The price of freedom: Reinventing the online economy (RSA Journal July 2009)

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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Rolodex 2.0 - the social web is becoming our address book

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:

• Everyone that I meet face-to-face is sooner or later added to at least one of my social networks (that is, if I actually enjoyed meeting them, of course), freeing me from the onerous task of having to manually keep track how exactly I met them. For me, LinkedIn has in effect become my electronic rolodex, and finding, retrieving and filtering people has become very simple. I constantly use LinkedIn to keep track of people that I have met, and to re-connect with them as needed - and I keep LinkedIn pretty much reserved for people I have met in the 'meat-space'  rather than just online.  The bottom line is that just like GMail has greatly simplified searching through your emails, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are simplifying my people search; by far beating the traditional methods of keeping my contacts up-to-date.
• Everyone that emails me (or vice versa) is saved in my gMail contacts list - all I need to do is search (and yes, I do export my contact list regularly). Why would I export lists of addresses if I can always search for them? Why do I need Plaxo or iContact if I have GMail plus my social networks (and now, realtime search and Friendfeed streams?
• Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook keep very good track of my current conversations and make it easy to see my most active network members, so if I need to find someone I can certainly do it here very quickly
• Google private bookmarking tools and Yahoo's Delicious (which I keep public) make it very easy to bookmark and annotate people that are relevant to me, for later retrieval. I do this with 1000s of people I have met - I quickly bookmark your profile and add a few keywords, and even if I totally forget about anyone I will still be able to find them 5 years from now.
• Apple's slick MobileMe keeps track of my datebook, my contacts and my files; and on all my Macs and iPhones and iPods

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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The Future of Advertising: become like... Content

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.

Mobile Marketing Futures: Data is the new Oil (my presentation at CMMA 09 in Singapore)

Thanks to a recent Twitter conversation (with @copysense) I was inspired to make a lot of use of a newly found tag line "Data is the New Oil" during my presentation at the Mobile Marketing session at CommunicAsia 2009. You can download the PDF CMMA Mobile Marketing Futures Gerd Leonhard Public (15MB PDF).  Apart from data, trust and oil, this is what I talked about: 

The State of the Mobile Marketing Industry and beyond: Consumer generated content, social networking, online on-demand video, engagement and the death of television as we know it - The velocity of change only seems to be increasing. Zenith Optimedia estimates online advertising spending will grow 8.6% in 2009, reaching $54.3 billion by the end of the year, even as the overall market slumps by 6.9%, as marketers increasingly leverage digital media and technology platforms to establish a dialog with their customers,    optimize messaging and delivery and, ultimately, drive brand preference. How will the looming recession impact on media and advertising? Will digital media suffer along with other platforms or might our industry benefit from these tough times as marketers shift a disproportionate amount of spending to performance-based marketing channels?

Mobile Marketing & Advertising Futures (Data is the new Oil)

View more Microsoft Word documents from Gerd Leonhard.

Told you so: eMail is now second to communicating via Social Networks

I just ran across some nice research from Nielsen called the Global Online Media Landscape - download their free PDF - (yes, I know, it's from April 2009... so I am a bit late to the party...sorry) shows that as of February 2009 the use of eMail is paralled by the use of social networks as far as the frequency of communication is concerned; so-called member communities and social networks are now an equally preferred method of conversation. This trend will continue and I predict that eMail will remain popular mostly for business communications but will otherwise decline drastically, within the next 3 years. I kind of pointed in this direction in a blog post in October 2008 "eMail is for old people'. Now just wait until the Google Wave hits!

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Some recent Twitter-related wisdoms you should read for sure

Twitter is indeed a game-changer and is quickly becoming a major force in social media, news, search and mobile communications. I have written about Twitter quite a few times, already, so today I will just share some really important Twitter-related stuff that I just discovered, myself (via the people I follow on Twitter, naturally ;)

First, the always-seriously-cutting-edge Umair Haque just published a blog post on 'Twitter's 10 Rules for Radical Innovators' which is simply a must-read. Here are my favorites morsels: 

"Open beats closed. Anyone can use Twitter, make friends with anyone else on Twitter, and read anyone else's Tweets, unless they're locked. Here's Oprah, for example. Openness is important because it unlocks 21st Century economics — the new economics of interdependence"   The new economics of interdependence - that's a crucial term, in my view.  I like to think about this as Egosystem becoming Ecosystem...;)

"Connection beats transaction. In the 20th Century, what was viral was mostly the flu. Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies. I got this awesome link from you got it from he got it from them. In the 21st Century, virality can make many different kinds of value activities significantly more efficient and productive..."  Circuits beat channels. Twitter isn't building a new media channel. It's turning yesterday's channel into a circuit. ...Twitter has dropped a neutron bomb of real-time feedback into the heart of media: yesterday's inert, rigid channel becomes a flexible, ever-shifting, reconfigurable set of circuits instead. Efficiency is gained — and monopoly is vaporized — as demand coalesces around supply, and vice versa"

No comments required here;)

Second, be sure to read TIME's recent ode to Twitter: how Twitter will change the way we live. The goodies, quoted, my comments are [...]

• In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
• For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings ...But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors
• Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching
• One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties [I call this the Rise of the API Culture - and it's a crucial driver of 21st century content economics]
• As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search [This is often called Social Search - and imho, it will beat the pants of Search 1.0 within 9 months. Another reason why Google will buy Twitter, for sure]
• Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs...but impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.
• In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium.

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This is what cool companies do in their Shareholders Meetings now: Southwest Airlines GAAP Rap

Just ran cross this via Digital Media Wire:  "Southwest Airlines’ Rapping Flight Attendant, David Holmes, explains Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in a “GAAP Rap” at the 2009 Shareholder’s Meeting held at the Company’s Dallas headquarters on Monday 20th" Really funny, and a very unique way to bring some really boring points across.

Image via Wikipedia

To me, this shows that:

• Southwest Airlines is still cool, and funny
• Public Relations is now solidly intertwined with Online Video
• People love stuff that's different
• You can be funny and serious about business, at the same time

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Sponsored Conversations - yes, no, maybe?

I have run across the sponsored conversations concept via Josh Bernoff and via Techdirt's Mike Masnick before (see Techdirt's sponsored conversation example here), and found it very interesting yet a little hard to align with a more 'seriously independent' blogging approach. I am not sure that I would personally want to engage in having my blog or my tweets sponsored by someone that wants to reach my readers or 'followers' (and yes... there have been offers), but I still like the concept and will investigate it further.  It seems like there is a nice package to be made with good old Word of Mouth, web-native Word of Mouse, and Sponsored Conversation - or what do you think?

Picnic Interview: Gerd on Social Media Marketing

This is from the Picnic Conference blog, taken from a telephone interview with me, last week. Please note that I am firm believer that there is NO COOKBOOK for success in social media (whatever that means!), at least as far as I can tell. And there is no certainly not a definitive correlation between your mere numbers of followers or friends, and the quality or merit of your work. We are still very much in the very first, embryonic phase of social media marketing (and the related personal branding options), and it would be very premature to equal success in numbers with success in business or even any real degree of influence.  I am experimenting with this just as much as everyone else... so, read this below, in that spirit! 

Btw - the Picnic conference in Amsterdam (Sept 23-25, 2009) will be well worth attending (and not just because I'll be speaking ;). Last year's event was thoroughly entertaining as well as inspirational, if sometimes a bit overwhelming due to the sheer number of topics and attendees.  Check out my 2008 Picnic presentation on The New Music Ecosystem, here.

From the Picnic site (comments by me are in[...])

"Last Friday, the team at PICNIC had the opportunity to pick Gerd Leonhard’s brain about social media marketing and what has made him successful. Gerd is a well-known media futurist and a regular PICNIC participant. He travels the world speaking about the future of media, content, technology, communication, business and entertainment.

In less than six months Gerd accumulated over 5000 followers on Twitter and his website traffic [and RSS feed users] increased by 300% (60% of which comes from Twitter). As a result he decided to completely stop communicating with his 17,000-strong database by email and his business has continued to thrive. It was a pleasure to chat with Gerd on the subject of social media marketing and we are excited to share some of his top tips with you.

Pull, don’t push: Get people’s attention by providing value and earn their love by engaging with them. This will naturally lead to increased website traffic and increased sales.

Getting started

• Choose a plausible position and objectives you want to achieve
• Find out where your target audience is, i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube…
• Listen to others and decide carefully who you want to follow and get feedback from
• Track replies and keywords to help you actively participate in the conversation
• Set up multiple accounts if necessary (by topic, employee, etc)

Building momentum

• Jump in: don’t be afraid to start, there is no right or wrong way to use social media for marketing
• Provide value: link to content on your website or blog like videos, slideshows, tips, interviews; provide useful resources from other sites; don’t be afraid to re-package existing content by putting a new spin on the story.
• Avoid sales pitches: but do offer special offers or rewards to members of your network
• Participate: develop conversations with members of your network; ask for feedback or advice
• Be transparent: people will feel more connected with your brand when they know what is going on behind the scenes
• Establish yourself as a thought leader or authority: dialogue with the right people

Measuring success

• Social media marketing is not a replacement for other marketing tactics. Success with social media tools requires time and effort, not money. Success has to be defined by the individual or company.
• The number of followers or members is important, but not the only measurement of success. You can also track traffic to your website generated by social media sites, number of RSS subscribers, and increase in comments or leads.

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All my short blog posts will now move to Twitter. If you get my blog feed be sure to subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed, too

Image by photopia / HiMY SYeD via Flickr

I used to blog short stuff all the time - usually a link to a great story or resource somewhere else, and maybe add a few comments. That was then, and this is now: this kind of activity has now almost completely moved to my Twitter account (main) (others: Futurefeed &  DailyWisdoms), because it makes a lot more sense there. Blog posts will be a bit less but more substantial and more carefully crafted - as they should be, imho.

So, if you are already subscribing to this blog's RSS feed but have not been sucked into the Twitter universe quite yet - and don't really want to (yes, I know you people are still out there!) - please be sure to also subscribe to my Twitter RSS feed, as well as my Friendfeed RSS, that way you can be sure you keep getting all the goodies, regardless of what you use. Both of those RSS feeds can still be read even if you are not logged-in to either of them. Hope that helps?

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Just discovered: powerful free book 'MetheMedia - Rise of the Conversation Society' - a must read.

Sander Duivestein, senior analyst at Sogeti's VINT, and one of the co-writers of this powerful ebook that provides a huge amount of both information and inspiration for anyone pondering the Future of Media, just send me the link to where his great book can be downloaded as a free PDF. Go get it before they run out of server juice;)

The full title is: Me the Media: Rise of the Conversation Society - Past, Present and Future of the Third Media Revolution

The authors are Jaap Bloem, Menno van Doorn, Sander Duivestein. There are some pretty cool illustrations in the book as well (see below).

I will be chewing my way through this during the next few weeks - hey, I may even take advantage of this opportunity and start using my new Sony Reader, i.e. without printing all 292 pages.

The main topic of the book (as far as I have read it, at the time of this blog post) is how drastically things have changed because WE 'the people formerly known as consumers' are becoming more empowered by the minute, i.e. it's increasingly more about MEMedia than about THEIRMedia; about conversation and engagement not (you guessed it) about Control. The video below provides a nice intro as well, more vids are here.  This is a must-read, imho! Be sure to pass on the news of the release.

Incidentally, I have found a few slideshows on Slideshare that are also a very good fit with this book, including this one (not mine:), and, naturally quite a few of these PDFs might also make a good fit (yes, they're mine;).  Enjoy. Don't print.

 

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Facebook's CEO on the ToU debacle: "Governing the Facebook Service in an Open and Transparent Way" - Adios Control!

Read Zuck's post: Facebook | Governing the Facebook Service in an Open and Transparent Way.
When Facebook changed their Terms of Use last week, making it look a lot more 'controlling', all hell broke loose.  Even in Switzerland (where I live), the national TV news reported on the uproar that followed. Everyone hated Facebook's new ToUs and lots of people were considering ditching their accounts. Even though their new ToUs did not surprise me, and I already consider everything I do on Facebook to be kind of  'in public domain' (under the Creative Commons license I use for pretty much anything), I do think that they way they have gone about this left a lot to be desired. Their brilliant and decidedly Web2.0 move was to immediately back-paddle and return to the old ToU - very smart, and something that probably got them extensive media coverage all over the world (hey - there's a lot more room to grow, from their measly 160 Million or so users;).

So Zuck wrote in this blog-post:  "Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way. And... we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way. Beginning today, we are giving you a greater opportunity to voice your opinion over how Facebook is governed"

Well-done. Sure sounds a lot like Facebook will be more like a 'Public Utility' ... kind of like the BBC, maybe? Now, there's another blog-post, right here!

But here is the key point, for me: It is now abundantly clear that the WE-THE USERS can control and influence what happens - not (just) the 'Network Owner' or 'Provider' or 'Media Company' or 'Studio' or 'Label' or "TV / Radio Network".  If we-the-users, the people formerly known as consumers, don't like it, we'll leave, taking all our friends with us, deflating the platform's value very quickly - just imagine what would happen to Google if we pulled our trust from them. Control has now shifted to the Users - and that's a good thing.

This is,  of course, the topic of my next book (download some previews, here).  More soon.  Facebook ToU tag cloud by Flickr, AuntieP

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Information Culture to... Conversation Culture

The fight for Control was a fight for Distribution.
The flight for Attention is a fight for Trust.
The beneficiaries of Control were Monopolies.
The beneficiaries of Trust are those that can Collaborate.
The Future of Marketing and Advertising is CONVERSATIONS.

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The Culture & Economy of Participation (my presentation at Emergence 2009 in Cyprus)

Image via Wikipedia

 I just finished my presentation at Emergence 2009, a really interesting and engaging e-Tourism event in Limassol / Cyprus. I spoke on the topic of how the tourism and travel industry is changing because of the Internet and the new habits of those hyper-connected 'people formerly known as users'. From the program: 

The participative Economy by Gerd Leonhard Adopting customer-centricity and connecting through experience - access, usage, sharing - an inevitable future scenario for differentiation and competitiveness.Gerd is an expert on the drastic changes that are impacting content, media and communication companies as a consequence of the rapid deployment of new, disruptive technologies, and of convergence. 

Here is the PDF (15MB) - hopefully we will have a video soon, as well. Slideshare to follow as soon as bandwidth (not so hot, here)  allows!

Download Culture and Economy of Participation Gerd Leonhard Cyprus Emergence2009

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The Culture And Economy Of Participation: Futurist Gerd Leonhard @ Cyprus Emergence2009 etourism event

View more presentations from Gerd Leonhard. (tags: tourism etourism)

4 bottom lines of the Internet economy: participation, engagement, attention, content = ads

This, below just became clear to me this morning, on the 6.50 am flight from Basel to London (airplane trips always make good occasions for lofty thoughts I guess):

• People nowadays seem more keen to participate than to just consume - quite a stunning reversal if compared to mass media traditions. The culture of participation is spreading very quickly. See: flickr, youtube, blogs, twitter,

  Image by gleonhard via Flickr

  wikipedia, amazon ratings, digg...
• People are much more likely to check out, and maybe even like, a brand (or their advertising) when they are being engaged rather than marketed-to (i.e. yelled-at). See: Nike+, Bacardi & Groove Armada, Dell Idea Storm, Comcast on Twitter etc
• Attention is becoming more scarce by the minute (maybe even more so than time), and as a result attention-data -what do I where, how, with whom, when - is becoming more valuable as well. 'Paying with attention' will become a real option once a) content becomes available on the basis of attention-revenue sharing,  b) new forms of advertising (yes, call it 2.0;) that can exploit this data are becoming more mainstream. Watch this video from my talk at Google UK, to find out more.
• Content will become completely mashed up with Advertising. Since, as Cory Doctorow said back in 2006 (!), Conversation is King - not just Content, we will see more and more innovative advertising based on sponsorship and product placement concepts injected into conversations around content - after all, this is what social networks are all about!

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