Why mice get to eat dinosaurs

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Many of us work for a reason. We have something we want to achieve. We want to make change, fix a problem, get stuff done. In the ideal scenario 100% of our efforts are focused on exactly that.

Funnily enough, that's also the reason for every business ever to start. Every start-up is a solution to a problem that someone stumbled on, woke up screaming about or otherwise identified a 'gap on the market'.

So why does it often feel like your ambition to get things done, to make things better, ends up being constrained by the very organisations that were meant to be configured to share in and scale your ability to make that difference?

It's an old conundrum - labelled variously Dis-economies of Scale, career politics, empire building, silo'd thinking etc. Whatever the name the result is immense waste, both for the businesses themselves and for the customers they aim to serve.

This waste gets formalised in structural inertia that constrains the organisation's ability to adapt.
And unless these are understood, acknowledged and a plan for responding to them is drawn up - well that inertia will keep things as they were, stalling the ability to compete.

Of course you don't need to worry if there are no new entrants to your market arriving without all those constraints. But if there are (there always are) then you must address them or try to compete with roughly half your capability and capacity to respond focused on dealing with internal drag instead of focused on meeting market need.

The start-up mentality comes without the brakes. It's little surprise therefore that in case after case the businesses that have succeeded since digital began (you know the examples off by heart by now) have been start-ups built on a different way of working. I'm not saying every start-up will out-compete every incumbent. I am saying that those that survive long enough to emerge to compete come without the inertia of incumbents and are instantly better positioned to perform better.

The inability or unwillingness to identify and deal with their inertia is also why it is so hard to point to a large scale incumbent business in any sector and claim they have pulled off a genuine transformation driven by digital. Orgs that were not born digital have to deal with a heap of internal inertia such as:

Resistance to:

• Ending old supplier relationships in order to establish new ones. Better the devil you know, right?
• Admitting you may have backed the wrong horse (eg ending investments you built the case for and/or supported in the past). I haven't got to where I am today without sticking to my guns, right?
• Moving monoliths of capability and capacity from old to new requirements. What do we do with all these mouths we always fed with the old, while we scramble towards where the market is actually headed?
• Cannibalising what you do with cheaper alternatives. But that hits my margins! (Sure, wait for someone to eat your business from outside instead then).
• Anything we aren't absolutely clear about, have little experience in, or isn't core to our strengths. We have no expertise in X. Hint - if it's new, nor does anyone else. The thing to be expert in is learning and responding at speed.
• New Data. Seriously - how many times have you heard 'we tried this before and it failed' when the whole landscape in which the plan was meant to operate has shifted? New guys don't have your hang-ups (or as you may prefer to call it in the boardroom, your 'corporate memory')
• Accepting that success in your old model is not what's required to succeed in the new. Proven leaders in the old are just the folk for the new, right?

All of these and several others lead to the most debilitating inertia of all - rabbit-in-headlights syndrome. This is the resistance to making a decision in time to jump.

Of course - not only must you be able to make a decision fast enough, you also need to know which way to jump. That's where real strategy plays, where you ditch the 4x4s to find the insight to really understand the landscape, your opponents, the direction of travel of change/market demand, the wisest places to attack and defend, and the challenges yourselves and your rivals face in implementing the tactics that attack or defence will require. And I've shared much on this in recent posts. (eg The Job Of Digital Strategy).

For today, let's focus on how we can remove some of this inertia.

Perhaps its worth taking some lessons from DevOps (and emerging DesOps). It seems odd to me that many incumbent organisations are taking up, or being sold on, the advantages of one or both to make things but rarely getting the hint that perhaps this is how they should be organising themselves to operate for value.

For example, high-level lessons from DevOps:

Measure: Localise accountability.

This requires the redistribution of the power to act - you can't ask for accountability without it. Flattened hierarchies are pretty much inevitable.

Speed: Get to “learn” as quickly as possible.

That demands some Scrum Mastery... driving the notion of server-leaders whose job is to support the makers on their mission, and remove obstacles. If the inertias are your obstacles then, game on. This one organisational focus could save it.

Responsive: Pivot on lessons quickly.

See above. Speed without the power/capacity/capability to respond is just a faster way to crash).

Automate: Use software to do more to help create and manage what can be automated.

See also the idea of Scrum Mastery - as in removing obstacles, accelerating pace, repeating what can be replicated (getting to nuts and bolts you can re-use vs making a new set of nuts and bolts for each piece of work).

Small chunks: Reduce risk through compartmentalisation.

This one large orgs really struggle with. Small teams working at speed, enjoying distributed power with the capacity and capability to act on their own decisions).

There is power in these basic tenets of DevOps, much of it writ-through agile approaches and all of it core to a new way of working.

But let's be clear, this requires a different way of working, different flows of capital, different distributions of power. These come as standard in start-ups. But unless and until you are able to match the freedom to move that a start-up is born with, you will be out-competed, as sure as mammals followed dinosaurs.

Standardising innovation will deliver disruption at scale

I joined in a conversation on Linkedin triggered by one innovator positing a view on what disruption really is - and a dozen more piling in to place their version of the truth on record.

My point of view was/is this:

A technology trend has the potential to be disruptive. 

The response to it is a business model built on the co-evolution of practice which that trend prompts. If that response is a new model creating value in a new way, it will disrupt the existing landscape.

I felt the lack of clarity/consistency/agreement about a pivotal term like disruption revealed how far from being truly disruptive the innovation industry currently is. This comes as small surprise given that it is a core part of digital transformation (being the way-of-working How of digital transformation). And as I have previously pointed out - Digital Transformation faces its own lack of clarity on the supply side, at a time when demand is outstripping the industry's ability to supply it.

The nuts and bolts of innovation remain too often hand-wrought. We can not expect innovation to become the new way of working at a scale and regularity that the speed of digital demands, unless and until we bring a little more standardisation and certainty to it.

This was something I also referred to in: A Shared Language of Innovation recently. In that article I discuss the way in which terms such as MVP, POC, Pilot and Prototype get used in multiple ways. This speaks to the current lack of standardisation and uncertainty (when the client demand is for more standards and more certainty).

But that was just a start. Take a look at the terms I italicised in my initial POV above. We could have a lengthy debate on the meaning of all of them. Which would waste effort, time and intellect which would be better spent on creating the higher order complexity in which value actually resides.

Innovation - particularly where it relates to digital transformation - must agree and stick to making standard sized nuts and bolts. 

Until it gets close to ubiquity its impact will be limited.

There is little Disruption in making nuts and bolts - but there is next to none without them.

Consulting faces a digital reset

Disruption creates opportunity. In the challenges to our cherished business models and organisational norms there is the requirement to act.
The burning bridge beneath our feet prompts us to make significant and often rapid movement. Just such a moment has arrived for the consulting world.
Platforms enhanced by AI are making application development, business process engineering and customer management all things a business can now do for itself - shifting the role of technology consulting. (in large part out of the door).
New ways of working are giving everyone in the business (and from IT) access to human insight, ideation and rapid innovation - blurring roles and delivering organisational adaptability to align with the needs of the digital world.
And these two drivers alone would be significant enough to force a change in perspective.
But add to the plans in the UK to overhaul regulations in respect of the big four accountancy firms and business as normal faces an existential threat.
KPMG has already announced is will no longer offer consultancy to businesses it audits. It, like the others, has been down this road before.
The Enron scandal in the US prompted a break-up and realignment that resulted in Atos, BearingPoint, Cap Gemini. and a merry go round of acquisitions, rebrands and bankruptcy. Accenture while moving first, was born out of the same climate of concern over  operating models.
So we can expect to see great change in the market.
And with this comes the opportunity to reconfigure consulting for the digital world.
In many ways the industry is late to the party. Digital has wrought its disruption to media, retail, travel, utilities, even government.  Now the consulting business has the opportunity to press its reset.
I believe that means becoming genuinely digital. Digital first. Because all business is becoming digital.  Business is changing/has changed the way it thinks about value, about customer, about experience, about responsiveness (to market mastery).
That means consulting must identify its own a clear value proposition that makes sense in a digital world - understanding its place in what are no longer supply chains or value chains, but eco-systems.

• It means setting a strategic position as a value hypothesis to be tested through rapid iteration with customer insight at the heart.
• It means embracing new ways of working and making them the way to work from pitch to delivery - emphasising customer-led design, agility and market responsiveness
• It means changing KPIs to deliver the open, collaborative, trust-building behaviours required of organisational vs individual performance.
• It means addressing digital capabiltity and capacity short-falls in creative and scalable ways (see also blurry people)
• It means establishing the legal and commercial frameworks to support rapid partnership models and value-led billing models
• It means organising around product/service design, development and life-cycle management
• It means tackling ambiguity head on - with minimum viable organisations from which to scale out fast, enabled by blurry people and responsive products and services

Make no mistake - when disruption comes knocking at this scale, incremental change will only delay the inevitable. The start-up mentality IS the digital mentality.

Create value as if the world exists

There is a final disruption charging at full speed through the old world. It promises to be more fundamental than the disruption to the business of content creation and distribution, more disruptive even than our ability to self-organise to shape what we care about.
It is that we can self-organise to pay for it.

It is this disruption to mass, centralised blocks of capital, the switch to widely-distributed ownership and leadership that this entails, that will have the greatest long term impact on how our society is organised – on how we live our lives.

The web has been like a Big Bang to business as usual – disrupting media, marketing, customer service, new product development, the business of elections, the business of who governs us, how we are educated, how we are cared for and so much more.

But disruption of this people-power kind alone has limits. Even though we can find other people who care about the same things as we do, and in so doing lower the cost of action to achieve the shared purposes we have, long lasting and valuable change is slowed by the huge inertia of big capital.

There are those who argue big capital is just too big to be undone from the edge. But who thought the arrival of the internet would one day herald the end of big media? Today more people read Twitter each morning in the UK than read all the national newspapers put together. The power shift is almost complete in media; The content and distribution monopolies gone.

And so for big capital?

Make no mistake, big capital is holding back real change. Take Facebook. First the VCs have to get paid. Haven’t developed a business model to meet the needs of the networked world? F**you! Pay me! And so we get traditional broadcast style ads interrupting your FB time.

Then the VCs are replaced by Big Capital. Who want dividends. Fast. No time to develop a new model. You’ve caught all those fish in a barrel – let’s go spear them...

Where is the interest in long term benefit to the users? To their communities? To their society?

Clay Shirky has a nice line about news websites which are (shock!) “designed as if the web exists”.

Member-led, peer-funded partnerships offer the opportunity to create value as if the world exists. By which I mean value creation which goes beyond the back slap in the boardroom and the bottom line on the balance sheet, value creation which acknowledges that resources are finite, that people, communities, societies and ecologies are connected and matter to each other.

As I described in a recent post about Mindful Consumption, this kind of approach isn’t for a happy clappy hippy utopia, it provides a genuine competitive advantage: In a connected world where to win is to work together with ever greater numbers of people who care about the same things you do, few are going to sign up to support businesses who are damaging the ecosystem in which they exist.

Exploitation which damages our connected well-being has never been welcome. The fact is that exploitation is visible now more than it ever has been before: The web has revealed our interconnectedness like nothing in history before.

And that is a genie which is not going back in its bottle.

Change will come, big capital inertia can only slow things. And where we are frustrated, where we care most, where we see the most significant damage to our future and to that of those we care about, we will vote with not only our connectedness, our collaboration, our action – but with our personal funds.

Sure, it’ll be slow. We’ll chip away at first – Kickstarter by kickstarter. But one day big capital will wake up to find itself in the place newspapers have.

Related articles

• 
  How crowdfunding can kickstart the Big Society

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• 
  Video: Launch of Big Society Capital

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  The Business Model for Disruption

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  Organising against the enemies of internet freedom | Naomi Wolf

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Honing the past versus building the future

Image via http://www.oldukphotos.com: Kingsway 1920

This decade looks increasingly as if it will be defined by the clash between those seeking to make the old world more efficient and those aiming to build a new one.

By which I mean as we hurtle towards the flowering of the full impact of digitally-driven faster, easier, cheaper, group-forming abilities, the defenders of the old will seek to use the technologies simply to lower the cost of doing the things they've always done.

This can loosely by characterised as channel management. Business as usual with a veneer of 'social' technologies at best. This is the world of the turn key solution.The rest of us, those building the new, must find ways to bring them with us.

The urgency becomes greater by the day. There is an oft-quoted peculiarity about the impact of new technologies on society: a consistent 20 year cycle between innovation and its widespread adoption - together with the impact wrought.

I spoke about this in New York in 2008 when I suggested the key technology in our case is user-friendly social networks - as these delivered simple and cheap group-forming into the hands of the mainstream.

I benchmark the beginning of this process as 2003 - the year MySpace launched.

Which means next year will see us half way through the 20-year cycle of disruption. My favourite example of this (via Vin Crosbie) is the impact of the car. In 1900 the streets of London were full of horses. 20 Years later? Full of cars, trucks and buses - and garages, and petrol stations, and new roads, and people and products travelling further, more regularly, more quickly.

In 1910 if you were a horse cart manufacturer you were likely feeling the pinch. But you still had a choice.
You could have chosen to stick to business as usual and used the new tech to make your business more efficient. You could have bought in cheaper supplies, wood, nuts, bolts, studs, leather. Delivery trucks could get you them cheaper and faster. You could deliver your carriages to customers farther afield - on the back of trucks.

You could make your old world more efficient with the tech of the new.

Or you could have joined in making the new world - turning your skills and resources to truck and car making. (If you want a starker example still - consider the cavalry charges and the emergence of the tank in World War I).

One scenario gave you a fighting chance of still being a business in 1920. And if you still want to be in business in 2023 you know the choice to make.

Related articles

• There is no insight button (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

12 years left to adapt or die

Disruptive technologies generally take 20 years to make their broad society-wide impact felt.
The first commercially available mobile phone network opened in Japan in 1979. 20 years later everyone and their mother had a mobile phone.

in 1900 London the horse was still king of the road. 20 years later the motor car had become ubiquitous.

Social networks - and the technologies of social media, have only really been with us in user friendly form since around 2003. I pick that since that was the year MySpace was founded. (Image courtesy PetruzzoPhoto)

Yes there were social technologies before MySpace - just as there were cars before 1900 and mobile phones before 1979. But in all three cases using them (be it social technologies, cars or huge cellphones) was relatively cumbersome and/or time consuming, complex and expensive. MySpace made the peer to peer connectivity of the internet something everyone could do. On a global scale. Easily.

And by 2008 it was pretty well on the way to making the concept of social networking ubiquitous. Facebook built on that. And today as the race for 1bn users advances at a high rate of knots, it's hard to avoid the impact of this user-friendly driver of self organisation - whether it be for customer complaints or armed insurrection.

The ease with which groups of purpose can organise in social networks is something that wasn't so easily enabled on forums and in newsgroups of emails. And not as many (and perhaps not enough) people understood or were driven to understand what they could do with the web - until the nice easy interface of the social network showed the way.

When new tools become truly ubiquitous then, and only then does their full impact on society become clear. In this case I'm suggesting the new tool wasn't simply the internet, it has been the refinement of social networks to the point at which they are delivering self-organising groups of purpose on a global scale.

The process of using social networks has educated a new and huge generation in the value of real-time synchronous communication which is the guts of the formation of communities of purpose.

The future is not digital - it is self organised. That is what social networks reveal.

Everywhere this process touches it disrupts. The media industry lays witness. Others will, of course, follow. Most dramatically throughout the Arab world currently, the disruption is to centralised control. Every where there is centralised control, every where there is mediation - so adhoc self-forming communities of purpose have the power to disrupt.

Given the standard 20-year life cycle of a technological revolution, and my assertion that 2003 is the year zero for this revolution, then we can expect the complete impact to have been wrought by 2023.

In two years time we will be half way through. Half way.

The old ways have 12 years to transform or die.

Related articles

• 5 Failed Social Networks Even Worse Than MySpace (huffingtonpost.com)
• MySpace for sale, News Corp has given up (downloadsquad.switched.com)

The networked world can make brands more relevant than ever

Brands risk losing relevance in a networked world - if they continue to apply broadcast, one-size-fits-all thinking to it.
But, by listening, responding and adapting to its group-forming nature, brands can become more relevant than ever.

Chuffed to say the following slidedeck was selected to be featured on the slideshare homepage on Aug 19.

Adapting Brands To The Networked World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: brands marketing)

What the network (the internet) is for:
The internet is for forming groups.
The fact that people can use it to organise themselves around shared interests, passions and aims (communities of purpose) at next-to-no-cost, disrupts everything.
People can organise themselves to achieve what they want on a niched global scale.
This has world-changing implications for all forms of mediation - branding and brand messages included.

Three key disruptions:

1. Who gets to create content (control messages)? Any and everyone.
   
2. Who gets to distribute content (share messages)? Any and everyone
   
3. Who gets to control the user experience? The user is the destination now. They control their own A-where-ever journey.

You can't target every community of purpose. They can.

This 10-slide deck explains how allowing messages to evolve is the most efficient way of transmission in the networked world - and the only way of reaching into the increasingly long tail. It is the right response to life in a complex adaptive system.

Without this reach your ability to achieve scale in the networked world relies wholly on one-size-fits-all quality. That's fine in broadcast mediums. But the network is not a broadcast medium. In networks, where communities of purpose form, relevance wins every time.

Why Traditional Ad Models will not work in social networks (and what will...)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: advertising networks)

The timescale:
The great disruption of the internet has only just begun.
It is only with the arrival of social networks that the majority of users have been offered an easy-to-use interface for accessing the power of the network; group forming (with purpose) on a global scale. When an interface becomes ubiquitous, then significant change occurs. Cite: The telephone.

It is only three years since myspace first clocked more page impressions than google. It is only three years since YouTube started changing the way we think about television.
The great disruption of the internet started just three years ago. You ain't seen nothing yet!

Key Lessons


1. Listen:

Brands are what their users say they are.
Noah Brier's Brand Tags illustrates this in a so-funny-it-hurts (and not in a good) way. Check out your brand now at brandtags.net. There is a UK version too, but data is currently a little patchy. Make it richer, here.

Users tweet about coke, british airways, o2, macdonalds, or anything else you care to name. Search using your own terms at summize.com (twitter search)

Their conversations tell you not only what they think about your brands, but also how, where and when they use them and who they are using them with. They use them as the content that sparks their conversations.

The conversations are happening with or without your consent, on or off your own mediated forums, branded social networks and chat rooms, in every connection between every node. Where people are, they talk. And where they talk, they talk about you.

Some brands are making great use of the new social mediums. Zappos (an online shoe retailer in the US), for example. And David Armano at Logic + Emotion offers a useful reminder of how brands should approach social media (using twitter as his example).

You can't build communities or control the conversation. You can enable. Join them around their campfires. Be prepared to listen, then serve them with things that are useful - things they they will think are cool enough to pass on to others, who they think will think its cool, too. They are best placed to judge this. Not you.

You've got to be joking?
Look on the funny side. Think how jokes are adapted to be passed on. How do you select which gag to tell which person or gathering. How do you adapt it to suit. That adaption = adoption by the next community of purpose.

The business case
Since approximately 70% of purchase decisions are made based on friend's recommendations (according to Forrester) - you have to seriously consider focusing more of your spend on connecting where the conversations are happening and placing higher value on the conversations and the results of those conversations.

Radian6 among other sentiment trackers, can reveal how your brands are being talked about. That's the information gathering phase... But there is a tangible connection between trust and responsiveness, as Jeff Sonstein says.

2. Respond
In the networked world marketing isn't done to them, it's done by them. Think less about where the eyeballs are and more where the mouths and ears are. And think about joining their conversations in real time.

Real time captures the moment of inspiration. "I want to buy X". It is the essence of two of my more simple concepts, the Intention Economy. and Lean-To-Marketing.

Responses that work:

Widgets with personal outcomes.
Widgets that allow users to adapt them to better suit them to the community with whom they choose to share them next, are a brilliant fit with the networked world.

There are numerous examples. One of my favourites was Pampers US campaign last Christmas. It lowered technical barriers to allow any and everyone to mash up pictures of their own kids with a beautiful video and Silent Night message of Christmas peace. And that made it a widget with a personal outcome. Anyone who did it would want to share it with their close relatives, at least. And each of the receipients may like the idea sufficiently to adapt it to include their own children, and pass it on to the next adhoc community... and on it goes. Unfortunately it is no longer available here.

Others include the Simpsonizeme.com (can you see what they'd done there?) which turns your mugshot into a Simpsons version of yourself, to coincide with the movie release. That does live on, in association with BurgerKing.

In each case we create a version for ourselves to take on our journey with us. And in the process it becomes our message to share with our communities.

Mark Earls (author of Herd) suggests "give them something to do together".

The Cadbury's Gorilla's manifold reinterpretations on YouTube illustrate the power of this idea. And here's an important lesson, whether or not Cadbury wanted the network to take its idea and play with it and share it or not, that's exactly what happened. (hint, they aren't in control of the message. They never were).

You can tap into this.
There are three conditions required for a successful widget.
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

We've clearly got creative users. We can make their lives easier by lowering the technical barriers (as Pampers did) and providing tool-kits to make co-creation easier (just as NiN have by providing tools on their website to allow fans to easily remix their work and share the results).

And since that which we create, we embrace, we're more likely to take on the role of marketer on behalf of what we have created, selecting the right communities of purpose to share the outcomes with.

2 & 3 are relatively easy. It's number 1 many struggle with. But without it you're left trying to control a message - trying to dictate where and when and how it will be delivered. And you're not very good at that - at least you're nowhere near as good as the people living in those communities.

This post How We Are Made Great discusses how individually we cannot hope to be in control of turning the flock, how important it is to take a human social approach to changing opinion or behaviour.

In this world even the role of links is challenged (as I discussed in Portability is the new Linkworthy)
They did a great job at discovering people through content.
But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.
Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with. Widgets are consumate taken-with enablers.

Going on the journey all brands must make if they are to adapt to survive in the networked world goes more than skin deep. It requires cultural shift, a cultural shift that makes the brand itself a better fit with the networked world. We are in transition - so broadcast models still have great value - but the speed of the transition becomes faster by the day.



Great examples of brands listening to and adapting to the networked world:
Zappos understand that customer service (human interaction) is everyone's responsibility.
Pampers makes your kids the stars Christmas campaign.
NiN make mash-ups easy and shareable.
Where are the Joneses takes Ford to new places.
The Simpsons/Burger King
Itsmy.com (their user-chooses-the-ad model leverages the social graph in a brilliantly simple way).
Spinvox for listening and responding. (and that reminds me of qik's lean-too marketing)
Carphone Warehouse listens... (example of inevitable two-speed culture in a giant?)

Your further examples welcome. Post links in the comments below and I'll add them to the list as they come in.

The great disruption of social networks reaches its tipping point

I feel like I've been warning that global warming was about to reach its tipping point - and suddenly images of the arctic glaciers collapsing, crashing into the sea at an alarming rate, are being broadcast around the world, providing hard evidence for all to see.

The great disruption of social networks has reached its tipping point. The theory of the impact of the networked world has become real. The evidence is now with us.

A short time ago I wrote that the disruption caused by social networks had only just begun. I thought we'd been guilty of over-estimating the change that the internet heralded - and of underestimating the significance of the rapid charge toward ubiquity of social connectedness - via the easy-to-use tools of 2.0 - social networks in their various guises.

But it looked to me like a two-speed 'social' world had emerged:
1. UGC-powered broadcast models (where 99% of the 'audience' consumed what 1% created)
2. Total Communities: where to take part you have to create part (eg twitter, secondlife, facebook (reversing the 99/1)

But now, Via JP Rangaswami's Confused of Calcutta, comes evidence of the inconvenient truth of the speed with which the networked world is emerging - a shock for those of us who perhaps thought the UGC-powered broadcast model was something more persistant than a hangover of the broadcast world.

It's evidence of the speeding up from broadcast to networked, from centre to edge.

It concerns youtube - one of the models I placed firmly on the UGC-powered broadcast side of the equation.

In the past our assumptions were that it followed the 1% create, 99% audience model.

That may be changing - and very rapidly indeed.

JP Rangaswami tells us that Dr Michael Wesch, (of The Machine is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today) is speaking on the Anthropology of YouTube at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.

And this, according to the Library of Congress news release is what he will be talking about:
"More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.” "Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C."

Update: www.twitter.com/mwesch: " finishing highly experimental presentation for Lib. of Congress ... 50 minute video made of over 300+ YouTube vids that I will narrate live"

I think this part is worth repeating:
"In the last six months...About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

The numbers were so impressive that I thought I ought to check with Dr Wesch. I am extremely grateful for how rapidly he has responded:

"The numbers are as fuzzy as the distinction between professional and amateur. We are very confident that at least 80.3% of all content is UGC ... and as much as 95% (depending on how it is defined).
"The difficulty comes because many "users" are now creating near-professional-level content and are often getting paid for it - even if they did not expect to get paid for it when they started creating videos. I would consider myself one of these people in this fuzzy category (see my youtube account "mwesch")
"And one more clarification: the 88% figure refers only to what is new and original (and may be ugc or pro) - the other 12% are repeats, reloads, or stuff that was copied from TV, etc.. I think 80.3% is the safest figure for what we call "unambiguously user-generated content"

The notion that we are all publishers now (and that also means we are all advertisers now) has taken a giant leap from theoretically possible to actually happening.

The networked world is becoming reality before our eyes.

The end is in sight for the silent majority
When all is said and done Youtube may yet remain a UGC-powered broadcast model, attracting large audiences to consume that which is created by ever-larger numbers of user-creators. But as surely as participation rises towards the norm, so those who would passively consume will fall into a silent minority.

They'll get as much as they ever got from the broadcast world, which is to say, rather less than those of us enjoying the fruits of the networked world.


I'll be speaking about some of the implications of this in New York next week. Find me at WidgetWebExpo I'll be in NYC from Saturday evening.

Resources

• SOCIAL MEDIA STATS: UM Wave 4
  
• BLOGS: Top 100 that'll keep you up to date
• Design: Googley UX defined
  
• Disruption Group tools
• Disruption: SloaneReview MIT.pdf
• Engagement: Social Media Case Studies uberlist.
  
• Engagement: Alan Moore's keynote at Nokia World
• Engagement: AlanMooreEngagementMktingPodcast1
• Engagement: AlanMooreEngagmentMktingPodcast2
• Engagement: Project VRM
• Engagement: SMLXL little book of engagement marketing.pdf
• Engagement: The End of Advertising as we know it (IBM)
• Futurology: Rheingold on where tech is taking us and how people are changing (videos)
• Lectures: MIT World (Media) videos
• Mobile ad survey UK 11-20yo.pdf
• Mobile Data Association (uk)
• Mobile internet UK usage figures
• Mobile Life Survey - mobile is the new village green!
• Mobile: Admob's mobile metrics
• Mobile: Betavine: Mobile developers playground
• Mobile: Check how mobile ready your site is
• Mobile: DotMobi developer guide
• Mobile: Oxford Forum (3G pros forum)
• Mobile: Qualitative research young adults and MoSo networks
• Mobile: Videos from Mobinar 2007
• Networks: User Generated Context (Havas Media Lab)
• Networks: Cluetrain as a powerpoint
• Networks: ClueTrain Manifesto. Read it online
• Networks: Concept of community in theory and practice
• Networks: Designing interaction into MoSo networks.ppt
• Networks: Don't just witness the network (download)
• Networks: Economics of Digital Business Models: Analyzing Economics of Platforms
• Networks: Economics of Peer-to-Peer business models
• Networks: Essential Guide to Social Media download
• Networks: Exploring emergence (MiT)
• Networks: Group Forming Network theory resource
• Networks: How Fuzzy R U?
• Networks: Internal comms: Euan Semple video
• Networks: Journal of Computer Mediated Communication
• Networks: Overload Shmoverload. Stowe Boyd on giving yourself up to the network
• Networks: Reed's Law, multiple identities and a longer tail (download)
• Networks: Niche social networks listed and reviewed
  
• Networks: Social Networking for Businesses.pdf
• Networks: Social Networking Intro for Businesses (pdf)
• Networks: Social Origins of Good Ideas
• Networks: The Intention Economy - Doc Searls
• Networks: Watts and Strogatz model
• Networks: White Paper download: Why Media is the New Business Ecology
• Networks: Wiki Vision of a Networked World
• Networks: Wiki: Why Media is the new business ecology
• Networks: Wikinomics - Chapter 1 download.pdf
• Reputation: Using Reputation to Augment Explicit Authorization.pdf
• Thought leadership for business
• Thought Leadership: Thought Leadership cribsheet
• Tools: Brainstorming software
• Tools: JS Kit - Web2.0 apps for the lazy!
• Tools: SEO Book keyword tool
• Tools: SEO: Opera Keyword check
• Tools: Applications listed and reviewed
  
• Video Industry Index

Got any to share? Please add as a comment, complete with url.

Twitter vs FriendFeed: Conversation vs Convenience?

Twitter has been suffering growing pains in recent days and weeks. Outages aplenty.

I noticed they are trying to control things by switching off some functionality from time to time. And what they choose to switch off indicates what they see of least value.

When times are hard, it is the archive, of previous posts, and direct messaging which get booted out.

Turning off the archive shows that they recognise the primary importance of synchronous communication. You might be interested in what someone said in the past, or what they were asking about in the past, but you can respond less effectively now than you could at the time the request or share was made. Twitter gets that; being prepared to drop anything to assist with a community of purpose is high on the list of useful value creating stuff.
Dropping IM's indicates they also understand that closed communications have less value than open.

This thinking pervades twitter and drips from its architecture.
They are all about the current, right now conversation and connecting people.

Blogs were described by Doc Searls as the best example of the sovereign self. Twitter (distributed microblogging), imho is the best example of our communal selves.

FriendFeed, surely makes that conversation even more communal, with its aggregation and friend-of-a-friend/fuzzy-edged groups form of sharing and distribution?

No wonder some tout it as the next-gen twitter. But I wonder if it is more about convenience than conversation?

Some have described FriendFeed (and I'll add links when I have more time - sorry) as distributed conversation.
I'm not clear that's delivered. At least it isn't delivered in the right-now and in one place synchronous way that twitter values so highly.

What FriendFeed does deliver is the convenience of compiling and redistributing huge amounts of an individual's metadata.

Not only do you get to see what I'm 'doing' on twitter, you also see the feeds I'm reading on googlereader, or videos I post on youtube, or images on flickr etc etc.

So now there's even more reasons for conversations to start.
More metadata on show to each other means more opportunities for us to find we share a right-now purpose and act on it. (Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21s century).

All good. But there's a risk in distributing the conversation. Where ever you follow the flag to, that's where the conversation risks being taken - and silo'd.

Twitter's value is in keeping the conversation open, visible, synchronous and consistent.

Friendfeed is a useful broadcast of our metadata - and potentially a step towards us becoming the url. The key will be connecting the conversations in a coherent human-focused way.

Right now the conversation is at risk of being disrupted more than distributed.

So I'll happily broadcast my metadata through FriendFeed, and have others broadcast their metadata at me, but when the conversation flags are raised where will the conversation be hosted which creates most value for all parties.

For this post, I'm hoping it'll be right here. If FriendFeed were to offer me that control...

More questions than answers I'm afraid.

The only thing worth measuring

Bluetooth. Used massively by kids who don't have the mobile phone contracts to go spraying data, mms and email willy nilly from their phones. Dr Ian Wood talked about the way his kids use it at yesterday's MIPS.
My observations of kids - and many adults for that matter - backs that up. They get together in physical proximity and share pictures, music etc via bluetooth.
Which raises questions about how we monetise this. The usual 'stick ads all over it' kind of solutions get chucked around. They lead to the inevitable "But how do you measure it?"

Here's my solution: Don't.

We are getting increasingly hung up on trying to measure how 'engaged' users are, or the pass-on rate of virals (which at least make an effort to understand that the ad is the content and the content is the ad - rather than plastering interruptive ads over 'the content').

The only measure that's real is; does more of what you're selling get sold?
The rest is observing information flows.

Maybe where this leads us is to a place where the creator of the ad message (the viral, the content that carries the message in some form or other) gets paid an agreed sum for the research and the resulting creative that the payee approves and then a % cut of the uplift in sales (if any!) over the next 12 months (that's an arbitrary number of course - meant to indicate over a longer scale than the blitzkrieg of most 'campaigns'. DIY distribution follows a much less explosive, much more organic, pattern).

Imagine if that 'creator of the ad' is a 'user'. There's a disruption. Where everyone is a content creator now, so everyone is also a marketer.

Advertising paid on results? Advertising that anyone can do? Is this a model already being offered or adopted (and I'm thinking a little beyond straightforward affiliate marketing)? Tell us why it's never going to work - or where it has already?

Social Network to Internet = Phone to phone lines

A little more on this.

Tools are important things. The telephone didn't change the way we communicate until it was in the hands of the majority - and until that majority was comfortable using it.

It moved from being an odd piece of high technology (left, Alexander Graham Bell with the one he patented) to being a familiar tool. We certainly needed all the phone lines in place for this to happen. But we also needed a really easy way for us to understand how to use them - an interface.

Once we had both, everything changed; from how fast news travels through networks, to how widely it gets distributed, to how many bank clerks and insurance salesmen need to be employed (witnessed through the dread edifice the 'call centre'). Emergency services, journalism, military activity, shop delivery systems, politics... you name it, the ubiquity of the telephone as a tool alongside a wide network to make that tool useful, changed our world.

Telephone wires aren't a tool, they are the medium. The handsets are the tools.

Ok, so what difference does this make? Well, I'm starting to wonder if we haven't been a little bit guilty of heralding the new era wrought by the internet a little too early. What we really meant was the new era ushured in by the ubiquity of the tool that is making all the difference - the social network.

What I'm suggesting is that social networks are to the internet what the handset is to the wires of the phone network. And just to avoid confusion - I'm talking about the fixed line phone for now. They are the interface which allows the majority of people to access the disruptive power of the network.

I know that email 'newslists' and forums have been with us since deep into last century. But there was a reason people who used them were considered 'geeky' and 'nerdy'. You had to be of a particular type to early adopt. They were flat two-dimensional implementations brought with us from a flat broadcast world.

Social networks have been spluttering into existence since about 1995 but they certainly weren't ubiquitous back then. It took lesson-learning and the explosion of broadband to move them into the 'familiar tool' category.

By 2005 MySpace was clocking up more page impressions than google.
This perhaps marks the watershed in the move out of 'geek' and into 'familiar tool' for social networks.

Social networks reveal to the users the new and very disruptive low overhead cost of forming groups. Easy-to-use social networks reveal this, and allow large numbers of people to experience this, in ways that previous connecting software and technologies could not match.

And as more and more people become more and more familiar with the power of the network through the familiar tool of the social network, so the disruption will bite deeper - the one that will remove the mediators in supply chain after supply chain as new networks form supply and demand webs.

You could argue people were using social networks before. But the difference may be that users of YouTube, eBay, whatever were not explicitly using them to form groups of purpose - they were a byproduct of their primary activities (sharing videos and buying and selling).

The 'familiar tool' social networks (of which facebook appears to me the easiest to use and best at revealing its group forming nature) do a different job. They put group-forming at their heart. They allow the user to dial D for disruption the moment they start a group.

How fast does the change happen when ubiquity arrives? I spoke at EPublishing last week, where Vin Crosbie gave the keynote. Vin showed pictures of a London street just before the internal combustion engine became ubiquitous. Streets filled with horses, a transport infrastructure to support all those horses, how far and how fast people goods and ideas travelled controlled by those horses. 20 years later the horse was all but gone from London's streets.

What do you expect the pace of disruption to be in the digital space in the 21st Century?
Consider this. YouTube launched from scratch a little over 3 years ago. How differently do we think about TV three years on?

Communities of purpose are the business units of the 21st century

Communities of purpose are the business units of the 21^st century.

This notion, should you accept it, has profound and far-reaching implications not only the future of publishing but also for advertising, marketing, production and the very process of the creation of value.

It has implications too for how companies should organise to benefit from the new way value is created. Yes, it is disruptive, isn’t it?

This paper seeks to explain why these communities of purpose are of such value and why enabling their rapid, real-time evolution unlocks the key to value creation.

It will consider why this has the potential to be the greatest explosion in value ever created.

And it will propose solutions in which content, conversation and communities of purpose provide the cornerstones. With them I believe we can unlock value now and into the mid-to-long term.

It seeks to answer the question “How do we monetise hosting the conversation?”

Translation: How does media make money in the future?

You can read it in full or download and/or share it below. Hope you'll share your comments below.

Read this doc on Scribd: Communities of Purpose are the business units of the 21st Century

Widgets are to web 'sites' as blogs are to broadcast

The Power of the Network means not one but two serious disruptions for media companies to come to terms with.

We've had a while to get used to the idea that we are no longer the owners of the means of production (of content, be it 'editorial, 'advertising' or 'marketing'). We understand that the lowering of technical barriers enabled by blogs and other social networking tools mean that everyone is a publisher now. Not broadcasters, but conversation starters.

The bit that seems harder for us to get our heads round is that this also means we are no longer the owners of the means of distribution.

In a print, tv, radio, (even web1.0) broadcast world we did the distribution. We not only produced the content, we packaged it as we saw fit and handed it out through our chosen channels. There was only one central hub and we were it. So the only way for content (either editorial or marketing messages) to be distributed was by it being broadcast by the same people who created the content, through our channels.

Part two of the disruption would therefore seem obvious: Now everyone creates content, so everyone distributes it.

We saw our position as lone distributor eroded by 'viral' and 'word of mouth' but we didn't really see it as a radical challenge to the status quo of our position as 'the great mouth'.

This is a hard lesson to learn. We imagine that by 'providing a place' for people to aggregrate their user generated (and other) content we can hang on to our role as distributor, as if this can be achieved without collapsing back into broadcast mindsets.

Our aggregating, community-focused plans tick all the right boxes until someone asks about 'reach', or gets excited by how many millions of eyeballs may be scanning that homepage (hello facebook, youtube etc).

I think aggregation is the right approach because members of communities (us included, btw) need to serve one another - individuals blundering around the web cherry-picking little bits of disaggregated content will soon run out of inspiration, for example.

But I also think there's a reason sites which aggregate ugc and conversation (yes that is what facebook does, too) are currently no better at generating high click-thru rates than the rest of the web. That is, there is a reason we struggle to make the business models work.

The models - no doubt responding to those who haven't understood both elements of the disruption - attempt to squeeze the networked production of content into a broadcast-style of distribution. Just look at the page impressions on that. Slap on those banner ads... surely some have to stick... That combined with attemting to take a share of transactions generated (the middle man is only ever the next good idea away from disruption) is about all we see.

The issue is that niche community generated content doesn't lend itself to being broadcast. It's our old friend relevance over quality all over again. One man's 'rubbish' is another man's quality - and the difference is its relevance to that man. A blurred family video of a treasured moment will get distributed to the people who care about it by the people who care about it - but will not become a youtube hit. If you've ever seen a complilation of 'greatest hits from YouTube on TV you'll realise how inappropriate the broadcasting of niche ugc is. Editors selecting for the lowest common denominator get involved. Relevance disappears up the rear-end of a production meeting.

Of course there are rare occasions when someone's niche community generated content breaks out of that niche to become a hit that others want to share. But these are few and far between. The vast majority is in the long tail of 'relevant to me'.

By all means, if advertisers want to give you money to have their wares on show as users fly past them to reach (or upload) the niche content they are actually interested in, you'd be foolish to say no thanks. But response rates remain horribly low - and those responding horribly familiar.

Those advertisers are bound to want something better sooner or later. And when they do, perhaps we can all start coming up with the models that benefit from the fact that networked content production and networked distribution should work together.

Widgets make this requirement clearer, as each day passes.

Trust me, they are more than a tactic.

Widgets are as disruptive to web 'sites' (the notion of the url as home/hub/destination/centralised point of distribution) and therefore to the vestiges of our role as distributors, as blogs and social media have been to broadcast and our role as centre-out content creators.

Widgets combine the two network effects - of production and distribution. The ones that work best allow you to mash-up, creating a personalised outcome. This of course makes you more interested in a) displaying on your own space b) sharing with your friends. In a) you co-created the content. in b) You are the distributor.

But widgets also offer the greatest new opportunities for the creative minds of the media industry. Every great widget starts as the cool implementation of an idea which serves a need. The best respond to the needs of niche communities. It is built to serve and the builders need a strong understanding of who it is they are serving.

Those in a position to understand those needs and to respond with creative and useful solutions stand to benefit. And those of us in specialist media would certainly like to think we're among that number. Of course, the brightest among us will turn to the communities we know to co-create the launching widget in the first place, I hope that's a given...

Perhaps my 'updated definition of media brands' requires a further update:

• A media brand is a platform for a community with shared interests.
• Focused on the interests of this global niche community, we should provide the tools to allow the co-creation and aggregation of content, products and services
• Services are best delivered at the point they are needed – and that is always, always mobile!

The widget-related update?

• Focused on the interests of this global niche community, we should provide the tools to allow the co-creation, aggregation AND DISTRIBUTION of content, products and services

Your thoughts, as always, very welcome. Please post below.

Resources reorganised - your suggestions for more, please!

I've reorganised the 'resources' section you'll find in the left-hand navigation of this blog (a fair way down the page!).
Now the items included (downloads and specific links) are loosely categorised under the following:

• Disruption
• Engagement
• Futurology
  
• Mobile
• Networks
• Thought Leadership
• Tools
• Video

I hope you'll find them useful. And if you have a suggestion for something else that should be included (something you've found useful!) please share.

Microsoft buys ScreenTonic, Yahoo launches onesearch

A couple of fairly heavyweight mobile internet moments happened today, and this post is simply to log them.
Microsoft has bought ScreenTonic, the Paris-based mobile-internet advertising company. The firm felt it missed out on the disruption opportunity of the fixed-line internet (hello adsense!) and is 'positioning itself better' for this second internet disruption.
It'll be interesting to see how much they paid.
The second biggy today is Yahoo's launch of OneSearch - a locally biased mobile-focused search. It claims to be radical and new. Not sure how different it is to google's mobile search?