Media Trends + Strategy: The State of Play

By

Media Trends+Strategy magazine (click on the link to access the magazine in interactive format) includes a piece titled Media: The State of Play – Expert Analysis which features edited interviews with a variety of participants in the media space, including John Sintras, CEO of Starcom, Belinda Rowe, CEO of ZenithOptimedia, Collin Segelov, Executive Director of the Australian Association of National Advertisers, and myself.

My interview is below. You can also read it and the other interviews by going to the magazine from the link above – my interview is on page 30.

Further context on some of my comments is available from the Seven Driving Forces of Media and Creating the Future of Advertising.

What does the ongoing consolidation In the industry mean for marketers?

The first thing to understand is that the most powerful broad trend in media is fragmentation and while mass media remains, it is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall media landscape. So within that context, what we see is that there is consolidation within particular segments and in some of the larger players. We have seen more and more cross media ownership as regulation has eased. One of the implications for marketers is that they are increasingly being offered media packages across different segments from the same owner. This is obviously not a new trend, but as we get more and more cross media ownership, more and more marketers are being presented with these offers to access an audience through a multiplicity of different channels. From a marketers or media buyer perspective , these can only be judged on their individual merits. It really needs to be driven by the media buyer as to what is the appropriate set of media channels to reach their audience with the right message, and that may or may not tally with what is being offered by some of the larger media owners.

Read more →

Fast growing companies are more likely to use social networking tools

By

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research has recently released research on the use of social media by the Inc 500, which are the 500 fastest growing privately owned companies in the US as ranked by Inc. magazine. This is one of the first longitudinal studies, showing changes in adoption of social media tools from one year ago. The topline results are shown below.

socialmediaInc500.jpg

The researchers point to the significantly higher usage of social media by these companies compared to the Fortune 500. A few thoughts on this point and the research findings generally:

Fast growth vs large companies. Fast growing companies by necessity are open to new tools and approaches, and tend to have a culture of adoption and innovation, meaning they’re more likely to experiment with social media tools. There are no studies I’m aware of comparing growth rates of companies and their use of social media, and the causality would be very difficult to unpick, but I believe that consistent rapid growth will be hard to achieve without social media tools to facilitate effective collaboration in the organization.

Read more →

Living Networks – Chapter 6: Network Presence – Harnessing the Flow of Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Knowledge

By

Download Chapter 6 of Living Networks on Network Presence

Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.

For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.

Living Networks – Chapter 6: Network Presence

Harnessing the Flow of Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Knowledge

OVERVIEW: Today, your company’s success depends on how well it builds its network presence in three key domains:

• Marketing, which is now mainly about influencing the flow of messages through consumer networks;

• Customer feedback loops, that tightly link a company and its customers, enabling them together to constantly create more value;

• Work processes and knowledge, that flow through the networks of workers within and beyond the firm.

The idea of the ‘network presence’ of organizations is still very relevant today. Still today not many companies truly have a strong presence in the social networks of consumers and customers, even though much progress has been made over the last five years.

The first space, where there probably has been the most movement so far, is in marketing. Marketing using social network approaches is now mainstream, though a nascent idea back in 2002. I opened with the example of the online marketing for Lord of the Rings, which took advantage of the strong social cohesion of the book’s fan base. While the concept of the ‘meme’ seems to have lost traction over the last years, I still think it is enormously relevant. I wrote:

Read more →

Four great visual representations of the social media and Web 2.0 landscape

By

People often ask me how I keep track of everything that’s going on in Web 2.0 and social media and make sense of it all. The most important single tool for me is creating frameworks. The many frameworks I create (e.g. Future of Media Lifecycle, Future of Media Strategy, Trend Map 2007+ (with Richard Watson) etc. etc.) are all primarily to help me organize in my mind what’s going on. They then allow me to readily understand new developments as they emerge and how they fit into the landscape.

The release of the Conversation Prism last week made me think it’s worth providing a quick review of visual frameworks for the social media landscape.

The Conversation Prism is intended to evolve over time based on changes in both companies andchannels, which is a great idea, given the other landscapes below are static, and my framework in particular is ageing and needs rework. Another cool idea would be to provide animated frameworks that show the development and disappearance of different companies over time.

Recently I have been trying to make sense of some of the recent changes in the landscape, particularly about how the primary platform is shifting from the social network to distributed conversation. Even before the Conversation Prism came out I had decided to work on a new framework that will incorporate my latest thinking on this – hopefully out in the next couple of months!

Here are the four most interesting landscapes of companies in the social media world that I’ve come across.

Conversation Prism (August 2008) – Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas.

Read more →

What I’m up to and where I’m at with blogging

By

Blogging is both rewarding and frustrating. I can get my thoughts out as they emerge and get immediate feedback and engagement. But it is always hard to find the time to blog. I would love to blog more, but client deadlines, event organization, hiring staff, and far more end up being higher priority. Someone asked me recently if I thought of myself primarily as a blogger. Since I usually manage from one to a few posts a week, far from it. It’s something I try to fit in to a very packed schedule. It’s now well over a week since my last blog post, and it’s very frustrating given there’s so much I want to write about.

I always have a backlog of at least 20 blog posts I want to write, including drawing on recent media interviews, content generated during events, book chapters from Living Networks, speeches I deliver, specific topics I’m developing, and far more. On top of that, I like to get engaged in current blog discussions on a timely basis when they’re of special interest. As such the frequent requests I get from PR and other people to cover things extremely rarely cut through.

One of the hardest times is travel periods, when I get intensely stimulated, but find almost no time to write, with email and current projects filling all available gaps between meetings and client work. I just got back to Sydney this morning after a few days in LA and Silicon Valley, and while there is much that happened on the trip I’d love to write about, including my client project on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, meeting Khris Loux of the extremely interesting JS-Kit, some very stimulating discussions with a strategy executive from a major handset manufacturer, catching up with Chris Saad of DataPortability and Faraday Media, and much more, the reality is probably just a fraction of this will get written up on this blog.

Read more →

New SEC guidelines: blogs can be used for investor disclosure – CEO blogging to surge?

By

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced new guidelines (available in the next week or two) that will recognize the role of blogs in disclosing investor-sensitive information to the public.

Back in 2005 I wrote an update on the situation at the time on investor relations and blogging, and in 2006 I delivered the keynote at the Australian Investor Relations Association on the Future of Investor Relations, and wrote about SUN Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s initiatives for blogging to be a recognized form of investor disclosure.

The SEC appears to be moving ahead at a swift pace, despite cries from some, particularly in the news release business, that the old system shouldn’t be changed. In fact the comments below from SEC Chairman Christopher Cox come from a podcast, transcribed by IRWebReport:

Read more →

Global media strategies: review of Future of Media Summit panel

By

I’ve been trying to get the time to do reviews of the key panels at the Future of Media Summit, but it’s been tough to get. Here I will kick off with a quick review of the Global Media Strategies panel. The fantastic cast of speakers that I moderated was:

Loic Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic

Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix

Willie Pang, Head of Yahoo! Search Marketing Australia/ New Zealand

Craig Blair, Executive Director, netus

Global media strategies is the one topic that is covered every single year at the Future of Media Summit. One of the main reasons we run an event across two locations simultaneously – in the Bay Area and Sydney – is to gain insights into the differences between media markets. On each side of the event, by comparing experiences across variations in market size, media ownership structure, regulation, culture, broadband and mobile data access etc., we can think usefully about what it takes to build and implement global media strategies.

In the very popular Future of Media Report 2008 that accompanied our event, we included insights such as the expected growth in advertising revenue 2007 – 2010 in both dollar and percentage terms, illustrated below. While the largest absolute growth will be in the US, emerging nations are where the bulk of new value will come from.

fastestadmarkets07-10.jpg

Here are just a few of the insights from the panel discussion that remain from my notes and scattered brain cells.

Read more →

New LinkedIn deals – LexisNexis and Xobni – extend the reach of professional social networks

By

After the news of the deal between LinkedIn and New York Times I wrote about a couple of days ago, LinkedIn has just announced new deals with LexisNexis and Outlook plug-in Xobni.

The LexisNexis deal is particularly intriguing. Back in 2003 a number of corporate social networking applications were launched, notably Spoke, VisiblePath, and Contact Network Corporation. I knew all the players well, and Spoke was in fact the Gold Sponsor of the Living Networks Forum I ran in New York in December 2003. At the time there was one other significant player which was in a similar space, which was InterAction CRM software, owned by Interface. The CRM software was primarily sold to legal firms, where it had a strong presence. Its functionality included a “who knows whom” function, so that lawyers could find out who in their firm knew people at client or prospect firms. As with all the other corporate social networking applications, this included a high degree of user choice on what personal contact information was made available.

In December 2004 LexisNexis, the largest provider of legal information, acquired Interface, making InterAction CRM part of its suite of offerings. Since then LexisNexis has very actively acquired software companies, notably VisualFiles in case management, Juris in pratice management, and Axxia in backoffice legal solutions, repositioning itself far beyond being an information provider.

Read more →

How will news and social networks be integrated?

By

It is inevitable that news dissemination will become a largely social function. By whatever means, we will be provided with extremely low touch ways of sharing content we think would be interesting to specific people we know. This will then be filtered in various ways by the recipients, however most will value being recommended articles and sites on an individual basis.

Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and other tools allow us to recommend content to the world at large. But recommendations are far more valuable if they are specific to the person and context. The best way to disseminate these recommendations is through our social networks, if we happen to spend time there. So social networks can become a platform for the collaborative filtering of content, giving individuals the benefit of their network’s judgment and access to information.

In this context, the announcement today by New York Times and LinkedIn of a way of providing custom content and recommendations to their network is a landmark. Over the next few years this integration of social networks and content will rapidly evolve to be a very important part of the landscape.

linkedinnyt.jpg

Read more →

The critical role of portable large screen devices in enabling mobile media

By

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has just announced that they are trying to create the specifications to build a tablet computer primarily for web browsing for $200. The intention is to design it, then open source the design and software so anyone can build it, thus making an inexpensive web tablet available to many. More background from Nik Cubrilovic.

This directly addresses one of the key points in our Future of the Media Lifecycle framework, illustrated below (full explanation at the link).

Media Lifecycle Framework

The development of mobile media requires rich media devices. These come in two forms: handheld and portable. The iPhone and its emerging competitors have finally created a handheld interface which is a true media device that will encourage people to engage in a wide range of media consumption and creation activities. However there is still an important role for portable devices, that can’t be put in a pocket. While I’m a strong believer in the role of video glasses and similar interfaces that allow a handheld device to provide a wide visual screen, the reality is that in most cases people will want a normal flat screen. Before long rollable and foldable screens will fulfil this role. In the meantime a flat screen is both available, and will long have a cost advantage over e-paper-based screens. Laptops have a place, but have long boot times and are over-specified. eBooks will also be important, though are currently fairly application specific. A web tablet as described by Arrington would neatly fill an important space in having an inexpensive, flexible portable media device that will facilitate accessing the personal cloud that will be at the center of our lives.

On another level, this is a great example of open source innovation, in which consumers define what they want, create the model, and by making the design open source, ensure the product is commoditized and low cost. The highest value part of the process is performed by the customers, not the vendors.