5 important ways in which crowdsourcing creates business value

By

The intelligent use of crowdsourcing can have many benefits for companies – as well as government and non-profit organizations – in achieving their objectives.

Here is a brief excerpt from Chapter 3 on Crowds and Business Value of Getting Results From Crowds

The business value of using crowds
Through history, companies have been limited in what they can achieve through the scope of their internal resources and how well they can draw on external resources. Crowdsourcing has the potential to create enormous value for businesses by giving easy access to an essentially unlimited pool of talent and capabilities. Those organizations that have the skills and competences to draw on external crowds, as well as in tapping the best ideas from their ‘internal crowds’, have an immense advantage over those companies that rely solely on their internal resources and traditional service firms.
Read more

The decade ahead for media

By

The latest issue of the annual publication Media Trends + Strategy magazine kicks off with a feature article I wrote titled The Decade Ahead for Media. Here is the article:

The decade ahead for media

The future of the media industry as a whole is extraordinarily bright. Alongside the extraordinary rise of social media and a connected world, in the last years we have learned the previously undiscovered depths of the intrinsic hunger humans have for media. As value creation in the global economy increasingly shifts to the flow of information and ideas, and every company can be considered a media organisation, those with the established capabilities, structures, and relationships in media creation and dissemination have an unparalleled opportunity before them.
Read more

Crowdsourcing management reviews: doing it before staff do it for themselves

By

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

Harvard Business Review has once again kicked off the year with a List of Audacious Ideas. One of them is Crowdsourcing Management Reviews for Better Management. Authors Linda Hill and Kent Lineback say:
Read more

Dominant themes for 2012: transformation and beyond

By

In December I created a list of 12 themes to frame the year ahead, and then explored the ideas in a number of media interviews. The slides for the 12 themes have been seen almost 50,000 times now, suggesting they struck a chord somewhere. It’s now interesting to reflect on these, especially the response from the media.

Read more

In the global talent economy over 50% will be mobile workers

By

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

Research firm IDC has forecast that there will be 1.3 billion ‘mobile workers’ in the world by 2015, representing 37.2% of the global workforce. This points to the massive explosion of what I call the ‘global talent economy’, in which talent can be and will be anywhere.

The forecasts suggest that the bulk of the growth will be in Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), which will see 838 million mobile workers in 2015, up 237 million from 2010, representing well over half the global mobile workforce.
Read more

Harley-Davidson goes direct to the crowd after initial success with creative crowdsourcing

By

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

Harley-Davidson has been in the vanguard of using crowdsourcing to fuel its creative marketing initiatives. That initial success has fueled its appetite, with its latest initiative a Facebook app that takes idea generation to a far broader crowd.

Last year I wrote about how Harley-Davidson had launched a major advertising campaign using Victors & Spoils, an agency built on crowdsourcing principles.

Harley-Davidson was initially cautious, saying:
Read more

Top 10 posts on the future of media

By

Another quick selection of my most popular posts from 2011, this time on the topic of the future of media:

1. Predictions for media industry in 2011

Social news curation, crowd sourced journalism, multi-platform distribution, personalized advertising and tablet media will be just some of the key trends shaping the year ahead.
Read more

The spirit of Sydney: an extraordinary New Year’s Eve celebration

By

Last night I was privileged to see in the New Year at the harbour-side broadwalk of the Sydney Opera House, at the Lord Mayor Clover Moore‘s party.

Personally, it was probably the best New Year’s Eve that I’ve ever had, not least because it was an absolutely fantastic party.

I wish I could do justice to the evening with an in-depth review, not least of the extraordinary fireworks and spectacle master-minded by designer Marc Newson, whose work I wrote about last year. Below is a brief excerpt of the display.


Read more

Today show: Social media and technology trends for 2012

By

Yesterday I appeared on the Australia national breakfast program Today, talking about what we can expect in social media and technology in 2012. I was on holidays in Melbourne so spoke from the studio there. You can see the clip below, or on the Today Show Video page, under the title Social Trends for 2012.

It is always hard to fit in a lot of content into a breakfast TV format, however I managed to cover thoughts on Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, augmented reality glasses, Siri and voice interfaces among other topics.

From news-on-paper to news-on-many-channels

By

I’m officially on holidays, but back at home between a family Christmas and beach sojourn and doing quite a few interviews as I go, so I’ll slip in a quick blog post or two. :-)

Yesterday I was interviewed by Toronto radio station Newstalk 1010 about the future (or lack thereof) of newspapers, coming off the news that New York Times has sold its regional newspapers.

They of course wanted me to talk about my Newspaper Extinction Timeline from last year, and I ran through some of the economic reasons why remnant demand for newspapers doesn’t necessarily mean there will continue to be supply.
Read more