On May 31, UK agency Browser Media Agency published a report about the top 100 influencers in the world in terms of digital marketing. I would be lying if I didn’t say that I’m quite happy to be part of this. Only four French digital marketing experts made it to the top and I’m number two in the list put forward by account manager Will Greenwood. What I particularly like in this report is the fact that BuzzSumo not only measures the number of followers but also takes into account the actual engagement which is taking place through Social media channels. You can browse the list of top hundred digital marketing influencers according to BuzzSumo from the following URL vismktg.info/top100digitalmarketersinfo.
Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers according to BuzzSumo
Influencer marketing is nothing new, people have always considered the opinions of their peers as a part of their decision making process. However, the constant rise of social media has caused brands to increase their influencer marketing efforts in recent years, with a 1500% increase in the number of Google searches for “influencer marketing” over the last three years.The rise in popularity of all social media platforms has meant finding the right people to work with on social media can be a long and time-consuming task.
Thankfully BuzzSumo’s extremely handy influencer reports make the whole process a lot easier. I’ve previously spoken about BuzzSumo on multiple occasions before and the Browser Media blog is full of love for their various tools.What are BuzzSumo influencer reports?BuzzSumo’s influencer tool allows you to search for topics, domains, or specific users to find the key influencers from within your industry. These individuals, or companies, are then ranked depending upon their ‘influence’ on the specific area you are searching for.You are able to further refine your list by selecting the type of influencers you want to find (e.g. companies, bloggers, journalists etc.), selecting the locations they are from, and to ensure they are active and engage with their audience.
Serious games have been on the agenda for a while. Disruptive learning solutions is a new technology company focussed that wants to take them one step further by creating video games for the business training marketplace. They are working in a number of areas including leadership and teamwork training. They created one of the first mobile games in medicine which is an emergency room interviewed Tony Coop who is the founder of that company to understand better how gaming could be used in education. While we were at it, he explained his strategy and his vision for the future of gaming in training.
From Serious Games to Gaming as a Service for Education
So the idea is that you can teach people serious things through gaming, isn’t it?
That’s perfectly right. We’re beginning to realise that the gaming world is not just a means of entertainment. But what we’re starting to understand as well is that good design in the gaming world involves setting a series of challenges for the participants in such a way that they have to learn.
Cinq – Teamwork video game – is now available for testing at playcinq.com/ (Register for Beta)
And in fact, coming from the bottom of the competitive side of the gaming world to the top requires a feat of training expertise which is the equivalent in the physical sports world.
You’re based in Paris. And your product is called CINQ, which means five
What you’re looking at is five collaborators, five members of the team who have to go and get something from a secret laboratory at the bottom of the building. But to do that they are given a minimum amount of information but enough to plan what they have to do. And they have to work through something like 40 to 50 obstacles that test their ability to collaborate, make rapid decisions, deal with failure and test their teamwork and leadership to solve problems.
So how do you design a game like this? I suppose it’s bespoke for each kind of training that you do?
You have to understand the problem first. The technology is just a tool. We’ve worked on the teamwork for over six years. We worked through trial and error. The first idea we came up with was to imagine somebody who has a view with the maze and that somebody has to guide somebody through the maze. But the other person is blind or has some sort of difficulty in the way that they think and they can’t see the overall picture.
Just take that principle and add five people and a set of predicaments in the game and suddenly you’ve changed the challenge. And the real difference is that you are not just sitting in a classroom where you’re just discussing theoretically how you’re going to lead the team or how are you going to manage how they work.
Here you are, faced with the practical problem of doing it. And the feedback is you fail or you win. But here when we talk about failure the key essence as to what we call forward failure or forward error. That is that by making a mistake it’s a learning point that allows you to come back and adapt what you’re doing and move forward as if you were doing something serious.
The only way that you know when you crash the car when learning how to drive. And you are sanctioned if you do something wrong. If you are in a game there are no sanctions. How do you make it sound serious to the participants?
What we’ve discovered when we were working with the teams is that their sense of presence within the game and the sense of role play is such that they feel like they are in a real situation. In a flight simulator for example when an aircraft crashes they almost feel physically and psychologically the same as if it had happened for real. So what we now know from studies is the emotions that take place.
So for example as in many games, you jump off a cliff and you land at the bottom, you experience the same sensations as if you did that in real life. Now that’s a physical sensation but it is also accompanied by a psychological sensation.
Let’s take healthcare simulations with dummies as an example. These simulations allow you to train in the way that you make decisions. But in terms of the actual impact of the failure, it’s different: the patient doesn’t die. So they’re able to retrain themselves again and again.
What matters most is whether technology solves a problem. Not everyone gets that.
Technologies have become cheaper and much more sophisticated, which allows us to publish much more quickly solutions across mobile across tablet and an across P.C. on even consoles. This means that we changed strategy about 18 months ago. Before, we would tailor make a solution for a client. Now we are about building a series of solutions that clients can rent from us. Now what we’re talking about is Games as a Service just like you have Software as a Service.
Who are the potential clients for this?
The biggest marketplace in the world for PC games is called Steam. Our ambition is to create a series of games for it that provides content that anybody can use. So do you just come in and you rent it and the cost is, for four or five players, for example, 25 euros per month.
Instead of fifty thousand dollars to solve one problem in one company anybody could come and use this product and they could use it on the server inside ou outside of their business.
Similarly, for the mobile game, we will have it distributed through standard stores for this kind of products.
Who is your primary customer?
One thing we have discovered, without being negative, is that HR have a real difficulty in working with innovative products because of their internal processes and the due diligence that finance imposes on them.
Our approach is horizontal rather than vertical. We are getting people interested in learning new skills and we’re coming horizontally at the business. So it’s very easy to distribute a link that allows people to download the game and play. That actually is a big change in the model of learning management systems.
Do you think that this kind of tools can be used in the hiring process as well?
Absolutely. One of the greatest difficulties in the recruitment industry is when people walk in with their CV and say “I’m an expert in soft skills leadership etc.”
Your only way of testing that is by a reference or by them talking to you or doing a powerpoint presentation. It’s not really a test. And whoever has been in the industry for a while knows that what’s on the CV and what you get in the interview is not necessarily what comes out the other end.
Using a vehicle like this means that you can pre-test the person and you can have them down to the last three showing their capabilities you can even shoot a video to show a real representation of this person leading.
What is your vision of potential future innovations in that space?
LMS systems are now commoditised. No matter how hard they try to say we are the Netflix of learning, they fail to understand what learners need. There’s a bigger growth in the self-learning marketplace than there is in the corporate marketplace because the corporate marketplace doesn’t actually provide products that employees are asking.
Google, Apple and other companies are now suggesting that you do not need a degree to be hired. If you have some form of qualification that certifies that you’ve done coding or you’ve got practical hands-on experience, you can get the job.
Similarly, in our type of video games, we are looking at the level of expertise that you have to show to be able to solve the problems as a team and be given awards and recognition for that. This is where we come into this idea of teamwork and leadership as an E sport for business, so that there is a ranking of your ability to solve these problems and work as a team.
What is the status of Social media listening? What standard business practices do we witness in the field? Has Social media listening evolved over the years? I wanted to understand how Social media listening was developing and I interviewed Digimind‘s Aurelien Blaha. Aurelien covered the different periods of Social media listening. A particularly broad overview since the Grenoble-based company – now present throughout the World – commemorated its 20th-anniversary last year. To sum everything up in a few words: Social media listening is good, but brands must better listen to their customers. Here is a summary of my interview with Aurelien.
First era: before Social media listening: 1998*-2008
At the time, we were not talking about the social Web; it was the early era of the Web. Shortly after its creation by Tim Berners Lee. The challenge of this period, for businesses, was to find relevant information in a data desert, a world of silence, in fact, and this lasted about a decade.
To take full advantage of Social media listening, you must learn to remain open to your customers’ requests and opinions. A more challenging exercise than it seems for many businesses
* date of creation of Digimind in Grenoble
The second era (2008 2018): find the diamond in the virgin forest
On the contrary, the second era of social media listening is known for its surfeit of information. In the middle of the first decade, a whole bunch of companies were founded: Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2006, and so on. The 2008-2018 period, therefore, spurred a plethora of information. However, the previous day’s mission remained the same, namely, to find relevant information.
I came across a brand new study by Forrester, which I analyzed in detail on behalf of my client iRevolution on its digital transformation horror museum blog. This study sheds new light on the role of CMOs within the digital transformation endeavours of their organisations. Or lack thereof. As a matter of fact, Forrester has highlighted the lack of involvement of marketers in such projects. This an issue in the United States, and the rest of the World. As I wanted to know more, I have interviewed Thomas Husson on our premises, earlier this month.
Too few CMOs are involved in digital transformation efforts
An interview with Thomas Husson, senior analyst at Forrester
Well, maybe. At the end of the day, it really depends on the CMOs’ remit and what their role and responsibility are within an organisation and obviously, it varies quite dramatically from business to business.
Who are these CMOs you have interviewed?
We surveyed 1,700 marketers globally — mostly senior, 40 percent of which are CMOs — and we asked them about their challenges and priorities. We interviewed a mix of CMOs from large and small organizations, across the globe B2B and B2C, and there are differences obviously, different industries and companies of different sizes. We interviewed CMOs dedicated to customer experience, others own sales, some are members of the executive committee, some have fewer responsibilities…
“CMOs need to become conductors of customer experience. This is all about orchestration, creating meaning and purpose” – Thomas Husson – Forrester
At the end of the day what we found out is that too few CMOs are really involved in digital transformation. This is a real challenge for them and it’s time that they redefine their role to be more proactive in the digital transformation of their organisations.
Christian Clot is an extraordinary character. Both a researcher and an explorer, he spent 4 times 30 days in the most extreme places on the planet. I saw his videos and testimonies and was much impressed. How you could get out of this time spent in the hottest Iranian desert in the world where the slightest drop of perspiration evaporates instantly! I interviewed Christian as part of the upcoming AI Paris 2019 exhibition, which will be held on June 11 and 12, of which Visionary Marketing is a media partner. As a researcher, Christian reflects on how humans may adapt to the most profound changes that await us in the coming decades. Artificial intelligence is not the least of these challenges.
You have experienced the most extreme places on the planet, for what purpose?
I have been conducting studies for about ten years now on the human capacity to adapt to new and changing conditions.
I did this because I have been an explorer for quite some time now and I have observed in the field the changes experienced by people who live in these tough climates: cognitive changes, personality changes and changes in the way they function very profoundly.
To prevent AI from disrupting society, Christian Clot crossed an Iranian desert during his “Adaptation” project This allows him to launch research on the adaptation of human brains to intense changes[Christian Clot image via VSD]So I decided to use extreme environments to see how the human brain reacts when it is confronted with significant changes.Continue reading “How to face the human challenges brought by AI? – Christian Clot”→
