Insights and perspectives on Facebook’s IPO
Last week I did an interview on radio 2SER on Facebook’s IPO and its future. You can listen to a podcast of the interview below.
A few key points I covered:
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The future of radio will be a personal mosaic of global and local audio
On Tuesday I was interviewed as part of a 30 minute panel discussion on ABC Queensland on the future of radio. The podcast of the program is here.
It was a wide ranging discussion, and we covered a lot of territory. At the conclusion of the program, when we were each asked to give our vision for the future of radio, I described what I see radio becoming.
As I pointed out, just as what we have thought of as TV is shifting to multi-channel video, radio is shifting to multi-channel audio, distributed over IP to a multitude of devices, notably mobile phones. However audio will remain an important media channel forever, as there are many reasons we sometimes want just audio without visual accompaniment.
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The many and varied risk factors in Facebook’s IPO
My favorite part of reading S-1 IPO filings is always the risk factors. They are seemingly endless, as the company tries to cover its ass for all the things that might conceivably go wrong. But they are often very insightful in pointing to the real issues facing the company.
To save you reading it all, here is a highly selective summary of just a few of the interesting risk factors Facebook points to in its IPO filing:
If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with Facebook, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.
…
Any number of factors could potentially negatively affect user retention, growth, and engagement, including if:
* we are unable to successfully balance our efforts to provide a compelling user experience with the decisions we make with respect to the frequency, prominence, and size of ads and other commercial content that we display;
* there are changes in user sentiment about the quality or usefulness of our products or concerns related to privacy and sharing, safety, security, or other factors;
* we are unable to manage and prioritize information to ensure users are presented with content that is interesting, useful, and relevant to them;
* we adopt policies or procedures related to areas such as sharing or user data that are perceived negatively by our users or the general public;
etc.
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Open business: Sharing our group priorities for 2012 – Why not?
A year ago I shared a visualization of our AHT Group Business Model.
Following that, I am now sharing our group 2012 Priorities. This comes from the principle of Open Business you can see in the 7 Enablers for our strategy. Our intention is to share more about the drivers of our business. The 2012 priorities document was created for our own internal use to guide our activities and use of resources through this year. However we are happy to make that open, in case anyone else finds looking at our approach is useful to them.
Looking for crowdsourcing workshop/ event partners: Europe, North America, Asia
A book can be a very good way to distill and present useful information and guidance. We have done our best to make Getting Results From Crowds as pragmatic and practical as possible in helping organizations to use crowds to grow business and new possibilities. However for some issues and some people, a high-impact workshop or participatory event can be a more direct way of learning new ways to do things. As such I am planning a series of participatory workshops around the world that will build on the content of Getting Results From Crowds.
We are looking for event partners around the world who are interested in working with us bring these workshops to their local communities. Please go through this brief document for an overview of what we are suggesting:
Crowdsourcing Workshops: Partner offer
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OPEN: Using crowdsourced legislation to beat SOPA
SOPA, The Stop Online Piracy Act, is big news in many ways, not least in marking what is likely to be a historical landmark in the battle between traditional media and a now-powerful new media, played out in political influence and the shaping of critical legislation.
One of the most important ways to beat SOPA is to provide a good alternative. The majority of politicians seem to think that online intellectual property rights need better protection, so to kill SOPA requires providing something that can supplant it.
Into this field comes Rep. Darrell Issa, whose involvement in legislation to allow equity crowdfunding I wrote about a few months ago. Issa is essentially seeking to ‘crowdsource’ a bill. Good.is reports:
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Dominant themes for 2012: transformation and beyond
In December I created a list of 12 themes to frame the year ahead, and then explored the ideas in a number of media interviews. The slides for the 12 themes have been seen almost 50,000 times now, suggesting they struck a chord somewhere. It’s now interesting to reflect on these, especially the response from the media.
Top 10 posts on the future of media
Another quick selection of my most popular posts from 2011, this time on the topic of the future of media:
1. Predictions for media industry in 2011
Social news curation, crowd sourced journalism, multi-platform distribution, personalized advertising and tablet media will be just some of the key trends shaping the year ahead.
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New frameworks of 2011: Connected Success, Transformation of Business and Government, Crowdsourcing
I believe strongly in visual frameworks as a way of communicating and engaging with complex ideas. I share these on the web, sometimes use them as central frames for my keynotes, apply them in strategy workshops, use them to shape my own thinking on the topics they cover, and sometimes create private custom visual frameworks for clients to define and articulate their strategy.
I will be shortly launching a more complete review of all the public visual frameworks I’ve created. For now, here is a review of the public frameworks I’ve created this year.
Success in a Connected World
I have used this in many keynotes and workshops this year to help individuals and small to mid-sized businesses to work out what they need to do succeed in a connected world, usually going into detail on the specific tools they can use in each area.
12 most popular posts of the year on the future
It’s almost the end of the year, so I’ll try to do a few compilations of my most popular posts of the year. Today, on the general theme of the future, here are 12 (+1 for next year) that have attracted the most interest…
1. Zeitgeist 2011: anxiety, mobility, blending, indulgence, immersion, wrath, nudity and more
The spirit of the times for 2011
