The continuing devaluation of LinkedIn connections

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How many LinkedIn requests are you getting?

Very likely significantly more than you were getting just a few months ago.

LinkedIn reached 100 million users in March. As one of the first 10,000 users, I early on saw the potential of a purely professional social network.

It consistently grew in size and user value over the years, however now that everyone is piling on to the LinkedIn bandwagon, the value of LinkedIn personal connections and networks are decreasing at what seems like an accelerating pace.
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Corporate blogging: value versus risks

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Knowledge@Australian School of Business recently published an interesting article on corporate blogging, which drew on an interview with me. Here are the quotes it took from my interview, along with a few comments.

One of the greatest dangers is not getting involved in blogging at all, claims Ross Dawson – futurist, blogger and chairman of Advanced Human Technologies, a company that consults on “the network economy”.

It’s certainly not that every company needs to be blogging, far from it. But many companies that would get great value from blogging, in particular for defending their reputation online, are being held back by overwrought fears of the potential dangers.
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The implications of the new broader, flatter distribution of music taste

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The distribution of music taste and consumption has shifted dramatically over the decade years, and will continue to evolve significantly in coming years.

Back before a dozen years ago, radio and MTV exposed people to a limited range of music from label playlists, and the cost of records and CDs made it hard to experiment with new music.

The first big change from that landscape was the widespread availability of online music downloads, which suddenly massively broadened the music libraries of the minority of people who were active downloaders, though didn’t give people an easy way of discovering music they liked that they hadn’t heard before.
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Research: The acceleration of Australian banks’ use of social media

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Financial services is one of the most industries in which the use of social media is the most relevant, not least because customer service is a critical differentiator between highly commoditized offerings. While financial services and banking were traditionally highly relationship-based, the shift to online has significantly eroded those relationships. Social media, used well, provides an opportunity to build relationships in a world in which most financial services are executed online.

In a global context, Australian banks were fairly slow to adopt the use of social media, however more recently a number have become a lot more active as they recognize its fundamental importance to their future.

Vindaya Senadheera, Prof. Matthew Warren, and Dr. Shona Leitch from Deakin University have done some interesting research in their paper A study on how Australian banks use social media.

To analyze the banks’ activity they use the Honeycomb framework of social media which was presented by Kietzmann et al in their paper Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media, which points to the key elements of social media engagement as Identity, Groups, Relationships, Presence, Sharing, Conversations, and Reputation.

Here are a few key points from the research

Twitter:

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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of newspapers

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Continuing our series of conversations between fellow-futurist Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here is our session on the future of newspapers.

Here are a few notes from our conversation:
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The extraordinary personal value of the web: $140 billion is the tip of the iceberg

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How much value do you get from the web? A lot more than you pay for it.

We may quibble about the cost of bandwidth and online services, and in some cases we should, but the reality is the value we get from connectivity and web-based services is massive.

Earlier this year McKinsey & Co released research titled The Web’s €100 billion surplus (registration required). The key findings are shown below.


Source: McKinsey
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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on the future of Twitter

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Continuing our series of conversations on the future with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here we discuss the future of Twitter.

Some of the topics we discuss include:
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Where Google+ needs to go: Why we need to be able to follow parts of people’s personas

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The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success.

The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family, and information about a boating event to their yacht club friends.

This effectively addresses privacy issues in allowing us to share both public and private information on the one platform, and not have to divide ourselves across different profiles.

However even our public personas have many facets. One person can be a leading software developer, music enthusiast, food lover, skier, and overall a lovable person. All of that is public – there are no constraints on sharing in any of those spaces.

Some people will want to follow everything that person shares. Many may be only interested in their thoughts on software development, and not care about the rest. Yet they have no choice – either they follow everything that person shares or nothing.

Gartner analyst and VP Brian Prentice brought this into focus in a recent Google+ post:
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Futurist conversations: Ross Dawson and Gerd Leonhard on Open vs Closed Systems

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Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.

Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
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Futurist conversation: Gerd Leonhard and Ross Dawson on the future of music

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Continuing our series of conversations on the future between Gerd Leonhard and myself, today’s session is on the future of music.

Here are a few of the points we made:
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