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.
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!
Jeff Jarvis rocks - no doubt about it. I have been reading his new book "What would Google do" and in my view it's at least as important as Wikinomics or the LongTail. Check out Jeff's slideshow and video below (yes, you can fast-forward thru the first 8 mins of German intro;) - no matter what business you are in, this will give you some serious food for thought; if you're in the content business - well... watch it 5 times! Some of his key points:
The link changes everything
Do what you do best and link to the rest
Join a network / Be a platform
Think distributed
If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found
Everybody needs a little SEO
Life is public, so is business
Your customers are your ad agency
Small is the new big
Manage abundance (not scarcity)
Join the open-source, gift economy
The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches
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 ;)
"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"
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.
The amazing power of online networking and collaboration, open platforms, creative commons licensing and crowd-sourcing (whew... that's a mouthful!) has manifested itself once again: for the past 9 months, the tenacious and dedicated Zvonimir Dusper (Dus) from Croatia (LinkedIn profile) has been hard at work translating my entire Music 2.0 book into Croatian language (see the English book site here, download the English version as a PDF here, buy the dead-tree version or U.S. letter size book PDF at Lulu, here, visit the Amazon.com book page [incl. reviews] here).
The book is now available as a free PDF download and in a print version via Zvonimir's Glazba2.0 site - check it out and please forward this post to anyone that may be interested in reading Music2.0 in Croatian (you can use the tools provided, below)
To receive the free PDF please use the email box on the left site of the Glazba2.0 site (see here >). Enjoy!
PREDGOVOR HRVATSKOM IZDANJU Tematika “2.0” u posljednje vrijeme sve više okupira medije (nove i stare :-), pa smo, osim već razvikanim Webom 2.0, sad bombardirani i Novinarstvom 2.0, Marketingom (komercijalnim ali i političkim!) 2.0, Ekonomijom 2.0, Sociologijom 2.0 i drugim raznim inačicama tog fenomena, među kojima nas, ljubitelje glazbe i/ili glazbene profesionalce, najviše zanima upravo tema ove knjige – Glazba
2.0. Riječ je o promjeni iz sustava kojim je dominirao princip “od-vrha-prema-dole”, u sistem “od-dole-prema-vrhu”, u kojem korisnici/potrošači svojim sudjelovanjem u interaktivnim online mrežama grade tkivo budućih socijalnih ekosistema. Pažnja je postala nova valuta, a poslovni princip vrlo jednostavan – ako je privučeš dovoljno da se posuda prelije, višak možeš lako pretvoriti u novac. Kako god to zvučalo jednostavno, živjeti u 2.0 svijetu znači imati hrabrosti za radikalnu promjenu svojih navika, i odustajanje od tradicionalnih očekivanja i (nerealnih) projekcija budućnosti. Budućnost ne dolazi, ona je već tu, samo je neravnomjerno raspoređena – da citiram Johna Cage-a (taj sam citat, naravno, “pokupio” iz ove knjige :-) ....
I have mentioned Google's music-related activities in Chinaa few times during the past 2 years; and just yesterday this topic seems to have heated up considerably. I think these developments are crucial and need further exploration.
As you may know, Google owns a good chunk (or all?) of the Chinese search engine Top100.cn, one of the biggest rivals of the Chinese super-portal and ruling search giant, Baidu. However, Google is still a more or less distant second in the Chinese search market (in 2008, Google had approx. 16.6% vs Baidu's 76.9%) and really needs its Top100 property to better compete with Baidu. The major issue here is - you guessed it - the availability of CONTENT- or rather, the simple displaying of links to millions of music & film files that those hungry freeloaders i.e. digital natives want to stream or download. Baidu allows this - in fact, thrives on it - while Google / Top100 does not (i.e. it filters and removes the links to the files). This is a huge handicap for Google, because the filtering of those content-links is basically driving away all of those 100s of millions of Chinese Internet users that are looking for just that.
Realizing that the real value of the users is in their participation and engagement, and then in paying-with-attention, Google has clearly pursued a strategy akin to the 'Music Like Water' model that I (and Dave Kusek, my partner-in-crime for "The Future of Music") have also described countless times: Google will simply provide the platform where music can be turned into money, by connecting the user with the content they want right where they already are (i.e. the search page), while gradually but aggresively monetizing their presence and their clicks via 3rd party payments - and this does not mean just ads. Sounds simple but maybe this has not yet been financially feasible in the past - today, any new money for the music companies is welcome, I guess, so here we are, finally: Search with us and we'll give you Free Music. Kai Fu Lee Image via NYT.
Clearly, it is much better for Google to offer and develop a new payment logic and mechanism for the music that is being used, i.e. to somehow license and pre-pay for it (I call this 'being the lubricant of the ecosystem') until such time where the revenues from advertising, up- and cross-selling are big enough to pay for everything, and quite possibly beyond that, as well. And as far as the music licenses are concerned - otherwise a no-go minefield that few Internet companies have crossed in the past - China is clearly a very good place to start as most of these new revenues will be 'found money' for the record labels.
Total Telecom reports: "Record companies will take roughly half of any revenue from banner ads
placed on the page users see when they are downloading or streaming
songs, with Top100.cn taking the remainder. Google could benefit from
increased traffic on its Chinese site, and can sell its trademark
search ads on the search page" The bottom-line? For all parties, it is better to deploy new kinds of ads (think mobile - that will certainly be key), sponsorships and affiliate links while the music is being used (fka consumed;) and to thereby fund thepool of music licensing costs, then not to get involved and leave the turf to all the other guys that don't play by the rules, anyway.
Now, Google has apparently licensed 350.000 tracks from all major labels (how long did that take... I am afraid to ask... *rant alert) and many leading Chinese record companies and artists, and if you are logged into Top100.cn, and based in China (sorry - no access from EU / US), apparently all the music is yours to stream and download.
So: Google pays for the music to get our attention for their ads - sure sounds like a familiar strategy. Radio and TV broadcasting, anyone?
Another interesting morsel is that apparently streaming and downloading is treated as pretty much the same thing (again, from the WSJ coverage, see link below): "Google's Lee said songs on the service are downloaded or streamed
around 1.5 million times a day, and he hopes the number will eventually
be many, many times that". I believe I have mentioned this basic fact of Internet music a few times before, too: streaming & listening IS downloading, access IS ownershop, and that's that. The legal artifacts remain, I guess...?
Now, just because I won't want to agree with the major labels and their lobbyists too much;) - here are my big questions:
If this works in China, why not do this everywhere else? If this works for Google, why not for telecoms, ISPs and mobile operators? If this works for music, why not - sooner or later - for music, TV, video, books and newspapers?
First: China does not have much of a business of 'selling units', i.e. there are no Billions of $ in selling CDs or single-track downloads. Therefore, any money that the rights-holders (i.e. the record labels and music publishers, and hopefully the artists) can actually get from anyone in China is probably very welcome; and that is exactly what the Google / Top100 deal will provide. And even though it would be a fair bet to guess that this deal is probably not coming cheap for Google China, it is probably still quite doable since the 'competition' of physical music sales is negligible and so-called 'cannibalization' of traditional music sales is not a major concern for the record industry in China. This would of course be substantially different in the UK or Germany where CD sales and the omni-present iTunes still generate Billions of Euros per year. But this is the lesson: someone had to put some money down. Congrats to Google / Top100. Next: the telecoms - within 6-9 months, imho.
While the cannibalization prevention is, of course, entirely reasonable (if you still sell units), it does beg the question: why do those lucky Chinese Internet users - many of whom may never had to worry much about potential copyright issues, 3 Strikes+Out ideas or MP3-server raids - now get a de-facto feels like free music service, while we - the more or less faithful and compliant residents of 'The West' - still need to pay 1 Euro / 1 $ for each single download on iTunes, $3 / month for Last.fm (ouch) or run off to the record store, or order on Amazon.
This clearly does not make sense: it feels a bit like we are being penalized for having actually paid for our music until now. So, some will surely argue, does this mean we should stop paying for music until such deal is being offered in Europe as well? You tell me - but it's sure worth a discussion, I think. It seems to me that this model is workable around the world now - and not just for / with / via Google - and that it should be pursued in Europe and the US, as well. Give us a licensed platform provides 'feels like free' music to the users, based on collective and public blanket licenses that can enable anyone that wants to offer music with what they do, while paying for the licenses with the traffic that those offerings, the added values, the platforms, will generate.
Here is another interesting quote from the WSJ: "I can't overstate how important the new Google service is, said
Lachie Rutherford, president of Warner Music Asia Pacific, which is
making its entire global catalogue available in China as part of the
deal: until now, the online market in China has been completely
un-monetized by the music business"
This strikes me as a very interesting way of putting this: Lachie / WMG: isn't the entire Internet music-sharing economy (i.e. P2P, stream-sharing, drive-sharing etc) un-monetized, as well? And why is that? If WMG can do this in China because their is no previous unit-sales income worth mentioning, why not do it for the Internet, period? Why not license Google - and Facebook et al - and the ISPs in much the same way? Or will you just do this in places where nobody paid anything to begin with?
Techdirt has a very fitting comment, on this (see the link below): "The fact that the labels are moving forward with this plan in China,
given its reputation as the wild west of copyright infringement,
undermine their contention that they can solve the supposed piracy
problem with legal or technological means elsewhere. Furthermore, it
exposes the reality that what's staring them in the face is a
tremendous opportunity, not a problem"
Not much to add here, except for my usual Lessig-esque mantra "Compensation not Control". Google + Telecoms - will you do that for / with us, please? This year?
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.
IBM's Institute for Business Value has published a brilliant new study entitled A future in content(ion): Can telecom providers win a share of the digital content market? A lot of what they are saying in this study is amazingly close to what I have been trying to tell the telcos for the past 2 years: you MUST get involved with content and media, no 2 ways about it. Read this study! The 3 biggest eye-openers:
Image via Wikipedia
Jeff Jarvis is a leading thinker as far as the future of media is concerned; I have been reading his blog and his books for a few years already, and I can guarantee you: he's inspiration pure! So, I just ordered his new book "What would Google do" and really look forward to reading it - the topic is a perfect theme for anyone looking at future trends, obviously. Here is a short video with Jeff where he talks about the lessons we can learn from Google ("make mistakes and make them well")- check it out.
If you saw my presentations at MIDEM and MIDEMNet 2009 here in Cannes, and would like a free PDF of my Music 2.0 book, here it is: Download Music20book_hires My slideshows on this topic are all available on Slideshare.
I am using Twitter to share links pretty much on a daily basis. However, if you are not (yet) into Twitter and just want to follow what I write in my blog posts, here are a few links that I think are worth sharing as we move into the new year:
Steve Rosenbaum at AO: 2009 - 5 Trends That Will Change Media | AlwaysOn. Great stuff in here, and I like his summary: "2009 will be a year of gut wrenching, dramatic, roller-coast change.
Big things will get smaller, or die. Little things will survive and
start to grow. Consumers will become creators. Lurkers will become
participants. The volume of voices will expand exponentially - and
the need for clarity and trusted filters will go from being useful to
being essential. Just as MP3s turned the music industry on its ear,
and Craigs List turned newspapers upside-down, the emergence of
personal publishing and new forms of both trusted and Community
Curation will have an immediate and long-lasting impact on media,
commerce, community and politics"
"Yellow Pages will dip in 2009 below their 1998 revenues of $12.1 billion. Myers Report (www.myersreport.com)
projects Yellow Pages advertising will decline 12 percent in 2009 and 6
to 10 percent in 2010"
"All print media are struggling with the same reality. While some
magazine publishers are moving quickly to identify and invest in
alternative revenue models...the magazine industry for the most part remains dangerously
dependent on traditional print advertising revenues that are eroding at
a rate even more dramatic than Yellow Pages' ad revenues"
"Consumer magazine ad revenues will decline 12 to 15 percent in 2008
and even more in 2009. ....the realities
are that print-based media are on the decline"
"Newspapers, which do not reap the benefits of high engagement scores
(except among Hispanic and African-American readers), are at an even
greater disadvantage. In 2001, according to Myers Report, newspaper
advertising revenues were $49.2 billion. In 2010, they are projected to
be only $28.5 billion, a 42% decline. Consumer magazines are projected
to decline in ad revenues from more than $14 billion in 2005 to $10.3
billion in 2010..."
If this is not a call for action, now, I don't know what is. I am working on a longer blog post on what I think could be done to re-invent the print media business - look for this to pop-up on your RSS feeds and Twitter feeds sometime next week.
In the meantime Jack sums it up quite succinctly: "But for the print media industry as a whole, there is a pressing
need to adjust to a new reality. There are solutions. There are
opportunities. But if management fails to quickly and dramatically heed
the clear warning signs of both economic and systemic, secular dangers
to their core business, the reality of extinction will face them sooner
than they imagine"
"The thing I saw as characterized by Obama’s campaign is exactly this:
an understanding that the ramifications of one
extend far beyond
necessary consequence, and those ramifications could inform, dictate
and structure other actions as necessary. In the Music business, and
indeed many other industries that are undergoing post-information
economy change, this method of operation was missing for a long time.
There has and was a very thorough understanding and examination of the
repercussions of technological change, without understanding that the
roots of every manifestation was from a common place."
"This is what the world has become. This is what culture has become.
We’re not a singular, linear tree-branch structure extending from
power-elite to the consuming class. We are defined instead by a
circuitous relationship with those that wish to define our relationship
with the world, with culture and with art. A recombinant dialog with
those that want to better our lives, or just provide us with something
to listen to.
The cultural industries today have to adapt to this. The role of an
artist, musician, performer or otherwise has as much of a part of our
lives as it ever did. The complication is that we are not in a
single-point endgame toward one goal (purchase) that enables other
goals (relationships)...We
have to define the relationship before we monetize it. And in the
same way, once the relationship is monetized, it has to be maintained
in order to solidify its value and ensure further investment.
Here is where newspapers didn’t learn to adapt. Those used to
linearity, hegemony and control had a hard time giving up a piece of
that toward universal access without the possibility, necessarily, of
monetary gain. Since then, with the Register the 5th newspaper online,
newspapers have held on to the sanctity of their own identity while
ignoring the increasing irrelevance of it in a rapidly decentering
world. This escalating to the point where ex-newspaper executives are
killing the gray-papers, to the point where the rush on newspapers was
only as a reified reminder the next day of what they read on the
Huffington Post the night before. The key to an industry weathering a sea change is to admit that they
are falible, and to learn from the lessons of others that are driving
the sea change forward, while not loosing sight of exactly what it is
they produce and do..."
Well I could keep quoting but read for yourself - it's worth it. (Ethan Kaplan is 29 years old and Vice President of Technology Warner Bros. Records).
Lulu rocks! I just created a 92 pages 6"x9" b/w book that comprises my best blog posts and essays from 2008, along with various illustrations. I thought that a very-low-price, on-demand book likes this makes perfect sense for everyone that does not have the time to keep up with my daily writings on this blog or otherwise - and a lot of people told me that they would like to read my stuff in a different way than via RSS or PDFs.
So now, courtesy of the ingenious folks at Lulu, you can order a nicely printed 'real' book for a very low price ($9.95 USD) and read it using the good old 'dead tree' interface. A PDF is also available, for 1/4 of the price of the book ($2.50 USD) Please note that I will keep revising this book (Lulu makes that very easy), i.e. I will of course add my best posts from Nov & Dec 2008, as well.
I get a lot of books in the mail, via my clients or (mostly) via networks on LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendfeed etc. Very few of them make it into my dead-tree-interfaced reading list (yes, it maybe that part of my problem is the 800+ RSS feeds I try to look at when I have a minute). But when the DDB people in NY send me their CEO Chuck Brymer's new book "The Nature of Marketing" I was quickly drawn into actually reading it all the way through (in pretty much one go, no less... perfect for that ZRG - SNG longhaul I went on a few weeks ago;), which by itself is a rare occasion.
I reckon that a lot of people at DDB have contributed to this book but mostly it is Chuck's enthusiasm for reinventing advertising that makes this book an inspiring read. Chuck, and DDB, is of course known for the Swarm Marketing concept (get the white paper here) which keeps popping up in this book, as well, but more importantly I really like all the various examples such as the Philips 'Simple Switch' campaign that are being presented throughout the book. Great food for thinking laterally!
I will be chewing on some of the ideas in this book for some time to come, but in the neantime here are 2 things I agree on, very much, and therefore want to share with you:
The future will require connected agencies that are evolving from merely orchestrating campaigns to actually facilitating conversations
Technology is now merely a commodity, and this is a social / cultural revolution, not a technological one
Making a long story short - this is a good read.
Related: my slideshow on the Future of Social Media, here
Disclosure: I have held various speeches and keynotes for DDB and TribalDDB in the past.
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