Yesterday at the Brite conference, one of the breakout sessions explored how we can navigate a world where everyone is a media company.
Matthew Quint, Associate Director of Columbia Business School, brought together four very different speakers to discuss the opportunities and fears of this future of content and curation.
Bob Garfield, editor of Ad Age and host of NPR’s “On the Media,” took to the stage at the Brite Conference at the Columbia Business School to speak about the human element that is needed in digital marketing today.
For more than 300 years, we were in the product era and from 1965 to now, it is the era of the consumer. But how is social media changing the standard of what was the standard of trust?
Chatroulette might not be for everyone, but the randomly generated video chat site’s runaway success is a developer’s dream. Created by a 17-year old in three days, the site’s user base has doubled every day since its inception.
The concept of getting users to grow a business was a popular topic at the BRITE conference on Wednesday. As Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems once put it:
“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”
At Columbia University, many speakers agreed — the role of the consumer has changed. And increasingly, businesses that succeed today rely on their users to create and improve products. But most businesses would kill to be in the position of Chatroulette’s founder Andrey Ternovskiy, who told The New York Times recently:
“It continues to multiply and I just couldn’t stop it from growing.”
For the last 10 years, David Rogers has been the executive director
of Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand
Leadership, focusing on branding
issues for researchers and executives. Three years ago, the Center began the BRITE conference, an event focusing on how technology is
transforming brand building. His latest book, “The Network is Your Customer: 5 Strategies
to Thrive in a Digital Age,” will be out this fall.
This year’s BRITE conference begins Wednesday. I caught up with David to discuss what he’s got on deck at Columbia this week, and how brands should work with technology today.