- Summary:
- This week - CMWorld provokes a content and attention debate, while the virtual event binge rolls on. Walmart and Home Depot team up for the last mile, and Zoom regroups. We can now add Twitch as a contender for "worst data breach of the year."
Lead story - CMWorld 2021 - how do we overcome constraints with content?
MyPOV: CMWorld always brings a provocative conversation - for anyone in the content business. Or really, for everyone in the attention business, which is... just about everyone.
As Barb writes in CMWorld 2021 - how do we overcome constraints with content? It's about creativity, we can start by getting rid of lazy assumptions:
Adam Morgan, Executive Creative Director at Adobe, wanted to bust some myths around content that works. You know, things like people only read what's above the fold, headlines need to be short and punchy, most don't watch past two minutes in a video (I heard 30 seconds somewhere), that our attention spans are like goldfish, and so, and so on…
What works instead? Barb:
It's not about speed or time at all; it's about how our brains consume content. Most of the time, Morgan said, we aren't paying attention until something is different. This is because there are so many inputs hitting us that the brain can only pay attention to so much; the rest it predicts. But when it sees something different or out of the ordinary, it pays attention.
There are implications for memory. Memory is about fusing anomalies with emotion. Therefore:
It's about the quality of the content. If there's something about your content that hits them quickly: evokes an emotion or forces them to create a new memory, then you've captured their attention.
That beats the heck out of fussing over the length of an article, or fifteen second attention spans. However, I think this needs further pressing into B2B. Too often, B2B content evokes emotion via exaggerated headlines (e.g. "Writers - AI is coming for your job.") Does that evoke emotion? Yes. And a memory: of a really crudtastic sensational article. Perhaps emotion AND quality resolves that - but is far from easy.
In B2B, deviating into attention-seeking content doesn't always help. Somehow, emotion, attention and content trust/credibility must be reconciled. That's hardly the only content challenge. As Barb writes:
That's the challenge for marketing today - taking all the tactical advice around SEO, content structure, and format, mixing it with understanding the information your customers want at the right life cycle stage, and then wrapping it all with storytelling to create the right content experiences. Oh, and by the way, do that so that it's contextually relevant and personalized for each customer - not a broad approach.
It's no wonder marketing is confusing today.
Indeed - but it beats brandcasting.See also: Barb's CMWorld - winning the hearts and minds of consumers.
Diginomica picks - my top stories on diginomica this week
- Zoom loses Five9 - leaves the cloud contact center business open to innovative alternatives - Kurt examines the acquisition that wasn't, and where that leaves Zoom - and the cloud contact center business: "Zoom’s strategy of using the technological maturity and market dominance of its video conferencing system to expand into other enterprise markets and insinuate itself deeper into business processes is solid, but was dealt a significant, but not fatal blow by Five9’s shareholders."
- How Hearst aims to tower again – with the help of AI - Chris filed a standout use case: "Today, Hearst runs its own bespoke chatbot and digital assistant, Herbie, courtesy of conversational AI and automation specialist, Moveworks. With an increasingly remote, mobile workforce, self-help in IT, finance, payroll, and procurement is essential, so Herbie is on hand to answer as many questions as possible before human agents step in."
- Home Depot delivers a major win for Walmart's new e-commerce Delivery-as-a-Service offering - Stuart on Home Depot's last mile play with Walmart: "A fantastic win for Walmart and one that changes the perception of who might be the target audience for this new service, as well as providing a timely reminder of the importance of that last mile in the increasingly febrile e-commerce sector. This is going to be worth keeping a close eye on as it rolls out."
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- BoxWorks 2021 - Box targets ransomware as it sets out its stall to be the content layer for digital teamwork - Phil rounds up Box's annual user event: ""There's no need for Box to offer some grand vision for the future of hybrid work or other buzzword-laden mission statements, just careful attention to continuing to build its credentials as the trusted cloud platform for enterprise content. That's still an ambitious goal to achieve."
- ServiceNow dives deep into process with new Celonis partnership - Derek on an ambitious partnership: "Strategic partnerships are often dime a dozen, but the financial investment in Celonis by ServiceNow shows how close these two companies intend to get."
- Has large enterprise cloud ERP adoption finally turned a corner? Inside the Oracle Cloud ERP Virtual Summit - Oracle has been making big noise about cloud ERP adoption in the large enterprise. After the Oracle Cloud ERP Virtual Summit, I took a closer look, and gave my "future of ERP" take as well.
Yep, it's another week of "How many virtual events can you handle?" coming right up. Here's a few diginomica event hub highlights to get you going:
- What should we expect from Google Cloud Next ‘21? - Derek
- EVOLVE21 - Rocket Software brings open source to the mainframe for 'modernization in place' - Phil
- conXion 2021 - in the zone with Geoffrey Moore - Stuart (Software AG event, replays available)
A couple more vendor picks, without the quotables:
- You have the power! Consumers, not companies, are in charge of business communications now, say Zendesk and WhatsApp - Madeline
- How Steinway & Sons changed financial planning to keep pace with the pandemic economy - a Planful use case - Jon
Jon's grab bag - Brian scoured the business bookshelves so you don't have to. He came up with three keepers: Three quick book reviews (or what I want Santa to bring me). No offense to these good reads Brian, but I hope Santa brings you just a bit more...
Derek reminds that "regulators are independent for a reason" in ICO has “strong concerns” about independence if GDPR changes go ahead. Finally, Stuart returns to his caustic brand of Facebook analysis in Facebook vs Congress - smear the whistleblower's credibility, plead for more regulation and keep Zuck on a boat ("Zuck's been busy sailing while whistles get blown").
Best of the enterprise web
My top seven
- North American Orgs Hit With an Average of 497 Cyberattacks per Week - The headline here is the COVID attack surge. Oh, and the 93% increase in ransomware attacks: "One reason for the high interest among attackers in ISPs and MSPs is due to the access these organizations provide to numerous other potential victims."
- Twitch hack: data breach exposes sensitive information - As we were saying... “This is as bad as it could possibly be... How on earth did someone exfiltrate 125GB of the most sensitive data imaginable without tripping a single alarm?”
- Top 5 Human Factors in Digital Transformation - Didn't expect to see "emotional intelligence" in a piece on digital transformation, but Eric Kimberling got it done: "The subjective, qualitative, and intuitive aspects of a digital transformation must be appreciated."
- When We Don't Have Answers, We Need to Work Quickly To Build Them - Lora Cecere has been killing it on supply chain issues of late, and it comes at a necessary time.
- Measuring Content ROI: How to Make the Case for a Bigger Budget in 2022 - Parse.ly with a timely webinar recap (and replay).
- San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns as public test nears - Local news? Perhaps, but it brings the issue of so-called "autonomous driving" to a head.
- Video of my Presentation at SaaStr 2021: A CEO’s Guide to Marketing - Dave Kellogg posts his video replay and slides, which covers, amongst other intriguing ideas: "Why marketing is sometimes seen as a dark art."
Whiffs
So, Facebook suffered another outage: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp Go Down Again for Some Users. It wasn't the global embarrassment of last week, but it was enough to cause Redditors to point out the irony of the New York Times asking you to log into Facebook to read the article.
Meanwhile, Mozilla decided that being nominated for privacy awards was boring anyhow:
Firefox Now Sends Your Address Bar Keystrokes to Mozilla https://t.co/MECKDwDEDQ
"Mozilla’s blog post on the subject says Firefox Suggest is an “opt-in experience,” which was the case in September 2021—but it’s now enabled by default in Firefox 93."
-> super classy....
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) October 9, 2021
Reader Clive Boulton sent in a few doozies this week; I'll go with this one: Navy engineer, wife busted for trying to sell confidential info. Clive passes along a tip as well: "Don't use a PB&J sandwich to sell nuclear secrets." Seems like good advice to me...
Finally, I guess this one from my digi colleague Alex Lee needs some explanation:
When you unexpectedly see @jonerp's desk out in the wild. pic.twitter.com/BDcjsaovqi
— Alex Lee 🏳️🌈 (@AlexLeeComms) October 7, 2021
My flamingo always seems to show up on my video meetings - but it doesn't beat the real thing. Get outside, and see you next time...
If you find an #ensw piece that qualifies for hits and misses - in a good or bad way - let me know in the comments as Clive (almost) always does. Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed.
Image credit - Waiter Suggesting Bottle © Minerva Studiom, Overworked Businessman © Bloomua, Businessman Choosing Success or Failure Road © Creativa - all from Fotolia.com.
Disclosure - Oracle, Workday, Planful, ServiceNow, Zendesk and Salesforce are diginomica premier partners as of this writing. Software AG, Rocket Software, and Google Cloud Next are diginomica event hub partners.
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