February 2007 Archives

The BRW Digital Media Leaders Forum is on in Sydney on 23 March, promising to be another excellent event in the Australian digital media space this year. The agenda includes pointed issues such as Web 2.0 and the social web, creating revenue streams and commercializing content, new content delivery methods and more.

I will be chairing the panel on “The Case for Digital: Branding & Marketing Perspectives – Agency Perspectives”, joined by Leigh Terry, Managing Partner of OMD, Belinda Rowe, CEO of ZenithOptimedia, and Jonathan Noal, Managing Partner of BoilerRoom Communications. The panel will touch on some similar themes to The New Media Mix session I chaired at Ad:tech, in terms of making a case for digital channels relative to, and complementary to, traditional channels. However a key additional issue will be branding, which is a highly challenging domain in an increasingly cluttered, fickle, and diverse world. There is unquestionably less control in a world driven by social media. There are also far greater opportunities than previously to create powerful brands very quickly. Agencies are in the front line as clients become more demanding, yet remain risk averse, and often don’t understand the challenges of execution in a highly fragmented media world. It promises to be a great discussion – I’ll report back after the event. Hope to see you there!

There seems to be a trend for trend maps! Back in late December Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network released a map of major trends for 2007 and beyond, as below. My original blog post described some of the background to the trend map.

Click here for the full Trend Blend 2007+ map

The pdf version of the trend map has been downloaded over 20,000 times from the various sites at which it is hosted, with many times that number having seen the map. Along the way it has generated many, many comments – here is a small selection:

“The World’s Best Trend Map. Ever.” The Big Switch
“The mother of all trend maps” Cookthink
“A neat map of trends, words and made-up words in the form of a tube map. This is about as close to art as marketing strategy gets. Really usefu"’ Dead Insect
“I find these graphical depictions of trends fascinating. While no map can tell you everything, they are valuable for triggering ideas at a glance.” Free Rein
“The amazing Trend Map for 2007 and beyond” Madeforone.com
“If you’re interested in a global overview of next years trends, don’t miss out on Ross Dawson’s amazing Trendmap 2007” Information Architects
“Check out this off the hook trend map! Wow, cool.” The Caucus House
“I love visual stuff like this, and just spent half an hour redrawing all the coloured lines and connections after printing the map out on my b/w printer…” Yule Heibel
“I got shivers. A pattern to give us a way to talk about the future. I particularly appreciated the "river of conciousness" that runs through Ross Dawson's map.” Nancy White
“Great piece of information architecture that shows how all the current trends out there come together and are shaped by the underlying motivators within society” Renaissance Chambara
"Visualisation of trends is amazing. It inspired me to think of the interaction of independent trends." PSFK
“Perdu dans la jungle des buzz word, de la mondialisation, du hype, du Web 2.0 et du reste ? Heureusement Serial mapper est là et a trouvé pour vous cette magnifique carte "Trend Blend 2007+" Serial Mapper
“Las tendencias más bonitas. De todo lo que se está publicando sobre tendencias para el 2007, me quedo con este mapa del metro del 2007 de Ross Dawson.” The Mixer
“Un documento realmente interesante que con un diseño original y bastante creativo” The Orange Market
“Interessante visualização do conjunto, uma maneira mais inteligente de se entender e contextualizar o que vem por aí neste ano que está só começando.” Coolhunterbr
“Este tipo de trabajos para presentar la información están de moda, pero recomiendo su visualización porque ofrece una mirada comprensiva a las próximas mega-tendencias.” Javier Velilla
“Interessant sind vor allem wie sich Schnittstellen zwischen unterschiedlichen Trends ergeben.” AYRWeblog
(By the way, this is not only my work as some have assumed – Richard Watson conceived this project.)

A few days later after we released our map, Information Architects, seemingly inspired by our map, created a map of web trends, based on the Tokyo subway map.

Click here for the A4 pdf

Their map seems to have got even more attention, helped by blog posts from some of the A-list bloggers featured. They even scored an article in Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese business newspaper with readership of 2.8 million, as well as other media uptake in Germany and Italy.

In the course of exploring the impact of these trends maps, I came across GreatMap, a fabulous site that has hundreds of links to fabulous visual representations. It’s well worth a browse through its links to see some of the work being done in visualization.

We are clearly rapidly shifting to an increasingly visual culture. As our world becomes increasingly complex, particularly when we consider the extraordinary possibilities of the future, words and linear structures fail us. We respond to visual representations that help us to make connections, even if they’re more fun than serious, as for our trend map. As a result, we’ll continue to produce more visual representations of interesting trends and the future – coming up soon!

Today BRW launched its flagship Australia Online issue (which is only available online at a hefty subscription price!), covering an interesting range of topics including the rise of online advertising (over $A1 billion annually now), e-commerce, online classifieds, travel, internet TV and music downloads. There is a truly atrocious full page picture of me facing their article “Business blogs on” (Don’t look – please!). This was intended to be a follow-up to their Blogging Power article of December 2005. In my interview for today’s piece, I tried to stress that the issue for corporates was no longer just blogging per se, but how activities across the enterprise are aggregated to enable more efficient working. The writer seemed to base the entire article on what we covered in our discussion, though only used a few anodyne comments from me. Certainly there is a real issue in getting corporates to use blogs for their external communication. Inside the organization, the game is now not about getting people to blog. It’s about creating an infrastructure whereby comments and activities by individuals have value across the enterprise. I’m hoping that Australian corporates will be able to leapfrog the phase of experimenting with blogs to start implementing enterprise-wide systems to tap collective behaviors, including document creation and viewing, bookmarking, annotating and more. A lot more on this later – I am currently developing a Web 2.0 framework (including enterprise and consumer), which I’ll launch sometime in the next few months.

Another article in the same issue was on internet TV and movie downloading, looking at competition among the online video platforms in Australia. I was quoted in the article (somewhat accurately) as saying:

Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says: “It surprises me how slow free-to-air TV channels have been to stream programs on the internet, especially as they can get a better idea of their audience on the net, and tailor advertising to suit them.”

Dawson says device convergence – such as Microsoft’s Xbox initiative – is also critical in how the market evolves.

“Manufacturers know convergence [will happen] and are desperately seeking to be at the centre of it,” he says. “ It happened with Apple. The sold people a physical device, an iPod, which led them to an internet site to make music purchases. Now this encompasses podcasts and video. They have moved from selling a single device to having a strong relationship with consumers selling content.”

Have a look at what I’ve written on how European telcos are positioning themselves to get some more insights into the foundations of this strategic positioning game.

Hey, how come I read about this on Scobleizer first? Randal Leeb-du-Toit and I are due to catch up for lunch when he’s back from Silicon Valley, so he can tell me about Outback Online, a new 3D virtual world his company Yoick is creating. Robert Scoble has just had lunch with Randal and executive producer John Wolpert (who when he was with IBM was mentioned to me with great reverence by his colleagues). Robert has now told the world about the new product, and he seems to think it’s possible that the new service could indeed offer real competition for Second Life, based on graphics quality, scalability, and age-based segmentation. I very much look forward to seeing the alpha. Certainly for the meantime there’s been some very good buzz generated, suggesting that people are open to an alternative to Second Life.

There are definitely some rather hefty network effects at play in this kind of virtual world, not least because the worlds are created from scratch, and thus require substantial personal investment from many people before they start to become interesting. However there have been many complaints about Second Life, not least on performance, as well as on some of it policies. Second Life has established itself as the de facto leader in user-created free-form virtual worlds. Yet it is more than possible that in 5-10 years from now others will have taken the lead. TD Goodcliffe believes that the space is open for the taking. Duncan Riley has doubts about the name (“the outback sucks”). Justin Thorp wonders whether virtual worlds are ready for mainstream acceptance. I certainly believe that virtual worlds will play a major role in our future, both socially and in business, though that may take quite a while to pass. I’m not prepared to punt on whether Second Life will be transcended by others, as this partly depends on how good a job Second Life does at defending what is absolutely a very solid incumbency. It’s definitely going to take significant capital to take it on. However I’m all in favor of competition, so I certainly hope that Outback Online has what it takes to put the field into play.

Emily Chang has written about a project to aggregate all the information that flows through her life.

"As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway)."

She has now created a data stream that aggregates her blogs and websites, and usage of stylehive, del.icio.us, twitter, plazes, flickr, last.fm, and upcoming. There has been substantial interesting commentary on this initiative already, notably from Grant Robertson, Chris Saad, Daniela Barbosa (including what an enterprise data stream may look like), and Stowe Boyd, who says he’s working on a similar initiative. Stowe writes:

"This traffic flow -- made more liquid by RSS and instant messaging style real-time messaging -- is the primary dynamic that I believe we will see in all future social apps. Yes, we will want to have our traffic cached -- for search and analysis purposes -- but we will increasingly move toward a flow model: where the various bits that we craft and throw into the ether -- blog posts, calendar entries, photos, presence updates, whatever -- will be picked up by other apps, either to display them to us, or to make sense of them. We want to consolidate all into one flow -- a single time-stamped thread -- that all apps can dip into.

A pal of yours is having a party? He will create the event using some social application site, and the event will be cast into his traffic. Your flow-aware calendar app might snag the event from the traffic, and ask you if you'd like to confirm. You agree, and the agreement is thrown into your traffic, for your buddy and others to make sense of, downstream."

For me, what this suggests is a world in which many people choose to expose all of their activities to the world. Del.icio.us is a great example. People used to favorite websites on their PC. Now many are happy to do it publicly, so other people can look at what they choose to make note of. Very importantly, this exposing of behaviors provides the foundation for Web 2.0, in that it provides input to allow collaborative filtering and the creation of “collective intelligence”. It seems that many people are thinking about and putting the mechanisms in place to expose all that we do, including our activities in socializing, entertainment, work, and more. Clearly not everyone will choose to expose their activities, yet many will – this has been proven over the last few years. From an enterprise perspective, implementing these kinds of exposing mechanisms inside organizations will allow far more effective knowledge work and business processes – but only after substantially new workflow and systems are put in place to synthesize this plethora of valuable information.

The second edition of Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships was released 18 months ago now. The first edition, launched in January 2000, was on several Amazon.com bestseller lists, including ranking at #1 from Australia for the two months after its release, and on the top 20 sellers list for Deloitte & Touche for over two years, and sold through five printings. When the time finally came to update the book, it ended up as half new material, including a couple of entirely new chapters. I wanted to include what I’d seen in my work with major organizations, and what did and didn’t work in practice. The response to the second edition has also been very pleasing, with a good presence in the market, and getting named one of the Best Books of 2005 by BOSS magazine.

From the outset two of the book’s chapters have been available online for free download, but sometimes these kinds of things get overlooked. I thought it was worth pointing to the free chapters here.

Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: Chapter 1: Leading Your Clients

To provide some context for the chapter and the changes I made, here’s a snippet from the preface to the second edition.

The first key lesson is that even if you are brilliant at engaging in knowledge-based relationships with your clients, that doesn’t help you if your clients don’t recognize the value you can create for them through this deeper level of engagement. Professionals must lead their clients into knowledge-based relationships by demonstrating the value of collaboration. On every front, the future success of professional services firms will depend absolutely on the leadership capabilities within the firm. They must lead their clients into new ways of working, they must lead their professionals into combining their expertise collaboratively, and they must lead their industries by showing that new business models and approaches to value creation are possible and desirable. Thus the new subtitle of this book: “Leadership in Professional Services.” The subtitle of the original edition, “The Future of Professional Services,” still applies, as knowledge-based relationships are indeed the future of the professions. However the essence of this second edition is how to develop the leadership that will brings these kinds of professional relationships to reality.

Here is an overview and link to Chapter 6, which is on implementing key client programs and enhancing client relationship capabilities.

I’ve been interviewed a number of times recently about the future of mobile devices, both for media and also in financial services. I always emphasize the importance of the new generation of displays that are going to make viewing and interacting with mobile devices a great experience. People go on about how no-one wants to watch video on the screen on a mobile phone. In general, that’s true. But as soon as you can get larger screen experiences, everything changes. I’ve written before about the transformative power of video glasses, which I believe will become big over the next five years, and the role of e-paper. However the most likely candidates for broad mobile use are rollable and foldable screens, once they are in affordable commercial forms. Up until now most of these types of screens have been prototypes. One of the most exciting releases at the massive 3GSM conference in Barcelona was a rollable display from Readius, a spin-off from Philips. It gives a 127mm diagonal display that rolls out from a pocket-sized case. It has a high-quality screen and 10-day battery life. It won’t be commercially available until later this year, but we can expect competitors to come to market at a similar time, finally beginning to open up the doors to a rich mobile experience for all. As I’ve written before, one of the implications is an extraordinary surge in demand for content. This really will be transformative.

Source: Crave CNET.co.uk

Americans are unhappy with quality of journalism. That will be the key driver of the citizen journalism, or more broadly, new forms of media content creation and distribution. A survey performed in conjunction with the recently held We Media conference in Miami by John Zogby interviewed 5,384 adults nationwide, giving some pretty solid results. The figures below show that, not surprisingly, professionals (in this case the conference goers) are not quite as cynical as the population at large. However conservatives and older people are particularly contemptuous of the standards of journalism. As a result, a significant majority of Americans believe that blogging and citizen journalism will play a vital role in the future of journalism.

Source: WE MEDIA-ZOGBY poll

While I’m a true believer in the power of media creation outside the establishment, I’m still a little surprised by the broad enthusiasm of the respondents for blogging and citizen journalism. What it comes down to is dissatisfaction with the status quo, and having seen the potential for something better. This is certainly not to say that blogging in its current form is a viable alternative to mainstream news media. New models that combine professional expertise with amateur participation will absolutely become alternatives, or at least strongly complementary to existing media. My favorite example is NewAssignment.Net. David Cohn from NewAssignment.Net reviews the idea of “crowdsourcing” in journalism, and points to techPresident, which will include input from contributors across the nation.

This is great! Doc Searls of The Cluetrain Manifesto fame has written an extremely rich and interesting piece titled Building an Relationship Economy. He begins by describing a series of stimulating conversations, during which Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, one of the seminal pieces of the open source movement, suggested that there are three levels to markets: transactions, conversations, and relationships. Doc goes on to discuss several perspectives on the relational foundation to the economy, notably in open source projects, but also in public broadcasting.

Towards the end of the piece Doc alludes to ProjectVRM, which is a project to explore “VRM”:

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

CRM systems until now have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don't require the former to "lock in" the latter.

I will be following this very closely – there are already some very interesting resources on the site. I have to admit I’m guilty of writing a White Paper for Microsoft titled “How to Lock-in Your Clients,” though I think the spirit of what I write in the paper is in keeping with the project:

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could lock-in your clients, make them yours forever more? It’s a nice idea, however the reality is we live in an increasingly open world. Today it’s almost impossible to get clients to buy closed systems that would mean substantial switching costs if they then chose to move to another supplier. Given a choice, clients will always go for the option that gives them more flexibility. The trick is to create lock-in in a business environment in which systems and standards are more and more open.

In this world, the only way to lock-in clients is by consistently being able to create more value for them than your competitors can. This is a positive form of lock-in, in contrast to the negative lock-in of trying to make it expensive for clients to leave you. There are three key foundations for how professional services firms can keep clients coming back through positive lock-in.

1 You know your client better.
It is nothing new for professionals to have to know their clients well. It is just that now doing this better is the primary field of competition. Today, it is important not just to know your client better, but also to apply it in customizing your communication and service delivery, as discussed above. If you do, this creates a very powerful form of lock-in through the unique value you can create.

Yesterday I gave the keynote at a senior management offsite for a top-tier global financial services institution. One of the key issues for the organization – as for its peers – is building collaboration within and between a very diverse set of operations. Part of my presentation covered how effective organizational networks underpin the ability to create value. If an organization functions in deep silos, what is the value of being agglomerated into one company? Or more to the point, what are the lost opportunities in the missing connections and collaboration across divisions?

I showed the framework created by Harvard Business School’s Tiziana Casciaro in her excellent article from the June 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks. The key insight in Casciaro’s research is that while people claim that they go to competent jerks to get work done, the reality is that they gravitate more to lovable fools. The lovable fools are often the social glue that holds the organization together. Without them, communication can break down.

Source: Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks, Casciaro.

In my presentation I remarked that the high-level financial services industry was characterized by competent jerks. While most laughed in acknowledgement, a few seemed put out. But it’s true. Investment banking and corporate law in particular are full of people who are extremely talented, but not necessarily highly likeable. This has a strong impact on the effectiveness of collaboration and the structure of social networks in these organizations. There are no simple solutions, but recognizing these realities can help in designing ways to bring the right expertise to bear on problems and opportunities. I’ve written before about expertise location in financial service firms such as Morgan Stanley. While locating optimal expertise is a critical issue in large professional organizations, the harder part is getting connections between professionals to bear valuable fruit through a process of collaboration. The reality is that most major financial institutions are currently doing very well without being good at internal collaboration. It will be a gradual process, but over time the ability to collaborate effectively will start to be a key differentiator in market performance, partly driven by client perceptions. Clients are already getting tired of dealing with highly siloed banks, and are responding by allocating their business to different firms. There are major opportunities on the table for the large financial institutions. Enhancing organizational networks is at the heart of seizing these.

[UPDATE 13 March:] Updated information on the Web 2.0 in Australia event is here.

Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.

Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.

The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on [UPDATED] 6 June, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.

The event summary:
The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:
* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0
* Why progress has been slow in Australia
* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia
* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing

There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:

Sponsors and partners
Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.

Showcase participants
Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.

An article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Wizards of Buzz zooms in on a group of people much discussed by the tech crowd over the last year, but who have not visible in the mainstream media before now. They are the people who submit stories to the social news sites. The article includes a nice sidebar describing the most prominent social news sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Newsvine, and Netscape. These sites create what I call “social opinion” (as distinct from the traditional approach of status-based opinion). Each of these sites depends on people submitting what they think are the most interesting news items. Then the community at large votes on these suggestions, with the links getting the most votes going to the front page, being seen by thousands or even millions of people, and sometimes creating overnight stars. The main focus up until now has been the ‘You’ named by Time magazine as the person of the year – that is the many who vote on the stories. Yet there is only a fairly small pool of people who submit stories.

The Wall Street Journal did its own analysis of who was submitting stories on the sites, and came up with some interesting insights, including the startling fact that on Digg, 30 people (from 900,000 registered users) are responsible for one third of stories that made the front page of the site. The article names 20 of the most active and influential people who are submitting to social news sites, putting in the limelight people who are working hard for no pay, scouring the web for interesting stories, and being the first to submit them for a potential 15 seconds of fame.

Of course, influential people of all stripes can be wooed with attention, invitations, presents, money, and other nice things. Netscape, in a bid to attract some of these influencers, offered $1,000 a month to some of the top submitters on Digg to get them to switch to Netscape. No doubt PR people are already keenly courting these influencers. This research and article has helped to uncover the structure of influence in a world driven increasingly by social opinion rather than status-based opinion. What interests me in particular is how the structure of these influence networks will evolve – we are absolutely in a transition phase, and the way social opinion is formed will quickly change. Michael Arrington calls it a “crazy ecosystem”. Jason Kaneshiro focuses on the potential for these influencers to be paid – they are creating value, including being central to the very high valuations of some of these sites, so they should be rewarded. The question is, in what form does that reward come? Being written about in the Wall Street Journal is a strong reward in itself, for many. And if they are paid, who pays them, and is it overt or covert? This will be a fascinating space to follow.

Over the last few years the use of narrative and storytelling has become an almost mainstream approach to organizational change and development. Steve Denning, first at the World Bank, and then in his own consulting practice, has been at the forefront at spreading the gospel. Anecdote, an Australian-based consultancy, has become prominent in the field, sporting among others Shawn Callahan, who previously worked as regional leader of IBM’s Cynefin Center, at the time lead by Dave Snowden.

Anecdote is running workshops on Narrative Techniques for Business in Boston and Seattle at the end of March – full details here. Hopefully these will be well-attended – effective use of narrative inside organizations can be extremely powerful in building collaboration, culture change, uncovering strategic issues, and capturing implicit knowledge, among other rather useful outcomes…

A short, random collection of impressions from Ad:tech Sydney…

It was undoubtedly a big success, with very good attendee numbers (meaning all the keynote sessions and quite a few of the breakout sessions had a crowd of people standing at the back), a very positive response from all the attendees I spoke to, and all the exhibitors I chatted to saying it was very worthwhile for them to participate. It was well organized and provided both quality content and an opportunity for the industry to get together. I have long criticized the events industry – globally but particularly in Australia – at being very formulaic and non-interactive. Ad:tech is lifting the bar for this kind of event in Australia. Not to say that it couldn’t have been done better, but it certainly created value for the local industry, and I’m told Ad:tech head office is pleased with the event’s performance, including financially.

The New Media Mix keynote panel session I chaired this morning (pre-session description here) was good fun, with Harold Mitchell and Richard Kimber in particular responding to my request for some differences of opinion. The core of the discussion ended up being about what is making the shift in media, channels, and online slower than it should be. Skills and education were a prominent topic, with all panelists pointing to education as a fundamental issue in Australia’s future success, which is currently not supporting the skills and capabilities we need as a nation. Harold went on to say how he believes the nation is being fundamentally held back by low bandwidth and poor internet infrastructure, at one point sparking applause from an audience that no doubt feels likewise. I noted the very slow uptake in social media participation in Australia. Certainly I’m concerned that as a geographically isolated country, Australia is far from taking full advantage of communication technologies, meaning that it risks falling behind in a global, networked, information-based economy.

At Ad:tech Sydney this week I’ll be chairing the panel on Blogs as a Marketing Tool as well as the keynote session on The New Media Mix. My esteemed colleagues on the panel will be Mark Jones, IT editor at the Australian Financial Review, business coach and blogging evangelist Des Walsh, and Fred Schebesta of Freestyle Media. Given the topic is blogging, it seemed appropriate to have a conversation rather than a series of presentations. We had a conference call to discuss what we’d talk about, and agreed to have a single presentation for the panel, using five screenshots to illustrate the topics we’ll discuss.

The five dimensions of Blogs as a Marketing Tool are:

1. Advertising on blogs

Advertisers now have an additional medium to reach potential customers, in addition to the usual array of newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, outdoor etc. Blogs readers are affluent, influential, and highly targetted – this is a prime demographic. Yet there are almost no Australian blogs that are attracting advertisers. We use a blog on the Sydney Morning Herald as a starting point for conversation, as blog readership in Australia is still heavily overweighted to traditional media websites. There is advertising on the blog, but the SMH is using the same ads as the rest of the site. Individual bloggers can sell Google Adwords or other aggregated advertising, or sell directly to advertisers that are highly relevant to their readership. Blogging networks make it easier both for bloggers and advertisers to match up. So, what should advertisers be doing about advertising directly on blogs?

An article in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph says that a consortium of major mobile phone companies - Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, and Cingular – are planning to meet in secret to discuss creating a mobile phone search engine. The last five years have shown that one of the most powerful places in the online space is search – that is many people’s primary interface to the wonderful world of the web. And you can make very good money from it (Google’s most recent quarterly operating income was $1.06 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion). So as attention shifts to the mobile world, there should be no shortage of players keen to challenge Google’s intentions of transferring its dominance in the internet into the mobile space.

A framework that I described in my book Living Networks, and have applied in numerous strategy consulting engagements, is highly relevant here. In short, there are six key elements to the “flow economy” based on the flow of information and ideas. Any customer offering needs all elements. These elements are usually provided by different companies, though some companies may provide several of them, or work in alliances to provide them seamlessly to customers. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is leveraging your existing positioning to move into other elements of the flow economy. A great example is how Apple, through the success of the iPod, controlled people’s Interface to music. This enabled them to shift to delivering Content through iTunes, and thus to build Relationships with consumers (which is usually not possible through the sale of devices).

In this case, the mobile phone companies provide Connectivity, and have been striving to leverage that into Relationships, Content, and Services, with highly varied success. If they can use their existing positioning across the landscape to control the Interface, they can get far greater revenues. Standards are the foundation of the flow economy, and Relationships are where most of the value can be extracted. Yet Interfaces (and also Content) have proven to be the most powerful leverage points to create Relationships. So the mobile phone consortium, Google, and other players are all trying to get to the same place, but starting from different positions on the strategic landscape. It will be a very interesting battle. This paragraph is of course an extremely simplistic analysis, but the framework can be used to go into far more depth in developing effective strategies. I’ll post some more detailed examples of using the flow economy framework at a later date.

In other commentary, PaidContent calls the Telegraph’s story “very speculative,” bringing up the highly relevant issue of EU anti-competition laws, while SMS Text News doesn’t believe the mobile companies can create a search engine good enough to rival Google. This post's title is "European Mobile Companies don't understand they're just data pipes." That's exactly my point above, however there exists a strategic possibility to shift beyond being just pipes to doing more, and they'd be very foolish if they didn't make a good attempt to do so.

Ad:tech has been the main event in town in advertising and technology for 10 years now, running conferences first in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, then Europe and Beijing. After being hit by the tech bust, Ad:tech is back stronger than ever, with close 10,000 people said to have attended its San Francisco exhibition last April. Next city on Ad:tech’s list is Sydney, where the inaugural Australian conference will be held this week. I understand there are already 350 registered for the conference, and 1000 for the exhibition – good turn-outs for this kind of event in Sydney – meaning the keynote sessions will be standing-room only.

I will be chairing two panels at Ad:tech – the keynote session on the second day on The New Media Mix, and a session on the first day on blogs as a marketing tool (more on that in a subsequent post). Other than myself, the keynote panelists will be:
* Richard Kimber, the recently appointed Managing Director South Asia for Google, and previously global head of e-marketing for HSBC.
* Harold Mitchell, Chairman of Mitchell and Partners, one of the largest media buying agencies in Australia, and one of the grand old men of the industry here.
* Foad Fadaghi, technology editor of BRW magazine, coming recently from a role as Research Director at Frost & Sullivan.

The intention will be to create a provocative conversation, bringing together some of our different perspectives and viewpoints. I will kick off by showing the Future of Media Strategic Framework as a reference point, and to introduce some of the focal issues and questions we’ll try to address duing the session.

Social media: Is the rise of social media fragmenting consumers’ attention and making them harder to reach? Or does it make the total space of media and the ability to impact people larger than it was?

User generated and advertiser generated content: Does the highly targetted nature of user generated content outweigh the lack of control over content? Do advertisers need to become creators of content outside traditional advertising formats?

Format shifting: Is the newfound ability to shift media in time, space, and format a fundamental threat to advertisers? Or does it open up opportunities to reach people in new ways?

Monetizing attention: Will the targetted, measurable nature of advertising on digital channels result in a wholesale shift of advertising dollars over the next decade? What impact will the rise of advertising aggregation have on industry structure?

New distribution channels: How far can mobile go as an advertising medium, and what will succeed in this space? Can advertising be inserted at the level of the device (phone, music or video player, PDA) rather than embedded into content?

It promises to be a fun session! I’ll report back afterwards with insights generated during the conversation.

Last April I wrote a post about changes in newspaper headline writing. Editors were discovering that the witty, catchy headlines they wrote for their print versions weren’t working in the online versions. They weren’t easily visible in search engines, didn’t attract attention by readers using RSS aggregators, and generally meant articles were not getting read online. A very similar article appeared today on CNET, describing the travails of newspaper editors trying to make their print versions work in an online format.

The bottom line is that this is about education. The skills that have served editors and journalists admirably over the last decades need to be complemented by an understanding of how search engines, RSS readers, and social media websites such as Digg, Tailrank, Newsvine and their ilk work. In addtion, there is a new art and science of understanding the behaviors of online news readers. Some people read both print and online news in different situations, and some have shifted to read almost exclusively online. These are in fact demographically some of the most attractive readers. Training is required, and sometimes new people are needed to take the place of those who cannot or will not learn the new skills to succeed in this environment.

"We've had training sessions with copy editors and the night desk for the newspaper. It's been a big education initiative," said David Beard, editor of Boston.com and former assistant managing editor of its print sibling, The Boston Globe. "We're regularly beating the bigger boys, like the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal...and part of the reason is SEO.” In November, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked Boston.com, the sister Web site of The Boston Globe, as the fourth-most trafficked newspaper Web site in the country, even though its print circulation is ranked 15th by one audit bureau.