Louise McGregor Business

Web Summit Highlights; Day Two

I headed to the marketing stage this morning, and ended up spending most of the day there.

Content is King

A discussion with Adam Singolda (Taboola) Ian White (Sailthru) Sean Moriarty (Demand Media) Michael Learmonth (IBT)

Brands are more important in digital; as the due to noise:signal ratio grows, branded content helps viewers/customers find quality.

Brands need a content strategy, it’s not enough to just push content out there. Need a strategy behind it, and to measure the value to readers. Keep the ROI high, this allows you to keep building quality content.

In conversation with Clara Shih

This was the most relevant to me today, and I found myself agreeing with everything Clara Shih said.

Social is normal for people in their personal lives, it will become the standard operating procedure for companies. It always takes a decade or more to operationalise these things for enterprise, it seems to take a while for the change management to kick in.

Must understand social throughout the company – it can’t just be a team sitting in marketing – but through the company including the C-suite.

Shih sees 3 trends for social;

  • social becomes a service layer on top of everything; IoT, wearables
  • more data, meta data = shift towards hyper targeted “segment of one”
  • customer will expect exchange of data to give them something in return

Connected World

Raced over to the Machine Summit to hear a colleague talk about the Connected World. There was a queue to enter to prevent overcrowding, I was about the last person they let in.

There was some discussion on the opportunities of a future connected world. More features on devices came up as one option, for example adding a camera to a Roomba so that you can document what happens if your house floods – all I could think of was put a camera on it and film your pets. I guess that’s why I’m not working in connected devices.

One of the biggest challenges in this area was data standards and privacy questions. If you extract data from a device how do you protect that?

  • Explain what you do with the data in a way people can understand
  • Do a better job of always making it “opt in”
  • Define and share best practices around privacy and security on collection, anonymising, use and re-use of data
  • Privacy and security seen as a base layer – beyond that let people choose what to share

The future of connected – in the next five years?

Move from thinking about discrete devices to infrastructure and embedding connection into our homes and workplaces.Move to network of devices, and move to connected services. Move to configuration of homes for different purposes, eg; your home office disappears when guests visits.

Joanne Bradford from Pinterest

Introduces Pinterest as “inspiration plus action”, people use it to design their homes, think about their wardrobe, get inspired about exercise, collect recipes. The engagement is high because people use their boards. (OK, I’m the exception).

It was a platform created as a series of communities, starting with mum bloggers, and that meant it was under the radar in Silicon valley to start with.

They still see that community matters and arrange events for pinners, and invite them to press events.

Some stats;

  • 750M boards
  • 300B items
  • best pins have great image + useful link + good description
  • #1 category = comedy

Future of Media with John Ridding (Financial Times)

Always believed in the value of quality journalism, even when others saw a crisis of print media and declared that no-one wanted to pay for content. The mantra was “internet wants to be free”, but the internet is a channel so has no desires of it’s own.

More than half of their revenue now comes from Digital, and it’s the subscription model, not the ad revenue that’s winning it for them.

Innovation Divide

The challenge of getting some “start up” innovation fire into large enterprises, and an inside peek into the fantastic Unilever Foundry, which is great way of bringing fresh ideas and working them into something practical.

Pointing out the dangers of perfection mindset this presentation gave me the quote of the day

every day that a good idea sits in a powerpoint presentation is another day that the idea dies.

Keith Weed, CMO, Unilever

They’re one of the world’s big spenders when it comes to marketing, and they continued spending through the crisis although the breakdown of where that spend goes is shifting.

Marketing spend winners in general are social, search and increasingly mobile. But in terms of social media spend there isn’t a “winner takes all” platform as it makes sense to use multiple platforms depending on your purpose.

For consumers in social there are ongoing privacy and trust issues, right now technology is ahead of regulation, there are things being developed in technology that legislators don’t understand. I’d add that customers understanding is also often behind – even as their expectations grow.

As the Dutch saying goes “trust arrives on foot and leaves on a horse”

Brands have an opportunity to solve this ahead of regulation, and build trust with customers.

It was another packed day – lots of great speakers. The agenda on the marketing stage was rather random, as adjustments had to be made for speaker availability. So it was a bit of a surprising day, the other – less happy – surprise was the wifi. It wasn’t keeping up with demand, so my “life tweeting” was all over the place. OK, for an attendance of 20,000 people I guess it’s a challenge.

I’d still like an answer to my sheep tweet though.

Louise McGregor Digital, social media

TNW in Review

I’ve just got back from “The Next Web Europe” conference, there’s a good chance the conference is still going on, at least the drinking/partying fun part of the conference. A few of the speakers triggered my thinking so there will be a few more posts in the coming 1-2 weeks but here’s my summary of the conference.

Location: Westergasfabriek is cycling distance from my house, so that scores it a bunch of points on my unscientific scale. But there are other advantages as well, it’s close to the centre, and set in a park. We were lucky to have sunny days so it was a joy to wander outside in the breaks. The venue for the red stage is an old gas storage silo that’s now been rebuilt, it makes a great shell to stage events.

Organisation: Top. A lot of thought had gone into the details, clever branding throughout, lots of exposure for partners, presenters were taken care of, the MC did a great job, clear signage, there were loads of people on the “TNW” team – and all the ones that I spoke to were helpful. Oh, and the wifi was great, and held up throughout the two days. So a big congratulations to the organisers and the event team.

My only minor complaint; a book giveaway was announced to start at lunchtime, but in fact started at the end of the speaker’s talk. So those who believed the announcement arrived at lunch to be told the freebies were all gone, but you can buy a book and the author will sign. No thanks, I like the guy but his signature isn’t worth the 22 euro price differential (from a kindle edition).

Speakers: This is my subjective judgement, I think there’s a big difference in the American style of presenting and the European style of presenting. Americans seem to go for big statements, dramatic conclusions, and value passion as a speaker. I think European speakers structure their speeches to tell a story, provide evidence, and value charm and audience connection as a speaker. Thus there were a couple of speeches that I really wanted to hear but felt like I was being yelled at. The worst in this category for me was Stefan Molyneux, who is very angry with banks and governments. Granted there’s a lot to be angry about, and since I used to work for a bank I’ve probably heard more of such rants than is good for me but it just felt very… 2009.

I think the speaker I enjoyed the most was Dale Stephens, the founder of uncollege. His parents let him quit school when he was 12 and start managing his own education. I’ve felt for along time that our current education system isn’t fit for the future, and the existing university system is increasingly a very middle-class rite of passage rather than a real education. I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.

Audience: Mostly young, digital natives or near natives, hipster beards abounded. Mostly men – it’s one of the few places I’ve been where there was a long queue for the men’s toilet and none for the women’s. Generally they were enthusiastic about good speakers, but also quick to walk if a speaker wasn’t delivering what they wanted (except for me, muggins, who sat through to the end in hope). I’m a little sad that the audiences don’t stay in the room for the various awards and support their industry colleagues, perhaps next year those awards could be between two draw-card speakers to reduce audience drift.

Stuff I didn’t see: One of the problems of these megaconferences is that there is so much going on that you can’t see it all. So I missed out on some great speakers in the green and blue rooms, a hackathon full of brilliance, and talking to some cool startups.

Purpose: I’ve been to the Dublin WebSummit a couple of times, and left feeling I’d heard from people who are building the digital industry, I didn’t get that at TNW Europe.

It felt more like there were more researchers and commentators on digital than practitioners, this may be partly due to my choice of the red room. I certainly learnt from many of the speakers, but for thinking about “The Next Web” – which is after all the title of the conference – I think the Dublin WebSummit does a better job.

Best Moment: coming back into the room and finding anonymous masks on our chairs. It made the point that we were about to discuss those difficult issues of private vs public.

Plus it led to a rash of selfies, that’s my first ever “selfie” on the left.

The first part of this session was the story of Shawn Buckles, who sold his personal data to the highest bidder – for 350 euro.

At the end of which all those with masked stood for a great photo opportunity.

I guess the ultimate test of value (especially as I pay my own way for conferences these days) is would I go to the next one; yes, I would.

 

Louise McGregor Innovation

Web Summit

websummit2It’s the Web Summit conference in Dublin this week; a conference  filled with the great and the good of the digital world. This year’s conference has five stages; Main Stage, Digital Marketing, Cloud, Development, and Library.

There are more speakers with “Founder” after their name at this conference than any other I’ve been to, and there are new start ups pitching great (and not so great) concepts. There are also events beyond the conference – this year a Night Summit and a Food Summit have been added.

There are some speakers I’m really looking forward to; Padmasree Warrior, Robert Scoble, Matt Mullenweg, Phil Libin, Michael Acton Smith. All leaders in digital business. There are speakers from the best publications in digital; Spencer Reiss from Wired, Mark Millian the tech writer from Bloomberg, Alexia Tsotsis from TechCrunch. And there are some topics that tempt me; “Big Data for Good or Ill” and “Future Content: Making Stuff People Actually Want to Read”.

Last year some of the most inspiring talks were from people I hadn’t heard of before – it’s where I first heard about Coder Dojo for example.

This conference attracts speakers who are driving digital change, they are leaders and innovators. It’s an great lineup.

I’m looking at the agenda and it’s really terrible, there is so much great content that I’m struggling to make a choice on which session to go to – it’s a luxury problem.

Louise McGregor Digital

Coding for Kids

If Zuckerberg makes you feel depressed about your age you should probably stop reading now.

On stage at the WebSummit in Dublin yesterday were three young techie/entrepreneurs. Pep Gomez of FeverUp, Sujay Tyle of Scopely and James Whelton of Coder Dojo. Three very bright, very young men (all under 20) who are building a better world.

It was James Whelton who caught my attention, he explained that when he was at school he was bad at everything; sport, music, academics. The only thing he was good at was coding – but that wasn’t supported or recognised at school. He’s got a little bit famous for his coding skills while on a flight – he discovered and published a hack to get past Virgin’s pay-for-wifi setup.

So he left school, and started Coder Dojo, it’s an after school workshop where kids can go and learn to code. The stupidly simple answer to a problem that schools don’t have the expertise or resources to solve.

It’s now running all over Ireland and in 20 other countries, and not just wealthy western countries; Indonesia and Uganda have Coder Dojos. (If there isn’t one near you check the site – maybe you’ll get to start one.)

And just when I was getting over someone so young doing such cool stuff. He brought 4 children, average age 12 up on to the stage. They are fast becoming coding experts, one has already had a game top rank in iTunes. Take a look at Harry, the inventor of PizzaBot, age 12.

Kids are kids though, when the interviewer asked whether the top ranking and the sales in iTunes meant he could buy chocolate for all the girls at school he replied “well that’d be great, if there were any girls at my school”.

Given that technology runs the modern world more of the tech skills should be taught in schools. But of course there’s a long lead-time to make such a change. In the meantime there’s Coder Dojo.