Internet for Everyone
by Brian Reich | 24 Jun 2008, 2:00am
I am at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York and am attending a launch event for a new initiative that calls on Congress and the president to act in the public interest by enacting a plan for the wired and wireless Internet built upon the following principles. The project is called Internet for Everyone (http://internetforeveryone.org/)
NOTE: The organization that launched this project, Free Press, is a client — but I do not currently play a role in this initiative.
I won’t try and summarize all the important points made during the session. Andy Carvin did an excellent job of capturing everyone’s remarks, so you can see as close to a transcript as you’ll find on his Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/acarvin)
Let me quickly summarize the project:
An open, free, and accessible internet is critical — not just to those who do things online (like myself) — but to all aspects of our economy, our governance, and similar. The future of the internet is the future of all media. And it is pretty clear (to me anyway) that leaving the development of a national broadband policy to the cable and telecommunications industry, who have controlled much of the policy making around this issue, is not a good idea.
So, the initiative promotes a four-part agenda:
Access: Every home and business in America must have access to a high-speed, world class communications infrastructure.
Choice: Every consumer must enjoy real competition in online content as well as among high-speed Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.
Openness: Every Internet user should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce online in an open market without gatekeepers or discrimination.
Innovation: The Internet should continue to create good jobs, foster entrepreneurship, spread new ideas and serve as a leading engine of economic growth.
A broad, bi-partisan group of experts - business, policy, entertainment, etc. - have come together to help promote the effort. For starters, look at the group that they pulled together for the announcement:
Josh Silver, Executive Director, Free Press
Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square Ventures
Robin Chase, CEO of Meadow Networks, co-founder Zipcar
Van Jones, president, Green for All
Michael Winship, president Writers Guild of America - East
David All, co-Founder Slatecard.com and TechRepublican.com
Tim Wu, Columbia Law professor
Jonathan Adelstein, FCC commissioner
Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
int Cerf, chief technology evangelist of Google
Larry Lessig, Stanford Law professor
And going forward, the group will be hosting public forums across the nation to get citizens involved, and no doubt other things (that was all they had time to mention today).
My two cents: This is a tremendously important issue. This initiative deserves national (and local) attention - not just within policy circles, but at kitchen tables, in schools and libraries, and among friends over a beer or coffee. But, this issue, and this initiative, could very easily not gain the necessary traction among people who are not already within the media and policy space. This could be the darling of the wonk establishment and even the media (wouldn’t that be ironic) and still not move the needle towards being implemented. Why? Because this issue is complex. People don’t make an association between this issue and their daily lives. The people who don’t have access to broadband probably don’t fully realize why its such a big deal. The people who already have it take it for granted.
So, for this effort to be successful, the initiative has to get out of its own way. It can’t be about the groups or the organizers, or even the specific policy (which is way too complex for anyone to settle on a single set of criteria). You can’t just talk to people who gather at a PDF-like conference, where everyone is already in agreement on the need. And it can’t live solely online.
This movement will organize town hall meetings for people to attend and use as a way to show their support or get involved. But what about a true grassroots effort, going door to door and town to town to spread the word. Is that planned? The people need to have a voice - but will they truly get to play a role in shaping this policy, or just sending emails and making phone calls to their politicians to pressure them for support? This movement has a nice, straightforward website, which summarizes the issue well. But who will take responsibility for answering all the questions that people have and pushing content out - online and through traditional means - so that word spreads and people make this issue their own?
These are important questions - and just a few of the ones that need to be answered if this group to succeed and this baseline policy will become a reality. The big telecommunications folks know this, and are probably counting on the fact that it will be difficult to organize a broad-based, online and offline community to support this fundamental issue. We can’t let them get away with that. We can’t fall into the trap that so many organizations have fallen into with the rise of the internet, where the activity happens online (but never reaches the real word), we focus on the tools (blogs and wikis and such), and where the same people are talking to each other as they always have (and few new voices finding a place in the discussion). When that happens, little real, meaningful, measurable change being made. We can’t let that happen.
I’ll make that case to my client, and anyone else who wants to listen. I hope this group will not only realize the need, and opportunity, to organize this effort differently and actively push to do more to engage the public, move beyond a ‘campaign’ style effort, and get into the real world. And when they do, this effort will finally, finally succeed.
Can Science Deliver The Answer To the Measurement Challenge?
by Brian Reich | 9 Mar 2008, 3:00am
(This is cross-posted at the EchoDitto Blog and the SXSW EchoDitto Blog)
Ahhhh, science. The prospect of finding the answers to life’s most vexing challenges always seem to come from science (or faith, which in the case of online marketing and communications is important, but certainly not for everyone). So, this morning I sat in on a panel about the ’science of designing interactions’ in the hope of getting some additional clarity on this whole measurement debate.
The panel featured two folks, either professor types or PhDs, with thick accents — usually a good sign when you are talking about a complex subject (ok, totally unfair generalization, but tell me that you don’t agree with the statement at least in part) And, like so many other panels, this one promised metrics for determining the success of your social media/marketing efforts.
Sadly, like so many other panels, no metrics emerged. But, all was not lost. The moderator presented an interesting framework for ‘designing interactions,’ — seven patterns as he put it. Those patterns are:
1 Focus on designing interactions (the goal is to have people engage - with content, with each other, etc.)
2. Build experiment and measure (there is no single answer, no right answer, no way of knowing when you are done - so keep going)
3. Give user metrics of his standing (if you know that you are only 75% complete with a task, you will proceed through and complete the remaining 25%. If you don’t know, how do you know if you should go forward)?
4. Help the user decide actions (guide them, explain the meaning of what they are doing)
5. Frame interactions and costs, rewards risk (give the user an opportunity to understand the implications of his/her decisions, don’t decide for them)
6. Introduce currency for interactions (reward and incentivize people to take whatever action you want)
7. Create mechanism for discovery (collect data constantly, always be learning what your audience is doing and what it means to you)
What I learned?
Try not to tackle everything at once. Break down a big problem into many smaller problems and then look to various audiences/sources for help in solving those little problems. (The example of Amazon Turk was used to represent this concept). This seems to be a strategic blind spot for most people trying to communicate online — they try to create the ultimate experience, the ‘do everything’ technical solution, and inevitably they fall short somewhere. But, if you look at the individual attributes of various platforms (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) you will see lots of little successes.
There is a spectrum of activity that any user falls on — it stretches from interacting with just content (save, annotte for self, privately star, etc) moves to “mostly content” (comment, amazon review, share to audience) “some balance of both” (twitter, forward) and on the far right you get “interact with other people (wall, fan)”
And finally, focus metrics on users - at the end of the day, it is engagement we are interested in, not just activity. We want to know where the audience stands, how to improve, and how to contribute more. If you keep the focus narrow and deliver on the expectations of the user, you’ll discover your metrics in there somewhere.
Getting closer to the answer. I think.
TAGS
: Conferences/Events Event Coverage Metrics SXSWi
leave a comment
SXSW: What Teens Want Online & On Their Phone
by Brian Reich | 8 Mar 2008, 2:00am
(I am at the SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, TX. I will be posting updates from here over the next few days. I will cross post to the EchoDitto SXSW Blog as well).
The first panel of the day was ‘What Teens Want Online and On Their Phones.” It was moderated/hosted by Anastasia Goodstein, editor of YPulse (a blog that tracks teen culture), and featured seven local Austin teenagers sharing their personal reflections on technology.
The discussion started with the obvious things:
- What are your favorite sites (A: MySpace, various music sites, etc.)?
- Why do you like them (A: because I can build my own lists, I can see what’s cool)?
- Do you still use email (A: “I created my email so I could get on MySpace”)?
- What kind of cell phone do you have (A: LG, Blackberry Pearl, Sony Excursion - slide phone, Verizon LG Camera Phone)?
- What do you do with your phone (A: play Tetris and PacMan or other ‘emergency games’ if I get really bored, get ‘official SAT question of the day’, ringtones, send/receive text messages, take pictures, ‘just slide my phone - when I am bored or nervous’, listen to music)?
- Do you hang out on virtual worlds (A: Zwiki, Gaia, various MMOs, but overall not too much)
Then we got into audience questions.
Here are my observations/insights.
First of all, this was a good panel By having a group of actual users talk about what they want/expect from the internet and mobile phones, we got an honest assessment of whether the web, mobile, and other related industries actually do a good job. The consensus seems to be - sort of. There is a lot more understanding the people who create technology, and content, geared towards teens could do to attract greater interest and participation.
- Money is clearly an issue. These kids did not seem to be rich or poor, so probably pretty middle of the road in terms of the money they have (or the money their families have). With limited funds, they have to make choices. They don’t want ‘pay to play’ (with games for example). Only some of the kids have phones, and those who do have limitations on their text messaging and none use the internet (”because its too expensive”)
- Content and News. There is some tracking of news (the war in Iraq, presidential elections) but its not universal. For those who are tracking news, they aren’t using mainstream sources — instead, focusing on Digg, YouTube political news, Wikipedia, the Onion (which they know is a spoof newspaper), etc. There is a desire for opinion and perspective - just reporting what is going on, not providing anything but basic facts is considered boring, even depressing.
- Causes: While involvement in causes wasn’t high, there was definitely some awareness. One of the kids is signed up for the Human Rights Campaign Fund — she said “I’m not gay, and I’m not saying its bad — just that if you can get over people being gay, people being a different color, you can get over anything” - so HRC is an important group. One participated in the Grain of Rice game (because you hid the cause in a game), another is doing a project at school that benefits Heifer. Interestingly, none wanted to take real offline action - instead, one said that she thought her friends wanted to feel like they were having an impact without having to actually do anything (”they are looking for the easy out”).
- TV and Movies: There is plenty of TV and movie watching — those who do watch regular TV use a DVR. There is also a lot of watching online, through Veoh or directly to a something like the Disney Channel online (which hosts special episodes of Hannah Montana for example). There are a few shows that they have to watch in real-time — mostly the shows that if you miss something by not watching on time, you’ll be totally out of the discussion. One added that she ‘has to watch wrestling when it is actually on.”
- Advertising: Someone asked if the kids would participate in an anti-marketing effort, to try and keep ads away from kids. Nobody seemed all that interested. They seem resigned to the fact that advertising was a part of the online experience. More importantly, they want better advertising… stuff that relates to the content on the site. And, advertising should stay on the sites where you are trying to buy things (and not be on the entertainment sites, or the social networks - when it distracts from the experience).
- Games. They like games — play on AddictiveGames.com, NewGrounds, BlackSheep, for example, but don’t really play the advertising-driven flash games. There is some mobile game playing as well (see above). Flash (or flash games) seem to be blocked at school, so they either look for the games that aren’t blocked or they figure out how to get around it (set up proxies, etc)
- Other activities: A teen stepped up and asked everyone, including the panel, if anyone goes outside — experiences real stuff, puts their laptop down. One of the kids is on a basketball team. One has a job at Sonic (”which is a carhop, so I have to go outside.’) Another was surprised that they weren’t obese (because they love to play on the computer. In terms of making plans to go out with friends, most of it is done via text message (though they meet up in real life) and they talk to each other. Nobody uses Facebook or MySpace because its not direct or personal enough.
- Marketing: What don’t marketers get about the web? And if you could have a greater say in how marketers appear on the web, what would you want? The kids don’t seem to like advertisements, mostly because they aren’t in context, aren’t directed enough. They don’t like ‘free’ offers that require you to fill out lots of forms and such.
Good discussion, very interesting..
TAGS
: Conferences/Events Event Coverage Metrics SXSWi
leave a comment
Age of Conversation
by Brian Reich | 16 Jul 2007, 2:00am
Today marks the official release date of “Age of Conversation.”
What is that? It is a collaborative effort of 103 bloggers and online types – a book that we all co-wrote and are now beginning the effort to co-market. It is also an experiment in distributed media, a test of whether a group is really more powerful than the individual. The goal was painfully simple:
- Pull 100 authors together on a single project
- The overriding topic was “The Conversation Age” — where you take it is up to you.
- The items are short - one 8.5? x 11? page — it can be words, diagrams, photos (again up to you). If it is words - about 400, give or take a couple.
- We write it quickly and get it out there. We publish electronically.
- We make it available online for a small fee and we donate 100% of the proceeds to Variety the Children’s Charity — which serves children across the entire globe
It all started with an off-handed remark on a blog post and grew from there. The credit for both launching and facilitating the project goes entirely to the editors, Gavin Heaton and Drew McClellan. I have never met either, but I was honored and flattered that they would let me participate.
All signs in this suggest that this crazy little experiment will be an overwhelming success… Age of Conversation is an interesting book and will get significant attention, hopefully driving good sales.
More information, and the option to puchase the book, is available at www.ageofconversation.com. Go buy a copy!
TAGS
: Age of Conversation Blogging Citizen Marketing Event Coverage Marketing Public Media Shameless Self Promotion
leave a comment
SXSW Sessions 9 & 10: Quick Notes
by Brian Reich | 13 Mar 2007, 2:00am
My SXSW experience is coming to a close. I haven’t had a chance to post notes and thoughts from the last few panels that I attended. So, here are two quick summaries — with more to follow:
The Rise of Blogebrity
‘Blogging celebrities’ have emerged legitimate media personalities with daily audiences equivalent to a cable show and the ability to drive mainstream interest — or kill it — with a couple of posts. What makes a blogebrity? The panel (moderated by Kyle Bunch of Blogebrity, with Amanda Congdon from ABC News, Henry Copeland of Blogads, Karina Longworth of Netscape, Casey McKinnon of Galacticast and Nick Douglas of Look! Shiny!), which included some real-live blogebrity’s (side note: Amanda looks very different in person than she does online) said that the key to being famous on the web was not the size of your audience but your overall media savvy. When you see bloggers on TV, writing books, being quoted in traditional press — that is when they transcend from online to having “full coverage.”
User Generated Content and Original Editorial: Friend or Foe
In the past few years, online media has embraced user generated content. The volume and influence of user-generated content is growing and editors are trying to figure out how to integrate it effectively with original editorial content. How can you do that? The panel (Moderator Mike Tatum of CNET, Dave Snider of EnemyKite, Will Smith of Maximum PC Magazine, Scott Rafer of MyBlogLog, and Evan Williams of Obvious/Twitter) explained that the overall concept media must adopt is conversation. The benefit is that the quality of the editorial gets better when your informed user base is contributing to the content. Whether they are right or wrong, going through their arguments, reviewing their thought process helps us to think about better ways to do our own editorial job. User generated folks can help to set the tone for the website, set the rules, find their niche and really explore it, etc. The secret sauce is giving the top users, the most committed and insightful special access to editors, special recognition for their contribution, or something that will keep them engaged. Additionally, while editors may be worried about bad contributions, the community very quickly will determine if someone is credible — through comments, or ratings, or similar. When the audience figures out what they like or don’t and if someone who puts up bad information the community usually calls them out and corrects the mistakes.
TAGS
: Event Coverage From the Trenches SXSWi
leave a comment
SXSW Panel 8: Building a Fan Community
by Brian Reich | 12 Mar 2007, 2:00am
By Sunday afternoon I was beginning to wonder if the different panels I was sitting through were worth it. But my perspective changed completely (for the better) when the building an online fan base panel started. The focuse: using the internet and related technology to reach millions of fans without spending millions of dollars. The panel (Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech moderated, Jim Miller of Brave New Foundation, Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, David Straus of Without A Box, Joe Swanberg — a filmmaker whose most recent movie is Hannah Takes the Stairs, and Lance Weiler of the Workbook Project) talked about how movies create and use MySpace pages and blogs during production, for promotion, and the role of user generated content and other activity online.
When asked what the secret was to generating online attention for movies was, like most panels, the answer to the question was “it depends” as in “it depends on the kind of movies you want to make,” or “it depends what kind of audience you want to reach” or “It depends if you have budget or not.” The general consensus was that filmmakers and studios alike need to create immersive experiences that leverage their own dedicated channels for the movie and tap as many distribution paths and partners as possible. And there were some interesting examples and case studies (Head Trauma and Clerks II chief among them).
Here is a brain dump of my notes:
- MySpace is really good for connecting with people where the films are already online. It is much harder to get someone to read about your film and then go out to a theater to watch. If the movie is only a click away then they will be more likely to act. Another opportunity to use social networks is to rally an audience locally (in advance of a screening or similar) to help with things like flyering.
- A consumer’s favorite film is most likely the film they haven’t seen yet.
- The power for self-distribution is the ultimate power. Very important to find the hook for a film/an idea and figure out how that is going to interest a certain audience and then go out to find that audience.
- The important thing is to let the right audience know why they should be interested in the film in the first place (before it is released, in some cases before it is even completed). One of the things that social networks have allowed us to do is tap into these audiences and create a dialogue. Social networks make spectacular audience relationship management tools. It is one thing to build a community, let them congregate and exist on their own. It is another thing to actually participate in that community or conversation.
- Being able to take your fan base from one film to the next is critical. Start courting your fan base the day you start thinking about the next film you are going to make.
Closing thought: The most important thing is to make a good movie. There is no process, no standardized set of tools that will work to promote a bad movie. Success in building a fan base will take money and effort, time, and a little bit of luck.
TAGS
: Event Coverage From the Trenches SXSWi
leave a comment
SXSW Panel 7: Serious Games
by Brian Reich | 11 Mar 2007, 3:00am
Gaming is one of the fastest growing, most influential industries in the technology/entertainment space. Most of the attention, naturally, goes towards entertainment games (first-person shooters, sports games, adventure games, etc.) because they bring in the big bucks. But there is a whole other genre of games though that deserves all of our attention: serious games.
The panel (John Purdy of Red Knight Learning Systems, Lauren Davis of the Liemandt Foundation, Paul Medcalf of Blockdot (disclosure: I just finished working with Blockdot on the development of the LindtGoldBunny game) and Melinda Jackson of Enspire Learning) that SXSW pulled together had a lot of experience building serious games, but not a lot of insight to offer on why they work or how to make them effective.
What did they tell us? Here is a quick brain dump from my notes:
- Serious games push an audience to learn something, or participate in some kind of engaging activity (even an engaging entertainment activity) and getting that player to the point where they are challenged, want to go back, want to be playing that game. Of course, somewhere along the way, you learn something. There are many different kinds of serious games: Education, Games for health, Games for change, Corporate, Military and government, Political, Healthcare, First responders and even Advergames.
- If a picture is worth a thousand words, animation is worth a thousand pictures, and a game is worth a thousand animations (i.e. a billion pictures)
- The ultimate goal is to provide a learning experience, but you have to entertain your audience if you want them to play. You need to get that entertainment value, capitalize on the fun factor to get people in there to play (and ultimately learn).
- When a designer is putting together game components they are looking for the most addictive elements possible to engage someone. The outcomes of a serious game are different however, because you have to make sure people learn the broader curriculum. The game designer may have to make trade-offs and shelve something that would be more fun in favor of something that the game absolutely has to teach. The ultimate goal is to balance them together.
Final thought: This panel was sadly under attended. Serious games can have as great, if not a greater impact on our society than games that are simply for entertainment. The money is in the non-serious games space so that’s where all the attention is focused. But, the real learning and innovation will probably be in the serious games space for some time to come.
TAGS
: Event Coverage From the Trenches SXSWi
leave a comment
Public Media 2007
by Brian Reich | 25 Feb 2007, 2:00am
I spoke on a panel Friday morning at Public Media 2007, the Interactive Media Association’s annual conference. The conference brings together the folks from the public broadcasting (radio and TV) communities who are focused on interactive (read: online) communications. While the public broadcasting community has been an innovator in many ways online, the conference was appropriately focused on figuring out how NPR, PBS, and all their member stations and partner groups could make the leap from being public broadcasters who have operations online to being leaders in the broader public media space, and leveraging technology to do that.
Here is a quick excerpt from the conference overview on what was driving this discussion:
For one thing, all media is taking a digital form and “public service publishing” has expanded dramatically–if you extend the definition of public media to any individual or organization creating and distributing media “in the public interest.” Technical advances and innovations have eliminated barriers to entry. The cost of audio and video production has spiraled downward. Podcasting and media aggregation sites, where you don’t need a license to distribute audio and video, now reach millions of desktops and iPods. With ubiquitous blogging software, everybody can be a journalist, a critic, a pundit at a cost of no more than $20 a month.
The speed of this change has been nothing short of revolutionary.
I sat on a panel entitled “Leveraging Social Networks” which promised to answer the burning question: “How can public broadcasting stations can leverage social networks to increase engagement and build audience?” The panel was moderated by Vinay Bhagat, the Founder and Chief Strategist of Convio and featured Dick McPherson, a consultant to the public broadcasting community, Heather Holdridge from Care2 and David Woodrow from Gather.com.
I was generally disappointed with how the conversation was framed. The easy way to think about social networks is to look at the existing technologies in the field and figure out how to use them. In other words, since MySpace has more than 50 million users, they must be a place we can go looking to engage our audience. Or, since more than 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day, we should be uploading our shows because that’s where the marketplace is headed. There is not enough consideration about why these properties may or may not be valuable and not enough thought about what makes online social networking function successfully.
I kicked things off with a presentation (here is my iMA Presentation) that framed social networking and new media in a broader format. My point was simply that social interaction online, and social networking more specifically, has been happening for a long time in many different formats — and innovations in technology will only expand on that. Successful communities are built and fostered online not because of the technology that facilitates the interaction, but rather its the content and experience that people create and share that drives interest. Public media organizations need to think strategically and creatively about what they produce, how if they want to truly engage their target audience. I think I resonated with the audience, but honestly am not sure.
Dick McPherson followed me and challenging the audience to focus on specific goals they wanted to achieve online (i.e. build community and membership, not raise money) and broadly about how to creatively execute on those efforts. Heather and David offered case studies about what works within their networks.
Now, I do not mean to disrespect either Care2 or Gather.com, both of which I think are terrific organizations and both of whom were well represented by my fellow panelists, but they are only two of the dozens of options currently available to consider. I am not a big fan of presenting personal case studies on panels because it should be obvious that I would biased towards the things that I have done. That was the case with both Gather.com and Care2, who have been working with public broadcasting groups to build out social networking efforts. It just seemed to me that the message of the panel was too much about how public media groups could use those two platforms and succeed. Maybe they are the best two networks for public media. Or, maybe the public radio community should be looking at more examples, and more opportunities. I don’t know, but most people probably left that room thinking about launching Gather.com groups or launching petitions through Care2 and not enough of them were considering all the other venues available to them.
I did make one point at the end that was good, and I think resonated. A woman in the audience asked for our opinions on how many social networks should a station target and what kinds of resources should they put into the effort. A good question. However, in asking the question, she referenced ‘us’ (meaning the station) and ‘them’ (referring to the audience members who would be part of the community). After everyone else had offered specific answers to her questions, I jumped in, adding something to the effect of: Its very important for you as an organization, for your staff, your talent, whoever, to see themselves as a part of these communities. You are not separate. It cannot be us vs. them. Most likely, the reason that your audience might be intererested in joining and contributing to a community that you organiz is the same reason that you, as a staff person at one of those stations, work so hard to make it successful. Its about the content, its about the experience, its about your contribution to our society. If you see yourself as separate from that community instead of as a part of it, you are missing the boat.
I got a lot of nods, and a pat on the back from one of my fellow panelists for making the point. I probably sounded a little righteous, but maybe that helped get the point across more effectively. I enjoyed being on the panel and would love to help the public media conversation move forward to where it desperately needs to be, but I am not sure I was able to broaden the perspectives of anyone in attendance with respect to the framing of a conversation about social networking.
Thank you to Teri Lamitie of WGBH in Boston for the invitation. I very much enjoyed the conversation and I hope that I was able to contribute some interesting thoughts to the discussion. Please invite me back to do it again.
TAGS
: Citizen Journalism Event Coverage Free Advice From the Trenches Journalism Public Media Radio Social Networks TV
leave a comment
SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture
by Brian Reich | 30 Oct 2006, 2:00am
I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States. I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic. I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.
Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ”The Next Society.’ The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better. He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio.
Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world. Here are my (rough) notes:
- The media industry is in crisis. Stories are covered and then disappear. Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span. The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters. And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.
- The web has created a hostile world for advertising. As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services. It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction. That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.
- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system. Why? It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most. That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.” People are finding they don’t want more stuff. They want more fulfillment from their lives. How do they know?
Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret? Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep). If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?
- How can we change the world? He offered two directives:
1) Operate in your zone of personal genius. Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that. At the center of that innermost circle is a blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion. That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.
2) Hire a coach to help you get there. They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need. The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.
- The way we work is changing. You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot. You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.
- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think. Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.
TAGS
: Advertising Citizen Journalism Citizen Marketing Conferences/Events Event Coverage From the Trenches Journalism Marketing News
leave a comment
Mindshare Blog Event
by Brian Reich | 30 Jun 2006, 2:00am
Mindshare hosted, and I moderated, a discussion about blogging on Tuesday night in DC. Our focus was on how corporations, trade associations, nonprofits, and others can take advantage of this medium — looking beyond the fad of blogging and into the real opportunities for communicating.
Our panel included Lori Harrison from the American Bus Association (disclosure - the American Bus Association is a client and we helped to create their blog, Overdrive), Pat Cleary from the National Association of Manufacturers (who blogs at ShopFloor.org as well as several other places), and Lindsay Czarniak, a sports reporter for the NBC affiliate in Washington, DC (who blogged the Winter Olympics in Torino and the Final Four in Indianapolis)
I thought it was a really interesting discussion — and I am not just saying that because I moderated the panel. The audience (who braved thunderstorms, flooding, and complete city-wide gridlock to join us) asked good questions and the panelists provided good answers. Pat and Lori, who both represent trade associations, shared very different blogging experiences — Pat, who has been blogging for more than a year, has a growing audience around the world, while Lori has just started blogging recently and is focused almost entirely on building an audience of her organization’s members. Lindsay isn’t blogging actively right now, but her brief foray into the blogosphere continues to garner attention on and offline (the full-force promotion her TV station provided probably doesn’t hurt either), and brought a very personal perspective to what it is like to blog and the impact it can have on people.
I won’t bore you with all my perspectives on blogging now. You can download the White Paper we wrote on the topic to get some sense of my thinking. If you were able to join us for the event, thank you. If not, we missed you.
TAGS
: Blogging Event Coverage Shameless Self Promotion
leave a comment
