5 central facets of media and PR in China

By

Last month I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York on The Future of Global Media. Immediately after my keynote I participated in a panel on media in the BRIC countries. The other panellists were Ketchum executives from Brazil, Russia, and India. Since their China team were kept at home with client commitments I stood in to talk about China, given my background in the region. Details on the keynote and panel are here.

Here are notes I made to prepare for the panel session, where we were asked to share 5 key issues about the media landscape in our country.

0. Asia and China encompass very diverse media markets.

Across Asia media markets take very different shapes. The largest market by revenue is Japan, which is very different from Western developed economies, notably in the size and resilience of the newspaper market, and the depth of penetration of mobile internet. Hong Kong and Taiwan have very distinct markets from mainland China, both being more similar structurally and in terms of media relations to Western countries. The massive mainland China market itself has significantly different characteristics at the national, metropolitan, regional and local levels.

The following points relate to the mainland China (P.R.C.) media market.

1. Newspaper and broadcast markets are growing rapidly.

As many more people shift to higher socio-economic brackets and literacy increases, newspaper readership and broadcast TV audiences are rapidly developing. China is already the largest newspaper market in the world, and TV and radio advertising revenue is growing at a double-digit pace. There is still substantial scope for sustained growth in these traditional media markets.

Read more →

The boundaries of crowdsourcing and how it relates to open innovation

By

I was recently asked to do an interview for the Turkish version of CNBC eBusiness magazine on crowdsourcing. I’m not sure whether the article will appear online – I’ll share it if so. In any case here are the answers I gave the interviewer:

1) The term “crowdsourcing” first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wire Magazine article. Does “crowdsourcing” is a new way of saying “open innovation”? Do these two terms have the same meaning? Or does crowdsourcing differs from open innovation?

Crowdsourcing and open innovation are related but distinct concepts. Crowdsourcing covers many approaches, which I summarize as ‘tapping the minds of many’. These can include service marketplaces, competition platforms, idea platforms, and prediction markets. In fact, all of these approaches can be applied inside organizations as well as externally, helping to tap some of the ‘cognitive surplus’ of employees. Open innovation is about looking outside the organization for new ideas and products, in what can be any number of ways. Often this is done on crowdsourcing platforms, but sometimes, as Procter & Gamble does, it is largely about seeking the best existing unexploited products in the market and adapting them for its own marketing pipeline.

Read more →

The rise of mini-blogging in 2011: Tumblr will continue to soar

By

SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogging.

Here are a few further thoughts on mini-blogs. I have written another post on the rise of social shopping, including 7 examples.

Here is an excerpt from the article on mini-blogging:

Read more →

The rise of social shopping in 2011: 7 examples of where it is going

By

SmartCompany recently featured an excellent article on The next 10 social media trends, which received considerable attention and was syndicated through a number of other outlets.

I was quoted in the article talking about social shopping and mini-blogs.

Here are a few further thoughts on social shopping. I have written another post on the rise of mini-blogs.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Shopping itself is also developing a social element thanks to services such as Shwowp, (www.shwowp.com) that lets a user keep track of their shopping history and then share it with others.

Social media researcher Ross Dawson expects strong growth from social shopping services.

“You can browse together what’s on the websites, look at different things, and comment on them,” Dawson says. “So you can go shopping with your friends, but do it in an online context.”

Read more →

Australian government releases Government 2.0 Primer

By

The Australian government is gaining momentum in its Government 2.0 initiatives, marked today by the launch by the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) of a handy Government 2.0 Primer.

The Report of the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce was submitted in December 2009. Although the Taskforce chairman Nicholas Gruen had earlier noted that Australian Government 2.0 initiatives were significantly behind countries such as the US and UK, the report and the government response impressed Gartner sufficiently to say “if the Aussies walk the talk, they have a very good chance to be the real leaders in the Gov 2.0 / Open Government race.”

Since then, the Declaration of Open Government by the Finance Minister (with comments enabled!) has pushed the ante up.

The primer is exactly what it says, a compact guide to Government 2.0 for neophytes, in the spirit of Gov 2 released early to be subsequently refined.

Gov2_PSI-dataflow.png

Source: Department of Finance and Deregulation

Read more →

Future Minds: the map of how screen culture is changing how we think

By

My colleague Richard Watson, building on the success of his book Future Files, has now launched Future Minds, which explores how screen culture is changing the way we think today, and how it will shape our future.

When I read the Contents and Overture to Future Minds, my first thought was that Richard and I should organize a public debate. In contrast to Richard’s tone of caution I think there are immense opportunities in having our brains shaped by digital culture (though certainly also things to be wary of).

Here is the map that Richard has created to acccompany the book. I saw early drafts of this as long as a year ago, so this has definitely not been cribbed from other recent maps with a similar look and feel.

FutureMindsMap.jpg

Click on map to view as full-size pdf

Read more →

Corporate blogging: not easy but a powerful way to connect with customers and stakeholders

By

The current issue of Australia Post’s Priority magazine has a feature section on ‘Blogging… Friend or Foe’, comprising four brief articles offering different perspectives from a lawyer, an academic, a digital strategist, and myself as ‘business advisor/ futurist’.

Here’s my piece:

Recent data shows Australians spend more time engaging with social media than any other nation. And yet few Australian companies have tapped the power of blogging and social media.

Back in 2002, I started my own business blog – Trends in the Living Networks – and, at the time, it was evident to me that these new platforms for communication could change the way that companies engaged with their customers, business partners and investors.

Read more →

Why this year Crowdsourcing is the topic of our Future Summit Series in San Francisco and Sydney

By

I’ve been remiss in not yet mentioning Future of Crowdsourcing Summit on my blog, so here is a bit of background to the event. Full details are on the Summit website with an overview in the flyer below.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010

Read more →

Conversation on the future of books and publishing

By

I am at a lunch organized by book publisher Blurb with Robin Goldberg, SVP of global channels at the company and a variety of authors, journalists and photographers. Blurb’s focus is on personal self-expression such as photography, travel journals, wedding books and so on, so they largely print on hardcover in full color. Blurb has been running for four years and did $45 million in sales last year.

One of the interesting differences between Blurb and some of the other print-on-demand suppliers is that Blurb doesn’t take any cut from the markup that authors choose to put on the sales price of the book.

Below are some of the many discussion topics at the lunch (some with my own thoughts and perspective inject), in no particular order.

  • Does anyone read purely on digital devices any more? One person at the lunch, Stilgherrian, says he rarely reads on paper, and he intends to get rid of any books he hasn’t touched in the last six months. Some others in the group are rarely buying books. I am rapidly shifting to buying e-books though I expect I will still buy some physical books. We’ll see.

Read more →

Australia’s top 25 business blogs ranked by traffic

By

SmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.

With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.

From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.

Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.

My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).

See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.

1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069

2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771

3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866

Read more →