This is a new video with a short and to-the-point interview produced by marketing magazine The Drum at Digital London, see http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2012/03/31/video-futures-agency-ceo-gerd-leonha... about the future of social media and how it will impact us. Most important message: in a digital society, you can't FORCE people to pay, you can only ATTRACT them to pay. Original video is at http://youtu.be/2jT6NcKmoM0 - thanks to everyone at Drum Magazine for making this available.
In terms of importance, 86% of respondents rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical. CEO activity on social networks also appears to influence employees’ faith in their company. The study findings indicate that 82% of employee respondents trust a company more when the CEO and leadership team communicate via social media.
Some very powerful comments on where Google is headed, below. I'm pretty sure I don't agree with quite a few points made in this piece but it's certainly some very good food for thought so ... Take a look!
Some of the best snippets (and my comments in brackets and italic)
"It's not surprising that the tracking debate had people up in arms. A Pew Internet study, conducted just before Google combined its privacy policies (and after it rolled out personalized search results in Search Plus Your World) found that three quarters of people don't want their search results tracked, and two thirds don't even want them personalized based on prior history. The bottom line: People don't trust Google with their data. And that's new. (my comment: I think it is new that we don't trust ANYONE with our data - Google is just the main agent of 'big data')
Google is a fundamentally different company than it has been in the past. Its culture and direction have changed radically in the past 18 months. It is trying to maneuver into position to operate in a post-pc, post-Web world, reacting to what it perceives as threats, and moving to where it thinks the puck will be. At some point in the recent past, the Mountain View brass realized that owning the Web is not enough to survive. It makes sense—people are increasingly using non Web-based avenues to access the Internet, and Google would be remiss to not make a play for that business. The problem is that in branching out, Google has also abandoned its core principles and values. (my comment: I really don't think that's true; but it may certainly have that flavor because, again, Google may have become too successful and too big for their own good as far as the objective of 'doing good' is concerned - that is a tough mission for ANY company).
Many of us have entered into a contract with the ur search company because its claims to be a good actor inspired our trust. Google has always claimed to put the interests of the user first. It's worth questioning whether or not that's still the case. Has Google reached a point where it must be evil? (my comment: now this is a serious question! But if that's the case than we would certainly have to conclude that capitalism itself has reached a point where it MUST be evil to continue - see the sustainable capitalism and #egotoeco debate)
Ultimately, it’s not about Gmail or Search or Android or Chrome or Maps or Plus. All of those are in service to one great master; pieces of the larger Google. He said that if I paid attention to what Larry Page has been saying recently, this would be apparent. And yup, PandoDaily recently quoted Page saying, “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else. One Googler authorized to speak for the company on background (meaning I could use the information he gave me, but not directly quote or attribute it) told me something that I found shocking. Google isn't primarily about search anymore. Sure, search is still a core product, but it's no longer the core product. The core product, he said, is simply Google. As Chris Anderson argued in WIRED:
Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a world Google can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule.
END OF QUOTES
PS: In the interest of full disclosure: Google frequently hires me for various speaking engagements
The EcoSummit 2012 in Berlin was my first speaking gig with an entirely new slide design and branding, created by AlpernCreative in Switzerland. Please let me know how you like it (and yes, the content, too:). Hopefully we will have a video soon, as well. See some related resources, here. Cross-posted at GreenFuturist.
Totally agree with Steve Case on this; Jeremy Rifkin argues very much the same in his amazing book "the third industrial revolution" . This is one of the reasons I am spending a lot more time on these issues and opportunities these days - check out http://www.greenfuturist.com From AOL to Revolution: Steve Case's second act | GreenBiz.com
“We’re now ushering the second Internet revolution,” he went on. “Now that everyone’s connected through multiple devices, connecting more habitually and more mobile-ly, you’re now able to have a transformative impact not just on media and communications and financial services, but on other core foundational industries in our country — energy being a key one, health care being a key one, education being a key one.”
“They actually have not changed that much,” he said. “But I have no doubt over the next 25 years those industries will be fundamentally reshaped, transformed, disrupted by this second Internet revolution, and that provides a real opportunity for entrepreneurs who are challenging the status quo, playing an attacker role.”
Just found this via Ricoh Europe, in collaboration with The Economist (free PDF download, but requires email registration). This is a definitive MUST READ. Serious intel and stats here, and totally spot-on foresights.
US consumers lead the world trend, here, surely, but this is happening everywhere: Speed and Nowness are 2 trends that are changing the way we live, buy, create, communicate (and not always for the better, either). Read what I have said about these trends why these links: http://gerd.fm/nowandhere Found via my futurist buddy Stowe Boyd (http://www.onlinegraduateprograms.com/instant-america/ for full version)
BRILLIANT video by comic author Rob Reid, showing how ridiculous the calculation of economic losses due to content 'piracy' is. Absolutely amazing how he strings the facts and hypotheses together - must watch for anyone in the content industry.
Read more here: Comic author and Rhapsody C-Founder Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists. Rob Reid is a humor author and the founder of the company that created the music subscription service Rhapsody.
Snippets from the transcript:
"The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars ... (Laughter) ... if we use pennies.
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. But it's also a morally important one. Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum -- whatever sorghum is -- losing sorghum. But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a yearsince Napster first came on the scene. So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. So this small missing chunk here is puzzling..."
Good example, below - I like to say that it's now interaction before transaction; same direction as Nilofer is saying I guess.Why Social Marketing Is So Hard - Nilofer Merchant - Harvard Business Review
One example is that of TED and TEDx. TED has its main conferences (TED in the US and TEDGlobal in Europe) where people with relatively big wallets gather once a year to hear smart people give short talks, creating “ideas worth spreading.” These TEDtalks get released online and allow global participants to share in the spreading of ideas. In June 2009, they announced a program called TEDx that allow many to organize their own TED-inspired conference.
By doing this, they got a benefit equivalent to a multi-million dollar marketing budget by enabling a franchise of passionate users to do their thing. Volunteers coordinated events in places as near as New Jersey and as far as Estonia. There was TEDxKibera, held in Africa’s largest shantytowns in Nairobi, Kenya. The first 2.5 years of TEDx have resulted in 2,500 events in more than 110 countries.
This is social marketing. Passionate people are co-creating because they value TED’s shared purpose. This shared purpose is not “build TED’s brand;” it’s “spread good ideas that matter.”
I had the great pleasure to speak at LawTech Futures in London last week, organized by Netlaw Media and Charles Christian, along with the fabulous Patrick Dixon (a fellow futurist that I have been tracking for a long time, and who I finally got to meet at this event). Kim Tasso just published a pretty good summary of what Patrick and me talked about; her comments about my talk are listed below.
We hope to have the videos available soon, as well.
“The purpose of looking at the future is to disturb the present” (Gaston Berger) was his opening gambit with photos of toddlers using iPads and the comment “these are your future clients” - the AO (“Always On”) Generation. We laughed at more photos where small children walked away from print magazines thinking them broken as nothing happened when they touched the images. His ideas then flowed out fast and fascinated us all.
Empowerment – More iPads than PCs have been sold and tablets can be made cheap and solar powered. The hierarchy of needs must be revisited as young people throughout the world will find money for mobile phones and tablets instead of other consumer goods. The world has shifted from service empires to networks and we are the content. Social media has made broadcasters of us all and the global village is in chaos.
Networked society – We have moved from being in a broadcast environment to being part of the chain of communication. The model is no longer one to many but now many to many. Youtube effectively wiped out MTV in 24 months and is making $36 bn pcm revenues. Convergence means there will be “networked law firms” and the leaders will become connectors rather directors. We will move from hyper-capitalism to hyper-collaboration.
Newscape – Despite all the free information, people still pay to use their preferred print medium. This may be because they trust the source, value the filtering or prefer “packaged news”. It suggests that information providers need to find new ways to add value all the time. Spotify is not about legal access to music – it is about seeing the music preferences of all of your friends. There will be a “tyranny of transparency”.
Control, access and authority – We were urged to consider a number of recent developments – copyright in music, unbundling, NetFlix, ZipCar and peer-to-peer collaboration. There was a nice image of lots of yellow Lego brick model heads all with different faces. He advised of the “loss of default expert” status and said that “sharing is the new owning”. He mentioned the famous McKinsey report which warned those industries that are still trading on information asymmetries (real estate/property industry watch out especially!).
Freemiums – There was a move towards things that “feel like free” – with LinkedIn and Skype and various online games providing free access to allow users to become familiar with and then reliant upon systems before payment was required. The key is to capture large volumes before charging as the value paradigm is changing. Do things for free and get a 50% conversion rate to the next (paying) level.
Nowness – There are new roles in the digital ecosystem – and real time has taken over with virtual services and “hangouts” increasing. He showed a video of a FedEx delivery man throwing a package – to illustrate that everything is observed and recorded. I liked his idea of organisations having “Chief Mavericks”. He said that the law model – where lawyers produce content – will be challenged as it was based on scarcity and we are now in a digital society where information is ubiquitous.
New business models - He then offered some observations on “rethinking the legal business model”, asked us “how visual are you?” and pointed to:
Influence and reputation
New ways to get paid (e.g. Facebook credits, currency for “likes”)
Immediacy
Personalisation
Attention
Interpretation
He talked about the changes endemic in moving from a world of “people of the book” to one of “people of the screen” and noted that you cannot outsource creativity, trust and human relationships. And, in what must have been like balm to the lawyers in the room, he said that “trust is the new currency”. He explained that MIT had put its entire course library on line and available to all – yet still received a 38% increase in requests to attend – people don’t want the knowledge, but the experience.
From the age of software to the age of data – Following the mantra of digital PR he asked us how we were monitoring our on-line reputations and said we must move to “data curation” and quoted Umair Haque (HBR) on the need to shift “from value chain to value circles”. He said we are all content businesses, brands who publish and that interaction comes before transaction. Return on Investment is being replaced with Return on Involvement, and commoditisation with collaboration.
To summarise, he mentioned Social, Local, Mobile, Video – and all at speed. That “like economics” will dominate (we need to find new reasons why people come to us), trust the new currency, data the new oil, to consider return on involvement, to seek interaction before transaction and to accept the loss of control. I am sure that I have not done justice to this startling presentation nor its presenter. And while it may seem like a stream of sound bytes, he did provide examples and elaboration (usually with some form of video illustration) of all the points. I have already downloaded his Futurist App. Originally, I had decided that – on reflection – I did not fear the future. And after these talks I decided that I was actually quite excited about the possibilities ahead. Yet I suspect there will be those in the audience who were thinking of that Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times”.
Here's a brand-new video from DigitalLondon 2012; good interview with many key topics covered such as sustainability, making money in a networked society, control versus trust, access versus ownership, future of content, climate change and global warming, how to become a networked company, why interdependence is the future, and much more.
Update: TechWorld has an interesting review of my talk, here. The best snippets:
Speaking at the Digital London conference this week, Gerd Leonhard, futurist and CEO of The Futures Agency, said that over the next decade, society needs to make the shift “from Ego to Eco”. “Global warming constitutes the biggest market failure in the history of capitalism,” said Leonhard. “The world is over-heated, over-spending and over-crowded, and a continued focus on growth alone may well kill us.”
He said that we are now moving from the “age of the network” to the “age of the networked”, where the concerns of the masses overtake the concerns of the one percent at the top of the economic pyramid. Leonhard identifies this as a major trend in business, energy and in politics. “Our entire system of economics and energy used to be based on systems that you had to invest in to build – and those were based on a closed system,” he said. “Now, because of the internet, systems are opening up and we can be decentralised. It's no longer important that you own the power plant, because if you have a distributed network of three million wind turbines you can do the same thing.”
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