Melcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.

I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you're interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.

The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications

Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.

Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.

Flipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.

Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.

Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.

As part of our ongoing research into iPad and media, and also to provide some insights for the audience of the iPad Strategy Workshop we ran at Newspaper Publishers Association, we created a visualization of the top 30 paid and free iPad apps in Australia, as of 24 August 2010.

Click on the image for full-size pdf

The chart shows in the left hand column free apps, and on the right hand side paid apps, each ranked from #1 to #30 in order of popularity on iTunes. The following bar shows the price (for paid), the user rating on iTunes, and the size of the download in MB. The horizontal axis for paid apps indicates price.

The color code shows the type of app, bringing to attention a number of interesting features, for example that aggregators are very popular in paid apps, and that broadcast and newspapers dominate in free apps.

The iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum was a big success. In a large room laid out for 120 there was just standing room by the time it started, with great content and a highly engaged audience.

The Twitter stream for #iPadStrat gives a pretty fair overview of proceedings, though there were just a small minority of people on Twitter in a room full of newspaper publishers.

Here are the slides from opening presentation, as promised:

This morning I ran the iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum in Sydney. To provide a framework for discussion at the workshop (and also as part of our ongoing research into effective approaches to the iPad for media and news organizations) I created a visual framework of key strategic issues, as below.

Click on image for full-size pdf

I will delve into these strategic issues in later posts.

This is a Beta v1 version, so as always, please give feedback on how to make it more useful, including anything that's missing or things that could be put better.

Following my live notes from this morning of the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference, and before my closing keynote, here are quick notes from the afternoon session.

Jan Rezab from CandyTech in Czech Republic was originally going to speak about mobile but decided that it would be more valuable to discuss Facebook. According to their statistics, over 1 million news articles were shared globally in July and August, with 100 million news items seen as a result. Media organizations in Australia are not strong on Facebook, with the most prominent, FHM, having 13,000 likes on its Facebook page, and the top newspaper, news.com.au, 10,000. In contrast, regional radio Europe2 has 300,000 fans over the sites for its various shows.  

I am at the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference, where I am giving the closing keynote later today. I will endeavor to capture a few thoughts through the day.

The overall tone is of an industry that absolutely recognizes that it is in dramatic transition, and is by no means in denial of the scope of change that is required. This creates an appetite for learning and ideas, and hopefully a broader shift to what I think is a very real optimism from the presenters.

I have to say that I agree with almost everything that John Hartigan, CEO of News Limited, said in his opening presentation. The rhetoric was all about new platforms, the role of the iPad, the necessity of journalists becoming entrepreneurial, visual storytelling, and creating news in multiple formats relevant to different delivery platforms. John clearly is a believer; the issue is in making it happen.

Tomorrow I'm doing the closing keynote at the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference in Sydney, with already considerable attention on what I will discuss.

I have just prepared a framework to crystallize some of my thoughts on the news landscape today, which I've called The NewsScape. Individual channels - such as print, TV, internet, and more - are becoming meaningless. In the post-channel media world we are entering, the entire landscape is laid open. The NewsScape shows how value is created in this world. (Media revenue models are addressed elsewhere with an update on this coming.)

Click on the image to see large version

Interfaces are the furnace at the heart of how we access news. Adding to the established interfaces of newspapers and television, newer interfaces including phones and tablets have emerged. Before long digital paper that has most of the great qualities of print as well as the advantages of the digital will be available at reasonable prices.

On Thursday I am giving the closing keynote at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference in Sydney. I gave a sneak preview of some of what I will be covering, leading to a wide variety of coverage including in The Australian, by Roy Greenslade in The Guardian, on The Inquisitr, and on Mumbrella (including a rich discussion). I will also be doing some interviews on ABC radio tonight and tomorrow.

Below are my pre-talk primer notes - more detail coming in a bit:

• By 2022 newspapers as we know them will be irrelevant in Australia. However the leading newspaper publishers of today may have transformed themselves to thrive in what will be a flourishing media industry.

We have just posted an ad over at CrowdsourcingResults for a senior researcher/ writer for a forthcoming report on crowdsourcing we are doing. I've posted the ad below as well - please pass on word if you can think of anyone who's perfect for this.

Seeking exceptional senior researcher/ writer for report on crowdsourcing

Advanced Human Technologies is publishing a highly practical report to help people use crowdsourcing tools well. We are looking for a Senior Writer/ Researcher to work on this project, and can offer good payment and rewards.

We are also in the early stages of working on a number of other reports on topics including social media strategy, iPad media strategy, media channels for marketing etc., so do let us know if you have interest and world-class expertise in these topics.

At the turn of the decade I selected Culture Jamming as one of the top 10 trends of the 2010s.

We have a fantastic example of that in the Auto-Tune the News series from members of the Gregory Brothers band. These take actual TV news coverage and use auto-tune to create songs.

The latest song in the series, Bed Intruder (below) has hit #25 on the iTunes top sellers, and solely on that basis (since that is the only way the song is distributed) it is now ranked as number 89 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Ofcom, UK's communications regulator, annually produces what is the most detailed study of the local communications marketplace available anywhere in the world. Every year it provides deep insights into many aspects of media and communications usage and the state of the industry, and Communications Market Report 2010 is another gem.

Depending on your interests different data will come out - here are some of the results I found interesting. All charts are from the Ofcom report.

The results that have received the most attention is the multi-tasking in media usage. Everyone multi-tasks, but younger people more, to the point of 29% of media usage being concurrent in 16-24 year olds. Back in our Future of Media Report 2006 we described how simultaneous use of media would drive future media consumption.

Here is the first of a series of infographics we are creating on the iPad and media. It shows the growth in sales of the iPad, including actual sales figures announced by Apple and forecasts by a variety of players for the end of this calendar year.

Click on the image to see at full size

It is interesting to look at the forecasts made before the launch of iPad for September 30 (Apple's end of financial year). No-one had any idea how successful the iPad has turned out to be. Given continued shortages in the stores, it appears clear that any forecasts for sales this year need will be driven by supply capacity rather than demand.

While some believe these high initial sales are just early adopters and Apple fanboys (and girls), I think the higher range of forecasts for this year and beyond (some as high as 35 million for next year) are likely.

[NOTE:] Our iPad Strategy Workshop on 27 August in Sydney is now at 75 registrations and will almost certainly sell out, so register soon if you want to come!

Very interesting results out from a survey by Cooper Murphy Webb of British iPad users:

Source: Cooper Murphy Webb

The study of 1034 iPad users in the UK showed that 31% prefer reading magazines and newspapers on their iPad, followed by 26% on their laptop/ computer and 24% on print.

On August 27 in Sydney The Insight Exchange is running an iPad Strategy Workshop as part of the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference. It is free for PANPA members and very inexpensive for others, including discounts for members of industry partners, so if you’re in Sydney I hope to see you there. See here for full details and registration.

It will be highly compressed event, packing much content, action and participation into two hours. One of the highlights will be the panel discussion with a group which has extensive experience and insights to share, including:

Keith Ahern, CEO, mogeneration
Grant Holloway, Managing Editor – Online, The Australian
Warren Lee, Group Director – Content Strategy & Integration, APN
Jan Razeb, CEO, Hungry Mobile (Czech Republic)
Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Development, ABC

Content partner for the event is Future Exploration Network, which is currently preparing a website and report on iPad and media. We are still developing the strategy frameworks, but I thought it would be worth sharing some of the high-level strategic issues we think are important, and will be raised at the iPad workshop (to the extent we can in the time available!).

iPad in the distribution mix. As some have pointed out, iPad can not be looked at in isolation. It is one of an increasing number of channels for content distribution and revenue generation. Strategies need to examine not only relative characteristics of the available channels, but how they complement each other and afford economies of scale or reach. In particular, the iPad is just the vanguard of a coming cornucopia of tablets and other media-friendly mobile devices.