176 years ago, Karl Marx was intrigued by how individuals are influenced by social institutions which grow to define society. In his view, the most addictive form of dependency-based social control at the time was religion. If he were writing today, he might instead be thinking “Social media is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the […]
Brand building must become more about customer experience
Originally published in BizCommunity on 14 January 2019 CX is everything. Businesses boom because they offer awesome differentiated customer experience, online and offline. The big trends in 2019 will follow this rule. The growth of messaging and decline of posting will lift platforms such as WhatsApp and Messenger into the prominence previously enjoyed by Facebook. […]
Real Disruptors Own the Future Unopposed
In our desire to be as headline-grabbing as an asteroid strike, everything new gets a “disruptive” tag. If you find yourself longing for the relatively hyperventilation-free days of “revolutionary” but are afraid of seeming stuck in the 1900s, perhaps it is time to step back and gain some perspective. Disruption is, after all, a 20th […]
Why Chat Kills Social Media in Customer Relationships & E-commerce
Traditional Social Media Implodes For marketers, social media was traditionally a free platform where you earned your audience through publishing relevant and meaningful content, and by occasionally talking to a customer. Most brands built up a fan-base of likers, then broadcast an endless pipeline of promotional messaging to an audience who over time simply stopped […]
Is Education Smart Enough to Change?
In education, much of what passes for disruption is simply hyped innovation — better ways of doing the same thing. The notion of disrupting the classroom is often more about giving a teacher better tools than about dispensing with the classroom (or the teacher) altogether. Handing out tablets loaded with text rather than paper-based books, is a […]