A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs, homework or trivia nights.

• Research pegs the total U.S. social media audience at 127 million. Source: Adweek

• At the end of 2008, there were 189 million mobile-broadband connections generating on average 175 megabytes of traffic per month. A year later the respective figures were 312 million and 273 megabytes – a growth of 158%. Source: The Economist

• Despite the surfeit of available apps – some 140,000 and counting – the average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses between 5 to 10 apps regularly. Source: The New York Times

• Facebook users post over 55 million updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. Source: The Economist

• An average of 247 billion email messages per day were sent in 2009. Source: Pingdom

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Is traditional media and advertising reaching the end of the creative line? In an increasingly cluttered media landscape it seems that nostalgia is being seen as the way to cut through and grasp our remaining collective attention.

Radio has long used the “formative years” approach to appeal to different demographics. This means playing music that was new during the teenage years of the desired audience. The result has been a plethora of classic hits and golden oldies formats. Read the rest of this entry »

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Start me up

I have become increasingly fascinated by technology start-ups and the business of launching an online business. With this post I am looking to start an occasional dialogue on the trials and tribulations of starting a new business in the digital economy. We’ll see how it evolves.

In early April 2009, five Australian guys met in a funky bar in San Francisco to compare notes on their respective business ideas. There were three different technology start-ups involved in the conversation, all excellent ideas with bucket-loads of potential, and all three have taken very different paths to realization.

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Meet the future of television, where broadcast TV and social media converge via the iPad. This video shows how the iPad can become a remote for your television viewing while also allowing you to share your viewing with friends. If you’re not convinced the television industry isn’t heading for major major change then this might convince you.

I originally saw this video on Mumbrella and tweeted out a link to it that generated big response because its just so interesting. So I thought I’d “file it away” here too.

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How many marketers and advertising experts actually practice what they preach?

Until recently it probably wasn’t a very viable option.

How many times has your media rep, who happily suggests where to spend your hard-earned advertising budget, actually “invested” his or her own funds in an ad campaign?

How often has your agency account manager had to feel the anxiety of committing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign that could make or break their business?

For that matter, when was the last time you saw an advertising agency run their own highly-creative, cutting-edge 30 second television spot during prime time?

You haven’t, have you. Agencies enter awards and then drum up column inches in trade press. Its called PR.

Truth is that most of the marketing and advertising experts who businesses rely on don’t actually practice what they preach. And, to be fair, in many cases its not very practical to expect them to.

But the emergence of social media and inbound marketing means that a new generation of marketers has emerged who do have skin in the game, who do actually live, breathe and experience the highs and lows of the strategies they extol.

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If you want to learn about social media and modern marketing then look no further than Age of Conversation 3. In one book you can hear from 171 of the World’s leading bloggers and marketers as they discuss 10 fascinating topics such as Conversational Branding, Measurement, Influence and Pitching Social Media.

For the third book in this series, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan undertook the mammoth task of attracting, editing and compiling in a wonderful example of modern collaboration. Fifteen countries are represented with authors coming from places as diverse as Oman, Finland, India, Mexico, Portugal, Ukraine and of course Australia and the USA. It truly is an International effort.

I think John Rosen says it best on the back cover:

Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan have created a true phenomenon – one that will be studied for yours and be recognized as a turning point in our vision of the author……the author of the future will be a coordinator, conductor and guide who directs a global workforce of the best and brightest in completing the ultimate endeavour.

Age of Conversation 3 is now available on Amazon in hardcover, softcover and even a Kindle version. Once again, all proceeds from sales of the book will go to children’s charities.

I am extremely proud to be a small part of the Age of Conversation for a third time. Please buy a few copies for yourself, your clients or your company. Spread the word and help us raise some money for children’s charities. But most importantly – get busy and join the conversation.

Meet the authors:

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A friend of mine is organising his high school reunion using the Posterous blogging platform. He’s hoping that everyone will be able find and follow the information, and start a bit of a dialogue in the lead-up to the party.

If you’re interested in the Kotara High School Reunion 1983 then check out the site. It has some funny posts already that clearly set the tone for the event.

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The last five years has seen traditional media, especially the press, suffering a steady and painful decline. One by one, media business models have been dismantled as the booming digital world has exploded.

In the 90′s it was presumed that the Internet economy would be very similar to the traditional business world and that the existing empires would be able to easily transition online and maintain their dominant place in the world.

Then it was assumed that maybe a new generation of Goliaths would arrive to take over or sit alongside the old players. To some extent that was true as Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Amazon and others grew and grew.

But the reality has been that the old media titans aren’t being toppled by one or two major new players, its more a death by a thousand (or probably a million cuts). Major news and entertainment sources have been replaced for many consumers by and endless array of blogs, microsites and alternative online service providers. Tiny niche content providers are able to provide deeper, more specialist information into anything imaginable and the old media models have no hope of competing.

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A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs, homework or trivia nights.

• At the end of 2008, there were 189 million mobile-broadband connections generating on average 175 megabytes of traffic per month. A year later the respective figures were 312 million and 273 megabytes – a growth of 158%. Source: The Economist

• China has 400 million internet users compared with America’s 240 million and India’s 80 million. Source: The Economist

• Around 20% of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems – bypassing banks and credit cards. Source: The Future of Money Magazine

• In America, the number of advertising pages in magazines dropped by 26% between 2008 and 2009. Source: The Economist

• The average profitability of companies using the internet has increased by 2.7%. Source: BBC News

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A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs,  homework or trivia nights.

• 668,000 dotcom sites are registered every month.  Source: BBC News

• For the week ending March 13th 2010, Facebook accounted for 7.1% of the America’s web traffic, compared with Google’s 7.0% – the first time Facebook has had a weekly lead. Source: The Economist

• Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but even that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones in 2009.  Source: The New Yorker

• By 2020 the internet will add $3.8 trillion (£2.5 trillion) to the global economy, exceeding the gross domestic product of Germany. Source: BBC News

• BBC’s website receives 20 million British visitors a month – a third of the UK population and around the same as the proportion of Americans who log on to Facebook. Source: The Economist

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