Trends in the Living Networks

Predictions for enterprise social software and social network analysis

2010-02-09T04:32:10Z

Gartner has released five interesting predictions for social software. Here are the predictions along with a few of my thoughts.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This is a transition that we’ve seen for a very long time, and looks finally ready to come to fruition. Coming from a financial markets background, I’d seen from as far back as the late 1990s that email as a primary medium was resulting in communication breakdown. I’ve long believed that shifting communication out of email was one of the main ways that social media would be valuable, as for example expressed in my 2005 white paper How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services.

This prediction will play out very differently across organizations. Many companies will remain bound in email. Others, particularly those that are project-centric and effectively implement social software, could well see a substantially more than 20% of communication shift out of email. The development and evolution of new tools such as Google Wave will see email not quite die, but rapidly erode in the most innovative organizations.

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

]]> I agree that stand-alone microblogging is likely to have limited uptake. There are quite a few success stories for Yammer, the current leader in enterprise microblogging, but far more cases of it simply not taking off.

I think the forecast of 50% of companies using microblogging in some form by 2012 is optimistic. While many or even most platform vendors will offer this, a minority of organizations will go beyond tiny experiments. This is not to say that microblogging, effectively used, cannot be an extremely valuable tool. However relatively few will get there in the next two years.

Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

More like over 95%.

Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

This is the most interesting prediction. What is most likely to be transferred from smartphones to PCs are the device user interfaces. There are very few enterprise collaborative apps on smartphones yet, so there is not much to learn so far. However the rise of the “third device” exemplified by the iPad will unleash a whole new world of collaboration. More and more collaboration and social media will happen on portable (but not pocketable) devices (as I noted in this recent interview on Sky Business). That is where lessons will be learned that can be applied to desktop devices.

Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

This is a particularly interesting one for me, since I have been applying social network analysis to help organizations improve their performance for close to a decade now. Having seen the uptake over that time, including noting in 2006 that organizational network analysis was going mainstream, I reluctantly have to conclude that this forecast is overly optimistic.

One of the current trends in applying social network analysis inside organizations is that it is far easier to take digital communication trails (e.g. from email) to infer social networks in organizations. Tools such as Lotus Connections now have social network analysis functionality embedded in the system, and other vendors are integrating similar tools. However I am very aware of the difference between generating a social network map, and using this to improve organizational performance.

As I expressed in my California Management Review article Managing Collaboration with a Network Perspective, there is real competitive advantage from effective use of social network analysis. In fact for many of the most sophisticated organizations that have been developing their capabilities over the years, it is the single tool that is most likely to drive significant performance improvement. However I fear relatively few organizations will do this, or at least do it effectively.

Sky Business: The implications of social media for business and why Australia leads in social media usage

2010-02-07T23:12:48Z

Last week I was interviewed on Sky Business about recent data showing that Australia leads globally in use of social media, and the implications of such high levels of social media usage for business.

Here is the full interview, with major points noted below.

It is surprising to see Australia at the top of the global charts in social media usage, given that just a few years ago it was significantly behind in uptake – this has been a dramatic acceleration in usage.

It is a fascinating question why social media usage surged in Australia (see here for more detailed thoughts on the topic). Contributing factors include the sudden improvement in mobile data costs when the iPhone 3G was launched in July 2008, and the shift to more a conversational style of social media that suited the culture and dispersion of Australians.

]]>

There are many business applications and benefits of social media.

Given the amount of time people are spending on social media relative to traditional media, social media must now be part of the marketing mix, and large companies are recognizing that.

Employees can be allowed or encouraged to use social media to develop their work-related personal networks, with significant benefits for productivity and business outcomes.

If personal networks are not relevant to a person’s work, then it may be valid to not allow them to use social networks on company time. However for most professional their personal networks can be very relevant

There is also an issue of trust and staff engagement. Monitoring or blocking people in their use of social media is akin to timing people when they go to the toilet, and employees do not respond well to that.

The launch of the iPad and similar larger-screen mobile devices will be important in driving mobile social networks. The very rapid rise of mobile social network

Many small and mid-sized businesses are leaping on the possibilities and potential of social media, as they see the value and have no impediments to taking them on board

Larger organizations have been grappling with the governance issues, however are beginning to find substantial benefits from using social media as they explore possibilities and set basic structures in place.

The power of personal brands in strategy and attracting talent

2010-02-06T22:03:47Z

A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang's move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.

This is a long-term secular trend - in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:

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.

In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:

]]> What is the downside for Forrester? Likely not much unless there is a big stink in the blogosphere that causes a public relations problem. It is also not likely that analysts with personally-branded research blogs will quit over this policy, especially in this economic environment where job opportunities are still at a premium. Unless those two unlikely events happen, Forrester will have a tool to help manage its brand equity and reduce analyst departures that could result in the launch of new competitors.

This is dumb and short-sighted thinking. Analyst firms, as all professional service firms, depend on attracting the most talented people. However the emphasis on the brands of the individual professionals is even greater than in most other professional services.

It is a possible strategy to try to avoid personal brands and subsume them to the corporate brand, but it is an increasingly difficult strategy to succeed at. Most importantly, the most talented will avoid these companies like the plague.

Dennis Howlett doesn't mince his words in discussing Forrester's move:

Whichever way you look at this sudden shift in Forrester policy, it represents an epic E2.0 fail.

Enterprise 2.0 mavens consistently argue that bottom up adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will make business better. That’s fine except in one crucial regard: pre-existing success history dictating future policy. There is plenty of evidence for that. Forrester’s belated but still knee jerk reaction confirms. Worse still. Rather than behaving as the doyen of what it preaches regarding social media, Forrester is showing itself as hypocritical in the worst possible way.

Certainly Forrester's move seems to be a deliberate step to prevent their staff from developing portable brands that will facilitate them leaving the company for other opportunities. Without going into all the reasons why this is dubious logic, it's yet another great example of a company trying to hang on tighter and tighter in a world in which everything is more fluid. That can only work for so long.

Tapping the power of crowdsourcing for good

2010-02-06T06:50:51Z

I am not that keen on the word "crowdsourcing", because people mean many different things when they use the term. However since it is the word most used to describe tapping the power of distributed talent, which is one of the most important emerging themes in our hyper-connected world, I will embrace it, and hopefully soon draw up my own taxonomy of what crowdsourcing means to help clarify the conversation.

I was struck by a post by Steve Kelman on The dark side of crowdsourcing?. Kelman attended a presentation by Jonathan Zittrain (esteemed scholar and author of The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It) in which Zittrain pointed to how crowdsourcing approaches could used for bad things. However Kelman came out primarily impressed with the vast potential of the field.

One of the best-known domains for crowdsourcing is getting contributions for inventors and innovators to contribute, using innovation markets such as Innocentive (which I described in Chapter 5 of Living Network on Innovation), and prizes such as the X-Prize Foundation.

An emerging domain is using large pools of people to monitor for crime:

Zittran then noted the growth of applications (this one from the U.K.) where people, for very small amounts of money, are apparently willing, from the comfort of their couches, to monitor crime surveillance cameras to look for suspicious activity and report it. Some companies are also getting people, again for micro-payments, to report in if they recognize photos of people participating in a mass marijuana smoke-in.

The downsides of these kinds of applications were then raised:

]]> Terrorists could request help on having people develop different chemicals that could be put together to create some horrendous weapon of mass destruction, without the innovators being able to connect the dots on the little part of the project they were working on.

The Iranian government could have people match photos of protesters against huge photo rosters of the residents of Teheran.

Taking this first point from a broader perspective, we are all being given far more power than ever before. That is in the main being used to create richer possibilities. Absolutely, that power will also sometimes be used to harm people. The genie is out of the bottle, and trying to put it back in would be wasteful and destructive. We must learn how to deal better with the increased capabilities of those who would do harm.

While I would not support enhancing the Iranian government ability to identify political protestors, I'm not sure I would support the American government's ability to identify marjiuana smokers protesting peacefully en-masse. Computer face-recognition technologies are already eroding our personal privacy at a rapid pace - the addition of crowdsourcing in the ways described could dramatically accelerate this process.

Which comes back to the increased power we all have, and how we can best use it. The fact of being a government does not mean that power is used wisely.

7:30 Report: the social impact of the population boom and Australia's future

2010-02-04T10:55:11Z

Last week the ABC's 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC's website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

]]> Towards the end of last year, in a piece on what I called the 10 TENsions defining the coming years, I chose Immigration – Borders as one of the most critical tensions and social challenges that developed countries face. While there are many benefits to immigration of talented people, there is also an inevitable pushback on a proliferation of newcomers from different countries and cultures.

I don’t think the path of strong population growth is going to be easy, with many massive challenges as a nation and society ahead of us. However, as I said in the program, I believe we must accept and deal with those challenges the best we can. The alternative is to live in a country that is slowly dying.

Here is the transcript of the excerpted video above:

KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Over the course of this week we've highlighted some of the economic, environmental and social issues Australia will confront if Treasury's projected population boom becomes reality over the next 40 years - the water we need for our very survival, the rooves over our heads, the critical transport systems, the basic protection of our environment.

Tonight we look at another critical issue on which this nation has sometimes been brittle: social cohesion. Can we confidently manage a 60 per cent population boost in 40 years?

...

MATT PEACOCK: In 40 years, with a projected population of 35 million, the face of Australia is likely to have a more ethnic, Asian look, believes futurologist Ross Dawson.

ROSS DAWSON, FUTOROLOGIST: We're going to look far more Asian, we really will be an Asian country as we've got far more people coming from that ancestry and far, far deeper ties in terms of trade and economy and culture to the rest of the Asian region.

....

MATT PEACOCK: The fracture points in Australia's society won't just be religious and racial, they'll also be aged-based. As baby boomers like me get older, we'll put greater pressure on our hospitals in a health system that's getting more expensive and more capable of keeping people alive for longer, and it's younger people who'll be paying the tax bill. But that larger ageing population is the one politicians will find hard to resist.

ROSS DAWSON: There'll be an extraordinary proportion of people in Australia in the year 2050 who will be 65 or older. Clearly these voters will be expressing themselves by how they vote and politicians and political parties will have no choice but to espouse policies that are friendly to the elderly.

....

ROSS DAWSON: Ultimately, the only way in which Australia can experience the real dynamic growth over the coming decades is through immigration. The birth rate has increased a little bit in recent years, but that will never be enough to do more than just maintain our population. If we want to be part of a really exciting part of a global economy and global society, Australia must have immigration, and the issue is: how do we effectively manage that?

Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)

2010-01-25T06:09:11Z

Well there are already plenty of opinions flying around and some excellent comments on my post yesterday Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?, which pointed to new research showing this startling result. I guess it’s time for me to offer some of my thoughts, helped along by the conversation so far. Be sure to read the insightful comments on the topic!

To my mind the question is less why Australians are such heavy users of social media, as why the uptake was so slow initially before a startling acceleration over the last couple of years. Here are a few initial thoughts.

Attitudes about the individual.
One of the most famed aspects of Australian culture is the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome (your head might get lopped off). This has tempered much over the years, but there has still been until recently a relative reticence to stand up and shout out personal opinions (with of course a number of notable exceptions). I felt this contributed to the initial slow uptake by Australians of blogging. Perhaps once enough people are expressing their views on social media, you no longer stand out by blogging and Twittering – you are in a majority and your self-expression is unleashed.

]]> Twitter and conversational media.
Following on from the previous point, as social media has become more truly conversational over the years, it has better suited the Australian style of social interaction. The development of Twitter reflects this, with again a slow uptake from Australia initially, followed by a dramatic rise, now placing Sydney as one of the leading Twittering cities in the world by population.

Cultural adaptiveness.
I think Australia is recently proving itself to be adept at evolving its culture. This is partly due to the strong international focus of Australians, as well as the increasingly rapid pace of immigration. While ‘Australian-ness’ for many decades barely changed, I think that over the last years we are shaping our culture, in a way that is primarily positive. This may be optimistic, but if it were true this would be a massive advantage in an increasingly culturally complex world.

Corporate risk aversion.
Corporate Australia, until very recently dominated by old-school managers and directors, is I believe one of the most risk-averse in the world in terms of trying different approaches. Initially this resulted in Australian businesses being one of the slowest in taking Web 2.0 approaches - see for example my 2005 post on The sorry state of Australian corporate blogging. More recently this risk-aversion is gradually switching to being afraid of being left behind as global competitors move ahead.

Telcos belatedly unleashing mobile data.
For a long time Australian telecoms firms charged absolutely extortionate rates for mobile data, holding us back as a nation. The launch of the iPhone 3G in July 2008 was the turning point in bringing the telcos to the party. While mobile data is still expensive in Australia compared to many developed countries, for 18 months it has at least been possible to use mobile social media on a standard mobile data plan, unleashing Australians' desire to connect while they are outdoors - where they are very likely to be at any given time.

Peripatetic nation.
Around 5% of Australians are abroad at any point in time, most of them on the other side of the planet rather in an adjacent nation. This increases the value of social media in keeping in touch with family and friends. In a similar way, one of the drivers of Turkey spending more time online than any other European country, and having possibly the highest per capita use of Facebook in the world, is that a large proportion of its population is working abroad.

There are a number of other issues, such as geographic isolation and a history of being early technology adopters, which may explain strong usage of social media in Australia, but do not explain why uptake was so slow initially before accelerating over the last two years.

As I noted some years ago when I was bemoaning what was at the time the very slow uptake of social media, we need to debate and discuss what is driving our use of communication tools. Five years ago The Bulletin quoted my diatribe on how Australia's future depends on how well it connects in a global network economy must.

I will certainly be thinking far more about what will continue to drive how well Australia participates and connects in the living networks. I would love to hear what others think is happening here - understanding the drivers helps us to push things forward faster.

Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why?

2010-01-23T04:57:20Z

Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago.

However the data point that struck my interest most is that...

Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media

This is a real news. For many years I was bemoaning the slow uptake of social networks in Australia. Research featured as late as our Future of Media Report 2007 showed that Australia was dramatically behind the US and UK in Facebook usage, though it was beginning to catch up on usage of MySpace usage and tools such as Photobucket.

]]> I was long having to come up with explanations as to why Australians were so slow at taking up social media. A Sydney Morning Herald article in 2007 reported my findings that blogging was one sixth as prominent in Australia as other English-speaking nations, and suggested it wasn't important. In response I wrote Why less blogging is a matter for national concern, referencing my early piece Australia needs a debate on why it lags in online and network thinking

Since then I have been very encouraged and excited at the pace that the Australian online and social media space has moved ahead. I have often said that in almost any domain, some of the very top people in the world are Australian, however that understanding or expertise is often not widely diffused. Now, clearly there is a far broader uptake of network thinking, as evidenced at least by use of social media.

The question arises:
Why are Australians now such avid users of social media after a very slow start?

I have a few thoughts gestating on this that I'll structure a bit before sharing.

[UPDATE:] Here are Some thoughts on why Australians are #1 globally on social media usage (from a slow start)

I'd love to hear what you think.

We are fast learning how to create "enhanced serendipity"

2010-01-22T20:02:32Z

Serendipity is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It originates from the story of "the Three Princes of Serendip", which tells the tale of three princes who had the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries (see more on the story here).

For the last decade I have been talking about the idea of "enhanced serendipity". For example I wrote about how I used social networking software to create enhanced serendipity at a Living Networks event that I ran in New York in 2003, used the term to describe what was done by mobile social networking platform Dodgeball (the first attempt in the space by the founders of today's success story in the space Foursquare), and a longer post about Creating Enhanced Serendipity in 2006.

In today's New York Times, Nick Bilton writes a post titled ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web. He writes:

]]> If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.

....

But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation. We’ve reduced the fear of missing something important because we share “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. And without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis.

We are all human aggregators now.

This too is the world I live in and delight in helping create. However "controlled serendipity" is a meaningless oxymoron. You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That's is what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.

Other ways of thinking about this are creating collective intelligence, contributing to the global brain, or transforming mass participation into emergent outcomes. However we describe it, it is extraordinarily valuable and important, and far more than many people recognize, fundamental to how we will evolve as a society.

How reputation measurement will transform professional services

2010-01-21T23:31:35Z

Earlier this week I did the opening keynote at the AMP Hillross annual convention, with the title of Embracing the Future. Hillross, one of the most upmarket of the wealth management networks, is seeking to lead the rest of the market by shifting to a pure fee-for-advice model, and rapidly developing a true professional culture. My keynote was designed to bring home the necessity of individual and firm leadership at this key juncture in industry structure.

One of the central themes of my talk was the increasing importance of reputation for professionals. Clearly reputation has always been critical for any professional, and there are some parts of professional services markets where reputation is already highly visible, such as prominent M&A lawyers, who are identified by numerous client surveys. While clients of other professional services (for example audit or management consulting) tend to be more focused on engaging firms rather than individuals, there is a fundamental shift from corporate to individual reputation under way.

]]> What is changing is the extraordinary visibility of people’s actions and character and how others perceive them. One of the most valuable functions of the emerging ‘global brain’ that connects our insights is to make reputation more visible. For over a decade people have talked about how the internet is lowering transaction costs. Still today, the biggest single cost of business transactions is assessing the reputation of your potential business partner. Easier assessment of the reputation of suppliers will have a significant impact on the global economy.

Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry.

Who is most influential in Enterprise 2.0?

2010-01-20T10:47:17Z

Over the holidays Mark Fidelman launched his 2010 Enterprise 2.0 All-Star Blogger Roster. Mark says:

Now that the holiday hangover has worn off and the bills are coming due, I want to turn your attention to the individuals that are most influencing the Enterprise 2.0 space. Those of you that are early adopters or just starting to research Enterprise 2.0 can short cut the search for quality information by following and reading from these all-stars.

The list of 22 people includes Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and has recently launched his book by the same name, sits at the top of the tree, with five termed "Most Influential" (where Mark has kindly placed me, presumably partly due to the success of my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0), five "Highly Influential", ten "Influential", with as a special extra Dennis Howlett, who believes that Enterprise 2.0 is 'a crock', as "Enterprise 2.0 Referee".

Click on the image to see Mark's post including a larger version of the image and the data used to assess the influence of the all-stars.

Creating Knowledge-based CRM initiatives

2010-01-18T09:56:23Z

I am running a two-day executive program on Relationship Management for Financial Services in Kuala Lumpur on 28-29 January, organized by IBN International. The workshop will be attended by executives from a variety of local and global financial institutions in South-East Asia.

Over the last few years I have spent less time on these issues as I've broadened my scope to look at the future of business, however much of my earlier career was in financial services, working at Merrill Lynch and Thomson Financial, and my focus was for a number of years on high-value client relationships, best expressed in my book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. As such , in the late 1990s and the first years of the following decade I did considerable work with major financial institutions on enhancing their client relationship capabilities.

Increasingly, the key client programs applied in corporate and insitutional banking and the CRM initiatives implemented in retail and private banking are coming together. The shift to online and data-driven relationships has facilitated that shift.

To help explain some of the key drivers of CRM programs from a "knowledge-based" perspective, I have created a Knowledge-Based CRM Framework which I will use in the executive program in KL. This will complement my existing content and frameworks on high-value relationships, which are summarized in Chapter 6 of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships. Hopefully the framework below is largely self-explanatory, however I will try to find the time at a later stage to explain the framework in more detail.

Click on the image to download Knowledge-based CRM Framework

Top Twitter nations: USA, Singapore, Canada, Ireland, UK, New Zealand, Australia

2010-01-15T04:59:15Z

Software firm Sysomos has provided some more interesting research on Twitter usage.

Using this data, we have analyzed which countries use Twitter the most on a per capita basis, shown below.

I did the same analysis from Sysomos' report in June, showing the most prominent Twitter nations on a per capita basis at the time, according to the data provided.

While the results are fairly consistent between the June 2009 and January 2010, it seems that neither set of results is complete. Norway, which ranked as the third highest per capita Twitter nation last June, had no data provided on it in this survey, while Singapore - now the second highest ranked nation - and Ireland - now ranked fourth - were not included in the June survey.

On a relative basis New Zealand has gained ground, catching up with Australia and the UK, while Germany appears to have moved ahead considerably compared to other countries such as France.

Sysomos doesn't give details on its "proprietary" methodology for identifying the location of Twitterers, however it very interestingly says that only 0.23% of tweets are tagged with location through Twitter's geo-location API tool. I may have a play with getting some of this data directly at some point.

Effective strategies for a rapidly changing media industry

2010-01-14T10:58:31Z

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you're interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

]]>
Media Strategy
Future Exploration Network works closely with its clients to help develop clear, actionable strategies. These can map a path forward for the entire organisation, or be applied to develop the potential of specific media properties.

Scenario Planning for the Media Industry
We apply our deep expertise in scenario planning to help media companies explore a highly uncertain industry landscape and generate new, profitable strategic options.

Future of Media Workshops
One of the most valuable ways to develop actionable insights is to run an interactive workshop with your executive team (or clients) exploring key issues and potential responses in a highly structured fashion.

Executive Briefings
We provide briefings to executive teams and boards of directors on changes in the media industry and examples of successful repositioning. These briefings can also be made to clients to help them understand why they need to change their advertising strategies.

Industry Research
We have extensive capabilities in national and global industry research and analysis to support effective decision making.

Thought Leadership Content
We create branded visual frameworks and white papers to demonstrate thought leadership to clients and the industry and capture scarce client attention. Our globally-recognised media frameworks have been viewed over one million times.

Trends in the Living Networks hits the AdAge 150

2010-01-11T22:25:18Z

Over the last couple of years the AdAge 150 has collated a dynamic list of the top blogs in advertising, media, and marketing. The list actually covers over 1,000 blogs, and ranks them daily by prominence, using a variety of sources including rankings from Alexa, PostRank, and Collective Intellect, as well as a subjective ranking by the list developer Todd Andrlik. These sources have changed throughout the history of the AdAge 150 list, in trying to provide a balanced view of blog authority

This blog was added to the list a couple of months ago, having previously not come to the attention of the list creators. While I write about other topics, including enterprise technology and the future of business, a large proportion of this blog is about media and marketing in their many guises. In fact I have often described the future of business as the media economy, in which almost all economic activity is a form of media.

The AdAge rankings are highly dynamic since they emphasize recent activity. At the time of writing this blog is ranked #97, which is pretty solid given many of the blogs on the list are professional blogs.

I’ve written before about blog rankings, notably about Wikio’s approach, and I’ve been intending to write about Technorati’s recent changes in authority ranking. I’ll try to get to a broader overview of the blog authority systems before long.

Where is privacy heading and who is driving it?

2010-01-10T23:47:24Z

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that "obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside," meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg's comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others - including Zuckerberg - have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

]]> Facebook, as the largest participant in enabling people to share personal information, absolutely plays a role in shaping people's attitudes to privacy. From a systems perspective, it does not control the system, but is an active player that can influence the evolution of social attitudes.

Facebook's commercial interests are aided by its users being more open, however if it goes beyond where many people are comfortable on privacy it risks losing users or impeding growth. So it needs to tread a fine line.

I often say that even with the evidence of the last decade on how attitudes to privacy have changed in a connected world, it is still very difficult to predict quite how privacy will evolve from here. It has to be understood as a system, with very diverse - and often rapidly changing - views and behaviors from individuals, and significant impact from corporate, political, and government influences. As we observe the evolution of privacy, some key lessons will be drawn from the response to Facebook's current moves to make profiles more public.