The many and varied risk factors in Facebook’s IPO

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My favorite part of reading S-1 IPO filings is always the risk factors. They are seemingly endless, as the company tries to cover its ass for all the things that might conceivably go wrong. But they are often very insightful in pointing to the real issues facing the company.

To save you reading it all, here is a highly selective summary of just a few of the interesting risk factors Facebook points to in its IPO filing:

If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.
…
Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:

* we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
* there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
* we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
* we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
etc.
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52% of Americans did mobile phone research while in stores over the holiday season

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The cross-over between physical and online retail is not just for innovators and techies. It is the way people shop. In a 30 day period spanning Christmas, 52% of Americans who have mobile phones (and who cares about the rest? :-) ) used mobile phones to help them make buying decisions, according to research from Pew Internet.


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ABC TV: Facebook’s IPO, Apple’s cash pile, and RIM’s woes

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I was interviewed last night on ABC’s The Business in a broad-ranging discussion about Facebook’s IPO, Apple’s cash pile, and Research In Motion’s future.


Click on the image to watch the interview on the ABC website

I’ll add some more comments on these very interesting topics shortly.

The headache (and opportunity) of managing your company’s online reputation

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In a world of instantaneous information flows, managing company reputation is ever more fraught.

An interesting article in Techworld titled How to manage your online reputation goes into the issue, describing how pharma firm GlaxoSmithKline had one of its trademarks hijacked by a dodgy company. The piece goes on:

“Reputations are more visible – and more vulnerable – than ever before,” says futurist Ross Dawson, who cites reputation as one of the key themes for 2012. So what can you do to ensure that your organisation is remembered for the right reasons?

The article then suggests some strategies, including this quote from me:
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Open business: Sharing our group priorities for 2012 – Why not?

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A year ago I shared a visualization of our AHT Group Business Model.

Following that, I am now sharing our group 2012 Priorities. This comes from the principle of Open Business you can see in the 7 Enablers for our strategy. Our intention is to share more about the drivers of our business. The 2012 priorities document was created for our own internal use to guide our activities and use of resources through this year. However we are happy to make that open, in case anyone else finds looking at our approach is useful to them.


Click on the image for full-size pdf
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Looking for crowdsourcing workshop/ event partners: Europe, North America, Asia

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A book can be a very good way to distill and present useful information and guidance. We have done our best to make Getting Results From Crowds as pragmatic and practical as possible in helping organizations to use crowds to grow business and new possibilities. However for some issues and some people, a high-impact workshop or participatory event can be a more direct way of learning new ways to do things. As such I am planning a series of participatory workshops around the world that will build on the content of Getting Results From Crowds.

We are looking for event partners around the world who are interested in working with us bring these workshops to their local communities. Please go through this brief document for an overview of what we are suggesting:

Crowdsourcing Workshops: Partner offer

View more presentations from Ross Dawsn

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Looking for exceptional events/ sponsorship manager in Sydney: Future/ tech/ influencers – Part-time

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We have just advertised on Seek for an events manager. We have been less active in the events space for the last two years as other priorities have been taking our attention, but we are beginning to build back our activity.

Please pass this on to people you know who may be interested.

Exceptional events/ sponsorship manager in Sydney: Future/ tech/ influencers – Part-time

We want talent!
We believe in talent and we want exceptional people. We see a particularly deep pool of very talented people who do not want full-time work. As such we are looking for someone working around 8-16 hours per week.
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OPEN: Using crowdsourced legislation to beat SOPA

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SOPA, The Stop Online Piracy Act, is big news in many ways, not least in marking what is likely to be a historical landmark in the battle between traditional media and a now-powerful new media, played out in political influence and the shaping of critical legislation.

One of the most important ways to beat SOPA is to provide a good alternative. The majority of politicians seem to think that online intellectual property rights need better protection, so to kill SOPA requires providing something that can supplant it.

Into this field comes Rep. Darrell Issa, whose involvement in legislation to allow equity crowdfunding I wrote about a few months ago. Issa is essentially seeking to ‘crowdsource’ a bill. Good.is reports:
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5 important ways in which crowdsourcing creates business value

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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.
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The decade ahead for media

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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.
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