or holiday resort? Do the traditional 4 Ps of Product, Price, Place and Promotion still work?
The answer certainly lies less in your marketing mix and more in what I’d call your Experience Mix.
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba has created the 4 Fs of citizen marketers. This is an elegant idea which distills some of the types of bloggers and new media activists you find in the blogosphere.