Get Digital

 

The get digital conference was held in the Helix on the 11^th of April and was the final conference of the year. It was a little shorter than usual, however, the speakers did not disappoint. There were three speakers, Johnny Walker, David Erixon and Alistair Croll. The conference was mainly to do with the future of certain industries which was extremely interesting.

 

The future of medicine:

Johnny Walker began the conference and he introduced his business which was primarily about medicine and keeping all medical records together in one place electronically. He mentioned that this type of development in the medical field has come about as a result of consumer driven disruption. The theme of disruptions and discontinuities ensued throughout the conference. Johnny Walker’s business idea has a lot to do with consumer convenience similar to a lot of today’s successful business ideas. I enjoyed his talk as the medical field is often not the first thing that comes into my mind when the future is spoken about. Technology and the growth of tech businesses are usually at the fore of people’s conversations but not medicine, even though it may seem like an obvious one. Further to this talk I read up on articles relating to the future of medicine and found that there are a lot of very interesting developments to be seen in this area such as 3D printing of biomaterials and drugs. As more and more objects can be printed with 3D printing the field of medicine is utilising this area and providing new opportunities for those in the field. It will re-structure the entire pharmaceutical industry. 3D printing will also be seen in the area of artificial organs. Surgeons will not only be able to implant things like artificial skin, cartilage and blood vessels but also grow organs with biomaterials and synthetic devices. As well as this there will be a lot of use of augmented reality in which things like digital contact lenses would be used to show operations live and to show them from the perspective of the surgeon. This augmented reality could also be used in emergency situations using the GPS feature while somebody is performing emergency CPR and waiting for an ambulance. Medical professionals will be able to see what the individual is doing and guide them on how to resuscitate the person. Another very interesting development is the use of digestible sensors. These devices will be tiny and will be possible to swallow. They will gather and store data, transmit body temperature and respiration rate to an external device. This will allow the medical profession to have a thorough understanding of the problem. These medical developments are extremely necessary in the world we live in today especially with health risks increasing and the population rising. The state of the medical system in Ireland surely would not be able to deal with the rise in population and demand for medical care so we need these kinds of developments to assist. Johnny Walker’s idea seems more realistic at this point in time and tracking patient’s medical information and storing all the data in one place will be hugely beneficial in situations such as travel abroad or in the case of an accident.

The future of banking:

As David Erixon took to the stage he mentioned that his talk was more about wealth rather than health but recognised the importance of the developments in the medical field. He said that less than 2% of all financial transactions in Sweden, where he is from, are made with physical money. This shows the Swedish transition to online banking and the move away from physical cash. This seemed like the real future of money to me, the developments in IT coming together with the banking systems around the world to create a secure place to make banking transactions. Technology is changing everything as we speak so why shouldn’t it change an outdated banking system. David Erixon spoke a lot about the way that information is accessed also. With new legislation released, customers can now allow others access to the information that is simply sitting with the bank uselessly. The customer can give permission to 3^rd parties to access the information that the bank holds which will allow them to make purchases much more quickly and without hassle. There will also be a ban on surcharging for card payments as well as better protection against fraud especially on transactions made outside of the EU. This made me think about how the banking industry is so susceptible to disruption. The banking industry has changed so much in the past number of decades in that we can now access our accounts and information at a touch of a button and can see ATM’s on every street corner. Banks now have to compete more and we saw this in the last conference when Bank of Ireland was starting new social media campaigns to gain young customers. With the rise in technology this generation are known as ‘digital natives’ and know that they case switch accounts and banks with ease in minutes online, something that would have been almost unheard of years ago. This means loyalty to banks is virtually gone and banks must now compete to gain its customers. The new area of digital only banks will hold a huge advantage over traditional banks as they will not have the restrictions of traditional tech and will soon be able to access customer data from these traditional banks. These new players will be able to offer their customers innovative services that will be easily tailored to their specific needs. The banking industry according to Erixon is moving in the direction of very personal banking where customers will be able to access all of their financial information all in one place very easily. The theme of convenience for customers continues and seems to be the real future.

 

Discontinuities:

The final speaker Alistair Croll certainly took a very interesting turn with his talk. The sense of confusion when he put up his first slide filled the room. His slide did not seem to make any sense at first but as he continued through his talk it all made a lot of sense and was extremely interesting. I did not think I would see the similarities between horses, tea, steam and perfume. The entire talk dealt with the interesting idea of how certain developments always take over existing ideas. He talked about discontinuities and how they are a point in time where things are not the same afterwards. Discontinuities are how he tied in all of the four topics on the opening slide. Discontinuities involve new to the world innovations that change the way we see a certain thing for example the internet. This innovation changed the entire world. The world would never go back to the way it was before internet. Certain ways of doing things such as looking a phone number up in the yellow pages has been completely replaced by looking it up online. The idea of the car also changed life. The use of horse and cart seemed like the only option and to people at the time was the most normal thing. The introduction of the car, however, changed this view forever. This brand new technology made the horse and cart extremely outdated and medieval looking, an idea that people would never go back to. The idea of discontinuities will no doubt continue to develop into the future as the world becomes more technologically advanced and open to change in this area. As the population becomes more technologically literate change in this technology field will be welcomed with open arms. Developments such as self driving vehicles will change the world in the future. This not only develops safety but also convenience for users.

 

This conference was very interesting as it made me think about the future and the developments that are yet to be seen. This is an extremely exciting prospect as we look back on all of the major developments that have happened in the past 50 years and think about the developments of the next 50 years and the fact that we will witness major discontinuities that will change the way that people do things for good, in ways that we have not yet thought of now.

 

I hope you enjoyed this series of blogs and thank you for reading,

Johanna

 

 

Sources:

 

https://medicalfuturist.com/wp-content/media/2013/10/the-guide-to-the-future-of-medicine-white-paper.pdf

 

http://www.sepaforcorporates.com/single-euro-payments-area/5-things-need-know-psd2-payment-services-directive/

 

http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-banking-growth-of-innovative-banking-fintech-services-2016-12?r=US&IR=T

 

Get Social

Welcome back to my blog! After leaving the #Getsocial17 conference in the Helix on the 14^th of February I had so many ideas regarding social media that never even crossed my mind before. The afternoon conference began with Paul Hayes making a very daring statement saying you shouldn’t talk about yourself to others because they will ultimately get bored, you should talk about your impact to keep them engaged. This links into the idea of what social media is really about. It is about sharing content with others and to successfully share content it must be interesting and engaging for others. Another very important thing that I learned during the conference from Hugh Curran, digital transformation consultant, was that you should always create original content. As the conference continued more ideas about the future of technology were introduced which I found particularly interesting.

“Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community”- Simon Mainwaring

Collaboration

The idea of collaboration came up a lot in Anne Marie Boylan’s presentation about the use of social media in Bank of Ireland. I found this particularly interesting as I have seen their campaigns in the past. She talked about collaborating with bloggers and influencers for projects such as Bank of Ireland My Firsts campaign. I saw this on snapchat and thought it was a great way to make the content more relatable and interesting. Snapchat in particular is gaining in popularity with over 300 million monthly active users and with the average time that users spend on snapchat daily between 25 and 30 minutes this area is worth exploring for businesses. The use of snapcodes to instantly connect someone to the businesses snapchat is an extremely useful way that a business can gain traction. [1] Collaboration allows businesses to make their content relevant as it is indirectly advertising their business. However, recently the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland has clamped down on the use of marketing in social media as followers of influencers were often being misled by the content they were viewing. Now if someone is advertising a product or service they must put hashtags such as #ad or #sponsored to notify viewers that they are advertising a product or getting paid to advertise it. Each speaker emphasised how collaboration is a very useful way of promoting your business, however, made it clear that one size does not fit all. Collaboration and advertisements aimed at particular audiences should be suited to that audience. There would no point in a firm advertising their products aimed at the elderly on snapchat as they majority of their target audience would not be active on snapchat. This was emphasised again in Anne Marie Boylan’s presentation when she spoke about the campaign aimed at farmers in which they used a video with a tractor because it would be of interest to that target audience.

Connection:

Throughout the day the idea of connection was very important. Speakers such as Matthew Weil, Aisling Tobin and Hugh Curran touched on this. The idea of connecting your business to certain events that were occurring at the time or to particular trending hashtags is very beneficial to a business in attracting interest to the firms social media sites. They emphasised that using hashtags that align with your brand reinforce your social media message. For example Kit Kat do this perfectly. They use the hashtag ‘mybreak’ and print that message onto their chocolate bars so when somebody unwraps a Kit Kat they are prompted to join in on the Kit Kat community on social media using that hashtag. This ensures that Kit Kat are being recognised worldwide without having to do any of the advertising themselves. However, this free reign to users of the hashtag can turn into a disaster very quickly for a business if the hashtag that they promote is unsuitable or even possibly allows customers to criticise the business. With social media sites continuously growing in popularity firms need to engage as much as possible to gain customers. Aisling Tobin talked about how the Jameson brand regularly associate themselves with events that are fitting to their brand such as major rugby matches which their target audience would be interested in. Hugh Curran reiterated that a business should not simply jump at any trending hashtag as they are not relevant to the brand and often spam the customer so much that they may unfollow a particular brand.

Management:

Another very important thing that I learned throughout the conference was the importance of managing your content. Understanding when and what you are going to post it essential to the success of the post. Planning the content comes down to creating it around certain events which I mentioned above and also on particular dates. For example, a large chocolate company such as Lily O’Brien’s will have to make a social media marketing plan for the run up to Valentine’s day as a lot of their sales will occur during this time. It would be useless for them to advertise their chocolates two days after
Valentine’s day as people will have already bought from their competitors who were more wise with their social media strategies. Hugh Curran suggested making a plan for the release of content for a longer period of three months and possibly in a very busy time for a month with weekly objectives. As it stands Facebook seems like the most important channel for most businesses as when asked 55% of marketers named Facebook as their most important platform and 67% of marketers planned on increasing their Facebook marketing activities. [2] This is understandable as Facebook currently have 1.86 billion monthly active users. [3] However, twitter is another great platform with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and 320 million active users. [4]. A marketing activity that was suggested by the speakers was the use of video. There were over 4.4 million videos uploaded directly to Facebook in February 2016, generating over 199 billion views. [5] Videos are an excellent way to generate interest on a firm’s page. Visual content is more popular on social media platforms and videos that had subtitles performed better than videos without them as a lot of users tend to watch videos without the sound. Video allows a business to create emotive and informative content for their potential customers. It is a platform that is becoming increasingly popular and of utmost importance to businesses.

Spend money:

Social media campaigns are often driven by creativity and money. Businesses must be prepared to spend some money on producing good quality, engaging content. Obviously firms that have sufficient funding to create large campaigns gain huge traction and popularity on their various social media platforms. Forbes released a list of the most powerful brands and some of the brands that have made the top ten unsurprisingly include, Apple, Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonalds. [6] McDonalds receives so much bad press yet remains in the top ten of the most powerful brands and this is entirely down to the power of social media marketing and the money that they can afford to put into their campaigns. McDonalds takes an unusual hands off approach when it comes to their Facebook page. They rarely post unique content and simply post about new products and changes to their menu while still maintaining impressive levels of engagement. However, McDonalds are very active on Twitter. They actively respond to their customer’s feedback but again on Twitter, like Facebook, they refrain from tweeting anything too obscure as they were subject to backlash in 2012 with their #McDStories campaign which resulted in users complaining about the quality of food in McDonalds. As I mentioned before, selecting the right hashtag for your firm’s campaign is essential to its success. Hugh Curran especially talked about the importance of spending money on creating good campaigns as well as not relying on young people such as teenage family members who have some idea about technology to do the social media for the business. You would never trust someone who had only done Leaving Certificate accounting to do the businesses accounts so why would someone let someone with no training in marketing do all the important social media content.

Security:

The important aspect of security also cropped up during the course of the conference. Understandably with more and more people engaging in social media and sharing an abundance of information, firms must be careful with the information that they possess. Firms reach a huge proportion of social media users and therefore must be careful with what they post online. They must refrain from posting anything which will offend or cause too much negative backlash as it will damage the image of the brand. Firms must also invest time into understanding their foreign markets. For example, in China there are certain numbers like 4 which hold superstitious beliefs and therefore if a company decides to release a social media campaign that centres around that number it is unlikely to be very popular in that market. Not only this but companies must be vigilant with who they allow to access their social media pages. It is important that the employees who have permission to make posts on social media are monitored so that they are posting legitimate content which is beneficial to the business. A great example of a firm unsuccessfully doing this would be with the decline of HMV. Their employees continued to have access to their social media pages and proceeded to post negative posts about the decline of the business and their treatment of staff. The pubic saw the firm in an
extremely negative light and there was a great amount of backlash because of this. Hugh Curran suggested that a firm should regularly change passwords and remove admin rights from a person after they have left the business. This allows for successful reputation management.

 

Future:

Later in the conference after the intermission Paul Berney and Eric Weaver spoke a lot about the future of social media and connecting in the future. It was really interesting to hear about how we will be constantly connected to media in the future. We already use social media and various trackers on a daily basis even when we are sleeping for things like monitoring how we sleep so it was interesting to learn that in the future this technology will almost be like an extension to our being. We will soon be unable to differentiate between physical and digital. It was mentioned that mobiles have become our external brains which is so true. We use our phones for everything from checking when the next bus is arriving to finding the fastest route and deciding what food to order. The possibilities are endless and new technologies are constantly springing up. We have become accustomed to this type of connectivity and expect this level of service wherever we are. It often feels that we are lost when we are in an area without Wi-Fi connection. Companies must become savvier now in order to win over customers. They need to connect physical, digital, sensorial and emotional together to create a successful product or service to attract and retain customers. Marketers must look to combine these four key aspects to create a better brand. According to Paul Berney the future of successful businesses will be in reducing friction in people’s life. People are becoming increasingly busy and look for brands that will reduce the tasks of waiting and queuing for example, he mentioned Disney’s wristband strategy that stops the need to queue for amusements. The pace of innovation is moving rapidly and companies should be open to change and should foster an environment where change is not seen as a dirty word. This will ultimately create a path to an agile organisation.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed the Get Social conference and learned a lot about the importance of social media. It is an area that is ever growing and if used correctly can expand and make a business more lucrative. A loyal brand following can be created and fostered through correct engagement and consistent original content creation. Thanks for reading my blog post and keep tuned for my next blog post about the Get Digital conference in April!

Johanna

 

[1] https://www.omnicoreagency.com/snapchat-statistics/

[2] https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2016.pdf

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-monthly-active-users-2015-7?r=UK&IR=T

[5] http://tubularinsights.com/top-facebook-video-creators/

[6] https://www.forbes.com/powerful-brands/list/#tab:rank

Fortune favours the brave

 

Don’t be afraid of failure – the biggest lesson I learned during the Get Started Conference on the 8^th of November 2016 in the Helix. Many of the speakers either started with or touched on their times of failure. They emphasised that only by failing did they understand how to continue and grow a successful business. The speakers Gavan Walsh of iCabbi and Brian O’Rourke and Alan Farrelly of Cityswifter particularly emphasised learning from failure and using it to move forward towards a better idea and growing a successful business.

 

Elva Carri

After hearing so much about failure being a good thing rather than a bad thing I began to research it a bit more. I found an interesting talk by Adam Grant who is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He had an interesting take on the idea of failure. He said that ‘the greatest originals fail the most because they try the most’. This particular quote resonated with me and I completely agree with him. Throughout his talk he emphasised that to be original you don’t have to be first you just have to be creative and different. While many of us believe that we cannot start a business because the idea is already out there, Adam Grant challenges this. It reminded me of one of the speakers in the Get Started Conference, Elva Carri, founder of Girlcrew. As she introduced the story behind her idea I began to realise that this isn’t a particularly authentic idea as groups of people can already be made on Facebook and social media sites and open events can be created by individuals. However, the way in which she came up with the idea for Girlcrew was an intriguing and original story that caught peoples’ attention. The method was already there for her using Facebook but she did the same thing that Adam Grant challenges people to do, be creative and different. Even though Elva Carri was not first with her idea she found a niche market to target and has been successful ever since. She found a problem that needed a solution which she originally had been looking for and stumbled on a solution herself. She could have dismissed the idea in the fear of failure as she mentioned she originally hated the idea of starting a business and readily stayed away from coming up with a business idea. However, she pursued her particular idea and pushed aside her fear of failure to create this successful business. She now has a team of 5 employees working for Girlcrew and has met Mark Zuckerberg, which I think is a pretty unbelievable achievement. Not only that but she is empowering and inspiring thousands of women between the ages of twenty five and forty with this successful idea.

 

Philippe Brodeur

Philippe Brodeur of Overcast HQ took the stage and began with an interesting story about Youtube. This particular story engaged the audience as we have all used it at some stage and most of us on a very regular basis, sometimes more than we should admit to. He used this success story as an introduction to the idea of being in the right place at the right time. His own company also is central to this idea. He mentioned that 93% of marketers and publishers now work with video. This number was astonishing to me and it made me realise why he was so successful with Overcast HQ. If Philippe Brodeur introduced this idea 10 years ago he may have been laughed at or completely misunderstood. Worse still if he thought of the idea in 10 years’ time the idea may have already been taken by somebody else and made into an extremely successful business. In the time when people are glued to their phones and look up everything on the internet it seems like there is no time like the present for this idea to come to light. Brodeur gave the five main reasons why start ups succeed according to Bill Gross, financial manager and author who he mentioned in his talk and these were team, idea, plan, timing and funding. Timing was stressed as the number one most important reason. He said that the market needs to be ready for the product. I read an article that reiterated the point of timing. In this article Tamir Poleg, founder of Real said “you feel you have the answer and yet, you see no one taking any steps to resolve the issue…The issue kept gnawing at me to the point where I felt it was time to start a company that I felt had the solution”. [ii] Tamir Poleg and Philippe Brodeur among many other successful entrepreneurs realised that they needed to start their business now or it may be too late to start it in the future.

 

Brian O’Rourke and Alan Farrelly

This particular talk made me think of how anybody with a great idea can make it happen. There are plenty of resources and lots of help out there for people interested in starting a business. Maybe it was because the two speakers were recent college graduates and have started a business with help from the DCU Ryan Academy but this talk really inspired me. They spoke about failure again which emphasised the issue again. They told us that they had some bad names for their business in the past but eventually came up with one that proved successful and engaging. They also reiterated the idea of timing when they mentioned that they did not feel they were ready to launch but at the time of the bus strike they felt that this was the perfect opportunity so the pursued it and it proved to be the correct time. They could have failed and their plan to proceed may have been a setback, however, the chance they took was the correct move. To add to what I had already learned over the course of the conference they mentioned the importance of networking. The fact that you need to seek out honest advice by doing market research and asking people outside family and friends about their opinions would prove to be of great importance in the success of a business. Networking helps to meet likeminded people who may aid the success of your business. “Ultimately, it’s not about who you know … but WHO KNOWS YOU”. [iii] This quote is so important because it highlights that if you do not make others aware of your business you will understandably not be a successful business.

 

Gavan Walsh

The next speaker of the day Gavan Walsh spoke with such enthusiasm it was hard not to be inspired by him. He began with a quote “if not me, who? If not now, when?”, this quote stuck with me and I can imagine with many other listeners on that day too. He also spoke about his failures in the past with numerous business ideas coming to nothing. However, he believed that he learned so much from his failures and they pushed him to being a successful business founder and CEO today. His success and the growth of his business from a small idea to having a strong business at present. This made me think of other small companies that have proved themselves and have made it big. A lot of the time the companies that fall into this category would be ‘garage companies’. Amazon began as a garage company and is now the largest online retailer in the world. This started off as a small idea just as Gavan Walsh’s did and through hard work and perseverance as well as accepting failures along the way proved to be an extremely successful idea. Not only this but again the story of Amazon proves that timing is essential to the success of a business. Jeff Bezos of Amazon spotted a need for his idea in the market and ran with the idea which ultimately paid off for him. [iv]

 

Adrian Mihai

The next speaker, Adrian Mihai brought an interesting take to the ideas of the day. He had the idea of survival. He said that initially a start-up has one goal and that is, survival. He believed that a start-up should not be thinking about world domination as a realistic goal in the beginning, of course do not completely disregard the idea, but keep your goals more attainable at the beginning. He seemed more practical in his approach as he mentioned critical things such as making sure to meet deadlines and to understanding why you need investment. I think that everything that he mentioned is extremely important to the smooth running of a business in the beginning and to building a reputation with for possible investors and customers into the future.

 

Iseult Ward

Iseult Ward’s company Foodcloud initially began as an Enactus social project. She saw an extremely important issue regarding food waste and hunger that she felt was not being dealt with. She now has a team of 15 who are working in this company that find retailers with food that they want to get rid of and matching them with charities that need the food. This simple idea tackles a huge issue and has now been introduced into over 1000 retail stores in Ireland and the UK. Iseult Ward looked internationally for ideas on how to go about the running of her business which proved to be of great use to her and to her company. I believe that a lot of people think that social enterprises cannot be very successful but I came across this article which highlights that social enterprises need to use a business strategy as start-ups and other businesses would in order to survive and most importantly to be successful. [v] “Social enterprise stems from a desire to make the world a better place. But if we want it to do so at a meaningful scale, it is time to acknowledge that social enterprises earn their right to be in business the same way private enterprises do: by serving customer needs better than their competition” this quote from the article highlights this idea perfectly. Despite wanting to do something great for society, a social enterprise must still have a knowledge of business to be successful. This particular talk, for me, was important to reflect on because it made me think about what social problems I would like to see solved and feeling inspired that I could potentially start up my own successful business while making a real difference in the world.

 

 

Thank you for reading my first blog post and please take with you that failure in business is not the end but the beginning of a richer journey!

Check out the speakers websites here:

girlcrew.com

opening.io

icabbi.com

food.cloud

cityswifter.com

overcasthq.com

 

 

References: 

[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxbCHn6gE3U

[ii] http://tech.co/17-entrepreneurs-right-time-start-business-2016-05

[iii] http://www.strategicbusinessnetwork.com/about/importance

[iv] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-and-the-age-of-amazon-excerpt-from-the-everything-store-by-brad-stone

[v] https://hbr.org/2013/01/to-grow-social-enterprises-mus