The future of social networks and television distribution channels

By

Last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph published an article titled Tech to the future that looks at what’s coming next in consumer and social technologies. Unfortunately it isn’t available online, however here are the sections where I was quoted:

Futurist and author Ross Dawson says the next big shifts will pivot around how we connect to other people and “how we share the content of our lives with others. It’s all about the social use of technology.”

Analysts predict that rather than a new Twitter-styled platform emerging, social networks will move towards being meshed or interconnected. They say private and public data will blur together and an advanced version of the social networks of your choice will be your browser of entry point.

Now that we have as a society discovered sharing the content from our lives, the floodgates are open. Interoperability across social networks is evolving slowly, but is what we are coming to expect. Then later in the article:

Read more →

Will Influencism supplant Capitalism? The emergence of the influence economy

By

One of the most interesting topics at the recent Future of Influence Summit was the emergence of business models for influence. Some particularly intriguing issues were raised in the Business Models for Influence and Reputation panel, suggesting that one of the key currencies of the future will be influence.

The panellists generally agreed that total revenue in the influence sector, including the companies represented on the panel (Rapleaf, Buzzlogic, Klout) is around US$100 million. The primary business model is providing insights to companies on who the influencers are in their customer base.

One example given is a hotel that asks guests checking in for their Twitter name, swiftly ascertaining how influential in social media they are, and treating them accordingly. If someone who has real reach is their guest, the hotel might upgrade them or otherwise treat them in a way that they are likely to rave about.

Read more →

A short video review of MD80 – smallest video recorder in the world (no not the iPod Nano)

By

A few months ago I bought an MD80 video recorder – supposedly the smallest in the world, and smaller than the iPod Nano, which David Pogue reviews today as the smallest camcorder.

I thought I’d do a video review of it, discussing both its use and demonstrating its video quality. In fact the biggest problem is the audio quality. I love how I can just clip it on my jacket and take ambient video as I walk around, but the audio is not good enough for doing interviews of people. A very nifty device and certainly with its uses, but not quite there.

The shift from corporate brands to personal brands

By

Was just catching up on Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang joining Charlene Li’s Altimeter group from Altimeter.

Jeremiah is quoted in the New York Times:

Mr. Owyang said that his story holds lessons for other companies. “I think this is an interesting trend that many companies are going through — personal brands are here to stay, alongside corporate ones, and the key to success is to make sure they help each other,” he said. “But now the power is shifting to the workers, because they can take their network and a lot of what they know with them, with these social media tools.”

The third trend in my recent Five key trends in how influence is transforming society is:

Reputation shifts from the corporation to the individual

I strongly believe in Jeremiah’s point that individuals and corporations need to support each others’ brands. In fact one of the important reasons I have pointed to as to why companies should support use of social networks is that it helps their employees to build their own brands, to the benefit of both individual and company.

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

Inside Knowledge review of Implementing Enterprise 2.0

By

I just came across Inside Knowledge magazine’s review of my most recent book, Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Full details of the book including free chapters and the Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework mentioned in the review and pictured below are available on the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 website.

e2impl_framework_200w.jpg

Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework

It’s a useful review – here are a few excerpts:

Read more →

Catch-up with Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital – the intersection of digital and professional services

By

I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Deloitte Digital‘s CEO Peter Williams, someone who is always on the vanguard of innovation in professional services. A few things he mentioned about what they’re up to:

* Yammer (enterprise micro-blogging) has taken off and is getting substantial use across Deloitte Australia. They did a security test on Yammer for some clients and it came out solid. They are still using the free version though are talking to Yammer about a paid version.

* Deloitte has implemented an internal ‘Innovation Academy’ which among other functions enables idea submission and voting, which they’ve created by mashing up several tools. The system has generated ideas already worth $15 million to the company.

* One of the ideas was GreenID, a joint venture between Deloitte, Edentiti and Global Data Company that provides fast online identity verification for clients who have traditionally done this offline.

* They have also created an XBRL gateway to facilitate conversion of accounts into XBRL format.

* A collaboration with Cooperative Research Centre ACID yielded an interesting visualization and view of the mental models of how ideas are generated in the professional services frontline. Unfortunately this is not available online yet.

Lots of nice things happening here.

I recently wrote from my own experience about Six high-return initiatives for driving innovation in professional services, and Chapter 9 of my book Living Networks is primarily about how digital channels are changing how professional services firms operate.

Paris Hilton and the iPhone – I said it first

By

A CNN blog titled its story Is the iPhone really the Paris Hilton of mobile phones?, referring to a recent report saying that iPhone’s are not profitable for telecom firms.

It says that the term first appeared on December 5, 2008 in a newsletter from Strand Consult, referred to in an ITWire story titled iPhone – the Paris Hilton of mobile phones?

Well, for what it’s worth, I said it in September 2008. Following is an excerpt from my opening keynote for a five-city national roadshow for Optus Business, just after the iPhone was launched.

I don’t think I was making quite the same point though – the iPhone was enormously glamorized, feted on all sides for a couple of months, truly the center of attention, just over a year ago. However the difference with Paris Hilton is that the iPhone has great social value.

BTW I haven’t managed to track down the author of the photo in the movie – please get in touch if you want attribution or for me not to use it.

Answering questions in Turkish on the future of digital marketing

By

One of the best parts of my work as a keynote speaker is visiting places I have never been before. As such I’m delighted to be doing the opening keynote at IPZ2009, the digital marketing summit in Istanbul, on October 21. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to visit Turkey so I’m very much looking forward to it.

In the lead-up to the event the prominent Turkish online site Buzla is running a virtual interview with me. People can ask questions in Turkish and vote on the questions, with the most popular questions asked to me in a video interview. The deadline for questions is September 11, and the interview will be up on September 14. Click here to ask questions (in Turkish only) and for more information.

For those who don’t read Turkish, you might enjoy the fairly psychedelic promotional video on the site, which seems to associate me with teddy bears drinking hard liquor (though I might be mistaken :-) ).

bearturkey.jpg

Measuring people’s clout: what matters

By

In the wake of Future of Influence Summit last week, Seth Godin has done a short post titled Clout that neatly sums up one of the key themes of the event, and an issue that I and many others think is enormously relevant today. This subject is coming to the fore, as I suggested iin the second of Five key trends in how influence is transforming society.

I don’t think Seth will mind if I put the full post here, as it doesn’t really bear excerpting (as long as I include a solid plug for his awesome blog!)

Clout

The web knows something, but it’s not telling us, at least not yet.

The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.

It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.

It also knows how many followers your followers have…

So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout. Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don’t have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Back in the old days, we had no idea, so we defaulted to big newspapers, or magazines or the TV networks. But now we know. We just need to surface the data in a way that is useful.

I’ll be writing a lot more on this topic and how this can best be done in coming weeks and months.

I look forward to it: Finding any information in the universe just by thinking about it

By

This interview segment on Techcrunch quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying on the future of search: “Connect it straight to your brain”.

Indeed. Search is about finding meaningful information. If just by thinking about what we wanted to find, we could find that information or content among all the information in the Universe, that would be a Very Good Thing.

So the question is: will we ever get there? I certainly don’t know whether we will ever be able to search by thought, but it’s certainly in the realm of the possible.

If so, I hope I’m alive when we get it. It will be fun!