Wikis in marketing

This piece, first published in Marketing Magazine in Jan 2007, opened a theme I've returned to many times.  One of the biggest (and still most underexploited) sources of value on the internet is the ability it gives us to hear what customers say - if only we can stop talking long enough to listen. 

Web 2.0 - Time got it right

When at Christmas 2006 Time Magazine named you as their Person of the Year, they were bang on the money.  Web 2.0 has changed everything (even if we've forgotten what it was), and it's hard to remember what the web looked like before Facebook.

Digital trends for 2007

Every columnist gets sucked into making predictions.  When you get it right, you remind people; when you get it wrong, you keep quiet - after all, nobody else is likely to notice.  Here were mine for 2007, and four years later, I'm pretty happy with them...

What convergence really means

First published in 2006 in Marketing Magazine, this is the first time I predicted the internet-enabled toaster.  I'm still firmly behind that prediction, but still waiting...

Is 2007 the year of the mobile? Hedge your bets!

So did 2007 turn out to be the year of the mobile?  Um, no.  But this piece (first published Dec'06) points to three drivers of mobile growth, devices, content, and audiences.  It omits connectivity, one of the key factors; it turned out that all-you-can eat tariffs were pretty important too (as they were with the web).

The perfect website

The search for the perfect website goes on.  But much of the research into effectiveness continues to be inwardly-focused.  This piece from 2006 showed how factors like competition, consumer expectation, pricing, communication needed to be taken into account too.

Web retail needs to be fun!

I was with a client last week, talking about online instore merchandising - a topic which hadn't crossed their minds, despite the fact that they're one of the best at merchandising in physical stores.  This is a discipline which is hardly given a second thought right now, but those who get good at it will find themselves ahead of the pack.  Even in 2006 when this piece was originally published, it was clear that this was an area ripe for exploitation - in 2010, no-one's yet picked up the challenge...