Launch of Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds at CrowdConf

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[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

When Getting Results From Crowds was published in December last year the intention from the start was to regularly revise the book, both to keep apace with the rapidly changing world of crowdsourcing, and to continue to improve it.

The Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds will be launched next week at CrowdConf in San Francisco, where all attendees will receive a complimentary copy. In fact participants in the Crowd Business Models Summit that I’m running on October 22, the day before CrowdConf will be the first people to get the book.
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Fantastic insights on the inspiring future of crowd business models

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I have just had my mind blown.

I have got off a call with three of the speakers in the Future of Crowd Business Models session at Crowd Business Models Summit, which will be held in San Francisco on October 22, the day before the major crowdsourcing conference CrowdConf.

What I heard from the speakers on what they will cover and the conversation we had was amazing. This is going to be an awesome session.

I can’t do justice to their ideas in a blog post, but here are a few notes from the conversation.

BYRON REESE is EVP of Innovation at Demand Media, having joined the company when his company PageWise, including its subsidiary Expert Village, was acquired by Demand Media.
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Crowdsourcing workshops in NYC: Crowds for marketing and Crowds for media and content

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I wrote Getting Results From Crowds to provide a broad view of the rapidly growing role of crowds in business and society, and how to get the best outcomes from using crowdsourcing. From there, I have been delving into what I see as some of the most important specific applications of crowds, including business models, marketing, and media.

I will be sharing some of that work, and bringing together some of the most talented and experienced people in these spaces at a series of events in the US in late October.

I have already written a little about the Crowd Business Models Summit on October 22 in San Francisco. The speaker line-up we have for that is fantastic; the event should put the topic of crowd business models squarely on the entrepreneurial agenda.

Later that week, as part of the Crowdsourcing Week venture, I will be running two crowdsourcing workshops in New York City:

Crowdsourcing for Marketing in Enterprise & Agencies

Crowdsourcing for Media & Content
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The ultimate in convenient banking: make payments by thinking

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In my presentation at yesterday’s media launch of ANZ’s Banking on Australia program, I spoke about new ways of making payments using biometrics.

An article in today’s Australian Financial Review reports:

“Biometric security” involves using fingerprints, voice records or eye scans to access secure systems instead of number-based passwords, which are much easier to steal or hack.

Speaking at an ANZ event in Melbourne on Thursday, futurist Ross Dawson said the “post-cash world” was coming to advanced economies.

“It’s inevitable we move to biometrics, things that measure who we are to uniquely identify us to enable easy payments,” he said.

“The US Department of Energy, for example, is using our thought waves to identify people. To think of something is obviously a great way to be able to pay for things.”

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The future of banking: biometrics take over cash, payments in fluid economy, personal digital agents

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This morning ANZ announced its Banking on Australia program, in which it will spend $1.5 billion over the next five years to reshape its business and invest in digital technology, with the immediate launch of a range of digital initiatives.

At the media event announcing the program at ANZ’s headquarters this morning I spoke about the future of banking, and ANZ Australia CEO Phil Chronican shared ANZ’s initiatives.

I will try to write more later about what I covered in my presentation. For now here are some excerpts from ANZ’s press release on some of the very interesting statistics from a survey performed by ANZ for the launch, together with some of my comments.
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Come experience Crowd Business Models Summit in San Francisco on October 22

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My book Getting Results From Crowds was designed as a highly practical overview of how to create value using crowdsourcing. However the last section on Crowd Business Models is perhaps where my deepest interests lie, and is one of the most important issues in the crowd space. Business models are increasingly based on crowds, so we need to understand how to make them work.

As such I wanted to bring together an event to focus attention on crowd business models. I am delighted to be partnering with CrowdConf, the premier crowdsourcing conference in the world, to run a half-day Crowd Business Models Summit immediately preceding CrowdConf at the same venue, UCSF at Mission Bay (where incidentally we also held our Future of Media Summit 2007).

For full event details see the Crowd Business Models Summit website on the CrowdConf site.
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The Future of Customer Service: Using technology to increase both efficiency and relationship strength

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Last week I gave the closing keynote at KANA Connect 2012 in Las Vegas, on The Future of Customer Service.

I packed in a wide-ranging view on where customer service is going, including the impact of connectivity, the rise of new channels, where value will reside in relationships, and what supports the integration and integrity that will be at the heart of successful customer service.

One of the key areas I covered was the shift in customer service channels, using a diagram I originally created for a keynote and supporting article on Creating the Future of Customer Relationships.


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How divergence in labor productivity is shaping the future of work

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My recently launched Future of Work framework provides a highly summarized overview of the future of work. Over coming months I will delve into specific aspects of the framework.

One of the most important issues is divergence in labor productivity, mentioned as the fourth point under Labor Productivity in the Economic Structure section.

Across industries as well as countries, the productivity of labor is diverging dramatically, creating job opportunities in some sectors and constraining them in others. There are many broader issues in shifts in labor productivity that I’ll come back to another time. For now, it’s worth looking at these two charts.


Source: Andrew McAfee
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The 5 elements that enable expertise networks to flourish

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Last week I gave a keynote at an internal conference of a large technology services firm that has recently acquired another firm. The conference brought together senior executives and managers from the two organizations so they could get to know each other and plan how they would work together with existing and new clients.

A significant part of my role was to provide a highly upbeat, optimistic, engaging perspective on the future of business. However I also wanted to address the specific issues they would be encountering in combining their capabilities.

Many years ago when I was working with a large law firm to help them develop their client relationship and cross-selling capabilities, I created a simple framework, shown below.

The fundamental issue for any significant professional firm is to match the best possible capabilities in the organization with the relevant opportunities for value creation at their clients.

This begins at the interface with the client. Whoever has any interaction with the client, including the relationship leader and relationship team, has responsibility to identify and bring to the client the most relevant capabilities of the firm. However there are 5 key steps that are required for that to happen.


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The future of fast food: faster, more convenient, healthier, more luxurious

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On Friday I was interviewed on the current affairs program Today Tonight about the future of fast food. Click on the image to see a video of the segment.

Perhaps the dominant trend in society today is increased expectations. Those expectations apply across all domains, but absolutely in the immediacy of our everyday lives.

As people feel – and increasingly are – time-poor, speed and convenience dominate. Not surprisingly, customers are expecting fast food to become even faster.
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