Ad: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.
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!
Professional networks and marketing without advertising
By Ross DawsonOne of my deepest interests is professional networks – how groups of independent professionals coalesce to serve clients. I’ve written about professional networks in both of my books, and this will be a central theme of one of my future books. Future Exploration Network is my own implementation of a professional network, in which we bring together global best-of-breed consultants and thinkers as required for specific client projects around the world.
One of the more interesting and successful professional networks I’ve seen is Connect Marketing in Australia, led by the energetic Carolyn Stafford. This started from a series of networking breakfasts for marketing professionals. It has now grown to a national network of professionals, with Connect providing clients with introductions to appropriate professionals, a series of packaged offerings, and the ability to create ad-hoc teams for specific projects. While Connect focuses on the small to medium size sector, it also does work for some top global brands.
Carolyn, as part of her own very successful promotion efforts, has written a book, Small Business, Big Brand, that provides 33 marketing tips for business, together with a wealth of case studies. There is also a mini version of the book with just 5 tips, which Carolyn has kindly allowed me to put on my blog – you can download it for free here. You can also purchase the physical book here. The downloadable mini version includes a case study on Future Exploration Network on how we promoted the Future of Media Summit 2006, titled “Stop wasting your money on ADVERTISING”.
This section of the ebook, including the Future Exploration Network case study, is below.
Read more →
Will micropayments transform publishing and the internet?
By Ross DawsonMicropayments on the internet have been a major topic of discussion since the mid-1990s. The internet supposedly creates a “liquid economy” in which products and services can flow easily around the planet. Yet a foundation for any business is the ability to get paid. Most transactions are done through credit cards, with Paypal a rising alternative, yet these systems are either not appropriate for very small payments, due to high transaction fees, or are not widespread enough. As such, it is almost impossible to charge for anything worth less than a few dollars. That’s fine for relatively expensive items such as books, but makes everyday content such as news, analysis, and humour very hard to charge for.
Bill Gates said today at the World Economic Forum at Davos that Microsoft is launching a points-based micropayments system. As Robert McLaws and Dean Collins have pointed out, similar systems have already been implemented by Microsoft for Xbox Live to enable simple online transactions. Not for the first time, a concept tested in the gaming community is now reaching the broader community. Mary Jo Foley harks back to Passport, Microsoft’s aborted attempted in 2001 to create a “digital wallet” amid a suite of online services. Today, as then, Microsoft’s power cuts two ways: many get exposed to Microsoft’s offerings and view them as credible, yet there is strong reticence at Microsoft’s power. The more limited scope of the current offering, where consumers buy a portfolio of points for $10 or $20, then spend them online, will make this a far more palatable offering.
As Donna Bogatin and a number of others have noted, a good micropayment system could disrupt Google’s Adwords program. Publisher may be able to make better money by charging tiny amounts to visitors to read their wares, than they can by putting up advertisements. There are two big uncertainties here. One is whether people will be prepared to pay even small amounts for content, now that an everything-is-free mentality has built up. Even if that turns out to be possible, Microsoft’s challenge is to become the de facto standard for online micropayments. In this domain more than most, network effects reign – online one micropayments systems is going to win. I believe that in the long run a micropayments system will be central to the internet. But I’m not convinced that either of the two conditions will be met for a good while. It is an idea whose time is coming, but may not yet be quite here. Publishing will definitely be transformed when micropayments are part of the general infrastructure, by creating a better business model to encourage high-quality, targetted content. Let’s see how this one pans out.
The magic of data visualization for everyone
By Ross DawsonEvery day I am amazed afresh by the transformative power of the Web. Today I have discovered Many Eyes, a site hosted by IBM’s AlphaWorks. It combines open participation with a wonderful set of visualization tools. As such anyone can upload data sets, and then create sophisticated visual representations of those data sets, including scatterplots, tree maps, histograms, bubble diagrams, network maps and far more. Anyone can then either reuse the data sets, create new visualizations, add comments, or blog about the visualizations. To try it out I created in around one minute a bubble diagram representation of the frequency of words in the English language (See below for the non-interactive diagram – I won’t link directly, as I think generating the diagram is rather resource-intensive – have a look at the visualization gallery that includes it). In the first edition of my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, which was published in 2000, I wrote about both data visualization and concept visualization (which uses visual representations to convey concepts rather than information). Both of these will be fundamental in a world in which we are swamped with information. While I haven’t spent as much time on visualization over the last years, I am shifting back towards this space, not least in facilatating clients in easily understanding and responding to strategic issues.
In Tim O’Reilly’s very interesting post about the site, he asked Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, the people who conceived Many Eyes, about their inspiration. Fernanda calls it ‘“social data analysis,” in which “playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis”. Martin says that their goal is to “democratize” visualization. These are seriously valuable tools being provided for free to the community at large, where one person can use the tools for their own purposes, then have their ideas be taken up and developed further by others. I’ve long used AlphaWorks as one of the best and earliest examples of open innovation. It’s great to see them both offering this kind of value to the community, and have this fully integrated into their business models. Note that another social data visualization site, Swivel, launched before Many Eyes – it doesn’t appear to have as rich visual functionality, as Brian Dennis notes, but has far more data sets uploaded for people to play with.
IBM and social networking in the enterprise
By Ross DawsonIBM has just launched Lotus Connections, a suite of collaboration software, with functionality including staff profiles, communities, project spaces, social bookmarking, and blogging. This is a major release, but has long been on the cards. Back in November 2005 I discussed how Lotus executives were seeing the future in terms of social software. At the time blogs, photo sharing, social bookmarks and similar tools for consumers were rapidly emerging. These clearly had massive applicability to large corporations, where the tools and approaches of knowledge management had never fulfilled on their promise. Since then IBM has continued to roll out social software applications inside its own 300,000-strong organization and to select clients. There is no question that IBM sees social software as a key enabler of productivity in large organizations, and will continue to focus on development of the platforms.
There has been an interesting range of responses to the announcement. Steve Borsch says that it “legitimizes the entire category.” It certainly helps to have this major announcement, though the reality is that IBM and Microsoft have been active in this space in various ways for some time. There are a number of smaller companies providing social software for the enterprise, including SocialText, Blogtronix, iUpload, and Traction. All of them are finding that corporations are rapidly becoming receptive to these approaches. No doubt this trend will accelerate, bringing in another wave of corporations after the early adopters.
More intriguingly, the conclusion that Larry Dignan of ZDNet draws from IBM entering the market is that “the social networking run is over, kaput, done, finished.” I can only presume Larry is not familiar with what has been done over the last ten years in enabling collaboration inside the enterprise, what has and hasn’t worked, and how this release relates to previous enterprise collaboration software. This release is by no means a massive change in direction for the industry – much of IBM’s release today has been foreshadowed in enterprise software developments over the last few years. Larry no doubt thinks organizations would perform better if they communicated solely with email.
“Social networks” basically means people are connected and communicate. If you don’t have social networks, you don’t have an organization. We now have better software tools than in the past to enable people to communicate and be productive – it’s that simple. Not liking SecondLife or other applications that are tagged “social networkng” has no bearing on the value of the latest releases that support enterprise collaboration.
On a related note, I’ve just discovered that Ask.com uses what I’ve written on my blog when asked “what is enterprise 2.0?” I’m still planning to do a more lengthy post on enterprise 2.0, what it means, and why it’s important sometime soon.
Interview on mobile social networking
By Ross DawsonSocial networking has being the hot, hot trend over the last few years. Over the next few years mobile social networking will in turn become massive. There have been a number of interesting initiatives I’ve referrred to over the last years in this blog and my books, including Dodgeball and its acquisition by Google, the location-based Meetro, and Japan’s Imahima. Now that a large proportion of people in developed countries have rich media capabilities and location capabilities on their phones and handheld devices, the stage is set for mobile social networking to soar. Proximity dating (in which you are linked with compatible people who are currently in the immediate vicinity) is something I first wrote about in 2002. A potential killer app is the ability to see on a map your friends’ location and to arrange meetings. Of course, existing social networking platforms will go mobile, as in the recently announced deal between MySpace and Cingular to offer MySpace on mobile phones. There are many more dimensions to how mobile social networking will become pervasive – this is a field that will explode in the next years.
I was recently interviewed on mobile social networking for the Mobile Media Show and spoke about these and related issues – the podcast is available from here. To quote from the Mobile Media Show introduction: