Age - what's it to you?

Maybe it's because I'm planning birthday parties at the minute, maybe it's because at work they call me Auntie Fiona for to most I'm (relatively) old  I've been pondering on the notion of age. ( I should add that for some of my sailing gang I'm still a whipper snapper with all these crazy ideas about newfangled computers and mobile things, software, hardware, techniques and tricks though, so it's all relative.)

We used to call people over 60 OAPs. Luckily that's evolved at least if into the icky American term "seniors" or the nicer silver surfers, even if I dare you to suggest that to a number of ladies of my acquaintance who would rather not disclose their hairdressing secrets... after all my Mum taught me there were certain questions it was rude to ask.

 I have many 60+ friends, one of the offshore sailors I most admire and sail with confidently and happily is 70. I certainly don't think of them as old. There's no pipe and slippers or bad taste flowery cardigans or "I can't go out Coronation St is on". These are active, confident, outgoing people who mostly have a better social life than I do because they are lucky enough to have the thing I don't have - time, and for many a better standard of living that my generation will be able to afford. In their day mortgages were still big and hairy but rarely had hundreds of thousands in the price.

Society needs to get a better grip on valuing knowledge and wisdom over novelty, more reverse mentoring to drive the digital agenda.  I'm on my own personal crusade to upskill a handful of people, and it's a task that requires bags of patience I'll admit. Alone I can make a positive difference  to a few but not improve the lives of many at scale.  As a marketer, brands could be doing sooo much more to help - this is the age of the brand butler remember? Be useful don't just flog boxes.

So fair play to a brand with a long established relationship with the over 50s... (such youngsters(!)), for encouraging creativity, digital uptake and challenging the stereotypes with the Saga film competition, which somehow I've only just tripped over as digital treasure.

This was the winning entry. Be inspired. Then call your nearest older than you relative without a PC and talk to them about getting them a tablet, and set it up and show them how to use it.



You might want to download some of the Saga Apps whilst you're at it.

Healthy reminders for marketers

Gosh, another month has gone by... I've turned into a once a month blog poster.  Depressing really.  Sure, I'm still juggling some internal stakeholder focused publisher platforms at work, and there's been a lot going on in my "real" life.. that thing that has lived on the sidelines for a while during a period of intensity at work, but still!  I'm sure I've missed out on a heap of interesting stuff.

I can at best claim to have managed to watch one TED talk in the last month. Must try harder... TED never ceases to inspire me.

My digital treasure find of the month was Comscore's really useful paper on UK / European digital trends, full of handy slides like this one... Might not be rocket science but good to have stats to back stuff up.

So, with a slightly calmer week, I've fired up Tweetdeck, and started nourishing my inner curiosity monster again. He feels so much better already!  So nothing desperately new today but a few nice examples of things that as marketers we should remember to stop and remind ourselves of once in a while.

So first up... this great Slideshare from W&K, providing a healthy reminder for those  that spend too much time at work, that we also wear a consumer hat and we should reconcile the two more often, nothing new in the thinking but a story well told deserves sharing...

How to (not) Fail from Martin Weigel

One of undoubtedly many such posts kicking around the internet on the topic of marketing kpi's... and why we need to remember ultimately we should be measuring the right things that answer the objectives and not just measuring stuff cos we can... nothing new here again but a brief reminder does no harm.

A nice post from the Harvard Business Review that whilst likewise is not revolutionary does a nice job of simply starting to explain attribution and predictive modelling.  As just one potentially small part of the mix these days, Twitter are trying to demonstrate their ad formats really work with this Nielsen research piece.

And whilst there's been lots of interesting things going on with both the CeBit conference in Hanover (Spotify player on the web and in Volvo & Ford cars for example), the Mobile World Congress (still no phone capable of making & bringing me tea in bed yet though), nor SXSW in Texas this week, my discovery of the week is this post from Stephen Wolfram (of nerdy but awesome computational knowledge / solutions engine Wolfram Alpha), who predictably has taken the notion of data visualisation and personal data modelling into a whole new league.  Seriously nerdy yet quite fascinating in a world where Nike + & Fuelband, apps that monitor all sorts of things are increasingly helping us make different decisions about our life (02 health are doing some interesting things in this space)  and measure our goals.

As I type, Mark Zuckerberg is announcing the latest re-design for Facebook - new larger images (the instagram influence), a new approach to the newsfeed... and a heap of new things I'll now have to explain to my Dad. ;-)