The future of news: automated, crowdsourced, and better than ever

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ABC journalist Mark Colvin last week delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, a prestigious annual lecture on journalism. Mark is a Twitter afficionado as well as journalist with over three decades of experience, making him a great choice for the lecture this year.

The full transcript of the lecture provides rich stories from the history of journalism in Australia, and an incisive view of the present.

On the topic of crowdsourcing, Mark says:
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Excellent data on the state of global innovation: idea generation, idea conversion, and crowdsourcing

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Strategy + Business magazine has just launched its annual Global Innovation 1000 study, a deep analysis of the 1000 biggest spenders on innovation globally. As it happens I separately caught up with S+B editor Art Kleiner and Booz & Co Chief Marketing Officer Tom Stewart last Friday in New York (more on those conversations later), fortunately getting out before Sandy hit town.

Here is a good video of the highlights of the study:

The theme of the study this year was on the early stages of innovation, in generating ideas and then converting them to products and services.
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Insights on using crowdsourcing for marketing

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As I will be running a Crowdsourcing for Marketing workshop in New York this Thursday, I was keen to attend the Marketing session at CrowdConf today.

Here are brief notes from the speakers through what was an excellent panel discussion:
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Chart: 11 critical success factors for crowd business model

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On Monday October 22 I am running Crowd Business Models Summit, where some of the most experienced leaders in successfully building business models based on crowds will share their insights. The event is being run in association with CrowdConf 2012, the leading industry crowdsourcing event.

Beforehand I thought it worth sharing part of the Chapter on Crowd Business Models from Getting Results From Crowds.

Here is the overview of the success factors relevant across the 8 major business models (see the Crowd Business Models Framework for details), excerpted from the chapter on Crowd Business Models (Chapter 22 in the first edition, Chapter 25 in the second edition). Explanations of each factor are provided below the chart.

Success factors for crowd business models

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Come experience Crowd Business Models Summit in San Francisco on October 22

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My book Getting Results From Crowds was designed as a highly practical overview of how to create value using crowdsourcing. However the last section on Crowd Business Models is perhaps where my deepest interests lie, and is one of the most important issues in the crowd space. Business models are increasingly based on crowds, so we need to understand how to make them work.

As such I wanted to bring together an event to focus attention on crowd business models. I am delighted to be partnering with CrowdConf, the premier crowdsourcing conference in the world, to run a half-day Crowd Business Models Summit immediately preceding CrowdConf at the same venue, UCSF at Mission Bay (where incidentally we also held our Future of Media Summit 2007).

For full event details see the Crowd Business Models Summit website on the CrowdConf site.
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The Future of Customer Service: Using technology to increase both efficiency and relationship strength

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Last week I gave the closing keynote at KANA Connect 2012 in Las Vegas, on The Future of Customer Service.

I packed in a wide-ranging view on where customer service is going, including the impact of connectivity, the rise of new channels, where value will reside in relationships, and what supports the integration and integrity that will be at the heart of successful customer service.

One of the key areas I covered was the shift in customer service channels, using a diagram I originally created for a keynote and supporting article on Creating the Future of Customer Relationships.


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The 5 elements that enable expertise networks to flourish

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Last week I gave a keynote at an internal conference of a large technology services firm that has recently acquired another firm. The conference brought together senior executives and managers from the two organizations so they could get to know each other and plan how they would work together with existing and new clients.

A significant part of my role was to provide a highly upbeat, optimistic, engaging perspective on the future of business. However I also wanted to address the specific issues they would be encountering in combining their capabilities.

Many years ago when I was working with a large law firm to help them develop their client relationship and cross-selling capabilities, I created a simple framework, shown below.

The fundamental issue for any significant professional firm is to match the best possible capabilities in the organization with the relevant opportunities for value creation at their clients.

This begins at the interface with the client. Whoever has any interaction with the client, including the relationship leader and relationship team, has responsibility to identify and bring to the client the most relevant capabilities of the firm. However there are 5 key steps that are required for that to happen.


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The future of fast food: faster, more convenient, healthier, more luxurious

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On Friday I was interviewed on the current affairs program Today Tonight about the future of fast food. Click on the image to see a video of the segment.

Perhaps the dominant trend in society today is increased expectations. Those expectations apply across all domains, but absolutely in the immediacy of our everyday lives.

As people feel – and increasingly are – time-poor, speed and convenience dominate. Not surprisingly, customers are expecting fast food to become even faster.
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If you’re in Sydney and totally awesome, we want to give you $250!

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We have recently been advertising for a Genius projects/ marketing/ web/ publishing assistant/ manager – part-time in Sydney.

As we describe in our working principles document, the process starts with an interview and tests, after which we offer the most interesting candidates a one-day trial, in most cases offering to pay $250. For those we hire after the trial work, the most common pay structure is hourly rate plus profit share.

So let’s reframe this. If you think you could add value to what we’re doing, and have a day of your time spare, we’d love to pay you $250 for helping us with some project ideas we have.
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The enormous opportunity for writers and readers in an ebook world

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Last Friday I was interviewed on ABC’s News Exchange program about ebooks and their impact.

Click on the image to view the video of the program. The ebook segment is around 13:30 – 17:15.

We covered a lot of territory in the interview, ranging across topics including why ebooks are rising so rapidly to the impact on booksellers and libraries.
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