[UPDATE 13 March:] Updated information on the Web 2.0 in Australia event is here.
Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.
Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.
The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on [UPDATED] 6 June, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.
The event summary:
The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:
* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0
* Why progress has been slow in Australia
* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia
* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing
There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:
Sponsors and partners
Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.
Showcase participants
Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.
Announcing: Web 2.0 in Australia
By Ross Dawson[UPDATE 13 March:] Updated information on the Web 2.0 in Australia event is here.
Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.
Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.
The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on [UPDATED] 6 June, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.
The event summary:
The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:
* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0
* Why progress has been slow in Australia
* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia
* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing
There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:
Sponsors and partners
Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.
Showcase participants
Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.
Uncovering the structure of influence and social opinion
By Ross DawsonAn article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Wizards of Buzz zooms in on a group of people much discussed by the tech crowd over the last year, but who have not visible in the mainstream media before now. They are the people who submit stories to the social news sites. The article includes a nice sidebar describing the most prominent social news sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, and Netscape. These sites create what I call “social opinion” (as distinct from the traditional approach of status-based opinion). Each of these sites depends on people submitting what they think are the most interesting news items. Then the community at large votes on these suggestions, with the links getting the most votes going to the front page, being seen by thousands or even millions of people, and sometimes creating overnight stars. The main focus up until now has been the ‘You’ named by Time magazine as the person of the year – that is the many who vote on the stories. Yet there is only a fairly small pool of people who submit stories.
The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of who was submitting stories on the sites, and came up with some interesting insights, including the startling fact that on Digg, 30 people (from 900,000 registered users) are responsible for one third of stories that made the front page of the site. The article names 20 of the most active and influential people who are submitting to social news sites, putting in the limelight people who are working hard for no pay, scouring the web for interesting stories, and being the first to submit them for a potential 15 seconds of fame.
Of course, influential people of all stripes can be wooed with attention, invitations, presents, money, and other nice things. Netscape, in a bid to attract some of these influencers, offered $1,000 a month to some of the top submitters on Digg to get them to switch to Netscape. No doubt PR people are already keenly courting these influencers. This research and article has helped to uncover the structure of influence in a world driven increasingly by social opinion rather than status-based opinion. What interests me in particular is how the structure of these influence networks will evolve – we are absolutely in a transition phase, and the way social opinion is formed will quickly change. Michael Arrington calls it a “crazy ecosystem”. Jason Kaneshiro focuses on the potential for these influencers to be paid – they are creating value, including being central to the very high valuations of some of these sites, so they should be rewarded. The question is, in what form does that reward come? Being written about in the Wall Street Journal is a strong reward in itself, for many. And if they are paid, who pays them, and is it overt or covert? This will be a fascinating space to follow.
Narrative workshops in Boston and Seattle
By Ross DawsonOver the last few years the use of narrative and storytelling has become an almost mainstream approach to organizational change and development. Steve Denning, first at the World Bank, and then in his own consulting practice, has been at the forefront at spreading the gospel. Anecdote, an Australian-based consultancy, has become prominent in the field, sporting among others Shawn Callahan, who previously worked as regional leader of IBM’s Cynefin Center, at the time lead by Dave Snowden.
Anecdote is running workshops on Narrative Techniques for Business in Boston and Seattle at the end of March – full details here. Hopefully these will be well-attended – effective use of narrative inside organizations can be extremely powerful in building collaboration, culture change, uncovering strategic issues, and capturing implicit knowledge, among other rather useful outcomes…
Impressions of Ad:tech Sydney
By Ross DawsonA short, random collection of impressions from Ad:tech Sydney…
It was undoubtedly a big success, with very good attendee numbers (meaning all the keynote sessions and quite a few of the breakout sessions had a crowd of people standing at the back), a very positive response from all the attendees I spoke to, and all the exhibitors I chatted to saying it was very worthwhile for them to participate. It was well organized and provided both quality content and an opportunity for the industry to get together. I have long criticized the events industry – globally but particularly in Australia – at being very formulaic and non-interactive. Ad:tech is lifting the bar for this kind of event in Australia. Not to say that it couldn’t have been done better, but it certainly created value for the local industry, and I’m told Ad:tech head office is pleased with the event’s performance, including financially.
The New Media Mix keynote panel session I chaired this morning (pre-session description here) was good fun, with Harold Mitchell and Richard Kimber in particular responding to my request for some differences of opinion. The core of the discussion ended up being about what is making the shift in media, channels, and online slower than it should be. Skills and education were a prominent topic, with all panelists pointing to education as a fundamental issue in Australia’s future success, which is currently not supporting the skills and capabilities we need as a nation. Harold went on to say how he believes the nation is being fundamentally held back by low bandwidth and poor internet infrastructure, at one point sparking applause from an audience that no doubt feels likewise. I noted the very slow uptake in social media participation in Australia. Certainly I’m concerned that as a geographically isolated country, Australia is far from taking full advantage of communication technologies, meaning that it risks falling behind in a global, networked, information-based economy.
Read more →
Ad:tech Sydney: The five dimensions of Blogs as a Marketing Tool
By Ross DawsonAt Ad:tech Sydney this week I’ll be chairing the panel on Blogs as a Marketing Tool as well as the keynote session on The New Media Mix. My esteemed colleagues on the panel will be Mark Jones, IT editor at the Australian Financial Review, business coach and blogging evangelist Des Walsh, and Fred Schebesta of Freestyle Media. Given the topic is blogging, it seemed appropriate to have a conversation rather than a series of presentations. We had a conference call to discuss what we’d talk about, and agreed to have a single presentation for the panel, using five screenshots to illustrate the topics we’ll discuss.
The five dimensions of Blogs as a Marketing Tool are:
1. Advertising on blogs
Advertisers now have an additional medium to reach potential customers, in addition to the usual array of newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, outdoor etc. Blogs readers are affluent, influential, and highly targetted – this is a prime demographic. Yet there are almost no Australian blogs that are attracting advertisers. We use a blog on the Sydney Morning Herald as a starting point for conversation, as blog readership in Australia is still heavily overweighted to traditional media websites. There is advertising on the blog, but the SMH is using the same ads as the rest of the site. Individual bloggers can sell Google Adwords or other aggregated advertising, or sell directly to advertisers that are highly relevant to their readership. Blogging networks make it easier both for bloggers and advertisers to match up. So, what should advertisers be doing about advertising directly on blogs?
Read more →
Search is the interface, but who controls the relationship?
By Ross DawsonAn article in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph says that a consortium of major mobile phone companies – Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, and Cingular – are planning to meet in secret to discuss creating a mobile phone search engine. The last five years have shown that one of the most powerful places in the online space is search – that is many people’s primary interface to the wonderful world of the web. And you can make very good money from it (Google’s most recent quarterly operating income was $1.06 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion). So as attention shifts to the mobile world, there should be no shortage of players keen to challenge Google’s intentions of transferring its dominance in the internet into the mobile space.
A framework that I described in my book Living Networks, and have applied in numerous strategy consulting engagements, is highly relevant here. In short, there are six key elements to the “flow economy” based on the flow of information and ideas. Any customer offering needs all elements. These elements are usually provided by different companies, though some companies may provide several of them, or work in alliances to provide them seamlessly to customers. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is leveraging your existing positioning to move into other elements of the flow economy. A great example is how Apple, through the success of the iPod, controlled people’s Interface to music. This enabled them to shift to delivering Content through iTunes, and thus to build Relationships with consumers (which is usually not possible through the sale of devices).
In this case, the mobile phone companies provide Connectivity, and have been striving to leverage that into Relationships, Content, and Services, with highly varied success. If they can use their existing positioning across the landscape to control the Interface, they can get far greater revenues. Standards are the foundation of the flow economy, and Relationships are where most of the value can be extracted. Yet Interfaces (and also Content) have proven to be the most powerful leverage points to create Relationships. So the mobile phone consortium, Google, and other players are all trying to get to the same place, but starting from different positions on the strategic landscape. It will be a very interesting battle. This paragraph is of course an extremely simplistic analysis, but the framework can be used to go into far more depth in developing effective strategies. I’ll post some more detailed examples of using the flow economy framework at a later date.
In other commentary, PaidContent calls the Telegraph’s story “very speculative,” bringing up the highly relevant issue of EU anti-competition laws, while SMS Text News doesn’t believe the mobile companies can create a search engine good enough to rival Google. This post’s title is “European Mobile Companies don’t understand they’re just data pipes.” That’s exactly my point above, however there exists a strategic possibility to shift beyond being just pipes to doing more, and they’d be very foolish if they didn’t make a good attempt to do so.
Ad:tech Sydney: Keynote session – The New Media Mix
By Ross DawsonAd:tech has been the main event in town in advertising and technology for 10 years now, running conferences first in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, then Europe and Beijing. After being hit by the tech bust, Ad:tech is back stronger than ever, with close 10,000 people said to have attended its San Francisco exhibition last April. Next city on Ad:tech’s list is Sydney, where the inaugural Australian conference will be held this week. I understand there are already 350 registered for the conference, and 1000 for the exhibition – good turn-outs for this kind of event in Sydney – meaning the keynote sessions will be standing-room only.
I will be chairing two panels at Ad:tech – the keynote session on the second day on The New Media Mix, and a session on the first day on blogs as a marketing tool (more on that in a subsequent post). Other than myself, the keynote panelists will be:
* Richard Kimber, the recently appointed Managing Director South Asia for Google, and previously global head of e-marketing for HSBC.
* Harold Mitchell, Chairman of Mitchell and Partners, one of the largest media buying agencies in Australia, and one of the grand old men of the industry here.
* Foad Fadaghi, technology editor of BRW magazine, coming recently from a role as Research Director at Frost & Sullivan.
The intention will be to create a provocative conversation, bringing together some of our different perspectives and viewpoints. I will kick off by showing the Future of Media Strategic Framework as a reference point, and to introduce some of the focal issues and questions we’ll try to address duing the session.
Social media: Is the rise of social media fragmenting consumers’ attention and making them harder to reach? Or does it make the total space of media and the ability to impact people larger than it was?
User generated and advertiser generated content: Does the highly targetted nature of user generated content outweigh the lack of control over content? Do advertisers need to become creators of content outside traditional advertising formats?
Format shifting: Is the newfound ability to shift media in time, space, and format a fundamental threat to advertisers? Or does it open up opportunities to reach people in new ways?
Monetizing attention: Will the targetted, measurable nature of advertising on digital channels result in a wholesale shift of advertising dollars over the next decade? What impact will the rise of advertising aggregation have on industry structure?
New distribution channels: How far can mobile go as an advertising medium, and what will succeed in this space? Can advertising be inserted at the level of the device (phone, music or video player, PDA) rather than embedded into content?
It promises to be a fun session! I’ll report back afterwards with insights generated during the conversation.
Newspapers, search optimization, and transforming old-school editors
By Ross DawsonLast April I wrote a post about changes in newspaper headline writing. Editors were discovering that the witty, catchy headlines they wrote for their print versions weren’t working in the online versions. They weren’t easily visible in search engines, didn’t attract attention by readers using RSS aggregators, and generally meant articles were not getting read online. A very similar article appeared today on CNET, describing the travails of newspaper editors trying to make their print versions work in an online format.
The bottom line is that this is about education. The skills that have served editors and journalists admirably over the last decades need to be complemented by an understanding of how search engines, RSS readers, and social media websites such as Digg, Tailrank, Newsvine and their ilk work. In addtion, there is a new art and science of understanding the behaviors of online news readers. Some people read both print and online news in different situations, and some have shifted to read almost exclusively online. These are in fact demographically some of the most attractive readers. Training is required, and sometimes new people are needed to take the place of those who cannot or will not learn the new skills to succeed in this environment.
Mainstream media merges with social media, including the rise of news aggregation
By Ross DawsonAlex Iskold and Richard McManus have a great piece on Read/ Write Web titled “Mainstream Media Usage of Web 2.0 Services is Increasing”. The article details how many major media organizations are regularly including “Digg this”, “Tag on del.icio.us,” and other “web 2.0” features that we’ve grown used to seeing on blogs. Alex says:
Alex’s piece includes the following chart which shows web 2.0 functionality on major media sites.
As it happens, Future Exploration Network did a similar research exercise as part of a recent strategy project we did for a global news organization regarding the future of one of their online news sites. While we came up with some similar results to Alex, we also focused on personalization and aggregation functionality. At the moment the only major news sites that offer the ability for users to select their own news feeds from any media source are USA Today and Fox News. I haven’t yet had a chance to see the personalization features of MyTimes – the New York Times personalized news site, which is still under Beta. However I presume that it will offer this capability as well. Until very recently this open third-party aggregation functionality was only possibly from pure online properties, notably Yahoo! News, Netvibes, and of course any of a host of browser-based RSS aggregators. Big media content providers wanted to be just that – content providers. Now they are beginning to realize that providing quality content IN ADDITION to allowing readers to aggregate the best of the web creates a far stickier relationship. They can have the best of both worlds.
All of this reflects what I’ve written before about the symbiosis of mainstream media and social media – each learns from the other, integrates their best features, and feed off each other, until the boundaries between them are blurred beyond recognition.
Value Networks Masterclass in New Zealand with Verna Allee
By Ross DawsonBusiness and society are founded on networks – networks of communication, people, organizations, infrastructure, trade, and far more. This has always been true, but in our hyper-connected world the fundamental networked nature of our world is coming to the fore. In my book Living Networks I described how these networks are now coming to life. We’ve seen the rising prominence of network partly in how “social networks” has become one of the hottest phrases on the planet, describing the extraordinary phenomena of MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, Wikipedia, and a host of other new tools. Organizational network analysis (ONA) has been adopted as a powerful management tool by many leading organizations. Influence networks are now one of the hottest themes in PR and marketing. Open innovation, the most talked-about development in corporate innovation, is fundamentally based on tapping external networks. Yet one of the most powerful applications of network approaches works at the very highest level – that of the how value flows through these networks.
The concepts of Value Networks were first thoroughly developed by Verna Allee in her book the Future of Knowledge (2003), in which she described how she had been mapping the flows of tangible and intangible value in industry networks. Examples included Cisco’s extended network, value flows in the pharmaceutical industry and an engineering firm, among others. Over the last few years the field has grown rapidly, with now a real critical mass of tools and real-life examples. Organizations such as Cisco, Boeing, SAP, and others are ardent proponents and users of value networks approaches. The Value Networks Cluster brings together practitioners around the world, having run events around the US and Europe, and runs a very active and interesting Value Networks discussion group. Verna, working with Oliver Schwabe and others, has released a suite of Creative Commons-licensed open resources, tools, and applications for value networks analysis. The rapidly broadening understanding of the central role of networks in business, together with the development and maturation of practical tools and methodologies, means value networks approaches are likely to become very prominent in business over the next few years.
[This diagram was taken from a excellent introductory article by Verna Allee on Understanding Value Networks].
I’ve known Verna since 1997, when she had just published her seminal book The Knowledge Evolution. Over the years we’ve shared many ideas and much thinking on the role of networks, and continuously sought opportunities to work together. Verna goes to New Zealand regularly in her role as Visiting Professor at University of Waikato, and has also been doing work for organizations including the independent government research organization AgResearch. AgResearch have been so enthused by the value networks work that they’ve been doing with Verna that they are keen to share these approaches with the broader community in New Zealand. Verna and I have planned similar workshops together before, so Verna kindly asked me to co-facilitate a workshop with her. Our Value Networks Masterclass will be held this 1-2 March in Hamilton, New Zealand. Full details including the agenda are on the event website. The idea is to make this as practical as possible, moving from the foundational concepts of value networks, through case studies of applying value networks methodologies, to specific tools and methodologies. It will be great to work with Verna on this – please do pass on word if there are people in New Zealand who may be interested!