While I am getting lots of friendly encouragement here on Facebook, people who know me well; people who care about my writing have quietly asked me how I can be writing a book that I say is a sequel to Age of Context that is called Resurrecting Trust. How did I make the leap from Technology to trust? Among those who have asked me is Robert Scoble my co-author last time, and Paula Israel, my wife forever. Both have my best interests at heart and both are very deeply invested in the last books argument that mobile, social media, sensors, location and data will change almost everything. The new title and theme is a product of my new collaboration with Porter Gale, who loves digital marketing with the same immersion and passion that Scoble loves loves disruptive technology. In my hours of conversations with Porter, we have come to the conclusion that marketing has been broken for a very long time. The reason is that while marketers are employed to build brand trust, they are not generally trusted by the people they are attempting to reach. The messages they dispatch are not trusted by most people nearly all the time. So the first essential thought is that marketing is broken because it is damaging brand trust rather than building it. In that light, technology is being used as a weapon to intrude on people and thus it is accelerating mistrust. You cant blame technology for that. Tech, as I have said in each of my previous books, is mere a toolset for people to use and abuse as they choose. Porter and I feel very strongly that technology can be used as a toolset to restore trust in marketing, messages and the marketplace. In short, it can resurrect the trust which is dead--or nearly dead. The contextual technologies Robert and I talked about in the last book will be explored on how they can be used to improve marketing and how they will be used. Resurrecting Trust will have an entire chapter on beacons, the low-energy Bluetooth devices that came out just after our book published. We will look at how mobile apps are uber-personalizing services, such as Tapingo, a startup targeted to students, who can order and pay for food and books almost automatically, because the app studies each users patterns. We will cover a relationship between Esri, a GIS leader and Aisle411, a mobile app that lets you find anything in 12,000 of North Americas largest stores. We need more of these stories. Lots more. It is one of the reasons that I use Facebook so often to get new ideas and suggestions on products and technologies. I believe the success or failure of this book project will be in finding companies who are using, what Scoble and I called Pinpoint Marketing in our last book: technologies that knows who you are, where you are and can predict what you are likely to want next: thus giving users more and more benefits as they voluntarily share more and more of their personal data. Porter builds upon this. She is recognized as a thought leader in digital marketing. She knows companies that are using digital technologies to give customers a highly personalized experience, reducing noise and intrusion while increasing the quality of service, thus allowing companies to spend less and sell more. All of this technology can be used to benefit buyers and sellers in ways that build trust, and thus loyalty. We talk about how loyalty programs will become more contextual and that loyalty cards will move from barcodes and magnetic stripes to chips and sensors who know lots more about you. We are expanding a good deal of effort to find companies who are using these new technologies in ways that are new and better. We are also looking for companies whose marketing efforts attempt to abuse these technologies in deceptive ways, by misleading users the way Snapchat has done by promising not to store data while storing everything posted. We then spend some time talking about how Contextual Technologies give the users the ability to to find and expose marketing deceptions faster and with greater amplification than has ever been possible--through this very same technology. We look at how tech can expose people who are abusive or incompetent such as the former Paypal executive learned after he made the mistake of Tweeting while drunk--thus losing his job. We go a little away from just contextual tech, to look at how deception can damage brands longer and with greater devastation by looking the current GM disaster and wonder who among us would buy a GM car for their child anytime soon. We look at Warren Buffet, who has become one of the most successful investors of all time by sticking with a strategy of over-trusting. We talk with analysts who work with senior executives at some of the worlds largest companies in defining how well the public trusts them and what they need to do to increase the publics trust in them. The answer, it turns out, is to behave in a more trustworthy fashion. Our conclusion is that the companies who understand how behaving more trustworthy and executing a trustworthy marketing strategy will increasingly impact the bottom line: it becomes a survival issue as the Age of Context becomes the dominant factor in a world where the marketplace has no borders and brands are shaped more by customers than ads. I wish I could have told you all this in fewer sentences. Our ability to articulate the thoughts behind this work in progress will hone down over time. But does this make sense to you? Does it sound like a good book? Do you have any ideas or case studies that would help us make a stronger case. Robert Scoble and Paula Israel, does this answer the questions you have recently asked me?
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 17:20:42 +0000
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