Andy Warhol famously suggested that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In time, the phrase 15 minutes of fame came to more generally refer to short-lived media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon.
Out of the blue, I received a tweet from the Think Tank Media Group that I’d made their “list of top 50 Twitter influencers!”.
I started to really appreciate futurists Robert Scoble and Shel Israel through their 2013 book Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy . It focused on emerging interactive technologies, and shared some companies to watch. Wearable computing, one of the key focus areas of that book, plays a huge part in their new one.
The book’s introduction starts with an overview of three transformations that followed the mainframes:
The Fourth Transformation? That would be “Spatial Computing.”
The Fourth Transformation didn’t initially seem especially interested in discussing the actual technology. The focus was more on how retailers and marketers had better get with the program of augmented reality /virtual reality / mixed reality technologies. “If you are part of a big brand, you need to know about this now so you can understand how your customer relationships are about to change and so you begin to adjust course.”
Continue reading How Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence Change Everything
Fifty Shades of Grey was all over the news. Lovers stores took advantage of all the press by putting-up banners asking “What’s Your Shade?”
They were not the first to take advantage of what’s hot, and won’t be the last. However, some do it better than others.
Pi Day has been gaining visibility in recent years, with observances including math discussions and eating pie. What caught my attention this time was how WDLabs ran with it as a marketing opportunity.
Continue reading 3 Ways Companies Leveraged the News for Marketing
Usually I’m Steve Case the Xerox guy, or the Dell guy, or the JoeBugBuster guy. Sometimes someone confuses me with the other Steve Case, like the person who recently sent me this thoughtfully crafted invitation on LinkedIn:
Hi Steve,
I’m getting in touch as I’m really looking forward to your insights at South by South West (SXSW) in Austin next week and I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn if that’s ok?
Good luck with all the good work!
Xxxx
I’ve never even been to South by Southwest. In fact, when I worked for Dell and visited the Austin area a few times a year, I deliberately avoided visiting during SxSW. Flights and hotel rooms were painfully hard to come by as Downtown Austin hosted the festivities.
When people see my tweets, they often ask “why JoeBugBuster?”
My first tech job was at a now-defunct startup that offered vertical market software and systems for video stores. At one point I was doing software testing, and really took the job to heart. Apparently I did a good job, because I was nicknamed BugBuster in recognition of the number of bugs I identified.
The name stuck. I even named my first web site BugBuster’s Best, complete with a spider dropping down a web strand.
When is the last time you watched a TV commercial more than once. On purpose.
While I was skipping past commercials during a program I’d recorded, one ad caught my eye. I actually skipped back to watch this “Holiday Surprise” commercial from Kohl’s. I was touched, and checked-out the #ShowKindness hashtag shown at the end of the video.
It hit a chord with me and I checked if the video was on YouTube. Clearly it resonated with many other people, since it had been watched hundreds of thousands of times. After watching it a couple more times, I shared it across several social media sites, like this post on Twitter:
Love this #ShowKindness Christmas ad from @Kohls. That's the way #marketing should work. 🙂 http://t.co/aOsrz7TwJd
— Steve Case (@JoeBugBuster) December 21, 2013
Continue reading When Marketing Doesn’t Feel Like Advertising
