Around the Office is a weekly group blog of what the Kobayashi Online team has found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Curation Creates Scarcity from a Deluge of Online Content
As a prolific creator of content, David was interested in the idea of social curation as reshaping the digital landscape (and even being called the Internet’s “4th wave”) by selecting what’s most useful, relevant and interesting. Obviously, curation certainly isn’t new. For instance, religious communities would create a biblical canon of books considered to be authoritative scripture, just as news editors choose what stories to cover based on their newsworthiness. But the idea of transferring this power to non-professionals in the social sphere is transforming how we discover and react to content. In a world of nearly limitless content, curation creates scarcity from abundance, and, like any other commodity, scarcity means greater value.
Get Ready for Agile Marketing
The idea of “agile” management is all the rage in business circles, where managers forgo a fixed idea of how a project will unfold (or, in some cases, turn out), but rather a process that’s iterative and adaptive. It involves people working in small teams or “scrums” who work in short cycles or “sprints” towards meeting market needs, and acting on new opportunities. And while the term “agile” has been applied to anything from web development to farming, Andy thinks agile marketing is something to pay attention to. Instead of making a marketing plan, agile marketing takes into account the complexities of a marketing environment, and it’s a matter of experimentation to find out what works and what doesn’t. Time to limber up!
No Monday Spoilers
Last Sunday, the Game of Thrones season premiere and the season finale of The Walking Dead aired at the same time, causing a dilemma for the geeky staff at Kobayashi Online. Sharlene thinks this could be some sort of ratings grab where people will watch their favorite series, or else have the latest developments spoiled the next day at work. And with other favs including Once Upon a Time, Mad Men and The Good Wife, Sunday is becoming a battleground. Just don’t give away the plots on Monday morning, please!
What Came Before…
This week, Caroline saw how every content-curationsocial network has its predecessor. LinkedIn has the Rolodex, Skype has the phone, and Tumblr has scissors and tape. It’s good news for our friends at Whiteboard Consulting that there’s no social network equivalent of the whiteboard, nor can we foresee one. Consider your dry-erase markers safe.