The site rossdawson.com has long been where I point potential clients for my keynote speaking and other personal work. As usual it has taken longer than planned, but we now have just launched an entirely redesigned website.
For a keynote speaker having a good showcase video is critical. Potential clients want to get an idea of your style and presence before booking you, and usually a video is the only way to provide that.
I have just finished producing a new keynote speaker video. This was long overdue as the last one wasn’t nearly as good as it should be. The new one is a big improvement, though I think there is more scope for improvement yet. This video is also on the front page of my new rossdawson.com website and on the video page.
I will soon write more about the process of creating a keynote speaker video. In the meantime, I would love your feedback on the video, including any suggestions for improvement.
Last week I did an interview on radio 2SER on Facebook’s IPO and its future. You can listen to a podcast of the interview below.
A few key points I covered:
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On Tuesday I was interviewed as part of a 30 minute panel discussion on ABC Queensland on the future of radio. The podcast of the program is here.
It was a wide ranging discussion, and we covered a lot of territory. At the conclusion of the program, when we were each asked to give our vision for the future of radio, I described what I see radio becoming.
As I pointed out, just as what we have thought of as TV is shifting to multi-channel video, radio is shifting to multi-channel audio, distributed over IP to a multitude of devices, notably mobile phones. However audio will remain an important media channel forever, as there are many reasons we sometimes want just audio without visual accompaniment.
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My favorite part of reading S-1 IPO filings is always the risk factors. They are seemingly endless, as the company tries to cover its ass for all the things that might conceivably go wrong. But they are often very insightful in pointing to the real issues facing the company.
To save you reading it all, here is a highly selective summary of just a few of the interesting risk factors Facebook points to in its IPO filing:
If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.
…
Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:
* we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
* there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
* we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
* we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
etc.
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A year ago I shared a visualization of our AHT Group Business Model.
Following that, I am now sharing our group 2012 Priorities. This comes from the principle of Open Business you can see in the 7 Enablers for our strategy. Our intention is to share more about the drivers of our business. The 2012 priorities document was created for our own internal use to guide our activities and use of resources through this year. However we are happy to make that open, in case anyone else finds looking at our approach is useful to them.
A book can be a very good way to distill and present useful information and guidance. We have done our best to make Getting Results From Crowds as pragmatic and practical as possible in helping organizations to use crowds to grow business and new possibilities. However for some issues and some people, a high-impact workshop or participatory event can be a more direct way of learning new ways to do things. As such I am planning a series of participatory workshops around the world that will build on the content of Getting Results From Crowds.
We are looking for event partners around the world who are interested in working with us bring these workshops to their local communities. Please go through this brief document for an overview of what we are suggesting:
SOPA, The Stop Online Piracy Act, is big news in many ways, not least in marking what is likely to be a historical landmark in the battle between traditional media and a now-powerful new media, played out in political influence and the shaping of critical legislation.
One of the most important ways to beat SOPA is to provide a good alternative. The majority of politicians seem to think that online intellectual property rights need better protection, so to kill SOPA requires providing something that can supplant it.
Into this field comes Rep. Darrell Issa, whose involvement in legislation to allow equity crowdfunding I wrote about a few months ago. Issa is essentially seeking to ‘crowdsource’ a bill. Good.is reports:
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In December I created a list of 12 themes to frame the year ahead, and then explored the ideas in a number of media interviews. The slides for the 12 themes have been seen almost 50,000 times now, suggesting they struck a chord somewhere. It’s now interesting to reflect on these, especially the response from the media.
Another quick selection of my most popular posts from 2011, this time on the topic of the future of media:
1. Predictions for media industry in 2011
Social news curation, crowd sourced journalism, multi-platform distribution, personalized advertising and tablet media will be just some of the key trends shaping the year ahead.
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