Week 3 learnings

My favorite lecture from week 3 was the TED talk with Seth Godin titled "How to Get Your Ideas Spread." I completely agree with Seth Godin on this statement: "It's not always about the idea itself, it's about whether or not you can get the idea to spread." This statement rings true throughout my daily life, both at work and in personal interactions. Someone can have the most innovative/brilliant idea, but if they are unable to get buy-in from leadership and cross-functional partners (or friends/family), the idea goes nowhere. It's about selling the idea (differently for different audiences) and talking to the right people to generate excitement. The other points from the TED talk -- marketing to innovators and early adopters, and being "remarkable" -- also shifted my mindset regarding future marketing endeavors.

Other key learnings from week 3 are as follows:

• The meaning/effects of a "blog storm" (a term unknown by me until now) from "The New Influencers" - an event in which thousands of bloggers comment/post about 1 particular topic, which leads to the story being picked up by mainstream media

• Segmentation going away in favor of individual/customizable attention toward singular consumers (from "IBM's CEO on data, the death of segmentation and the 18-month deadline" 13 February 2013); this is relevant for me, as our company recently announced a shift from approx. 20 e-mail campaigns per day based on traditional segmentation to >1,000 e-mail campaigns per day (within next 6 months); e-mail content going-forward will be based on big data to customize content for each individual consumer; initial testing showed double-digit revenue growth per e-mail sent for individualized content!

• Twitter's attraction is communal experience -- live events are most popular; 140-character short format is ideal for hand-held devices, which majority of population has with them ALL the time; next step for Twitter is revenue generation, a crucial step in business longevity (from "The Point of Twitter" 23 April 2010)

• The 2005 Asian tsunami disaster in is credited as the "seminal moment" when blogs/social media became news; this situation allowed for the bottoms-up phenomenon of participatory journalism, and bloggers/social media users were able to better depict a portrait of the disaster before news teams arrived on the scene; PROS: participatory journalism, CONS: "circular mill" and the idea of "piling on" (from "James Surowiecki: When Social Media Became News")