Twisting the news – 35th edition

Automation again. Because automation no longer means only machinery replacing hard, physical work,  the white collars will also be affected, but it’s artificial intelligence that will affect their jobs.  Yes, as discussed yesterday, the first affected will be the blue collars, but the next ones will be even white collars. Obviously, the demand for jobs will increase while for others will decrease, as it has in the past.

Not only there is a market for self driving cars, but also a plan, as the US Department of Transportation has a $4 billion plan to reduce the number of cars accidents on American roads by increasing the number of self driving cars. The same article says Elon Musk recently stated that driving is too dangerous for humans and it will outlawed soon. With all due respect, dear Elon, meet the most loved in the world in 2015: BMW. Their slogan? The ultimate driving machine, recently changed from Sheer Driving Pleasure. It is only recently that humans have lost the pleasure in driving, but for some time it has been about pleasure and 90% of the branding in the auto industry is about escapism, pleasure, speed, adrenaline rush. I honestly hope you are wrong Elon Musk, although, rationally speaking, driving will become luxury, as the insurances for cars with human drivers will also become more expensive.

Twisting the news – 33rd edition

Robots, automation, artificial intelligence, are you afraid for your job? We’ve been concerned for some time now that a robot might steal our job, but not every job is endangered, Industry Week claims. However, it would seem that most threatened are the usually vulnerable ones, but not in the next 5 years.

Walmart has been declining for some years now. What happened to America’s biggest retailer? Not so long ago Walmart was the biggest employer in the US, but then, something happened and Walmart started declining and never managed to get back on track. Here’s an analysis of the reasons that led to Walmart’s decline. A summary: the world as we know it is changing, the American suburbia is dying, despite high rates of unemployment, cheap workforce is hard to find and not lastly, the Walmart’s business model with absurdly high pressure on providers is coming to an end.

Twisting the news – 26th edition

In the early days of my childhood we used to play a game called ducks and hunters, will kids in 5 years time play humans and robots? Not necessarily, we could make friends with robots, we already do, AI keeps us company in our smartphones. A percentage of our work is already automated, we use algorithms, we use some of the big data, but there’s more:

source: hbr.org

Look what’s happening in the banking sector: Banks are starting to look at Marijuana.  How come?

Social media: use it wisely!

Social media. Content. Targeted Content.

Twitter. 140 characters long microblog, social networking service, social media, new media. Ca veut dire that Twitter is part of the social marketing, which turned marketing from one to many from one to one. You know it and everybody’s talking about it. Yet nobody seems to be very aware of it.

Yesterday I hit the “follow’ button on Twitter for a marketing and sales specialist.  Later on I get a direct message: “Hey thanks for following. New to Social Media? You may find this page of tools useful, we certainly did. (…)”. What’s wrong with this message? “Hey, thanks for following” – it absolutely ok to welcome your followers. Next: “New to social media?” Oops. Nope, not new. My Twitter account is 5 years old. This is where traditional marketing fails in social media. From this moment on you lost me. Was I to be a lead, chances are you lost you lost your potential conversion.