I was a speaker at a fantastic event called DigitalK earlier this year in Sofia that was all about digital and digital transformation.
As I'm starting a new job at Cisco next week and because Cisco is all about digital transformation, I wanted to look at various things I've written and participated in about and around digital so I remembered this interview I did prior to the conference in Sofia.
Take a look at what digital means to me and how I see it impacting the business world.
Mary Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends report is out.
333 pages full of insights around internet users and usage, e-commerce, advertising, work, education, freemium business models and more.
It's pretty detailed and there's so much to learn.
I've gone through the whole report and wanted to share some of the things that stood out to me.
Before I go into the facts and learnings, I want to share this quote which I believe is very relevant to today's business and consumer reality, and specifically, businesses need to pay serious attention to this because few are living and breathing this:
The rapid rise of gathered / analyzed digital data is often core to the holistic success of the fastest growing & most successful companies of our time around the world. Context-rich data can help businesses provide consumers with increasingly personalized products & services that can often be obtained at lower prices & delivered more efficiently. This, in turn, can drive higher customer satisfaction. Better data-driven tools can improve the ability for consumers to communicate directly & indirectly with businesses & regulators.
Now onto the learnings.
One of the most popular buzzwords nowadays is customer-first or putting your customer at the centre of every business decision and activity.
I stand behind it. The Inbound PR methodology preaches this customer or as I call it persona-first thinking and in fact doesn't really work without it.
Far too many businesses are still putting their products and services first when it comes to their marketing, sales and communications decisions even though they say they're customer-centric.
In fact, over 80% of businesses are talking about the benefits of a customer-first approach, but few of these are turning talk into action.
This stat comes from Optimizely - a leader in customer experimentation technology that did research earlier this year around the digital experience economy.
I dug into it and I want to share some key findings and learnings:
AI or Artificial Intelligence has definitely become one of the most popular buzzwords in marketing and PR over the last few years.
Most marketing and PR pros haven't yet figured out the implications of AI in their jobs and there seems to be this misunderstanding that AI will replace the human.
In fact, according to a recent report automation threatens a quarter of marketing and PR jobs.
I don't believe this to be true. AI to me is an enabler, just as technology is. You still need a human's brain to discover and analyse problems, identify solutions and connect the dots between the human and the AI work through the best choice of tools.
AI might diminish the need for certain tasks to be performed by a human but then this frees the human to work on the more important and strategic stuff and should be seen as an opportunity, as a challenge to develop new and better skills.
These are exciting times for marketing and PR pros and agencies.
I've been reading a lot about AI recently and I want to share with you a compilation of blog posts and videos that apply to marketing and PR agencies.
Digital is an enterprise-wide strategic priority that cannot be isolated to just the marketing or IT department. Everybody in the organisation has a role to play.
I've just finished reading the 2018-2019 State of Digital Transformation report which clearly illustrates how disruptive technologies continue to impact organisations and markets and how digital transformation as responsibility is moving beyond IT and is maturing into an enterprise-wide movement but there's still a lot of work to be done.
As the report describes, digital transformation means modernising how companies work and compete and helping them effectively adapt and grow in an evolving digital economy where customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX) and organisational culture are the clear drivers that empower and accelerate change, growth, and innovation.
Let's take a look at some of the key findings that stood out to me while reading the report.
