Somexcloud and Digicomp together focus on continuing education

Peter Kupper, owner of Digicomp, David Schäfer, former Managing Director of Somexcloud and new boss, Oliver Müller.CELIA It has been an eventful year for Digicomp and Somexcloud. What is the background behind the merger of Digicomp and Somexcloud and where do you currently stand?MÜLLER Peter Kupper, the owner of Digicomp, Andreas Gedenk and David Schäfer, the managing directors of Somexcloud, and I, as Digicomp's business developer, had been talking for some time about opportunities for cooperation. It had long been clear to all of us that a merger would make sense. We were and are similarly positioned, have a very similar business model, but serve different target groups: Somexcloud is strong in the communications and marketing environment, Digicomp works in the field of corporate training for quick practical knowledge on the job, often in the area of IT and applications, but has also been running its own management seminars for ten years.CELIA What does the new structure look like?MÜLLER Somexcloud will now focus more and more on immediately actionable knowledge for digital professionals and training for the efficient and effective use of digital marketing for companies - something Digicomp has been offering for almost 40 years to increase overall employee productivity. In addition, digital marketing is technology-driven and requires more and more IT know-how in addition to knowledge of marketing and communication. For example, as soon as you want to embed a slideshare on your own blog, you need to embed HTML code. JavaScript and CSS play a key role in determining how our websites look and therefore how we communicate with our customers. After the merger, Somexcloud will be able to offer its marketing professionals over 100 courses - from web development and apps to digital publishing, user experience and digital collaboration with Office 365 or G Suite.CELIA What does Somexcloud stand for and does Somexcloud want to position itself in the training market?MÜLLER Somexcloud stands for practical courses and training programs from experts for digital professionals. Strictly speaking, Somexcloud is positioned in the field of further education, from training to Bachelor's and Master's degrees.CELIA What are the goals of Somexcloud?MÜLLER We want to become a center where the digital marketing community can exchange ideas, learn from each other and thus help to master the countless innovations that are taking place every day. Everyone who attends a Somexcloud course or training program can apply their knowledge the next day at their workplace. In our Google Advertising Manager course, for example, participants open or optimize the Adwords account for their company, set up a credit card and take every adjustment back to the company.CELIA Which Swiss regions should be covered?MÜLLER We will be active throughout Switzerland, where we will benefit enormously from the merger with Digicomp. The Digicomp premises are available to us in Zurich, Berne, Basel, Lucerne, St. Gallen, Lausanne and Geneva. In German-speaking Switzerland, the entire offering has already been put out to tender; for French-speaking Switzerland, we first need to integrate local requirements and recruit local lecturers.CELIA What else will change at Somexcloud?MÜLLER  Somexcloud will broaden its focus - in addition to social media, digital advertising, e-commerce and mobile are already important pillars of the offering. Inbound marketing seminars with Ivano Celia from MediaBros, content marketing and digital marketing strategy courses are being planned. In addition to the evening courses, we will be offering daytime formats and shorter seminars - some of the same content as in the courses, but modular and individually bookable - and we are also making full use of Digicomp's systems, which are perfectly adapted to training, for organization and administration. This helps us to grow easily without compromising on the quality and stability of our processes.CELIA Looking back, what were the most important online trends this year and what do you think the outlook is for 2017?MÜLLER There were two trends for me in 2016: mobile and augmented reality. Since Google focused on mobile websites in 2015, the general awareness of mobile has now also reached e-commerce in 2016. Alibaba has just turned over 17 billion dollars in one day on Single's Day - 80% of which came from mobile devices. China is way ahead of us in mobile commerce. For augmented reality, it was the enormous success of PokemonGo that showed us the marketing potential of this technology. Today's children are already growing up with a different idea of reality than the one we perceive, and in the area of advertising, we will have a lot to do in 2017 with programmatic and many AdWords innovations. Bots and marketing automation technology will be with us in 2017, but I'm not sure whether there will be a big wave of implementation next year. Our search behavior will change fundamentally with voice search. Not a trend, but a certainty: the speed of innovation will continue to increase exponentially. The question for me is rather whether there is a human limit somewhere where technology is no longer tolerable. The technology itself is becoming more and more independent.CELIA How do Somexcloud and Digicomp take such trends into account?MÜLLER The really fast trends and hypes take place on our blog and at events. On our website, you will find a series of events for January and February that deal with the trends of 2017. As soon as it becomes clear that a trend is here to stay, we produce training courses. Together with Digicomp, we have launched the first Internet of Things courses and are weaving new platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat into existing formats. Learnings such as e-commerce in China have an immediate impact on the e-commerce business manager course, for example. We have just added a new module to the Mobile Marketing Manager course.CELIA What innovations havelt Somexcloud for 2017 in the Köcher?MÜLLER Digicomp provides us with a comprehensive learning management system that allows us to roll out our courses and seminars online, virtually or physically as required. The system is geared towards the needs of companies, with employees being able to pick out individual video learning nuggets at their workplace and, if they are more interested, opt for an online or face-to-face course. We will be able to bring the training directly to the employees in the companies at the time desired by the knowledge seeker, and in terms of content, we will close the gaps in the disciplines and challenges of digital marketing in our portfolio. I am thinking here of the areas of programmatic and inbound marketing automation that I have already mentioned. We are focusing on phases in the marketing funnel: Generating traffic, converting web visitors and closing deals. A course on CRM and social selling is also being considered in the initial stages in order to better master the final phase of digital marketing at the interface with B2B sales departments. It is precisely at this interface between digital marketing and sales that many outstanding campaigns fail. in addition to these in-depth courses that help to master a specific phase, we will also train methods and approaches that integrate the entire process from a specific mindset: Campaigning, Growth Hacking or Data Analysis. So we will be building a horizontal and vertical portfolio in 2017 - a lot of work, I am very excited.