Paris Hilton and the iPhone – I said it first

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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

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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 :-) ).

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Measuring people’s clout: what matters

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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

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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!

Measuring influence on Twitter: the state of the art progresses step by step

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Influence is the topic of the moment (as well as the next decade). In the wake of our very successful Future of Influence Summit earlier this week, not one but two significant studies of influence on Twitter were released today.

An extensive study titled The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter, created measures for relative influence, tracking in detail 12 popular users. Commentary on this further down in this post, and a nice visual showing response density to these users below.

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Rapleaf, whose CEO Auren Hoffman spoke at Future of Influence Summit, released a quite different report showing the change in the structure of the Twitter ecosystem in the period late-March to mid-June of this year, during which time Twitter usage grew 60%. Rapleaf, in the course of doing a study to identify influencers in one of their clients’ customer community, came up with some interesting statistic in the dynamics of the most prominent Twitter users.

Twitter-follower-growth.PNG

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Quick review: Social media coverage of Future of Influence Summit

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I was very happy to be able to sleep in this morning after Future of Influence Summit. While I haven’t had a full debrief from the Sydney side of the event yet, it was a fantastic event on the San Francisco side, and I’ve had great feedback so far on what happened in Sydney.

Influence and reputation are now key issues on the agenda for any organization. At the Summit, we began to tease out the many issues that will be critical moving forward. I will spend some time digesting what was discussed and pull together some structured thoughts in the next little while.

We will also post videos of a couple of the sessions soon.

For now, it’s worth reviewing what attendees at the event captured on social media during the event – together these provide a great overview of the Summit.

Twitter stream for #foi09

Blog posts: (In no particular order – more coming soon I believe):

Mick Liubinskas: Live from Future of Influence Summit

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The quality of the audience is the heart of Future of Influence Summit

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Throughout all our events, including among others Future of Media Summit, Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, and now Future of Influence Summit, our intention has been to have top-level participants who are themselves creating the future, and generating useful insights from interaction with their peers.

This is not supposed to be about the audience coming to hear wisdom from those on the platform. The person sitting next to you should often have as much to offer as the invited speakers.

As such, we always include “audience roundtables” and other approaches that help participants to have conversations, building their own insights from the ideas proposed by the speakers and panellists. At Future of Influence Summit, we will step up a few notches the video interaction between the audiences at the San Francisco and Sydney events to again create something unique in terms of participation.

As importantly, we have a quite extraordinary audience line-up in both locations. Without checking with everyone we can’t generate a list of star audience members, but be assured it matches the calibre of the invited speakers. At a highly participatory event like this, the quality of the audience is what makes it exceptional. Based on who we have coming, we can expect it to be spectacular.

I hope you can be part of the Future of Influence Summit experience!

Future of Influence Summit After Party: San Francisco – August 31

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Once Future of Influence Summit finishes in San Francisco on August 31 at 6pm, we will go to the nearby 111 Minna bar for drinks and the After Party. The conversation on where influence is going will continue with a little lubrication :-)

See here for location and full info on 111 Minna

If you’re in San Francisco you really should go to the Future of Influence Summit itself – that’s where the REAL fun will be had :-) – but if for some reason you cannot make it in the day, be sure to come to the After Party!

There will be some other things on at 111 Minna – say you’re there for Future of Influence when you arrive and look for the Future of Influence Summit logo as above.

Five key trends in how influence is transforming society

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I just got off an interview on the future of influence on 2SM radio which lasted almost 15 minutes – close to a record for my interviews on live AM radio, which tends to do 3-5 minute segments. The talk show host was clearly fascinated by the issues of how influence is shifting away from people like him, and towards the unwashed masses.

In the interview, done in the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit which is on next week in Sydney and San Francisco, I discussed the social transformation wrought by the changing influence landscape, and pointed to key five trends driving this change:

1. Influence is democratized

It used to be that people were influential by virtue of their position, such as CEO, journalist, or politician. In a world of blogging, Twitter, and social media anyone can become highly influential, shaping how we think, behave, and spend. Companies can ignore no-one. As many more become heard, a truer democracy will emerge.

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What are the business models for influence and reputation – today and in the future?

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One of the most exciting topics of Future of Influence Summit next week is exploring the business models for influence and reputation.

This is an issue which is better addressed in San Francisco/ Silicon Valley than anywhere else, and we have an extraordinary panel lined up to address the topic of Business Models for Influence and Reputation at 2:20 – 3:10pm Pacific Time.

Some of the questions I see include:

* Will there be new mechanisms for individuals to monetize their influence?

* What products or services will advertisers and marketers spend money on in seeking to tap influence?

* Will advertising spending be driven primarily by influence?

* What are models for monetizing the measurement of influence and reputation?

* Who will take the bulk of the value? Will it be the influencers themselves, or intermediaries in the emerging ecosystem?

Let’s take a very quick glance at the people speaking on the panel and what they’re doing – absolutely a star-laden cast.

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