future trends | Kieran O' Callaghan

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Generating business interest with Craig Rispin 101

One of the many events i have gone along to was a mentoring event hosted by Craig Rispin, a futurologist i have been following for quite some time.

Why have i been interested in Craig Rispin you might ask? Well some time back, one of his comments was

‘In the future, everyone will be freelancing, you have to start thinking this way’

And the truth is, i have started thinking like a freelancer and all the right things are happening for me work wise especially, all i had to do was start on the IT freelancer path vision and start doing the right things for what i wanted to happen, to happen.

What are you waiting for?

Sounds simple enough? Let me explain

It is not good enough to be a plumber, carpenter or dog groomer in Sydney, Melbourne or Tokyo anymore, you need to be the best and if your not the best, appear to be the best and how do you do this?

One of the avenues you can use is social media for example Linked-in, Facebook ect, there will be other mediums in the future, maybe a few crystal balls too?

Medium of the future?

When someone searches for a service online, and you provide that service, it is good for your business if you are the top of that search list, its called Search engine optimization, sounds simple enough?

As Craig sai…

‘You don’t need a PHD when you have 4000 people following you on Linked-in’

Which is food for thought.

It has long been known that we pretty much make up our minds about someone within seconds, its a gut instinct, we might not be aware of this, but this is what social science indicates.

I have noticed, that rather than reading someone’s CV, you can tell all you need to know by viewing their website, people following them for example, if they publish content, you might see that ‘Barrack Obama’ is a fan and some people think he’s a smart guy?

Do you have any fans?

People judge you by your friends, not that they might be aware of it, but we get impressions and hints in slight ways
Some of the little hints i received were:
To get a first appointment, give people something for free that has nothing to do with what you are selling, it could be an invitation to an event, report, video ect.
When people you don’t know request to add you in Linked-in, request to have coffee first to see how you can both might benefit each other

Feture + Benefit

When stating a feature, have a bridge to the benifit of that feature

Feature (export your contacts from Linked-in to Mail chimp)
Bridge (Which is super for you or, Which is great for you)
Benefit (You can target people with specific promotion material with is specific to thieir industry and relevant to their life)

Always have something to invite people to, but only invite quality people to
Wednesday is the number 1 day people check their emails, so Wednesday is a good day to do your email targeting
Monday is the day people most follow the stock markets and business news
The marketing world is moving to permission based marketing system

Do you need a marketing campaign?

With freelancing and promoting your business, you could create a campaign for free like this

Campaign example:

Create an Event on Eventbrite for a promotion
You can export your Linked in contacts and import them to a site called ‘Mail chimp‘
You can target people directly VIA email with mail chimp/Eventbrite feature
You can target Linked-in interest groups
You can target customers with Linked-in ‘Status updates’

Craig said, the pro bono work he has done for charity’s has given him exposure to organizations and people ordinarily he would not have had the opportunity to meet and he has received a substantial growth in business, all from volunteering, there’s no excuse not to volunteer.

One of the words i learnt that morning was ‘Bespoke’, which of course means

Derived from the verb to bespeak, to “speak for something”, in the specialised meaning “to give order for it to be made”

Tags: Bespoke, campaign, Craig Rispn, future trends, Linked in, Trends

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Augmented reality, the 8th mass medium, connect the dots…

17 Dec

I’ve been doing a bit of research recently, i have been looking at what the futurists are saying, part of the reason i’m doing this is to try to figure out what i should be doing, thinking to align myself for the future.

A futurist might think of trends and possible scenario’s for future events, I’ve been looking at mass media and the trends they have followed through history

Toni Ahonen:

According to Tomi Ahonen, they are :

1st mass media, Print  from the late 15th century

2nd mass media, Recordings  from the late 19th century

3rd mass media, Cinema from about 1900

4th mass media, Radio,  from about 1910

5th mass media, TV, from the 1950’s. When i was in Lima i heard when TV was introduced in Peru, the young people in the country could see the great lifestyle that the city had to offer and voted with their feet, and ended up forming the shanty housing to be seen around Lima

6th mass media, Internet, from the 1990’s

7th mass media, Mobile

and now, the 8th mass media will be

8th mass media, Augmented reality

The funny thing with the list of mediums is when the medium was invented it took people a long time to figure out the business application, for example

The 4th Mass medium radio,people thought the radio would be good for broadcasting church services, nothing more, but when people fully understood the business applications of what the medium could do, until…

Wireless signals proved effective in communication for rescue work when a sea disaster occurred. A number of ocean liners installed wireless equipment. In 1899 the United States Army established wireless communications with a lightship off Fire Island, New York.

Two years later the Navy adopted a wireless system. Up to then, the Navy had been using visual signaling and homing pigeons for communication.

Source

The 1st mass medium

Books used to be so precious, in Christchurch cathedral they were locked in cages and bolted to the wall, now you can download rare and precious books waiting of a bus and read them while sitting in the park

Railroads were the internet of their time, and to be honest i’m surprised it’s not on this list of mass mediums, railroads allowed for:

Musicians, Education, News traveled at incredible speeds to travel
Mobilisation of troops for war, the civil war in America being a good example
Sporting teams could travel
Manufacturing industries and the Industrial revolution

Railroads altered time: (Source)

Before railroads, each town determined its own time based on calculations about the sun’s position. This system was called “solar time.” Solar time caused problems for people who traveled hundreds of miles in a few hours on a railroad. Before railroads, this could never be done, so there wasn’t any problem with solar time.

However, after railroads spanned the country travelers could pass through several time zones in a day. The railroads operated on a complex time schedule and if each town had a slightly different solar time, things could go wrong. To solve the problem,railroad companies set up standard time. It was a system that divided the United States into four-time zones. Within a time zone, every town had the exact same time.

The standard time system went into affect November 18, 1883. However,Congress did not adopt standard time until 1918. By then, most Americans followed standard time and understood its benefits because following schedules had become part of daily life

Up until the early railroad, people never traveled further that 20 km from where they were born

Can you see a trend here?

With the 7th mass media, Mobile, one of the reasons that SMS became so appealing is when businesses sent their customers a text, that counted as a legal notification, before that sending out letters was an expensive, time-consuming business and you could be sure if the customer received the message, it’s funny the inventor of SMS Matti Makkonen, received $300 for his invention, Dan Bricklin that invented Excel spreadsheets got nothing

When i was in Scandinavia, i remember hearing how shy teenagers used in the early years of SMS to ask girls out on dates, Nokia used kids for their product development, as they don’t have any pre conceived ideas of how things are supposed to work, that tends to happen a bit later on.

When the first mobile phones were introduced, at the release of mobiles Stockholm had more users than all of London, why? Ericsson which became Sony/Ericsson are based there, so they encouraged the locals to use their phones, so Ericsson could test them

I remember hearing, 10 years ago, pre-smart phone technology of how, when questioned:

Q, Whats the worst thing that could happen to you

A, Losing my mobile phone

I read recently how the employees of a well know company would sneak away from their partner to send messages on their smart phones, and that IT company advised their employees to leave the phone at home and go for a walk on a nature trail.

Steve Jobs said,

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

The thing that interests me most is the ideas, sometimes the technology is ahead of the ideas, when you have the idea, you can do just about anything, but it all comes back to an idea and you need to believe in the idea, find the business application, with new technology comes new methodology, after all it’s cost effective to be efficient.

With the 6th mass medium, the technology was ahead of the business ideas