Blockchain, brick and mortar, Deloitte Digital: 5 Memeburn articles you loved this week

I am breathing in. I am breathing out. Sometimes you just need to forget everything else and concentrate on those two things. That doesn’t really have anything to do with the most popular articles on Memeburn this week, but it’s something useful to hold onto as you go into the weekend.

Anyway, a variety of stories piqued your interest this week, including a Bitcoin and blockchain conference, setting realistic social media goals, and Deloitte Digital’s acquisition of fintech agency Jinja Interactive.

5. Blockchain and Bitcoin Africa Conference 2016 reveals speaker list

The 12 official speakers for Blockchain and Bitcoin Africa Conference 2016 have been announced. The conference will take place on 3-4 March in Sandton, Johannesburg.

Amongst the speakers are technology entrepreneur, VC, and Dragons’ Den investor Vinny Lingham; Federal Prosecutor at the United State’s Attorney’s Office, William Frentzen; co-founder and CEO of BitX, Marcus Swanepoel; and Verengai Mabika who is the lead business developer at BitFinance.

4. A digital customer experience revolution could save the brick and mortar store

The retail model of the future will be a radically different experience from today, largely driven by the changing shopping demands of the younger hyper-connected consumer. Bricks-and-mortar retailing will remain to be a very significant part in retail, however the lines between channels will erode at the benefit of both the customer and the business. Advances in technology will significantly improve the relationships between retailers and customers, much the way analytics is already doing to online shopping.

3. How to set realistic goals with your social media strategy

Do you really understand and know what you want to achieve with your social media marketing campaign? Do you know what social media can do your business? Have you included your social media strategy into your overall marketing mix?

With any digital marketing campaign, you need to be certain of your goals and objectives before you start, otherwise you can waste a lot of effort and time on something that is not producing targeted results.

2. 5 trends to set to revolutionise the customer experience in 2016

A massive 89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016, which is a dramatic increase since 2014 (36%) and 2015 (58%).

It’s clear that companies are making customer interaction experiences a priority, and the trends we’ve identified will be critical if businesses want to stay competitive. Of note is that all these trends rely heavily on the cloud, analytics and big data. These now form the underpinnings of nearly all things customer experience-related and will continue to be key components of any successful customer engagement strategy.

1. Deloitte Digital gobbles up Fintech agency Jinja Interactive

Deloitte Digital has made another raid into the specialist agency space. On Monday, the full services consultancy announced its acquisition of Jinja Interactive — a Cape Town-based strategy, design and app development agency.

In a press release sent to Memeburn, Deloitte Digital said it sees the acquisition as part of its strategy to build a fully-integrated digital transformation business, providing digital innovation and customer-centric engagement solutions to its rapidly growing list of clients across Africa.