Entries by Ross Dawson

BRW on blogging power

Today’s issue of BRW, Australia’s major weekly business magazine, has an article on “Blogging Power”, which hopefully will contribute to putting blogging and social software on the corporate agenda in the country. After opening with the salutary lesson on how what started with a single blog post brought Sony low, the article quotes me on […]

Innocentive and open innovation

I originally wrote about the open innovation model of Innocentive several years ago in Living Networks (see page 12 from selected excerpts from Living Networks). Last week The Economist named Innocentive’s chairman Alpheus Bingham winner of its business process innovation prize for developing the company. Innocentive was originally founded by Eli Lilly, which recognized that […]

The sorry state of Australian corporate blogging

I am based primarily in Sydney (though I also have US residency and a secondary base in San Francisco to run the US operations of Advanced Human Technologies and for my speaking and consulting work there). As such, I find it extremely frustrating when I find that Australia is significantly behind in the adoption of […]

The debate on monetizing eyeballs

At the end of September I wrote a blog post titled Back to Monetizing Eyeballs, suggesting that business models were returning to the good ol’ “monetizing eyeballs” model, driven by online advertising dollars finally reaching critical mass. At the end of November Om Malik, senior writer for Business 2.0 and also author of the excellent […]

The MySpace Generation

BusinessWeek continues its attention to the unfolding online world with a cover story titled The MySpace Generation. MySpace is the most successful social networking site, boasting 40 million members, and serving an extraordinary 10% of all online ads viewed in October, according to BusinessWeek. People who have grown up in an online world want to […]

Business transparency or mob justice?

The recent case of a blogger who had a poor experience with a camera shop brings out the phenomenal power of the blogging. Thomas Hawk, a professional photographer, ordered a camera online from PriceRitePhoto. When he was called by a salesperson to sell him expensive accessories, which he turned down, they reportedly refused to deliver […]

Best books of 2005

BOSS magazine has named Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships as one of the best books of 2005 in its December issue, out today. Always nice to get positive feedback! If you haven’t got hold of a copy of the book yet, feel free to download the free chapters.

What is the future for newspapers?

Newspaper circulation appears to be on a slippery slope, with over the last six months U.S. newspapers showing a circulation drop of 2.6% for weekdays (after falling 1.9% the previous six months) and down 3.1% for Sundays (after a 2.5% drop in the half-year before). The worst was the San Francisco Chronicle, down 16.4% over […]

The heart of professional services strategy

Last week I chaired a conference on Strategic Law Firm Management organized by Ark Group. While there was disappointingly little on law firms’ high-level strategic positioning and how that may shift over coming years, there were a wealth of insights into more general management issues. Clearly, people and culture are at the heart of managing […]

Moving on from email

Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein is using wikis, blogs, instant messaging, and other collaborative software tools to supplant email, according to an article in this week’s issue of BusinessWeek titled Email is So Five Minutes Ago. J.P. Rangaswami, Dresdner’s CIO, an ardent critic of email, says that in some cases use of these tools is […]