I’ve been working in the telecom sector ever since I managed the global launch of IBM’s Telecom Business Unit over fifteen years ago.
This experience was followed by two years of leading HP’s telecom positioning in the U.S. market, and then by three years of supporting the positioning of various Alcatel business units in U.S. and global markets.
I’ve continued to support telecom and service provider positioning across vertical market segments through my work with leading IT consortia and standards bodies in the digital identity and security, mobile application quality, sustainable ICT, and cloud, big data and data center industries.
So it’s not surprising that I am keeping a close eye on the potential Nokia and Alcatel merger, and on Nokia’s recent news about the possibility of selling its Here Map division.
News stories from around the world are showing there is significant interest in obtaining Nokia’s mapping and location-based services technologies, with Apple, Audi, BMW, Uber and Mercedes Benz reportedly among the potential suitors.
These industry moves will continue to drive media coverage as speculation surrounding the sale of Here continues and when details related to the Nokia and Alcatel merger become finalized.
Once deals are in place, communications teams from the organizations involved will likely have a variety of new options for proactively telling leadership stories and a wide range of opportunities for showcasing the spokespersons who will help tell those stories.
I learned a long time ago that a great spokesperson is key to telling a great story. And because I’ve worked with many spokespersons from Nokia and Alcatel, as well as with spokespersons from organizations rumored to be interested in Here, I also know these companies have an incredible pool of spokesperson talent.
Two of the top-ten best spokespersons I’ve ever worked with come from BMW and Nokia. I’ve worked with senior BMW executives to tell BMW’s leading data center, enterprise cloud and connected car stories and with senior Nokia executives to tell far-reaching digital identity management, security and privacy stories.
While it’s too early to know how the Nokia and Alcatel merger and potential sale of Here will play out, I’m betting these industry moves will help to further drive some of the next round of trend and hot topic stories we’ll see in the networking and technology sectors.
If proactive storytelling is part of your marketing and content strategy, it may be a good time to look at options for developing stories where spokespersons can speak to issues and unique differentiators in order to capitalize on these trends.
The connected car and location based services stories will likely remain hot topics for quite some time.
But I’m also seeing huge opportunities for proactive storytelling in areas that include the potential for more telecom industry consolidation, software defined networking (SDN), virtual mapping and reality, the Internet of Things, wearables, robotics, and of course, just about everything mobile. – Russ DeVeau