This morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It’s not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)
As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these – scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).
SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:
RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence
Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.
COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation
Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.
Together these dimensions yield:
SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
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Influence research: what drives people to Digg stories
By Ross DawsonIn the lead-up to Future of Influence Summit 2009, we will be pointing to some of the more interesting research into the influence space – there will be a wealth of insights coming up so keep posted even if you can’t make it to the event.
Let’s start with one which is a little outside the mainstream, drawn from the report Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior, created by new media research company One to One Interactive.
Digg was one of the first “influence aggregators”, bringing together the opinions of many to guide what content people read. In addition, the Digg ecosystem is a great example of an influence network. Research in early 2007 showed that 30 people were responsible for 30% of the stories that made the front page of Digg. Their personal influence networks generated waves of behavior that resulted in stories becoming very popular.
Today Digg’s prominence as an influence aggregator has waned relative to the growth other channels, most notably Twitter, however it is still a powerful force that concentrates vast amounts of web traffic to those stories the community push to the fore.
One to One Interactive uses a proprietary methodology that uses physiological data (breath rate, galvanic skin response, heart rate) in addition to eye tracking information and self-reporting to assess engagement. They did the study on a number of respondents who visit Digg an average of twice a day to see how the engage with the site.
Source: Social Media for Marketing: An Analysis of Digg.com Engagement and User Behavior
The above diagram from the report shows part of the research that resulted in the second insight below, that headlines are the most important factor in driving attention and traffic to stories.
These are the four key insights generated by the study:
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UK Newspapers: local classifieds lead the losses, Guardian and Telegraph lead online
By Ross DawsonSome more interesting insights from the UK OFCOM report (in addition to the shift in social networking activity from youths to adults I wrote about earlier today).
There has been a 25% slide in newspaper revenue over the four years to 2008 (with the biggest drop in 2008, and likely a larger one coming in 2009). Most interestingly, half of this loss has come from local classifieds.
UK has a distinctive structure to its newspaper market, with a number of national dailies mainly out of London, and a large variety of local newspapers. Classifieds by its nature tends to be a local market, so the national newspapers have in fact not taken the bulk of this revenue – this has been the province of the many local papers, which have been slammed by the fall in classifieds revenue.
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Adults take over social networking, children bail out?
By Ross DawsonUK telecom regulator Ofcom has released a major study on use of telecommunications in the UK, out of which some interesting statistics on use of social networking have come.
It’s not surprising to see the substantial rise in social networking in the 25-54 year old age bracket. Adults have “got it” and piled on board to network online with friends and for work. What is more surprising is that 15-24 year olds are using social networks slightly less than they were, with the Guardian speculating (there is no evidence for this from the report) that it is the uptake of social networks by older people that is causing this “adolescent exodus”. The nub of it is this:
“There is nothing to suggest overall usage of the internet among 15-to 24-year-olds is going down,” said Peter Phillips, the regulator’s head of strategy. “Data suggests they are spending less time on social networking sites.”
Part of it is definitional – what constitutes a social network? When young people use the Internet, they are primarily using it to connect with their peers. Whether that is on Facebook, through content sharing, or on music sites, they are effectively social networking.
The significant drops in use of social networks by the 65+ year olds makes me question the survey methodology – I find it hard to believe that 80% of the over 75 year olds who were using social networks a year ago have dropped out with none taking their place.
Here is the data as a spreadsheet, kindly provided by The Guardian’s Datablog.
Opportunities in Europe in late October?
By Ross DawsonFor the last years I have only got to Europe irregularly – my intent has been to focus on USA and Australia, however I have been getting fairly frequent speaking and consulting work in Asia and the Middle East as well.
I will be in Istanbul on 21 October to do the opening keynote at Marketing&Management Institute’s Digital Marketing Summit, and am exploring some possibilities to do public workshops or in-house strategy sessions in Brussels and Helsinki before or after then.
Let me know if there are other possible opportunities we should discuss for when I’m in that quadrant of the globe :-).
Sponsored Tweets opens up the world of monetizing influence
By Ross DawsonSponsored Tweets has just launched, providing a sophisticated pay per tweet system. Mashable has a detailed review of Sponsored Tweets, including how disclosure is handled.
This is the first substantive platform in what will undoubtedly become a crowded space. How prominent twitterers and their followers will respond to this is an unknown.
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Dialogue with Dave Snowden at KM Australia on success in a world of infinite information
By Ross DawsonKnowledge and complexity guru Dave Snowden (@snowded) recently tweeted me to ask if I would like to have an on-stage conversation with him to close the KM Australia conference. Apparently the session as originally planned didn’t pan out, so I’m the last-minute back-up plan.
In a brief Twitter exchange we decided on a discussion topic of :
“How to build organisations that succeed in a world of infinite information”.
I think the idea is we’ll walk on stage and have a conversation. I think it’s fair to say that Dave is forthright in his opinions, so it should be fun. :-)
It will be quite a while since I’ve been to a knowledge management conference.
Working out who influences the influencers
By Ross DawsonTravis Murdock has a nice blog post: Who influences the influencers? (which, tellingly, I found from @louisgray on Twitter).
Travis offers five tips:
1. Check who they are following on FriendFeed
2. Follow Influencer RSS reader feeds
3. Research Facebook events
4. Research ReTweets and @replies on Twitter
5. Follow the social brick road
There are a variety of other manual and automated ways to identify who key influencers are listening to and drawing on to shape their opinions.
What is critical about the idea of ‘who influences the influencers’ is that this intrinsically describes influence networks. Far too much influencer marketing is about finding the influence hubs and then trying to reach them.
The reality is far more subtle than that, in many ways. Influence flows through networks, and effectively working with influence can only be done by understanding influence networks, not the ‘hub and spoke’ model that many PR and marketing firms seem to base their thinking about influence on.
Far more on where influence is going at Future of Influence Summit in San Francisco and Sydney, coming up soon!
The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy
By Ross DawsonThis morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It’s not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)
As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these – scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).
SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:
RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence
Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.
COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation
Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.
Together these dimensions yield:
SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
Read more →
The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives
By Ross DawsonTomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity.
As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.
Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions.
Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions
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Online media and independents drive business software buying
By Ross DawsonSAP4SME, a diversified social media initiative from SAP to reach the SME market, is generating a variety of interesting content.
At 2pm US Eastern time today SAP is running a webinar: “The Stimulus Package: What Does it Mean for Your Business?” which examines how small to medium enterprise can best tap the US federal stimulus package (see also my earlier note on this).
On the SAP4SME LinkedIn group site there is a survey asking:
“Who do you trust most when making a business software purchasing decision?”
The results are very interesting, with 400-odd respondents, though it may not be a fully representative sample.
The stand-out most influential sources are the online technology media such as ZDNet, and independent bloggers and analysts, considerably ahead of the major analyst firms.
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