Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

Evolution of Blogging: 20 Years in the Making

[image of the evolution of man...] While the blog in the current evolution of publishing online officially turns 20#, we have been sharing our thoughts and collaborating through conversations for much longer than that. As Dave Winer says at The Guardian, “we were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn't know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.” One theme of the conversation on blogging continues to be whether social streams have replaced blogs. Given that so much of the activity online has been rendered frictionless by the ease of... Read more →

What it Takes to Make it Better

As I was putting the finishing touches to Marketing in 2014, I kept coming back to the question of how we go from bad to better in our development -- personally and as organizations, by working on the problem. This is particularly relevant as content overload, attention crunch, and production pressures cospire in forcing us to stack rank what is important to success. Scaling up excellence takes work, and once resilient companies and business models are being challenged at a faster rate. It is a topic I have tackled often, how creativity is developed and honed with use. Deliberate practice... Read more →

Customer Engagement

It pops up everywhere, in client meetings and requests (probably because it is the new marketing word in social and they are told they need some), in tech providers white papers, posts, etc. Over the years, I have done my fair share of writing about it. See for example: before and after engagement, as well as exploring the kind of stories that drive engagement. Typically, the missing part of the conversation is how we get there. This is not the same as flooding the social streams with content and promotions kind of how we get there. It's the commitment part... Read more →

Business Models, How it is Made, How they Do it

Making Sense: Business Models Battle of the Box. Stratechery: In other words, what we have here is one of the more interesting business experiments we’ve ever seen: is it better to have established a firm foundation in the top-down enterprise market that actually matters – i.e. Box – or to have built tremendous goodwill and customer loyalty with actual users – i.e. Dropbox? 7 Reasons Mobile Money From T-Mobile Should Worry Bankers. Jim Marous: While this is not the same as turning smartphones into mobile wallets, it is a solution offered by a wireless provider that has distinct advantages over... Read more →

Marketing in 2014: that Rigid Approach will Cost you

Marketing used to be a fairly straight forward profession, doable when leveraging a well defined set of competences and techniques, gaining a certain kind of experience over time, and keeping an eye on what everyone else way doing. Those aspects have not gone away, of course, they are a good starting point -- reliable and reassuring, like the dial tone when you pick up the phone. If that's all you've got, that rigid approach will cost you today. At the risk of restating the obvious, things have become exponentially more interesting today. The adoption of digital tools, customer mobility, and... Read more →

Scaling up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less

I still remember when I read In Search of Excellence# early on in my career. It was a suggestion from my mentor and my first introduction to the work of Tom Peters. My one take away was that successful organizations and teams focus on people -- customers and the individuals who serve them. Even as many of the examples chosen in Peters/Wasserman's book were later challenged due to apparent lack of rigor, the themes they highlighted are still monitored and talked about in some form or another today. For example, active decision-making, learning by observing customers, lean teams and autonomy,... Read more →

Interconnection, Preference, Convergence

Making Sense: Interconnection Disruption. STET: Epic disruption has arrived — in a package the size of a deck of cards, with the destructive power of a sci-fi disintegration ray. The smartphone has replaced calculators, wristwatches, cameras (still and video), alarm clocks, voice recorders, radios, remote controls, notes passed in class, libraries, books, bus schedules, cash registers, portable game systems, maps, compasses, GPS, telephones, and, increasingly, even the calls themselves. [...] The next physical object on the list may be us humans, as well. [...] Actual presence dissolves into a backdrop for insidiously addictive interconnection. [...] Our swipe exceeds our grasp.... Read more →

What a Children Co-Created Ad for WWF Italy can Teach us About Collaboration

Learning is an adventure in imagination, and imagination unlocks creativity and innovation. This short video documents the process Italian ad agency Leo Burnett went through to enroll elementary school children to create advertising thought by kids to get adults thinking on behalf of WWF Italy for the The Pets for Pets Project. Pairing an experienced creative team with the kids allowed Burnett to teach and learn at the same time. Inviting children to imagine and then letting them participate actively in the creation of new social campaigns to help protect the animals they love the most made learning fun for... Read more →

Imagination, Creativity, and the Active Construction of Perception

"The real key is being able to imagine a new world. Once I imagine something new, then answering how to get from here to there involves steps of creativity. So I can be creative in solving today’s problems, but if I can’t imagine something new, than I’m stuck in the current situation." [John Seely Brown] One of the topics he talks about in the interview (do read the whole thing) as part of how context shapes content -- the example of replacing music in movies is one I used to explain it, too -- is listening with humility. To understand... Read more →

Should Brands Get on Jelly? (+ Announcement)

Should they? Should they buy social ads? Should they become media companies even though they are not in the media business? How much should they invest in people and how much in tools? What budgets are their peers allocating to social? Which tools are better to do xyz vs. qwerty? Is brand x doing it all wrong and brand z taking the market? What is a minimum viable product (MVP)? One could get carried away with such questions, and have no trouble finding opposing views, strong opinions, and all kinds of advice through search and social. The hard part is... Read more →