Keynote slides on The Transformation of Government

By

Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote at the annual conference of Institute of Public Affairs New South Wales, on the topic of The Transformation of Government.

Originally I was scheduled to follow the recently elected NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, but he has had to travel to Beijing, so he will present at the conference after the morning break via Telepresence.

It is actually quite significant for an outsider like myself to be invited to speak at the event, let alone on a big picture view of a rapidly changing world. The title of the conference is The Future Course of Modern Government, mirroring an excellent policy paper of the same name created by IPAA a few months ago. I blogged about the 11 recommendations in the report, which are well worth a read if you don’t have the opportunity to read the entire paper.

The conference is intended to be a landmark event, several months since the NSW government changed after 16 years of Labor incumbency, and anticipating potentially dramatic change in how the state government functions in the years ahead. The themes of the conference – Technology, Innovation, Services Reform, Collaboration – are now squarely on the government’s agenda, and the reason I was invited to give the keynote.

Below is my Prezi presentation to support my keynote. I will shortly release the underlying framework as a pdf.


Read more →

The current 10 most viral video ads

By

Contagious Magazine does a regular Most Contagious Viral Video Chart Round Up. It’s not clear what criteria they use to rank the videos, but they clearly are all enormously contagious videos.

Go to the current Most Contagious Viral Video Chart Round Up on Contagious for the full list of the top 20 viral videos, plus some interesting commentary. The top 10 videos are below – there is some awesome entertainment in there to while a way a moment, and in some cases become inspired…

1. T-Mobile: Angry Birds Live

Read more →

Strategic positioning in the flow economy: 3 action steps

By

Below is an excerpt from my book Living Networks that describes how to develop effective strategies in what I call the “flow economy” of information of ideas, where today almost all value resides. You can also download the complete Chapter 7 on The Flow Economy from the book website.

While the examples I used in the book are now a little dated, the strategic concepts are still absolutely relevant. I find that senior executives and strategists at my corporate clients continue to find the strategic planning process outlined here extremely useful. While the flow economy framework is most obviously relevant in technology, media, telecommunications, and services, it can be usefully applied in almost any industry.

Strategic positioning in the flow economy

floweconomyframework.jpg
The six elements of the flow economy
Read more →

A critical point in the MegaTrend of Creative Enablement: DSLRs are revolutionizing video production

By

One of the biggest, broadest, most important trends of the last few decades has been how technology has democratized the tools of creation and production.

From early desktop publishing applications and screen-based sequencers in the 1980s, through to 3D printing of prototypes today, the production of professional quality output in just about every creative endeavor has become vastly easier and cheaper.

This MegaTrend of Creative Enablement means that it is no longer money or organizational resources that determine what creative people can achieve. It is simply their creativity, which can be fully expressed as never before without significant resources.


Read more →

The dilemma for professionals: How do you respond to anonymous leaks and slander?

By

Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others.

It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the local arms of the Big 4 accounting firms. FirmSpy provides insights into internal issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and staff satisfaction and turnover, resulting in Australian Financial Review calling it “Australia’s own Wikileaks for lawyers and accountants”.

For those accused of wrongdoing, there are limited possibilities for response. The article says:
Read more →

Integrating social media into cross-channel customer relationships

By

Una giornata di pioggia e di sole
A week ago I was in Sanya, China, where I gave the guest keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference.

NICE Systems’ history is in providing voice recording and analytics to companies with many customer interactions, such as banks and telcos, for customer services and security. From there it has morphed into providing a series of broad-based platforms to improve customer interactions across channels.

In the world of Customer Relationship Management, an increasingly important and now dominant issue is effectively managing relationships across channels. The critical ‘single customer view’ becomes more difficult yet ever more important as new channels such as chat, mobile apps, and a variety of social media are added to existing customer communication channels.
Read more →

The state of expert networks and the rising role of LinkedIn

By

It is some years now since ‘expert networks’ have become a significant force, linking subject matter experts in science, technology, and business to clients, largely in funds management and finance, usually at very healthy hourly rates. Clients such as hedge funds that are investing in particular sectors or companies want to know more about issues such as the viability of drug development processes, or when they can, about internal issues like staff turnover. A survey showed that over 40% of institutional investors found that expert networks were an “extremely” or “very important” aspect of their company research.

Clearly there is the potential for insider information to be made available if people are currently, or even possibly recently, employed by the company in question. The expert networks, most notably Gerson Lehrman Group, which is reported to control two-thirds of the market, have strict clauses in their agreements about what can be discussed by experts. But sometimes things go too far. An FBI probe into a consultant working through Gerson Lehrman Group was launched in December. The New York Times recently reported that after their success convicting Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon of insider trading, federal authorities are turning their attention to expert networks.
Read more →

Google+ may miss the big opportunity: spanning internal and external social networks

By

I was delighted to get an invite to Google+. Then amazed when I was told I can’t use Google+ because we use Google Apps.

It seems that Google is expecting to make Google+ available to Google Apps users “in a few months” with some .edu users possibly trialling it sooner. As many others have expressed, it is very frustrating to be delayed several months into the hottest new social space because we are more dedicated Google users than others.

Andy Pattinson kindly pointed me to the following video and form for ‘entities’ (companies, brands etc.) to apply for a Google+ profile.

This is fair enough, but it is coming from exactly the same mindset as Facebook. Individuals build social networks around their Profiles, and companies, brands, media etc. build Pages (in Facebook) in which there are slightly different parameters on how you communicate with their network.
Read more →

China leads the world in customer service, starting at its borders

By

Last night I flew into Sanya, at the southernmost tip of China, to give the keynote at the NICE Interactions 2011 conference tomorrow.

When I walked up to give my passport to the immigration official, on the counter in front of me was a box with 4 large buttons. There were green 2 smiley faces saying you were happy or very happy with your interaction, and two sad faces saying you were unhappy with the service or that it was taking too long.

My passport was quickly processed and passed back to me with a genuine smile, so I pressed the happy button.

While the Chinese visa application process requires significant documentation, both times I have applied for Chinese visas in the last couple of months I was in and out of the visa application center within minutes – it was very efficient.

So, the big question is when US immigration will learn from Chinese lessons in excellence in customer service.

The 8 sources of customer value in mobile apps and marketing

By

When I recently ran a webinar series for Ketchum on Tapping the Power of Mobile, our second session focused on running successful mobile campaigns. Perhaps the most important thing that companies and agencies delving into mobile marketing need to understand is that there must be real value for customers and consumers in order for the campaign to have any success. There is an enormously deep and broad pool of mobile apps and services available, and brands will only get a look-in if they are genuinely creating value. Only at that point is there any chance of marketing value being created.

Below is a summary of the 8 sources of customer value in mobile. Any campaign that has any chance of success must be creating strong customer value in at least one of these spaces, and possibly several.


Here are examples of the 8 sources of value.
Read more →