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)

Care less what the 15 year old intern does: Ask what his mum is doing.

I've really enjoyed the righteous abandon with which some sections of the traditional media have crowed about one 15-year-olds insight that his friends don't use Twitter.

Among the other details of his note for Morgen Stanley are that online advertising is 'pointless' (I'm pretty sure he means interruptive traditional style advertising of the kind that sustains traditional media) and that no kids are reading newspapers.

That teenagers aren't using Twitter (much) comes as no surprise to anyone whose been watching the regular stats that role out of Nielsen, Comscore and the like. That it took an 'intern' to tell Morgen Stanley is perhaps the greater surprise - but that's by the by.

What is of more concern to me is the considerable amount of barking going on up wrong trees around this.

First, why does it take one intern's paper to get media owners jumping up and down? Kids are available to speak to every day of the week everywhere. Take them seriously and they will speak to you. Ask Ruby Pseudo. Same message goes to Morgen Stanley. Publishing the bleeding obvious as 'insight' doesn't do you many favours.

Second. Please, please, please don't think that the behaviour (particularly what they say they do compared with what they actually do) of teenagers is an indicator for how the world is changing and a guide to how you should respond.

As Clay Shirky put it if you want to know what technologies will succeed don't ask what teenage boys are doing - ask what their mums are doing.

Mums are busy. And if the tech doesn't make a material difference to their lives they don't use it.
How many mums are on Facebook, how many on Twitter? How many using email? Text?

You can be sure there are many. They are organising their lives and the things they care about with these tools.

They are showing these tools matter for very many, now. Enough to change the world? Not yet. When we stop using terms like social media and just get on with organising ourselves - then we'll know the world has changed because enough of us find it everyday ordinary enough.

Follow the teenage boys if you wish - I'll be watching the mums.

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Why cut brands out of the conversation?

Cutting brands out of the conversation is not a wise business strategy. It is is limiting and potentially damaging for all concerned.

I’ve used Flickr for many years – as have many of my colleagues.

I’ve even used Flickr for ‘Branded’ functions – setting up accounts in the name of brands, using its functionality to upload and display to those brands' own websites etc.

And I know I’m not alone in this.

So when we thought of running a competition using the group functionality of Flickr no one thought – STOP surely this is all nasty commercial stuff Flickr won’t accept.

So it came as something of a surprise when we discovered that a competition group associated with a brand runs the risk of being closed down because it contravenes Flickr’s commercial use terms and conditions.

Let’s consider the landscape here for a moment. We’re told by Flickr that groups don’t support competitions. We found 3600+ running when we last looked. Image courtesy

A vast proportion of the users of Flickr are promoting their photographic wares, from just displaying the quality of their work right up to (and including) people selling T-shirts and mugs with their images on them.

Huge numbers of groups are brand-related. From the obvious (Canon and Nikon users) to the might-as-well-be-an-advert of group’s extolling the virtues of one of Ford’s trucks.

None of these have links to buy stuff (though, hang on a minute, many of the groups do, it turns out).

Seems even if your group has zero links to external sites, no calls to action to buy – in other words is less commercial than most, you’re still not welcome if you come attached to a brand.

It seems a little unfair that because you organise a group FOR a brand Flickr will take exception but if users of brands (and how can you tell the difference in most cases) create a group, all is well.

Not exactly encouraging transparency now, is it?

Is this a case of ‘if it’s from the edge its ok, if it’s from the centre, it isn’t’. A big principled philosophical stand?

Nah. It’s all about the money. Any brand can PAY for a sponsored group, which Flickr will then happily spam its users with by pasting it all over the homepage with no regard for that user’s interests. There is no moral high-ground in that.

Good brands don’t use social media, they participate in it. At least, their representatives do.

They go to the trouble of reaching out to people who care about a particular competition, theme or idea - to join in. And they ask them to bring others – more people to Flickr in this case – more of the people who make Flickr.

Flickr is the provider of tools and a platform. The community that emerges is not Flickr's, it's simply enabled by those tools.

Good examples make Flickr more useful for all those concerned. Users end up uploading and sharing more images, and forging more connections. And each new node on the network doubles its value.

We didn’t intend to give Flickr money. We did intend to give it more people and something useful those people could do together.

We usually charge for this service…

I suspect those at the top in Flickr get all this. But those charged with hitting short-term commercial targets don’t.

So, a little advice for the commercial strategists at Flickr. Nose off grind-stone a minute. Look around you.

Facebook. More images than you. More people than you. Treats brands just the same as it treats users. There I can set up a fan page, share functionality etc, as a brand or as a user. Perhaps they’ve noticed brands are made up of people (you can but hope…)
Whatever the case, Facebook’s treatment of brands is welcoming. Come and play. Join in. Learn from the networked world.

Consider Youtube. Brands can create channels, profiles, upload content. They are treated like users. Join in: Brand or user.

Consider Blogger. Brands can create blogs and have them hosted by google. All at no cost. Join in: Brand or user.

Consider Twitter. Brands can create a profile and interact just as much as any individual user. Join in: Brand or user.

These, and the vast majority of communities, see the bigger picture. They are not the owners of a community. They are the owners of a set of tools for the community to do with as they will. And the communities include people who happen to work for brands.

Flickr, and communities like it, are made up of people who have to create part to take part. Brands are one of the things they want to create around and interact around – just try some searches to see. Creation and interaction is what makes community valuable.

My best advice: Don’t stand in the way of this.

Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, twitter are all applying the principles of the because effect – when something that was once scarce becomes abundant you can no longer make money with it, you have to try to make money because of it.

The classic model is music. Now that digital music is everywhere and all-but free you can’t make money charging for it (selling cds) but you can make money because of your music (ie concert tickets –things that are scarce).

Youtube made uploading, sharing and broadcasting video abundant. They realized therefore they couldn’t make money from that. They have focused on making money from what has resulted from that (because of that) – their place as one of the biggest sites on the planet with huge, huge audiences and increasingly clever in context ads.

We appreciate these are difficult times for commercial considerations. We appreciate the lines are blurring.

But Flickr and other social networks have lessons to learn if they want to connect properly with brands as they adapt to the networked world.

• Social Glue has a plan to open debate around this and get the social networks (yes Flickr dudes, you included), users and brand-promoting folks to join in and establish some new ways of doing business in this networked world - ways which will be to all parties' advantage - particularly for the communities we're all trying to serve.

Hope you'll join in.

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Clay Shirky on why email stuffs facebook et al

I interviewed Clay Shirky earlier this week. Here's part two of the series.

(part one: How algorithms caused the credit crunch)

In part two Clay explains why he thinks email is the most effective tool for group-forming (and therefore for influence on social and political change) right now. He describes the impact its 'dull' ubiquity is having on the US Presidential elections.
And we talk about the future of mass any-and-everything (though particularly broadcast TV) with reference to solidarity goods (value gained from shared experiences). Clay reasons that far from dumbing down, the fragmentation of the internet is demanding increasing quality from its hits.
When media and channels were scarce you got a share in the value of solidarity goods simply for showing up. Now you only get a share by being truly excellent.
Watch the video below. Buy his book here. See him speak here.

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.

PR: It ain't broke, but it does need fixing

There have been some wild stabs in the dark (back?) at PR over the last few days - notably from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble.
Steve Rubel has been questioning the value of PR altogether in a world where we thrill in the discovery of the new for ourselves (we get more of a kick if this experience is NOT mediated).

And I've joined the fray with comments in mutliple locations. It's time to draw them together. (Image by candiceedicnac)

PR ain't broken. At least, it's no more broken than the next way-of-doing-things the mass-media, broadcast world presents us with.

Anything which involves mediation has to be rethought in the context of a world where communities of purpose can form at next-to-no cost - where control is simply routed round by people seeking their own co-created solutions;

PR is no more broken than broadcast media, than the music industry, movies or print.

It's no more broken than traditional visions of economics, politics, education or the law.

ALL need reconstructing to take account of the fundamental shift from a broadcast to a networked world.

To pick on PR is to miss the point. Everywhere there is mediation, the network will disrupt and is beginning to disrupt.

In the case of traditional PR, the kind of stuff that bugs Scoble et al (and frankly any traditional journalist since PR began) is the irrelevant.

PR, when driven from a broadcast mindset, aims for quality at the cost of relevance: A fabulous press release sent out en masse? Spam for everyone for whom it is not relevant. Relevance always beats quality.

PR has to take the same kind of approach as anyone wishing to spread or seed a message in the networked world (hello marketeers, advertisers, politicians, service and product providers?).

It goes a little something like this (those familiar with Why Traditional Ad Models Won't Work in Social Networks, And What Will, may recognise its evolutionary path!). See below. Relax. It's just 10 slides.

From broadcast PR to P2PR

View SlideShare presentation (tags: p2pr pr broadcast networked)

This speaks to some of the ideas we kicked around with the notion of P2PR.

But to dismiss traditional PR out of hand is at best link-baiting and at worst commercial suicide.

There's still huge swathes of value to be derived from taking traditional routes, reaching out to those who still broadcast in the hope of reaching their (ok dwindling but) still very large audiences.



No wise PR effort would do without it. And getting back to the basics of good human relationships with your intended broadcaster, so that you know what is relevant for them, will win you prizes here, too.

PR + P2PR = :-)

How to adapt to survive the 21st century

I believe in evolution. That is, I believe in complex adaptive systems which use relatively simple rules to create immensely complex outcomes - such as the weather, the economy, ideas, messages, the internet, ourselves, and life on Earth. They do this by a process of iteration, selection and amplification.

I have discussed (The Perfect Storm: A Fourth Element) how I believe it is no coincidence that the fastest growing company in history (google) exists at the same time as the internet: two complex adaptive systems are coming together (the economy and the internet) to fan the flames.
We are looking ahead into a golden age. And you will be part of it; If you adapt to survive.

One outcome of evolution is that there are always casualties - things that get dampened out of existence rather than amplified to success. Don't be a diplodocus. (image shared via flickr by cpurrin1)

I have a handful of simple rules for success for individuals driven by the idea that in order to adapt to survive in any given environment the first and primary requisite is that you are living in that environment (told you these rules were simple...)

So I always suggest:

Write a blog: Discover how easy it is to be a publisher, how easy it is to create and share content, how easy it is to form groups of shared purpose in networks of trust, how easy it is to find relevant content and for relevant people to find you. More.

Build a widget: You have to start by trying to guess who might choose to share your widget or be enthused or impressed enough to pass it on - which raises a whole bag of questions. More. Discover not only that we are all publishers now, we all distributors, too - and all of us are advertisers.

To which I'll add:
Join a social network: Discover the easy-to-use tools that are making group-forming ubiquitous (more on why this is so critical here).

What tips do you have? What other advice for individuals and groups do you have to help them adapt to survive in the networked world as it comes to dominate the 21st century?

I'm in media! Oh really? So are my children...

I responded to Paul Bradshaw's interesting question about the future of training for journalists here and by way of introduction mentioned that: "I've been in media for 20 years, unless you count the fanzines I wrote as a kid."

Actually, I was in media as soon as I could be. I even made my own comics and newspapers before I had any means of distributing them.

Which makes me think today's kids will be in media rather earlier and rather longer - and they'll understand the power that gives them rather earlier.

As soon as they connect via the likes of habbo hotel, club penguin, or many of the other social networks for kids they are in media. (image by Terry Lloyd Smith)

They have the tools to enable what we've all become:

We're all publishers now, we're all distributors now, we're all advertisers now, as I've said before.

Which means as soon as we start forming into groups via the network we're in media.

Perhaps we are really in media even before we reach out for our first mouse - part of the eighth mass media I've started exploring here and here?

Why traditional advertising won't work in social networks - and what will

Finally got round to doing a slidedeck which I hope graphically demonstrates why traditional ad models are bound to fail in social networks.
It also illustrates the ways messages ought to be released into the wild if you expect them to survive (succeed) in a group-forming environment.
Of course, we don't just form groups in the digital world, but the internet is a more rapidly enabling environment on a global scale than most physical ones. But the two are coming together.

Further inspirational reading:
Herd,
Here Comes Everybody (now only £8 gah!),
Everything is Miscellaneous.

Legendary 'visuals' dude Dave Armano tweeted of this slideshow: Armano @davidcushman nice visuals. Like the happy faces. Social networks are made of shiny happy people (holding hands)...
Who said Americans couldn't do irony?

| View | Upload your own

We're All Publishers Now: My presentation for Digital Asset Management?

I'm speaking at Digital Asset Management in London, tomorrow, June 25.

I'm on a panel in the morning and due to speak, on the topic "We're All Publishers Now" just after lunch - pay attention you at the back!

Please come and say 'hi' if you are attending.

The presentation I'll give is very similar to the one I gave in New York last week at widgetwebexpo - Media Transformative.

Here's the slidedeck for it (below), together with a transcript of my notes. Your comments, as always, very welcome.

Delighted to say SlideShare selected it for the top of its 'featured' list on the homepage on June 26.

The power of the network changes the traditional media model through two key disruptions. First it disrupts how, and by whom, content is created.

Second it disrupts how, and by whom content is distributed. Together these offer an opportunity for the traditional chasm between advertising and content to close. This session will consider how 'media' companies can reform themselves to change both what they do and the way they go about it to deliver products and services which are a better fit with the inhabitants of the networked world.

| View | Upload your own

Slide 2
One of the few images we have of William Shakespeare comes to us not because the artist charged with making the image was selected as the finest of his day, nor because this was the image chosen by Will’s adoring audience as the most accurate or representative (SMS voting of the American Idol variety hadn’t quite hit London in the early 1600s).

William Shakespeare was the most important play-write of his day – and this was a day when the play was THE primary form of entertainment. He was a big deal.

And yet the picture we have of him is… well it’s a bit rubbish really.

The creator was a young man named Martin Droeshout. And while he may not have been possessed of a huge artistic talent, he did possess something more fundamental to his ability to form the rare and enduring image we have of Shakespeare. He owned the brass-plate printing gear required to print Will’s mugshot on the famous first folio.

He who had control of the means of production got to control the information – even if that information wasn’t particularly great.

The information, in this particular case was packaged up in books by the media business and distributed by the media business.

Slide 3
And this remained the case as media revolutions swept through the 20th century – print was followed by audio recordings, radio, cinema, TV.

And the model remained the same, the same rules applied.

Media controlled the production of content. Media controlled the distribution of content.

This was true right up until the arrival of the internet. Even while the internet remained in its 1.0-pre broadband incarnation it was still essentially true – while publishing remained relatively complex and expensive.

Slide 4
But with the arrival of web2.0, with its really low technical barriers and promise of the ubiquity of tools for creating and sharing, the grip on control has been shaken, loosened… broken.

There are new ways for people to gather.

Now we can all sit on the global hotdesk, forming into adhoc communities of shared purpose, sharing and learning in real time on a global scale.

As Stowe Boyd puts it: “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, so are my connections.

Slides 5-6
Who gets to control production of content now?

Anyone and everyone. Good and bad. It’s all relevant to someone.

Social networks are made of small groups of purpose. Groups of people looking at each other – not at you! This is not an audience.

So congratulations on the scale of the gathering - but you have to understand these are an aggregation of small groups sharing separate purposes.

Slides 7-8
Who gets to distribute content now?

Anyone and everyone.

Shared with who they choose, chosen by who wants to share.

Widgets lower the technical barrier of this and make the disruption explicit.

Those twin disruptions are serious for every media business model. Not just for content producers either, but for anyone employed in the business of being the middle layer, the mediator, the middle man.

We now have a way around you!

Slides 9-10
Who gets to control the user experience?

With a print publication we produce the content, we control the distribution, and through our editorial selection, our choice of what to include and how to present it, we control the user experience.

Same applies to broadcast media. The programme maker decides.

But in the digital space that control is lost. Building intuitive user journeys remains a wise investment of time, but we cannot rely on users following our breadcrumbs. In fact, expecting them to is a bit patronising – as if we think they are too stupid to work out where they want to go.

The digital world is formed of discreet units each of which can be accessed from any other and in what ever order the user chooses. The user controls their own A-Z journey. Actually it’s A-Anywhere now.

The old model was based on building destinations and harvesting eyeballs. In the digital networked world we continue to try to build destinations

The new world is a very different place…

Slide 11
If you want to evolve to survive in this world then your first step has to be to live in its environment.

So write a blog and you’ll understand how easy it is to be a publisher, how easy it is to create and share content, how easy it is to form groups of shared purpose in networks of trust, how easy it is to find relevant content and for relevant people to find you.

Build a widget and the process will illustrate that we are all distributors now.

You have to start by trying to guess who might choose to share your widget or be enthused or impressed enough to pass it on.

And that reveals something of the new challenges and opportunities for media.

Slide 12
Think about this in the context of traditional advertising (and by association we'll realise we face the same issues with content, because as we discover over and over again, in this world they are heading towards becoming the same thing).

My first thought, on discovering that I could build my own basic widget through the likes of Sprout Builder (I don't code) and publish it, and all for free, is to consider ways the media company I work for can take advantage of this for low-risk experiments in widget making.

A quick easy option: RSS feeds gathered into an easy-grab widget that users can place where they choose.

In other words, offer a simple way for users to choose to disaggregate our content and make it portable. RSS enables this itself, of course, but grab-this-widget functionality and sharing through the likes of facebook make this a possibility for those who find the technical barrier of RSS still a little high – and I don’t underestimate how many people that still includes.

This extends our reach and (if we limit the RSS character count) it calls those interested in particular content back to our sites where they could be fed in-context related ads. All good.

Slide 13
But what about revenue models integrated with the widget itself?

When I choose to distribute a widget that's been made on Sprout Builder every iteration carries a link back to Sprout. Want to make your own? Click here? Every YouTube video functions in a similar way. And if you have Google Adsense enabled on your site then it will display related advertising, too.

But these models still treat the ad and the content as separate entities. The distribution of the ad message relies on users choosing to view and to participate in the distribution of a separate ‘editorial’ content.

The ads piggy-back on the content that the user actually wants. Perhaps this is a bit parasitical, a little like sneaking in the back door?

Slide 14
What if the advert was the content the user chose to distribute? That makes life interesting, doesn't it?

If ads and content are coming together, and everyone is a content producer now… doesn’t that make everyone an advertiser now?

With that in mind,would anyone choose to place 95% of 30-second slot TV, banner ads and the usual 'creative' solutions on their own (user-generated) content? Would they choose to grab it from where they see it and share it with others?

Slide 15
Take my simple widget (please!); it is an editorialised version of how widgets should be. First – I've decided the content. I have edited your choice, I've been the filter on the way in.

And that's hardly enabling a personalised outcome.

I would have preferred to make it a 'my favourite fasterfuture post chooser' in which you could make up your personal outcome from the full selection of my outpourings. Maybe those posts that get chosen most often would rise to the top of the list the community of users is then offered? You get the general idea.

The widget should allow the user to make the choice: That which we create we embrace. If we participate in the process we're more likely to share the outcome and to actively promote it.

This is obviously true of the marketing, too. I am more likely to choose to display the results of my personal choice of content and my personalised version of that content (or advertising message).

Because that which we create, we embrace (Alan Moore, et al).

Slide 16
It’s worth noting that this works because we live digitally in a community context. It's what the network is all about.

There is little point in me sharing what I think is cool unless I expect you might think it’s cool, too. We do this by sharing within our networks of trust. Just as we share links in twitter or thoughts on blogposts.

There is residual mass media thinking in the notion that you should create a place on the web for people to show off what they have done with ‘your content’ – for example the ‘for everything else there’s mastercard’ campaign - (all those personal outcomes) as if just anyone, any old set of eyeballs, might be interested.

The collective site might not rate your personal take – your friends will.

The real value is in the sharing of results with friends, who will be interested because that personal outcome involves a friend - in whom they are personally interested.

Then if they take the results and create their own personalised iteration, they'll have friends they may choose to share with, and so the iterations repeat, amplifying the original.

This builds on the understanding that the advert transitions into a recommendations. This is most likely to occur in communities of purpose, places where people share cool stuff with others because they believe those others think it’s cool, too.

The receiver decides if the advert is a recommendation – not the would-be recommender (the sender).

Marketing is not done to you, it’s done by you.

Slides 17-21
The outcome relies heavily on three things:
1. A willingness to relinquish control.
2. Toolkits users can play with.
3. Creative users.

2 and 3 are in place. Are you ready for No1?

The people best-placed to make the most effective iteration for their peer group are outside of your control.

Slides 22-26
The disruption to control revealed by widgets brings us back to that really tough question:

If media’s role is no longer about controlling who makes the content, and it’s not about controlling how content is distributed and it’s not even about controlling the user experience, what role can media play?

I think there are three potential plays.

Slide 27
1. Be the thing that’s paid for at the end of the ‘user experience’
2. Be a discreet element of the digital experience
3. Be the menu from which those experiences are selected.

1. Is obvious. 3. Is our default2.0 response: we are the aggregators – the nuancers of your experience. And there’s certainly mileage in this.

Number 2 is the part that we often neglect and it is the part that can be well served by widgets. Create something so useful that users choose to make it part of their own personal user journey from A-anywhere. A service.

And if you can do all three, be the menu, be on the menu and be the meal that’s consumed and paid for as a result, media has a great triple play.

Slide 28
It’s worth us getting our heads round this and perhaps more rapidly than we may have thought necessary. I’m starting to believe the impact of change wrought by the internet has been seriously underestimated while the impact of social networks has been underplayed.

This has much to do with how tools turn from geeky high tech oddities to the familiar items of everyday life.

Slide 29
The telephone didn't make us communicate. It’s a tool for communication. The internet doesn’t make us form groups. It’s a tool for us to do this through.

Yes, the internet is a tool for forming groups.

The tool that is the telephone didn’t change the way society functioned - 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 to being a familiar tool. We certainly needed the network in place for this to happen. But we also needed a really easy way for us to understand how to use that network - 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.

Telco networks aren't a tool, they are the medium. The handsets are the tools.

Slide 30
And social networks are to the internet what the handset is to the wires of the phone network. They are the easy-to-use interface which allows the majority of people to access the disruptive power of the network.

Email 'newslists' and forums may have been with us since deep into last century but there was a reason people who used them were considered 'geeky' or '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.

Slide 31
In other words, we haven’t had 15 years of disruption caused by the internet – we’ve had 3.

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. It will remove the mediators.

Slide 32
The 'familiar tool' social networks (of which facebook and twitter appear 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 in London in May, 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. They were filled with cars, buses, taxis and trucks.

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?

Dr Mike Wesch says 83% of YouTube content added in the last six months is user generated. This accounts for more content than has been broadcast on TV – ever. More than half of teenagers are creating UGC.

We are only a few short years into the real disruption – the one being wrought by the arrival of the social network as a familiar tool.

Slide 33
How many people are familiar with using social networks today?

Among online American teenagers, according to Pew a year ago, 55% were using social networks. Comscore stats in April this year suggested 60% of Latin Americans online use social networks.

40% of US Mothers are on MySpace.

Facebook claims 40% of online canadians use its service, alone.

In the UK, Ofcom found a quarter of 8-11-year-olds already have profiles on social networks. They are growing up fast and they are growing up connected in Total Communities – communities in which to take part you have to create part.

They are growing up understanding the power of self-forming communities of purpose - with a tool in their hands to access it.

They are growing up with different expectations not only of media, but also of business, politics, education and society and their own role within each of these. And this will change everything.

The silent majority have had their day. The participating majority are coming.

Slide 34

Widgets give us a mainline into the DIY distribution element of this revolution – an opportunity to enable and facilitate.

And through this we will discover our place in the new world.

Through this we may adapt to it.

Through this we may earn our place in it.

Carnival of the Mobilists #129

Delighted to say the presentation I was due to give at Mobile Advertising in Brussells on Monday is gaining a wider audience.
I had to cancel my speechifying at quite late notice so decided to share the slidedeck and what I was going to say here.
And that post has been selected as part of this week's Carnival of the Mobilists.
The Carnival celebrates the best of blogging about mobile and is hosted at a different blog each week.

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.

Filling the structural holes vs Proving the pudding

A lot of what I do could be described as filling structural holes. In fact, 'acts to fill structural holes' is in my current job description (note, where it reads emap, it should now read Bauer Consumer Media).
I've long thought it's important in any organisation. Social tools, no matter how good, can't forge the connections - people's use of them does that. And people who are the connections between tighter networks of separate interest groups fill those structural holes.
Nice to see Clay Shirky pointing at hard evidence to support this view.
To quote Clay:
"Information, beliefs and behaviors are more homogenous within than between groups. People focus on activities inside their own group, which creates holes in the information flow... structural holes.
"People with contacts in separate groups broker the flow of information across structural holes. Brokerage is social capital in that brokers have a competitive advantage in creating value with projects that integrate otherwise separate ways of thinking or behaving. Brokers create much of the value we associate with innovation."

As Ron Burt of the University of Chicago puts it: "People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas."

The question is can I make even more effective connections by doing the innovation myself rather than by brokering it?

Is it better to seek an AND solution rather than an either/or.

The proof of the pudding?
Access to loads of great ingredients opens ways to recombine them into wonderful puddings. Offering recipes gives a series of suggestions on what puddings should be made. Ultimately more puddings of different tastey varieties get made.
Alternately use that access to make one or two puddings with the ambition that others think they taste so good they are inspired to go looking for recipes to recombine themselves.

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?

MeM Cannes: Making money from social networks

Here's a few hasty notes from the panel that Gerard Grech of Orange led this morning in Cannes. The topic was communities and social networking and making money from them.

Panel includes Marco Argenti from Dada, Olaf Kroll from Myspace, Antonio Vince Staybl, itsmy and Mark Curtis, from flirtomatic and Arunachulam Nagappan, Newbay.

Question: Is there a difference between old social networks going mobile and starting mobile.

Antonio: mobile only social networks have advantages: itsmy's average age of uploaded content is within the last 24 hours.

Gerard: the more mobile the community the more instant and fresh?

Mark: mobile users log in 8 times a day, web users 3 times a day. usage patterns re times are similar, more use when travelling on mobile.

Mark; 40% have added their location to their profile with no prompting. Only 15% on the web.

Olaf: the big social networks can rely on their user base. myspace on mobile is used for basic communication. pureplay mobile have to add features like easy upload and lbs, which are pretty tricky and won't take off for a while, but that's the value add that the new guys can give.

Antonio: mobile is a new world, we have new isps, we have new operatiing systems, we have new companies.

Mark: It is because you (Olaf/MySpace) are seeing mobile as a subset of users is why you are going to struggle for the next few years. The revenue models are there from mobile social networks. Fixed line social network guys are still trying to find the revenue models to fly!

Marco: we believe the sustainable business model for social networks is a mix of mobile and web.

We make more money than facebook, and facebook is about 100 times bigger. Ads on community have lower click thru rates on line. on mobile the powerful micropayment mechanism works well.

Olaf: we started with a subscription service. didn't work, we then moved to ad-funded model. The cpms are much better, double or three times on mobile compared to online.

antonio: our main revenues today are advertising.

Mark: basic usage is free and we sell premium services, extra fun that people want to pay for. 15% paying for this on mobile - way higher than ads.

Ad models change when a new medium emerges. Internet advertising is currently the model we are using on mobile, it cannot be the end medium. we need to innovate and experiment. Hard to do because the advertisers aren't sold on mobile full stop yet.

Arun: operators were good at making lots of money, they did this even when people knew they could get stuff free on the internet. The big internet players are slowly getting into mobile. When the big boys come in and make everything free the small boys are going to have to change their models.

Mark: when a new medium emerges new companies emerge. there will be new champions. when you go on to an old medium you tend to design with the old medium in mind. facebook myspace etc will get it wrong in the first few iterations but finally will get it spectacularly right.

Re viral: Antonio: With mobile we have the first screen people can show to each other anytime anywhere - that's the real viral power of mobile. We can show what we are doing right there and then and rave about it.


In short a great session. And I'm on Mark and Antonio's side for what it's worth!

Social networks and the broadcast conversation starter

I spoke at EPublishing Innovation Forum in London today and it was fun. The brilliant Vin Crosbie was doing the keynote and I'm delighted to say he came by to say hi after my presentation because I'd reminded him of some important stuff that he usually forgets to say - the why of the internet is people reaching out to find other people. And we had a great conversation.

That highlighted something for me: presenting makes you the deliverer of content - this waves a flag for the start of conversation. As a presenter the audience has acquired some very useful metadata about me and my purpose and that triggers conversation galore once the broadcast (me speaking from the stage) is over. There's a lesson in here about the value of content in a broadcast mode which media could get something from. I'm going to think about this some more.

The other thing is that Vin's keynote covers much of the theoretical framework I'm interested in so I kind of adapted my presentation on the hoof.

I floated an idea I've been toying with in recent days - that perhaps we were guilty of over estimating the impact of the internet before the arrival of ubiquitous social networking.

Social networks have only gained currency in the last five years or so. Is it a coincidence that this has been the same period in which broadcast media has seen its revenues dwindle and its audiences shrink?

The real 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.

When new tools become truly ubiquitous change happens. In this case I'm suggesting the new tools isn't simply the internet, it's the refinement of social networks (networking for the masses?)

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.

Just a thought at this stage, and one lashed down at speed driven by battery run-down fear! Your input welcome.

I'm on my way to Cannes now, for MeM and the Meffys. More from there as live as I can make it!