ABC Radio National: Discussion on the future of influence

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ABC Radio National Future Tense this morning featured a discussion on the future of influence (click here for the podcast of both the radio program, and the unabridged discussion between Duncan Riley and myself). It kicks off with a quote from Chris Saad saying that influence and reputation are the currencies of the day, even more than attention.

When asked why we rebadged Future of Media Summit as Future of Influence Summit this year, I explained why “influence is the future of media”, and the five key trends in how influence is transforming society.

Duncan pointed to how the rise of Internet and social media means that influence can now be global. He also raised the issue of trust agents, and what it takes to be trusted as a publisher. We have more choice in what we look for, and so we need markers of credibility.

On the topic of business models for influence, I talked about two key ideas. The first is whether and how individuals can profit from their influence, and how that will develop. The second is the emergence of influence as a currency, and the companies that profiting from making influence explicit for companies.

Listen to the long version of the interview for more details.

Will Influencism supplant Capitalism? The emergence of the influence economy

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One of the most interesting topics at the recent Future of Influence Summit was the emergence of business models for influence. Some particularly intriguing issues were raised in the Business Models for Influence and Reputation panel, suggesting that one of the key currencies of the future will be influence.

The panellists generally agreed that total revenue in the influence sector, including the companies represented on the panel (Rapleaf, Buzzlogic, Klout) is around US$100 million. The primary business model is providing insights to companies on who the influencers are in their customer base.

One example given is a hotel that asks guests checking in for their Twitter name, swiftly ascertaining how influential in social media they are, and treating them accordingly. If someone who has real reach is their guest, the hotel might upgrade them or otherwise treat them in a way that they are likely to rave about.

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The shift from corporate brands to personal brands

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Was just catching up on Ray Wang and Jeremiah Owyang joining Charlene Li’s Altimeter group from Altimeter.

Jeremiah is quoted in the New York Times:

Mr. Owyang said that his story holds lessons for other companies. “I think this is an interesting trend that many companies are going through — personal brands are here to stay, alongside corporate ones, and the key to success is to make sure they help each other,” he said. “But now the power is shifting to the workers, because they can take their network and a lot of what they know with them, with these social media tools.”

The third trend in my recent Five key trends in how influence is transforming society is:

Reputation shifts from the corporation to the individual

I strongly believe in Jeremiah’s point that individuals and corporations need to support each others’ brands. In fact one of the important reasons I have pointed to as to why companies should support use of social networks is that it helps their employees to build their own brands, to the benefit of both individual and company.

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

Catch-up with Peter Williams of Deloitte Digital – the intersection of digital and professional services

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I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with Deloitte Digital‘s CEO Peter Williams, someone who is always on the vanguard of innovation in professional services. A few things he mentioned about what they’re up to:

* Yammer (enterprise micro-blogging) has taken off and is getting substantial use across Deloitte Australia. They did a security test on Yammer for some clients and it came out solid. They are still using the free version though are talking to Yammer about a paid version.

* Deloitte has implemented an internal ‘Innovation Academy’ which among other functions enables idea submission and voting, which they’ve created by mashing up several tools. The system has generated ideas already worth $15 million to the company.

* One of the ideas was GreenID, a joint venture between Deloitte, Edentiti and Global Data Company that provides fast online identity verification for clients who have traditionally done this offline.

* They have also created an XBRL gateway to facilitate conversion of accounts into XBRL format.

* A collaboration with Cooperative Research Centre ACID yielded an interesting visualization and view of the mental models of how ideas are generated in the professional services frontline. Unfortunately this is not available online yet.

Lots of nice things happening here.

I recently wrote from my own experience about Six high-return initiatives for driving innovation in professional services, and Chapter 9 of my book Living Networks is primarily about how digital channels are changing how professional services firms operate.

A futurists’ dinner: the future of content and remote engagement

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Last night media futurist Gerd Leonhard , Richard Watson, author of Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, and I caught up for dinner. Gerd is in Sydney for the first time for a couple of events, including The Insight Exchange’s Creating Value With Content on Tuesday (see the event review), and Richard happens to be in Sydney amidst a hectic global speaking schedule.

futuristsdinner.jpg

We had a fascinating discussion, largely on the future of content, and in particular how to leverage our own content. As futurists (I will write a blog post soon on ‘why I am happy to be called a futurist’ – that’s another story) what we sell is content in a variety of formats.

The most prominent monetizable channels we have are speaking, consulting (which can take a variety of forms), and books and reports (which now also can be packaged and sold in multitude of ways). Of course we all throw out plenty of free content on the web as part of the mix.

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The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy

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This morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It’s not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)

As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these – scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).

SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:

RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence

Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.

COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation

Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.

Together these dimensions yield:

SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

World2030_frame.gif

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SAP webinar on the US stimulus package and how to benefit from it

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On July 29 at 2pm ET SAP is running a webinar on the US economic stimulus package and ways to be able to take advantage of it. Full details here and below.

Tap Into a “Hidden” Stimulus for Your Business:

Understand Its impact. Discover another “Hidden Stimulus”

The current $787 billion Stimulus will surely help a lot of small and midsize businesses. For everyone else, however, there’s another even bigger “Stimulus” that isn’t in the news.

On July 29th, a panel of leading business experts will examine both:

• What the current Stimulus means to businesses like yours: find out exactly where the Stimulus will help businesses like yours and where it will not, and more importantly, what you need to do to best leverage the Stimulus package for your own benefits

• How to uncover the “Hidden Stimulus” in your own business: for businesses that don’t build bridges or solar panels, experts will share strategies, tools and examples to help find the other “hidden stimulus”—the one that saves you money year after year by purging inefficient business processes.

Click here to register

[DISCLOSURE:] I am being paid to participate in this webinar. That said, it promises to be extremely interesting :-)

Where do you want to play? Where the economy used to be or where the economy is going?

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Today asset manager James Altucher writes in Wall Street Journal that The Internet is Dead (As An Investment). There has already been a solid response, most notably from venture capital investor Fred Wilson, writing The Internet is Alive and Well (As An Investment), as well as posts from HipMojo, Stephen Arnold, and Elias Bizannes.

The nub of Altucher’s argument?

1. “Internet companies now should be treated, at best, like utility companies” such as electricity.

2. “Nobody can figure out a business model.”

Given a six-month timeframe, which Altucher seems to be taking, these arguments could be valid. However moving beyond that, it is delusional to think that the Internet will not:

a) continue to transform existing industries, as it has for more than a decade;

b) create value both in current forms and new ways.

There is no question that most investors would prefer to invest where there are clearly understood, long-established business models. However just because business models are rapidly evolving and changing in a new space doesn’t mean that there won’t be massive value creation. In fact, given that an increasing proportion of economic activity is shifting into ‘virtual’ activities, we have every reason to believe that that’s where a large proportion of long-term economic growth will be centered.

It will be a hairy ride for those on board, no question about it. In return I expect we will get what in economic jargon is known as ‘supernormal returns’. Either way, I know where I’d prefer to play.

The story of my life: reflections on how my interests were shaped

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I just discovered that an extended profile piece on me that appeared in Inside Knowledge magazine in October 2006 is now available online under the title The Knowledge: Ross Dawson.

It is fascinating to me to read it a few years later and consider what has and hasn’t changed. It provides an extremely good overview of my life story and how my work interests have been shaped. It also picked up on my personal interests such as improvisational music and recording as well as my family.

Please have a read of the full article if you’re interested – it’s a good story. Below are a few quotes from me taken from the article.

“The network approach to open innovation is very powerful, especially when you can uncover the nodes, find out how these domains are connected and how you can link people more usefully,” he says. “Some people don’t understand the idea of open innovation. They had better get it soon as you haven’t a hope if you rely solely on your own internal innovation capabilities.”

…

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Uncovering high-value applications of organizational network analysis

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New Scientist has published an interesting article titled Email patterns can predict impending doom, which reviews findings by researchers at Florida Institute of Technology. They, as many researchers, used the email logs from Enron, which have been made available for analysis by federal investigators.

The key finding from the research was that the number of active email cliques, in which groups exchanged emails between each other but not outside, went from 100 to 800 a month before the collapse of the company. This appeared to reflect decreasing trust across the broader organization and increasing stress. This indicates that very strong indicators of organizational health can be gleaned from network analysis.

Network analysis by Advanced Human Technologies of top executives in global corporation

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