Posts Tagged ‘xPotomac’

Should Marketers Care about Google Glass?

Posted on: April 8th, 2013 by Geoff Livingston 12 Comments
Image by Ars Electronica

Image by Ars Electronica

The buzz about Google Glass, a form of wearable computing, reached zeitgeist status after SxSW. Now mainstream media is picking up the hype drum for a product that won’t even be released until next year. Should marketers care?

It’s a very reasonable question, and there may be two answers.

First, marketers should care, not necessarily about Glass, but what the device represents.

Wearable computing promises to take ubiquitous mobile Internet access and layer unprecedented information into our day-to-day existence. Commonly called augmented reality, users can interact in two ways: Sharing and accessing information anywhere.
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Geoff Livingston on Google+

Context Always Mattered, Now It’s Crucial

Posted on: February 26th, 2013 by Geoff Livingston 17 Comments

As the flood of content marketing continues to populate the interwebs, you’re starting to hear context come to the fore. Context was the overriding theme at yesterday’s xPotomac conference with almost every session featuring conversation about the need to provide context.

It’s ironic, because in reality great brand and marketing campaigns have always resonated thanks to context. From the Maytag Man to Oreo’s slam dunk Instagram ad during the Super Bowl, people had an affinity to the creative and message.

Moving back to today, the Internet content of now demands time. Whether it’s a few seconds to absorb a photograph or several minutes to read a thoughtful post, you need to stop paying attention to whatever else you are doing and invest in that content.

Often to get that attention, this content has some sort of tangential context to the customer. Meaning, the content relates to a personal or professional interest. When marketing doesn’t have context, customers simply ignore communications.
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Geoff Livingston on Google+

Full Visual Integration

Posted on: February 20th, 2013 by Geoff Livingston 12 Comments

Jen Consalvo of AOL

Perhaps the most noteworthy change in digital media in the recent past is the rise of visual media. From photos and now increasingly videos, we’ve seen Instagram and Pinterest become two of the top social networks, both ranked in the top 50 U.S. web sites overall by Comscore. And to boot, Facebook and Google+ have reacted making visual media core components of their networks. That’s not to mention new upstarts like SnapChat and Vine.

The revolution continues with the full integration of visual media. Jen Consalvo, COO and co-founder of TechCocktail, is presenting next week at xPotomac on the visual revolution. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the things she’s going to talk about…

GL: How has photography changed social networking in the past two years?

JC: Photography has always been a means to communicate, but the tools that have become more mainstream in the past few years have made visual imagery much more integrated and seamless in terms of the flow of our communications.

When the social tools we use everyday include images within the flow, so that we’re not clicks away from images, they become the conversation, not merely an attachment or secondary thought. Just look at all the 2012 memes, like “Texts from Hilary” or the Ryan Gosling tumblr blogs “Hey Girl” – you can quickly see Images and video are the primary communication tool.

GL: Infographics, fad or forever?
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Geoff Livingston on Google+