Tag e-consultancy

Entries 3 Total

Speaking at “The Future of Digital Marketing”, e-consultancy – June 2008, London.

Jun 20, ’08 6:54 PM

The Future of Digital Marketing | Events | E-consultancy.com

I really enjoyed speaking on Wednesday at e-consultancy’s FODM conference. This is the 5th iteration of their ‘what’s new in online marketing’ format and the emphasis this year was less on “newness” and more on strategic importance and direction.
The roster of speakers was intimidating and the senior audience (with many clients and contacts) just added to the, ahem, ‘helpful pressure’.
It was a great opportunity to build upon some of the Digital Resolutions and similar best-practice presentations I’ve given this year and look at the underlying trends and emergent opportunites: from data, metadata, microformats, attention data (and my current love, APML), semantic data and towards a time when the data, enlivened by algorithms for use, spacial/place-awareness, contextual triggers and oodles of cunning creates a network effect – changing the nature of future marketing and engagement with customers. Long sentence.
The slides are available slideshare, but since it’s more picture than points I’ve listed some of the key sites and references below.
  • Socialisr from Yell – an interesting take on making their database into a social event organising support thing.
  • Microformats.org - the space for little things. Little, structured and portable things. Standards therefore.
  • APML – the standard, interchange, thinking space for Attention Profiling Markup Language.
  • engagd – useful and early implementations of APML. Worth bookmarking and keeping under watch.
  • Tastebroker.org – a place to grab and see your APML.
  • Phorm’s “Open Internet Exchange” – read, consider and see whether it’s threat, opportunity or both. And to whom…?
  • TrueKnowledge – really interesting take on structured, explicit and inferred knowledge.
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E-consultancy.com’s Graduate Academy

Mar 27, ’08 6:46 PM

This is a great idea. It’s become axiomatic that there’s a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills.

Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there’s not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to become the ecommerce practicioners of next year.

This initiative answers two problems for businesses:

  1. accredited, dependable training – you’ll have confidence that the graduates have covered the bases
  2. there’s a critical mass for recruiting (much easier than a ‘spray and pray’ approach to attracting junior staff).

What will the graduates do?

“What’s included for free on our Graduate Academy:

  • 3 day residential training placement in July at Reading University
  • 15 days of distance and online training during August
  • A further 2 days residential training at the end of August at Reading University
  • Free access to www.e-consultancy.com for the period of training
  • Guaranteed interviews with leading companies”

We’ll take a look at the progress of the Academy in more detail in InternetRetailing, but in the meantime this is a very welcome initiative and sure to be oversubscribed.

Graduate Academy | Training | E-consultancy.com

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e-Consultancy: Harnessing the Power of Social Media

Nov 1, ’07 12:02 PM


DSC00372

Originally uploaded by ikj
This is a really fun training day and you can (see details of the event) and I was speaking on “Emerging trends in social media”.

This is a photo of the audience as I manifestly fail to update my site via SMS… thankfully it worked the second time :)

The slides from the morning are on e-consultancy’s site and I recommend having a look – Ged, Ros and Will were great presenters and I learned a great deal in each of their slots.

It was interesting too how engaged the audience was in the ‘social media’ arena – there was a mix there from agency-side, publishers, government, retail and professional bodies. All are active in SM – from basic starts to pretty extensive activity. However, everyone’s now looking for a certain ‘edge’, to making money and to a more sophisticated exploitation of the opportunities.

Props to BSG for the venue too. I was trying out Apple’s Keynote and their nice ‘embed a web page’ capabilities to switch in and out of presentation and live demo/use. This is always high risk, but the excellent bandwidth and presentation facilities pulled this off. Much better than the time I tried it at a client’s where their wireless network was flakey and saturated and all of the windows blocked mobile/3G signals… There’s nothing worse (or more ironically sublime?) than doing a presentation on Web2.0 interfaces using nothing but a flipchart and the power of mime!

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