By now you would have read numerous articles proclaiming the death of the blog. Like this, this, this, this and this.
Friends are also telling me that nobody blogs anymore. Some of their sound bites goes like this:
Tag: digital
Coming Soon to a Screen Near You
Image courtesy of Desk Topped
Screens, screens and more screens.
With smartphones, tablets, laptops, and of course the good old TV (or Apple TV for the gadget geeks) and cinema, everybody is staring at an electronic device. Lifestyles have certainly changed in the hyper-connected new social era, enabled by digital gadgets that are perpetually connected to the web.
6 Steps To Building Brand Trust in the Social Age
Do you know that most TV ad viewers avert their eyes the moment a company’s brand appears?
Or that 6 out of 7 “megaviral” branded videos – think Subservient Chicken and Old Spice Man – are jump-started with paid seedings?
Samsung Launches 1st Pop-Up Shop in Asia
K-pop group SKarf – celebrity ambassadors for Samsung (courtesy of Samsung)
Riding on growing consumer interest to experience their mobile devices first hand, Asia’s number one brand Samsung has opened its first Samsung Mobile PIN in Singapore. A premium consumer experience space, the sprawling pop-up store will be at Ngee Ann Civic Plaza for a two-month period till 12 March 2013.
Value through Videos and Virals
I came across this fascinating post from Marketing Sherpa about how one can use both blogging and video logs (or vlogs) to generate word-of-mouth interest. While the subject matter is about golfing equipment and apparel, the same principles can be applied across other “experience-rich” businesses. They include sports retail, travel agencies, leisure attractions (especially zoos and theme parks), restaurants, and maybe even museums.
Everyone’s talking about all of the things you can do with online video — and why not? Once production completes and the clips are on your site, it’s essentially a 24/7 downloadable TV commercial.
But the space is becoming more competitive, and marketers will have to find ways to cut through the video clutter sooner rather than later as the medium matures.
See how one golf-club manufacturer used original programming in a blog and in merchandising to build their email database from scratch.
It would be great if Singapore businesses can explore leveraging on the power of youtube, Yahoo! video and other such channels.
From Main Course to Bite-sized to Crumbs
With the democratization and increasing portability of information, people’s attention span and capacity for reading has dimished at an astonishing rate. I must admit that I am one of those who suffer from this affliction.
In the past, we used to be able to plough through thick tomes of knowledge, fantasy, religion and whatever else captures our fancy. I could dawdle for hours and hours in libraries, picking up one book after another and devouring it with relish. I especially loved reading encyclopedias, and occasionally, I could read from cover to cover.
Not any more it seems. With the lure of easy information on the web, and the quick availability of bite-sized information on blogs, book summaries, wikipedia, and the like, I have become a scanner rather than a delver. Information now gets delivered to my cranium in small, often miniscule bite-sized pieces, instead of elaborate and complex frameworks.
I believe that I am not alone in this. Many have remarked that youths and teens nowadays tend to multi-task and acquire information from varied sources rather than a singular one. They do not have the stamina or patience to sit in one spot and read line after line. Short cuts, acronyms and abbreviated words seem to be the order of the day.