“A productive work environment doesn’t have to be stressful.”
Back in April, Texas-based Maura Thomas released her most recent book on individual and corporate productivity titled "Everyone Wants to Work Here: Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and Be the Leader in Your Market".
Maura is an award-winning international speaker and trainer and saw a gap in the skills being developed in leaders and the ever-increasing demands of work. She’s spent decades working in the trenches with tens of thousands of leaders. This research has led to proven solutions for how leaders can solve the problems eating away at productivity, and help their teams succeed in today’s fluid, fast-paced work environments.
In a recent member’s call we held an informal book launch for the new book, where Maura told us more about the book and shared a few actionable steps to plug your productivity gaps and energise your team.
Read moreThe exponential rate at which the technology is evolving, with new features and components being developed and released daily it’s very import that we have an open, scalable and agile architecture. However this is an ideal state and to tarnish the ideal state one of the biggest challenges today is vendor lock-in.
Often organisations don’t even realized they are locked in until the time they try and innovate with new components and try to open the existing architecture on a system, platform, tool or service.
Read moreWorried about climate change? Not sure what to do, and not sure how to speak with friends, family and colleagues about it?
Talking about climate change and personal choices can sometimes lead to challenging discussions.
In a recent member’s call we heard from Nina Horstra, Climate Coach and UX Research Manager at Booking.com in the Netherlands. At work she focuses on the topics of sustainability and accessibility. In her spare time, she has completed a training program to be a certified climate coach.
We covered insights on living a sustainable life, guilty pleasures, and how to take others along on the journey. There were also a few practical tips that you can apply in your day to day life and in conversations, but we started our wonderful journey somewhere else.
Read more“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for”
Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker is one of the most widely-known and influential thinkers on management and his opening quote is really an eloquent way of saying that the customer's experience and perception of the service or product is what ultimately defines its quality.
Peter Drucker also coined the term “knowledge worker” and that’s really what Gudrun Möller, Service Designer at Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) in Zurich, Switzerland is. Her focus is along the same lines as Drucker on using research data to focus on delivering value to customers and testing, testing, testing.
Prior to joining ZKB 2021, Gudrun has worked on both customer side and with a consulting firm in various roles including Senior Digital Media Manager at Swiss Re, Head of Digital Product Management at Neue Zürcher Zeitung and also as Senior Consultant at Stimmt, a boutique Swiss business consulting firm focusing on customer experience.
Gudrun is also our expert of the month.
Read moreMost marketers and digital ops teams are still busy asking “may I” when they ought to be pushing the envelope on innovation and innovating on what will make the company more resonant in the marketplace next month, quarter and year.
In a recent member call, digital policy consultant Kristina Podnar asked the question: What if we could change that dynamic, deliver “just in time guidance” and push for faster and more frictionless market engagement? What if we applied the same type of approach to our digital ops enablement that we apply to our consumers?
Kristina talked through several use cases and shared examples of how marketing and digital ops teams are reinventing digital policies for enablement. She also shared her tips and tricks on how to help your colleagues around the globe get to the next level of enablement.
Read moreWe all carry within us a set of assumptions about what is “normal” in our professional disciplines. But the realities of 2023 - including the climate emergency, armed conflict in Europe, and global technological and social change reveal gaps and flaws in the assumed boundaries of our work.
What are our obligations in this new world? What do we think digital technology is and does today? And how can our work become more consequential in an epoch of disruption and rapid change?
In a recent member call, digital cultural strategist Michael Peter Edson hosted a short talk and discussion, where he drew on 20 years of work at the forefront of digital transformation in culture and society. Michael was the Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum and research complex, based in Washington, DC; co-founder of the Museum for the United Nations; and is part of the founding team of the Museum of Solutions, Mumbai.
Read moreDeveloping and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams is something special.
That’s what Eric Greenberg has done in Philadelphia at The Wharton School since around 2013, when he began championing the growth of inbound marketing in the MarComm office after having spent several years in the department of web development.
Today, Eric runs a team of nine people at The Wharton School that covers a wide variety of scenarios. They run the Wharton content management system which has 130 websites on it, they are responsible for marketing automation and the graduate admissions Salesforce instance, as well as a school-wide email marketing platform.
Eric believes in “servant leadership”, mentoring, sharing knowledge, and creating a healthy workplace culture and a team that respects diverse opinions and works together to achieve amazing things. Eric is also our expert of the month.
Read moreIt seems like AI will have a big impact making us more effective, more efficient, helping us generate ideas more quickly and perhaps even making us better understand our audiences and to tailor content and design to meet their needs.
Dennis Oswald is Brand Experience Manager at Netgen in Zurich and like most of us, he is just another curious human being trying to figure out what's going on with AI.
In a recent member call, Dennis looked at how AI will change the creative process and the broader impact for design leaders.
As expected from a field that’s cooking faster than a microwave dish, we covered quite some ground. As Dennis said, doing the slides for the call was a creative wakeup call, but I think, that the call the same impact on most attendees.
Read moreIt’s quite unusual for a CMS selection process to take 5 years, but as the digital platform keeps growing in importance, year long evaluations are likely to get more common in the future.
In particular for large, complex and international organisations, where the task of migrating thousands of pages and custom-built development is a long, time-consuming and expensive one.
I recently spoke to Johannes Nygaard who is Chief Digital Advisor at the University of Copenhagen and a part of their CMS selection project. This project started back in 2017 and recently led to the selection of open source CMS TYPO3 as their new digital platform.
Let’s take a step-by-step look at what happened and see what you might be able to use in your own selection processes.
Read moreWhile sustainability is not a new topic in our member calls, we've mostly talked about how to create low-carbon websites, how to be smart about cloud computing and somewhat more technical angles.
Recently, Oslo-based digital leader Katrine Sundbye joined one of our local peer group meetings as a guest speaker and took a different angle in her session:
“We need digital to meet the sustainability goals!”
In a recent member call, Katrine shared her thoughts with the community. She introduced us to the green growth model and the ReSOLVE framework by McKinsey. She also shared examples of how data and digital solutions are key enablers for keeping resources in use more and longer.
Read moreReaching all employees and communicating successfully in this hybrid working environment has become a major challenge for companies.
Many have realised that just having an intranet or an employee app doesn’t cover it for internal communication as many employees are left out. To make matters worse, many internal communicators are struggling, understaffed and strained for time.
In a recent member call, we were joined by Kevin Hähnlein, Head of Product Marketing at employee communications and advocacy platform Haiilo. He shared his perspective on the future of internal communications, what a good employee experience strategy looks like and also how artificial intelligence will transform content creation at scale.
Read more“We are just at the beginning of seeing the practical application of AI in digital marketing.”
Andreas Ramos is a true Silicon Valley legend and when I recently spoke to him, he was just wrapping up his slides on what is probably the first university lecture on Using AI for Digital Marketing.
Andreas moved to Silicon Valley in 1992, has worked in engineering at SGI, SUN Microsystems and other companies. He did translations and localisation in six languages before joining as head of a digital agency, where he worked with Global Fortune 200 clients. Later he led global SEO at Cisco, where he worked in 44 languages in 86 countries.
Today, he’s the author of 22+ books (he stopped counting), several of them Amazon #1 Best Sellers, and also an instructor in digital marketing at Omnes Education, one of France's leading schools for management and communications.
Read moreYou know it as a regular part of many frameworks on change management:
Managing the “resistance to change”.
It requires plans to deal with this resistance, it comes in various levels of resistance, and it seems to be taken for granted.
Well, here’s a novel idea: Stop talking about resistance.
Read moreAt its simplest, an exceptional content experience means delivering the right content, to the right people at the right time and in the right format.
But brands across the globe know it’s not as simple as it sounds. And getting it right in times of economic uncertainty is more important than ever.
In a recent member call, Warren Daniels, CMO of Bynder (Digital Asset Management Platform) joined us to tell us about the six pillars of content experience and how digital asset management enables them.
Read moreSurviving the next several years as a school requires investing in digital marketing beyond a basic brochure website and a couple of tweets.
The hard truth is that most schools lack the means, executive understanding, and staff to succeed in digital marketing.
For example, after twenty years of market availability, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial to understanding how prospects engage with your digital ecosystem. Yet, it's rare to find a school outside the top 5% that even uses a MAP for more than an overpriced email platform.
If you're a community college or a smaller school and you own a marketing platform from Hubspot/Adobe/Salesforce, the going salary for a digital marketer who can use those tools to get results is over $100,000. Have you budgeted that much?
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