“Changing the Corporate mindset & strategy to work with New Media” was a session facilitated by Ahmed Salim and Manoj Changarampatt at the Digital Camp held in Naivasha in early November.
Ahmed
Ahmed delved right into it by calling us out on our obsession with blog stats. We are all guilty of that, aren’t we? Stop this obsession! Ahmed said. Concentrate instead on creating good content. Content is, after all, King. He did not mince his words and went ahead to say that what is important for a client is not the likes, shares and comments on your blog, but the results a client will get by aligning with your brand. What all of us should therefore worry about is how to grow our brand.
Confessing that no one can claim to fully understand the digital space because of its tendency to keep evolving each day, he advised us to stay smart by always changing with the times.
As much as he acknowledged that content is king, he also stressed the importance, the power and might, of the Idea. Ahmed cautioned participants from focusing on making money if their idea has not been fully implemented, insisting that for one to be able to succeed, they need to invest in growing their idea first, then money will follow later – sometimes much, much later. The formula he gave involves the powerful combination of persistence, creativity, and the fully-fledged idea.
Content creators need to provide value for their consumers – that was a point that was reiterated over and over during the Digital Camp. Ahmed believes that one can be a blogger even if they are not a brilliant writer, saying that there are various creative ways of putting a message across.
Strategic thinking, is however a preserve of a few and not everyone can do it well. Ahmed cautioned against sharing your strategy wholly with a potential client saying that one should share just enough information to make the client want to work with you, and not too much as to give it away. Non-Disclosure Agreement, he cautioned, are pieces of paper that can sometimes be ignored by unscrupulous clients.
Manoj
Picking up from where Ahmed left, and as if to stress his point on the evolving digital space even further, Manoj started by reminding us that there will always be a death of machines every decade or so. This is something that has been happening since the stone ages and will keep happening even into the future.
Manoj drew our attention to Healthcare, which is currently a multi-billion dollar industry. Healthcare is now leaning heavily towards self-care courtesy of the e-patient. The e-patient being that patient who visits the doctor’s consultation room having googled their symptoms and therefore fully aware of what ails him.
In a session that had us reeling in laughter due to his funny quips, Manoj explained the ever-changing consumer trends and stressed that we all need to keep up with these changes.
These changes, with advancements in modern technology going hand in hand with modern healthcare, means that we should not be battling basic preventable diseases in this day and age, he said.
The valuable message passed by Manoj was for the digital community to always watch the trends and create a strategy around those trends. He mentioned that self-care is a very lucrative trend in every industry. “Delve into the mega-trends and take advantage of the opportunities that come with them” he advised.
Ahmed Salim is founder of Qube.co.ke whereas Manoj is a business visionary and an independent consultant. Connect with them on twitter @AhmedSalims & @Changarampatt respectively.