Welcome to my blog, the next logical step in my social media journey that started about 2 years ago. You may not have known it, but this educational journey started with some central themes that were defined very early on. Initially exposed on Twitter and slightly refined at the top of this blog, the main themes that have driven the weekly postings are:
- Ideas on leadership, innovation, technology, and global retail trends.
- Interest in mobility, social media, e-commerce, security, global cultures, and emerging markets.
With these social media themes as the foundation, I pondered for a while what should be the focus of my blog. Would I restrict it to the retail industry where I spent a lot of time researching global trends to determine future growth patterns? Would I focus it on leadership, innovation, technology, and global retail trends which drive my personal passions and in reality are the foundation areas for the growth of retail and business in general? The final idea for this blog was inspired by my daughter Monica D'Onofrio who actually got ahead of me in the blogosphere. (http://monicasreellife.blogspot.com/)
Write about what's important in the moment and make it come alive through your analysis on what it means to you and potentially to those folks that take the time to read the material.
The objective of this blog will be to identify the most important storyline in recent posts and add to it some further color/commentary on why this favorite post is an important milestone forward (or backward) in the key central themes originally identified for the social media activities.
The most important post this past week was "From the CEO Suite, 5 Technology Trends That Will Drive Business http://ow.ly/cxrqx Social Networking and video are my favorites"
Why are video and social networkings two of my favorite tech trends?
Video - The importance of visual imagining to drive behavior, global collaboration, and commerce are dramatically increasing. Think of the success of YouTube where over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month. Future messaging needs to be increasingly visual, high impacting, short, and built to go viral. This is true for a simple advertisement that runs 30 seconds for a retail store or for anyone with an idea they want to turn into a business. The more visually impactful you can state your key message, your business idea, and your presentation, the greater lasting impact you will have on your audience in taking a positive action towards your business goals. Take most of your words out of your PowerPoint presentation. Focus on visuals and intersperse your message with video content. More than words on a page, visual imaging especially shorts videos resonate longer with your audience. This is especially important when delivering your vision (as I've done multiple times) to an increasingly globalizing business environment. "Big Data" will reach its full value potential when visuals can be added to its exception content to filter out the false alarms. The advent/growth of video/video analytics coupled with "Big Data" will be a powerful combination to future business models. When your think presentations, data results, the key message you are trying to deliver, in the future think visually and how video can transform the vision into a much more powerful lasting message.
Social Networking - Is social media a fad? Can it be monetized? What does it mean for industries like retail? To understand social media, you need to get beyond some of the early models that were focused on what you had for dinner last night and think about what this technology is all about. Social media is a market segmentation evolutionary step. It is a journey just started where audiences that have the same preferences, same complaints, same shopping likes, and yes even some same diseases, can find each other on common technology ground and have a virtual conversation. Social Media will create greater targeted market niches that successful entrepreneurs will explore to build new businesses. All of us have the potential to both drive and profit from the social media journey by understanding the basic themes that drive us and finding our online partners in the 2.1 billion people that will be on the Internet by the end of 2012.
