January 17th, 2010
Rishad Tobaccowala – Future Moves
Late last year I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Rishad Tobaccowala and Simon Mainwaring give a talk to some of Deb Morrison’s students at the University of Oregon’s White Stag building in Portland, Or. Rishad has a way of explaining himself so thoroughly and incisively that he left me feeling like I was in 3rd grade..
This weekend, I came across an article, Future Moves, that he had written for the Economic Times of India. As usual he has some interesting insights into what we might call our digital future and how it will align with our analog existence. Here’s a couple of his thoughts below. Read the whole article here. I also recommend checking out Denuology.
REAL TIME SOCIAL PLATFORMS
SMS which is still the world’s most used communication medium is a social platform. But with 350 million Facebook users, tens of millions Twitter users and a range of local and international innovations (Google real time search) that combine real time and social we are going to see an explosion in the impact of both word of mouth and real time information . For instance in many ways the best way to keep abreast of the 11/9 terror in Mumbai was twitter and real time live streams. Expect every media company and consumer brand to invest in real time listening and response in 2010.
THE RISE OF THE POST DIGITAL WORLD
The world is going increasingly digital but a) the majority of media and marketing is analog and b) people are analog. Thus it is wrong to become overly hysterical even in advanced digital penetration countries by screaming about “digital at the core” ! What is important is people and their needs and passions at the core and most of us combine the real and virtual worlds in ways that allow us to connect, save money and time and pursue our passions. We use mobile tools to have real world meetings and we enhance real world occasions with digital augmentation. Just like Walmart stores are paying a lot of attention to digital capabilities one can expect digital companies like Amazon to have analog or real world presence . Today besides Kindle you will see Amazon stores and maybe even book stores just like Apple has its online store and its real stores.