5 central facets of media and PR in China

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Last month I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York on The Future of Global Media. Immediately after my keynote I participated in a panel on media in the BRIC countries. The other panellists were Ketchum executives from Brazil, Russia, and India. Since their China team were kept at home with client commitments I stood in to talk about China, given my background in the region. Details on the keynote and panel are here.

Here are notes I made to prepare for the panel session, where we were asked to share 5 key issues about the media landscape in our country.

0. Asia and China encompass very diverse media markets.

Across Asia media markets take very different shapes. The largest market by revenue is Japan, which is very different from Western developed economies, notably in the size and resilience of the newspaper market, and the depth of penetration of mobile internet. Hong Kong and Taiwan have very distinct markets from mainland China, both being more similar structurally and in terms of media relations to Western countries. The massive mainland China market itself has significantly different characteristics at the national, metropolitan, regional and local levels.

The following points relate to the mainland China (P.R.C.) media market.

1. Newspaper and broadcast markets are growing rapidly.

As many more people shift to higher socio-economic brackets and literacy increases, newspaper readership and broadcast TV audiences are rapidly developing. China is already the largest newspaper market in the world, and TV and radio advertising revenue is growing at a double-digit pace. There is still substantial scope for sustained growth in these traditional media markets.

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Bio Destiny

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

BIO DESTINY

Now that biological and genomic technologies are largely driven by information technologies, they are on the same exponential trajectory. Medicines personalized to the individual, genetic modification of our children, drugs to increase intelligence, and life extension will all become commonplace.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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12th Annual Self-Employed and Entrepreneurs Xmas Drinks – Sydney – Drinks sponsors welcome!

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This is the now the 12th year that I and some of my friends are running the Self-Employed and Entrepreneurs Xmas Drinks in Sydney. It began when I and many of my friends didn’t have the glamorous and social (i.e. more than one person!) Christmas parties of the employed, so decided to celebrate together.

So, if you are self-employed, an entrepreneur, or work for a micro-business or start-up we’d be delighted if you joined us. Those who are employed but have friends who are self-employed are also very welcome – this is all about having a fun time!

Date: Tuesday, 21 December, 2010

Location: Front bar, Centennial Hotel, 88 Oxford Street, Woollahra, Sydney

Time: 6pm – 9pm

There is a Facebook page for the event if you’d like to check it out or say you’re coming.

Drinks and nice pizzas are available for purchase at the bar.

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ExaTrend of the 2010s: Augmented Humans

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Excerpt from the list of ExaTrends of the 2010s:

AUGMENTED HUMANS

More than ever before, we can transcend our human abilities. Traditional memory aids are supplemented by augmented reality glasses or contact lenses, thought interfaces allow us to control machines, exoskeletons give us superhuman power. Machines will not take over humanity… because they will be us.

See the full 3 page framework including the Map of the Decade, full descriptions of the ExaTrends of the Decade, and the 11 themes of the Zeitgeist of 2011 by clicking on the image:

ExaTrends of the Decade and Zeitgeist for 2011:

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The boundaries of crowdsourcing and how it relates to open innovation

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I was recently asked to do an interview for the Turkish version of CNBC eBusiness magazine on crowdsourcing. I’m not sure whether the article will appear online – I’ll share it if so. In any case here are the answers I gave the interviewer:

1) The term “crowdsourcing” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wire Magazine article. Does “crowdsourcing” is a new way of saying “open innovation”? Do these two terms have the same meaning? Or does crowdsourcing differs from open innovation?

Crowdsourcing and open innovation are related but distinct concepts. Crowdsourcing covers many approaches, which I summarize as ‘tapping the minds of many’. These can include service marketplaces, competition platforms, idea platforms, and prediction markets. In fact, all of these approaches can be applied inside organizations as well as externally, helping to tap some of the ‘cognitive surplus’ of employees. Open innovation is about looking outside the organization for new ideas and products, in what can be any number of ways. Often this is done on crowdsourcing platforms, but sometimes, as Procter & Gamble does, it is largely about seeking the best existing unexploited products in the market and adapting them for its own marketing pipeline.

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Map of the Decade, ExaTrends of the Decade, and the Zeitgeist for 2011

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It is traditional at the turn of the year to look forward at what is to come.

We have crystallized our thinking on the year ahead and the decade of the 2010s in a new 3-page visual landscape.

Note on ExaTrends: Given the exponential pace of change of today we are far beyond a world of MegaTrends. Exa is the prefix meaning 10 to the power of 18, following Mega, Giga, Tera, and Peta. As such Exa is Mega cubed.

Download the pdf of the framework by clicking on any of the images. The full text of the ExaTrends and the Zeitgeist themes is below.

Map of the Decade: 2010s

MapoftheDecade_500w.jpg

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Transparency has long been driving business and society… but it’s only just begun

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One of the most surprising things about Wikileaks is that it took this long for the massive shift to transparency to have an impact on this scale. The trend to transparency has long been evident, and sites to facilitate leaks have been around for many years now. The inevitability of a transparent world has long shaped my thinking about the future.

In my 2002 book Living Networks, the final chapter was on the future of a networked world. The second of my ten predictions was: Transparency will drive business and society.

Even before the book came out I spoke at KMWorld in Silicon Valley on Creating the Transparent Corporation, and given my background in capital markets, I have been interested in and written and spoken about transparency in investor relations from the 1990s with the rise of intangibles reporting and beyond to the impact of the rise of social media.

One of the facets in my widely read 2006 article Six Facets of the Future of PR was Transparency is a given, while one of my Seven Megatrends of Professional Services was Transparency.

In both of these papers, as in a number of keynotes I gave earlier in the decade, I mentioning the now-defunct corporate leaks site internalmemos.com, which was launched in 2002, and had a significant impact for a number of companies (which are next target in line for Wikileaks and its peers).

The full text of my 2002 prediction on transparency from Living Networks is here, with the full book chapter embedded at the bottom of the post.

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ABC News: Interview on Wikileaks and the future

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Yesterday I did an interview on ABC News about Wikileaks and its implications.

A few of the points I discuss are:

* The extraordinary social polarization emerging from the Wikileaks debate

* How many people feel strongly enough about the issues to provide support to the cyber-attacks defending Wikileaks, a first for hacker attacks

* The existing long-term trends to transparency have finally crystallized in Wikileaks and the political and social response of today

* Wikileaks cannot be closed down and new platforms for distribution will emerge

* This broad dissemination of information is a reality that will not be reversed

I will write in more detail about the broad implications of Wikileaks soon.

The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.

Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.

Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:

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The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going

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SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs.

Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise of mini-blogs.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Shopping itself is also developing a social element thanks to services such as Shwowp, (www.shwowp.com) that lets a user keep track of their shopping history and then share it with others.

Social media researcher Ross Dawson expects strong growth from social shopping services.

“You can browse together what’s on the websites, look at different things, and comment on them,” Dawson says. “So you can go shopping with your friends, but do it in an online context.”

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