Will the Respect Network enable us to take back control of our data and our lives?

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Yesterday I attended the Sydney launch event of the Respect Network, an initiative designed to allow individuals to own and take control of their data.

They played this video, narrated by John Hurt, who starred in the film 1984. Apparently American audiences have thought this clip to be highly controversial, however it seems to provide a reasonable view of how things are.

Take Back Control from Respect Network on Vimeo.

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The future of credit unions is community

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Two weeks ago I gave the closing keynote at the Boards of Directors and Supervisory Committees Conference of the U.S. National Association of Federal Credit Unions in the beautiful Hawaiian island of Maui, on the topic of Profiting From Technology Trends.

The credit union sector in the U.S outperformed commercial banks after the financial crisis according to the very interesting ILO study Resilience in a downturn: The power of financial cooperatives, moving from 42.8% to 45.0% market penetration to a total over $1 trillion in assets, while in the same post-GFC period credit unions increased their market share in most other regions in the world.
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Trying hard to be genuine: the only viable path is transparency

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ABC News recently ran a segment Social media forces companies to change their marketing strategies or risk being left behind.

The piece, which included quotes from Mark Zuckerberg, Guy Kawasaki, and myself, among others, looked at how companies are changing how they are connecting to their customers and communities.

One excerpt from my interview noted:

ROSS DAWSON: People can very quickly see when something is false or has a false tone. Indeed, companies now do have to find those that are genuinely engaged to be able to help them to spread their messages. So in a world which is becoming more transparent, being genuine – not trying to pull the swift one on your consumers – is in fact the only way to success.

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Driving retail success through visible uniqueness

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My wonderful wife, the talented jewellery designer Victoria Buckley, has had her boutique in Sydney’s historical Strand Arcade for 21 years.

The Strand is the best possible location for her in Sydney, with its classic Victorian architecture and rosta of leading Australian designers such as Akira, Alex Perry, Scanlan Theodore and sass & bide.

The Strand is producing a series of videos titled We Are The Makers, featuring the stores in the arcade. Below is the video of Victoria, which in less than 2 minutes successfully captures some of the vitality and creativity that is expressed in her jewellery. A very nice write-up of the interview is also available.


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The immense social media opportunity for real estate

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The Weekend Australian last Saturday had an interesting article titled Facebook shakes up house hunt (subscription may be required).

It described how a couple had bought their dream home after finding it on the Facebook page of a real estate agent. They arranged to inspect it immediately after it appeared on the page and bought it the next day, before the for-sale sign had been put up in the yard.

The journalist writing the article called me for some comments and included this at the end of the piece:

Social-media expert Ross Dawson said Facebook had enormous potential, but many real estate agent’s efforts were “terrible”. “They just don’t understand it. It’s a completely different mentality. They just want to sell,” Mr Dawson said.

This is true, but I think what was more interesting was the rest of what I said to the journalist, which wasn’t quoted in the article.
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Promoting alcohol on social media: where do we draw the line?

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Last Friday I was interviewed for a segment on ABC 7pm News about alcohol advertising on social media. Click on the image below to see the video.

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The piece begins:
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Launch of Future of the CIO framework

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Over the next few weeks I will be giving the keynote at the Tomorrow-Ready CIO Series organized by CIO magazine and sponsored by IBM. The events will be held over breakfast in Canberra, Perth, Sydney, Auckland and Melbourne, with an audience of CIOs and other senior IT executives. Full details on the events here.

My keynote will be on the Future of the CIO. I have recently pulled together my thinking on the topic, drawing in particular on a series of CIO workshops I ran across Europe last year.

Below is the Future of the CIO Framework that I will be sharing at the events. It is now up on my complete list of visual frameworks on RossDawson.com.

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Click on the image for the full-size pdf
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Slides for Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop in New York

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Last Friday in New York, shortly before Sandy shook things up, I ran a Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop as part of the Crowdsourcing Week global series of events.

Media is one of the domains which has been the most impacted by crowdsourcing over the last decade, in a wide variety of guises. The intent of the workshop was to dig into the many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied in creating media and content, and how to do so most effectively.

Below I have shared the slides used in the workshop. They were designed simply to provide some context to the flow of the workshop, and certainly not to stand alone as content, but they may be of some interest even if you did not attend.

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Slides for Crowdsourcing for Marketing Workshop in New York

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Today I ran a Crowdsourcing for Marketing for Enterprise & Agencies workshop in New York as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week series of events.

I was very happy with how it went and the response from the participants. There was a good mixture of brand and agency participants, and great discussion throughout. Little of the richness of the workshop and discussion is shown in the slides, but some of the frameworks might be of use to those who did not attend the workshop.

In particular we delved in some depth into the implications of crowdsourcing for the corporate marketing function and agencies. I will be spending more time on this topic, and creating more in-depth content. For now, the new chapter on crowdsourcing for marketing in the Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds contains some of the new frameworks.

Here are the slides for today’s workshop.

Insights on using crowdsourcing for marketing

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As I will be running a Crowdsourcing for Marketing workshop in New York this Thursday, I was keen to attend the Marketing session at CrowdConf today.

Here are brief notes from the speakers through what was an excellent panel discussion:
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