Remember books? Yeah, those things that are like really long blogs, made up of a massive string of tweets, which we used to call ‘sentences’. You can download them onto an ereader or, if you’re really old-school, buy them all wrapped up in paper like a sweet-smelling present from the past.
Most of us are now doing the former; last year, Amazon’s sales of ebooks outstripped those of print books for the first time. But the problem with ebooks is they’re difficult to share, and sharing is surely the moral imperative of our time. What’s more, I am a massive personal advocate of the print book as the ultimate in innovative technology (I’ll be talking more about that at an upcoming event on ‘Writing The Future’ with The Royal Society and the Arthur C Clarke Award – stay tuned).
So here at 1000heads London HQ I oversee a modest library from which any ‘Head (or trustworthy friend) can borrow. Our selections are crowdsourced internally, with an ongoing budget for purchasing any decent suggestion.
That depends on what you mean by “work” and by “free.”
Here’s my prediction: Social will get the ‘third degree’ in 2013. I’m starting to see some backlash in the press about social media marketing. The avalanche of startups in the social space over the last couple years are causing VCs to hold their wallets. And Facebook’s stock recovery isn’t happening fast enough.
For years I’ve written about how the 4 Ps of Marketing, Product, Place, Pricing, and Promotion represented a dated perspective of customers and markets. In an era of connected consumerism, one could argue the merits of any of “Ps” and whether or not they’re still relevant. I suppose that’s a debate for another time. Instead, I’d like to introduce of two additional Ps that will propel a decades old concept and modernize it for a social economy.