Entries by Ross Dawson

The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services – #1 Client Sophistication

Download the complete White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services Continued from Introduction. Full table of contents below. MegaTrend One: Client Sophistication What do you prefer? A sophisticated client, or an unsophisticated one? It’s an interesting issue to debate with professionals. Some say they like unsophisticated clients, because, as they usually express a little […]

The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services – Introduction

Around six months ago, I wrote a White Paper for the enterprise software company Epicor titled “The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services: The Forces That Are Transforming Professional Services Industries and How To Respond”. The paper has attracted a huge amount of interest, however up until now, it has only been available on sites requiring […]

Peer-to-peer banking

A new peer-to-peer bank, Prosper.com, is launching in the US, attracting articles in both the New York Times and BusinessWeek, with the latter titling the story “The eBay of Loans”. The principle is simple – you lend to individuals at interest rates based on their credit rating, and since you’re cutting out the bank as […]

Positive word of mouth

Lexus has given iPod Nanos to some customers who had delayed delivery of their cars, and has got big coverage not just in the Club Lexus Forums, but also in blogs and even on Digg. These days, companies can get massive benefit, as well as problems, from how customers spread how they feel by word […]

Linking the conversational threads

What many people don’t appreciate about blogging is that its power comes from how blogs are interlinked, not the blogs on their won. Individual blogs can be interesting. However it is the linking and commenting on other bloggers’ posts and thoughts that creates a single “blogosphere”. This unitary space of all blogs has powerful emergent […]

Collaborative filtering supports meritocratic Internet TV

Following on from my recent story on collaborative filtering for music, it’s worth taking a look at Videobomb (Thanks for the link Steve Rubel!). This enables people to post links to online videos. If enough people vote for the video, it appears on the site’s front page, so users can immediately find the most popular […]

Mass media is “nearly obsolete” for some buyers

Market research company Polk has found that first-time car buyers barely use traditional media in assessing potential options, leading to a description of traditional media as “nearly obsolete” for this sector. Internet is the primary information source for 35% of these buyers, four times that for television, and eight times that for magazines. Sixty-five percent […]

Moving beyond zero-sum thinking

John Hagel has a very interesting piece on zero-sum thinking – the idea that there if one person wins, another must lose. He draws out how this is epidemic in the business world. A great example is how companies treat their suppliers. In what way do companies do better if their suppliers suffer? Yet that […]

David Maister and marketing as a conversation

David Maister, the über-guru of professional services, has embraced blogging and podcasting. In a revamp last week of his website, which has always provided extensive resources, he has launched a blog titled Passion, People and Principles. It is highly interactive, responding in depth to questions and conversations raised by clients and the professional services community. […]

P2P and human evolution

In a great example of how digital connection brings people together in face-to-face meetings, Michel Bauwens saw my blog post saying that on my vacation I was going to pass through Chiang Mai in Thailand, where he lives. He sent me an email to suggest we get together, and we had lunch in a picturesque […]