I made a very short video on the same topic last week (90 secs) and a lot of people have pinged me to make a longer version - so here it is, in 2 parts (thanks to Youtube's really annoying 10 minute limit).
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I think you may have noticed by now - I really like Twitter. Twitter and my tweeps have been a huge influence on my work.
One of the most important realizations that has recently transpired via my Twitter pipeline is how much I am gaining from the ever increasing Sharism i.e. by what others are sharing with me. I am indeed very, very lucky to be connected to so many brilliant and like-minded people that are publishing their thoughts freely and openly, using platforms such as Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Slideshare and of course, their blogs. All of you deserve a big THANK YOU.
The increasing scope of the 'Proudly Found Elsewhere' approach (PFE) has become a very important component of my work; and vice versa I am hoping that my output is also PFE'd by others; the social web's "give and you will receive" approach has indeed worked out great for me.
So I figured it's time to give some more explicit credit to all those great people that have influenced me, and I maybe a good way to do that is to list them on a special, Twitter-API-based site such as Futerati; and maybe send some attention their way, in return. Futerati went online a few days ago, and much like Electric Artists' cool TrackingTwitter site (but a lot more personal) Futerati is presenting 6 constantly updated categories (Futurists, Thought Leaders Authors, Activists, StartUps and Others) with people that I follow, their latest tweets, the current number of followers, and with some brief comments on why I like them. With each featured twitter user, you can click straight through to their tweets or their profiles and easily connect with them, as well.
Please note that Futerati is a constant work in progress and therefore not complete at this time; I will be adding a lot more people as I dig through my 7400 network connections, during the next 4-6 weeks. So, if I should have listed you but have not done so yet please post something on Twitter (use @gleonhard) or use the hashtag #futerati or DM me via Twitter, or email, or comment on this blog. If we haven't 'met' yet but if you still want to be listed please ping me with your details so that I can take a look at you; in any case please note that every single connection I list on Futerati is personally selected by me. Enjoy - and RT!
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I was delighted to be invited to make a contribution to the RSA Journal's July 2009 edition, the printed version of which was just send out I believe, and the online edition that just went up on their website.
The complete title of my piece is: "The price of freedom - reinventing the online economy: Gerd Leonhard explains why ‘free’ content can still pay in the long term" and I really enjoyed writing this for them.
Following my last presentation at the RSA, in April 2009, on 'The Future of Content and Creativity' I have had many good conversations about this topic. The audio track from this event is here, btw; and the video is embedded again, below. Enjoy. And RT;)
I definitely recommend that you check out the other great features in the Juy 09 RSA journal, as well, there's some great gems in there.
You can read the entire thing on the RSA page, so here is just an excerpt:
"Free information, free music, free content and free media have been
the promises of the internet (r)evolution since the humble beginnings
of the World Wide Web and the Netscape IPO on 9 August 1995. What
started out as the cumbersome sharing of simple text, grainy images and
seriously compressed MP3s via online bulletin boards has now spread out
to every single segment of the content industry – and even into
‘meatspace’ (real-life) services such as car rentals. Without a doubt,
‘free’ has become the default expectation of the young web-empowered
digital natives and now the older generations are jumping in, too.
On top of the already disruptive force of the good old computer-based Web1.0, we are witnessing a global shift to mobile internet – a WWW that is, finally, so easy to use that even my grandmother can do it. While five years ago, we needed a ‘real’ computer tethered to a bunch of wires to port ourselves to this other place called ‘online’ and partake in global content swapping, now we just need a simple smart phone and a basic data connection. With a single click of a button, we’re in business – or rather, in freeloading mode.
As users, we love ‘free’; as creators, many of us have come to hate the very thought. When access is de facto ownership, how can we still sell copies of our creations? Will we be stuck playing gigs while our music circles the globe on social networks, or blogging (now: tweeting) our heart out without even a hint of real money coming our way?
Daunting as it may seem, we can no longer stick with the pillars of Content1.0, such as the so-called fixed mechanical rate that US music publishers are currently getting ‘per copy’ of a song ($0.091). Nobody knows what really defines a copy any longer when the web’s equivalent of a copy (the on-demand play of that song on digital networks) may be occurring hundreds of millions of times per day. No advertiser, no ISP and not even Google has this kind of money to pay the composer (or rather, the publisher), at least not until the advertisers start bringing at least 30–50 per cent of their global US$1 trillion marketing and advertising budgets to the table.
Traditional
expectations and pre-internet licensing agreements are exactly what are
holding up YouTube’s deals with the music rights organisations such as
PRS and GEMA: this is what the rights organisations used to get paid
for the music that is being copied, and this is what they want to get
paid now. This impasse is causing significant friction in our media
industries worldwide. Yet, below the top-line issue of money, there
lurks an even more significant paradigm shift: the excruciating switch
from a centralised system of domination and control to a new ecosystem
based on open and collaborative models. This is the shift from
monopolies and cartels to interconnected platforms where partnership
and revenue sharing are standard procedures. In most countries,
copyright law gives creators complete and unfettered control to say yes
or no to the use of their work. Rights-holders have been able to rule
the ecosystem and, accordingly, ‘my way or the highway’ has been the
quintessential operating paradigm of most large content companies for
the past 50 years.
Enter the internet: now the highway has become the road of choice for 95 per cent of the population, the attitude of increasing the price by playing hard to get is rendered utterly fruitless. Like it or not, a refusal to give permission for our content to be legally used because we just don’t like the terms (or the entity asking for a licence) will just be treated as ‘damage’ on the digital networks, and the traffic will simply route around it. The internet and its millions of clever ‘prosumers’, inventors and armies of collaborators will find a way to use our creations, anyway. Yes, we can sue Napster, Kazaa or The PirateBay and we can whack ever more moles as we go along. We can pay hundreds of millions of dollars to our lawyers and industry lobbyists – but none of this will help us to monetise what we create. The solution is not a clever legal move, and it’s not a technical trick (witness the disastrous use and now total demise of Digital Rights Management in digital music). The solution is in the creation of new business models and the adoption of a new economic logic that works for everyone; a logic that is based on collaboration, on co-engagement and on, dare we mention it, mutual trust – an ecosystem not an egosystem. Once we accept this, we can start to discover the tremendous possibilities that a networked content economy can bring to us.
Free, feels-like-free and freemium
Much has been written on the persistent trend towards free content on the net. It is crucial that we distinguish between the different terms so that we can develop new revenue models around all of them. ‘Free’ means nobody gets paid in hard currency – content is given away in return for other considerations, such as a larger audience, viral marketing velocity or increased word of mouth (or mouse). I may be receiving payment in the form of attention, but that isn’t going to be very useful when it’s time to pay my rent or buy dinner for my kids. Free is... well, unpaid, in real-life terms.
‘Feels-like-free’, on the other hand, means that real money is being generated for the creators while their content is being consumed – but the user considers it free. The payment may be made (ie sponsored or facilitated) by a third party (such as Google’s recently launched free music offering in China, Top100.cn); it may be bundled (such as in Nokia’s innovative ‘Comes With Music’ offering, which bundles the music fee into the actual handsets) or the payment may be part of an existing social, technological or cultural infrastructure (such as cable TV or European broadcast licence fees) and therefore absorbed without much further thought. Feels-like-free could therefore be understood as a smart way to re-package what people will pay for, so that the pain of parting with their money is removed or somewhat lessened – everyone pays, somehow, but the consumption itself feels like a good deal...." Read on. PDF: Download RSA - The price of freedom Gerd Leonhard July 2009
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Remember when we (meaning those of us 40+ years old) had those red moleskin diaries and notebooks with the names, addresses and phone numbers of all our friends and other contacts? Remember when we had those impressive Rolodexes on our desks, with thousands of business cards in them? When 'having a huge Rolodex' meant having a lot of power? When we painstakingly scanned those 1000s of business cards we garnered at conferences and tradeshows so that we could load them into our databases, or maybe add them to our eMail news list? Remember when we had those crucially important mobile phone numbers in our phone's memory (or on the SIM card) only? When Outlook had all our email contacts? When having a computer hard-disc crash or a stolen machine meant that many of our contact details were lost forever because we were always sloppy with our back-ups?
Well, no more: all of this is quickly becoming the past, for these reasons:
So are we becoming dependent on these new contact platforms? I guess so - but maybe it's better than looking stuff up the way we used to, anyway...? You tell me.
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I was invited to give the opening keynote at the Mediapark Jaar Congress in Hilversum, Holland, today (June 23, 2009). The PDF can be downloaded below (creative commons licensed, as usual - feel free to re-use non-commercially, but please give attribution). Mediapark Jaarcongress Hilversum Gerd Leonhard Future of Media Public (PDF 20 MB) Check out the #mpjc2009 Twitter Buzz (mostly in Dutch, all MJPC 2009 tweets google-translated, here). I always love speaking in Holland btw - great people! Update: the Dutch Cowboys Blog has a good summary of my presentation (in Dutch)
Update: here is the audio podcast from my speech
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When ads become so targeted, personalized, contextual, location-based, meaningful and relevant that I will want to see them (or at least not try to avoid them), then we are getting somewhere. I think that "Advertising IS Content" will be the key to web-native (and therefore mobile-native) advertising and marketing - all else will fall short of getting great results. I wrote about this in June 2008, here, and in yesterday's presentation at CMMA 2009 (the future of mobile marketing).
Some nice examples that are heading in this direction are the BMWZ4 Paint by Powerslide iphone application (a great example for branded apps), Jeep's 'have fun out there' campaign, and Apple's 'second opinion' commercial on the NYT website (thanks to Frank at MediaArts in LA, btw). What we really need is cutting-edge creative work that is based on a complete and real-time understanding of how people are starting to mix real-life experiences, the web, mobile and social media.
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This is part 2 of my presentations at CommunicAsia 2009 in Singapore:
The Future of Mobile Content, TV & Entertainment
The content industries are seriously challenged by the Internet's
disruptive forces - it may have taken longer but is really hitting home
now. Many trusted business models are no longer working, copyright and
value traditions are being challenged, and content consumption is
drastically changing, everywhere. Now that Internet access is becoming
a default part of just about every mobile phone, even more drastic
changes are on the horizon. Who will pay for what kind of content on
mobile phones, when, why, where and how? Will mobile TV and mobile
music finally take off, and what will be the future business models?
Where the opportunities are and where are the minefields and myths that
need to be discarded....
CMMA Future of Mobile Content Singapore Gerd Leonhard Public (PDF 12.7MB)
In preparation for for my keynotes and presentations at CommunicAsia in Singapore (June 18/19), here's a short video clip on how the mobile Internet is changing Marketing and Advertising. Enjoy. RT. Share. Embed. Download the 32 MB .mov file: Download Advertising Marketing 2.0 Gerd leonhard Futurist
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It feels like things are moving increasingly fast now - the global economic crisis has either really catalyzed people and companies into action, or it has completely paralyzed them; but there is no way to stay neutral. On my end, I am certainly seeing a lot more demand for the development of immediate (2-3 years) future scenarios than ever before - guess that's a good thing!
A new kind of currency is developing, and it's based on how connected, appreciated, vetted & verified and available you are. This can be expressed in a myriad of ways, including via the number of links that you are getting, the amount of followers and retweets you are getting (however superficial that may seem, at this early stage), the number of people that subscribe to your blog feed, and if you run a network, how many companies are building your business on-top of yours (i.e. via the use of APIs). Of course, beyond that rather primitive approach of pure volume and easily trackable stats lurks the much tougher question of real meaning, context, merit and quality, i.e. it is really the quality of every single node in your network is what matters, not just their sheer number.
While this Link Economy (see Jeff Jarvis) is, of course, not new, it is certainly getting a real boost from the likes of Twitter and Friendfeed where it appears that good links do matter a lot, and some Twitter search results now often trump good old Google search results. This "you are what you share" mantra is, of course, just one expression of the Web'whatever.0' principle of "success is the result of adding value not extracting value"; and clearly those that add the most value now get the most mentions i.e. links or retweets etc.
If this feels a bit like some kind of race to you I can definitely sympathise but would venture to say that we will see the normalization of this process within the next 9-12 months, just like we did with SEO which is now a pretty well-established routine and feels less like a constant race.
Another important point has been raised by Umair Hague several times in the last few months (and yes, I have been busy applying the 'Proudly Found Elsewhere' principles to his blog posts;), and that is the fact that we seem to be moving into an Interdependent Ecosystem, and away from what I like call the traditional EGOsystem.
In the Content & Media and TIME sectors it will simply no longer work to focus on driving revenues and profits just for oneself, and based only on one's own assets and capabilities. Instead, in the future, revenue streams will need to be discovered, invented, generated, nurtured and maintained in collaboration with other key players in the Ecosystem. This is a key point for me: we won't have recurring and scalable new generatives in the content business unless we all help to build them, in the first place. There IS no model we can apply, yet, there is no set way to cook this dish, there are no charts to play off - t
here's only improvisation until we have a new song. Stay tuned!
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I did an interview with the On iOn Communication people for a show on Balzac.TV(Barcelona) at last year's 'New Cultural Economy' event at Ars Electronica in Graz, Austria. Today, Balzav.tv published the interviews (which also included Creative Commons CEO and all-around thought leader Joi Ito, ARS CEO Gerfried Stocker, and Ronaldo Remos) online, and if you speak Spanish better than me I recommend that you check it out; the discussions in-between (with Gina Tost) are in Spanish, the Interviews are in English.
More details via From the OniOn blog:
"Hoy se estrena un nuevo capitulo
de Balzac TV, un trabajo realizado en cooperación entre los equipos de
ON i ON comunicación y de Balzac TV, y protagonizado por las
antagonistas “Gina copyleft” y “Gina copyright”. Con esta pieza queremos aportar una serie de reflexiones ajenas y
propias acerca de un problema actual que parece de difícil solución si
lo miramos sólo desde el lado del negocio: las limitaciones de la propiedad intelectual en la era digital.
¿Qué alternativas hay a la estricta interpretación del copyright,
Creative Commons funciona, y bajo qué condiciones, y hay modelos de
negocios viables basado en el copyleft?
A parte de la estupenda Gina Tost y sus alter egos, contamos con las aportaciones de Joi Ito (CEO Creative Commons), Gerfried Stocker (Director Artístico de Ars Electronica), Gerd Leonhard (Media Futurist) y Ronaldo Lemos (Creative Commons, Brazil). Os dejo con las Ginas peleonas…"
Balzac.tv: La belleza del copyleft
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Video: The Future of Content & Telecoms: Flat Rate Content Bundles and Social Media (Gerd Leonhard) via the eComm blog. Note that eComm Europe was just announced, as well (Oct 28-30, in Amsterdam).
And here is the PDF with my slides (summarized version) at the eComm Conference in San Francisco
Download Future of Content & Telecom Gerd Leonhard @ eComm Conf 2009 PDF
Summary of topics: " Imagine a world where unfiltered and limitless access to content is bundled directly into your access to the networks. A world where 'your cloud' holds all kinds of content, your social network connections, your community, and your context (i.e. meta-content), your meta-data and your interaction-trails, and where access to all of this is feels-like-free, legal, always-on and fully mobile, on any and all platforms. This is the future we are heading into, and telecoms, content-owners and brands / advertisers must forge entirely new partnerships. We are starting to see content creators and rights-owners aborting their long-standing quests for total control, and instead looking to build their audiences and share revenues. So where is this trend going to take us, what do we need to do in order to turn content (music, video, TV, news, games, books...) into a new and truly growing business that is really web-native, where are the big opportunities for telecoms, operators, social networks and rights-holders, and what will the new business models look like? In this context, Gerd will also address topics such as the flat rate for digital music, ISP/Operator + Content bundling examples in Europe and Asia, copyright 2.0 and the future of content commerce, the shift from control-economy to attention & trust economy, the latest developments in next generation advertising, and the growing economic power of those 'new generatives' (> Kevin Kelly)..."
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As the web becomes ubiquitous, everywhere, and mobile access dwarfs computers, we are seeing a key shift in the way that people use (fka consume) content. While it used to be good enough to present high-quality and professional content (think traditional TV, Radio etc) now people aka USERS want and really value good CONTEXT, too, i.e. links, recommendations, ratings, comments... and the conversation around the content. Social media brings this into sharp focus: all the stuff around content (I like to call this meta-content) is now just as important as the content itself. This has significant impact on every player in the content industries. Download the MP4 file: Download Content to Context shift MP4 (35MB)
More videos on my Youtube channel, iTunes video downloads via Blip.tv
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Joi Ito is a great resource and inspiring thought leader. Here is a great video with 2.6 Minutes of solid wisdoms. The nuggets:
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On Tuesday March 5 09 I was invited to hold the Leaders Lecture at the inaugural eCom Berlin event; on Wednesday March 6 I had the pleasure of delivering the closing keynote on "The Future of Retail".
Here is are PDFs, below (provided under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Attribution License, as usual)
Wed closing keynote Download Future of Retail eCom Gerd Leonhard(10MB PDF)
15MB PDF Future of Selling Ecom Berlin Gerd Leonhard (Tues)
This work by Gerd Leonhard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Just a quick reminder: Selling Music (or really, selling anything) is drastically changing - and yes, there'll be plenty of revenues. Stay tuned.
