The next big big thing: it’s happening now

Marketing and PR as we know it today have been transformed by two massive technological revolutions. The first was the Web, when the Internet became user-friendly, and its subsequent social morphings. The second was the mobile phone and its current zenith, the smartphone. These are the two giants to which most everything else that's changed relates.

The vast majority of marketing and PR strengths and weaknesses, and associated opportunities and threats, stem from the Web and from the smartphone. And yet another giant has emerged to which the vast majority of marketing and PR professionals are mostly blind in my experience: the Internet of Things.

Everything is being connected to the Internet. Cars, dishwashers, air conditioning, power supplies, clothes, animals, bottles of whisky, public transport, medicines, joint replacements, your front door, your training shoes and your bicycle. It is happening right now.

If you're an innovator on the lifecycle / adoption curvy thing, then you were thinking about the Web in 1995, about mobile in 1998, and smartphones in 2005. You started scoping the Internet of Things in 2008.

Now it's the end of 2010, it's the time for the early majority to embrace the Internet of Things, and that's you if you want more of that opportunity to come your way than the competition's. Join me at Internetome, the Internet of Things Conference, in London, November 10th. Sponsors include Intel, Qualcomm and the Consumer Electronics Association, and my own company.

And as the Internet of Things impacts all aspects of business not just marketing and PR, I'd urge you to get on the front foot and let the rest of your organisation / your clients know. Today.

Hope to see you on the 10th :-)

Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.

U.S. Mobile Advertising and Marketing Forecast

by David H Deans of Digital Lifescapes

Once again, analysts are predicting that advertising targeted to U.S. mobile phone service subscribers will be embraced by the mainstream American marketer, according to the latest market study by eMarketer.

U.S. mobile ad spending will be up 79 percent in the U.S. market to reach $743 million, based upon the current eMarketer forecast. However, growth will slow somewhat as advertising spending reaches $1.1 billion in 2011 -- and potentially more than $2.5 billion by 2014.

"The expansion of the smartphone market and the attractive usage and demographic profile of smartphone owners have forced more marketers to pay closer attention to mobile," More...

Mobile Marketing Fragmentation: What marketers need to know

by si crowhurst of We Love Mobile

Fragmentation. Sounds painful, and for those planning and implementing mobile campaigns and services, it presents a real and present challenge. It’s the technical term for the fact that we all have different phones, and that these phones tend to work differently. Take a look around a meeting room or a pub table: iPhones, Blackberrys, Nokias, each with their own operating system, applications and ways of displaying the web. For now and the medium term, there is no common format, apart from voice and text messaging that will work, 100%, across all your customers’ More...

The Business Guide to Facebook Part 1: Your Brand Page for the Social Web

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

Facebook is, at the moment, the most important social network in the world. Over 500 million people connect to one another in the “Social Network.” And, with the introduction of the Open Graph, we are interacting with our Facebook connections on our favorite websites where our social graph and the corresponding activity of Likes, interaction, and commentary become the centerpiece for social curation and more importantly, our focused attention. We are putting our social network to work and we are learning how to share, discover, and collaborate in public. More...

Real time, data driven marketing and sales

by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott

My first job was on a bond trading floor at a Wall Street investment bank. It's impossible to overstate the impact of innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets in the 1980s.

Within a decade finance was transformed from a clubby, old-boys' network to a 24-hour global trading system.

With that revolutionary shift a new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second—real time.

Today, no financial professional would ever consider making a transaction without understanding where the markets are trading right now and what’s happening in the news at that precise moment. More...

The RapLeaf backlash proves consumers still do not trust advertisers with their data

by Andrew Grill of London Calling

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of discussion about a new service called RapLeaf

I first came across the service some months ago when I saw that a web crawler called “rapleaf” was regularly visiting my blog and crawling all of the content there. Quoting from a recent blog post where RapLeaf has been forced to defend themselves, they explain their service thus

“Rapleaf works with information that is publicly-available about people online (similar to what would appear in public Google searches), and augments that data with various widely available offline databases — More...

Part 2 of Email Marketing Lifecycle Series: Conversion

by Rebecca Caroe of Creative Agency Secrets

Kath Pay from The Email Academy continues her expert series about email marketing.

She will publish another 2 articles over the next few weeks.

8 influencing factors for achieving conversion in email marketing

The most basic aim of sending an email is to get the recipient to open the email and action it in some way. Depending upon your definition of conversion for that particular campaign, it could be the action of simply clicking a link, driving the recipient to the website, requesting a whitepaper, entering a competition, attending event – More...

The Business Guide to Facebook Part 2: From E-Commerce to F-Commerce

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

Facebook Founder and Chief Executive Office Mark Zuckerberg describes Facebook as a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers.  Indeed, Facebook is so much more than a social network. As a social utility, it changes the dynamics of relationships, how we communicate with one another, and how we discover, share and learn. Facebook and Social Media re redesigning the information super highway, forever altering how information travels and how people connect. More...

Why Brief is Better when it comes to B2B Email Copywriting

by Matt Ambrose of The Copywriter's Crucible

Writing B2B emails is one of your trickiest tasks as a copywriter.

They might be brief (100 words max). But that just means you’ve got more to pack into every word.

Business people can be stressed and busy at the best of times. They don’t have time to patiently check through every message.

If you’re email isn’t relevant or interesting, it’s not going to be read.

So it’s vital that your email’s subject and headline hit them with benefits straight away. More...

CIPR Presidents Debate

by Philip Sheldrake of Influence Crowd LLP

I enjoyed having the opportunity to grab a couple of minutes with the CIPR's new CEO, Jane Wilson, prior to putting members' questions to the two candidates for CIPR President-Elect 2011, President 2012. Thanks to Rob Brown and Sally Sykes for accepting the invitation, and thanks once again to the Markettiers4dc team for making it happen. More...

Visible Technologies Unveils New Social Intelligence Platform

by Andrew Grill of London Calling

Visible Technologies Details Next-Generation Platform to Address the Changing Social Media Landscape

BELLEVUE, Washington, October 28, 2010 — Visible Technologies today unveiled its vision for Social Intelligence, the ability to extract measurable business value from social conversations, enabling companies to capitalize on the rapidly growing and changing social media landscape. The company also announced today Visible Intelligence™, the cornerstone of its vision and the industry’s next-generation software platform built from the ground-up for the future of the social Web. More...

Five Cultural Trends Shaping Business Communications and Public Service

by Brian Solis of PR 2.0

Guest writer Dr. Mark Drapeau is the Director of U.S. Public Sector Social Engagement at Microsoft, and the editor of SECTOR: PUBLIC, a new online magazine about how technology and innovation are affecting the public sector, public service, and social change.

Coming into my new role at Microsoft, I took on the task of reading more widely about business, communications, and other topics. I was very influenced by the new book Chief Culture Officer, written by Grant McCracken of MIT. It’s not about pop culture, and not about “cool hunting,” More...