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media file 6.14.10 | The “Content Graph” and the future of media brands

The “Content Graph” and the future of media brands

On the Publishing 2.0 blog, Scott Karp introduces the concept of the Content Graph--like the Social Graph, a map of relationships that defines one’s “brand strength” relative to the other parties mapped on the graph. Just as on a Social Graph, one is measured by the number and quality of one’s friendships, on a Content Graph, a media brand is measured by the number and quality of its distribution relationships with other media brands on the graph. With Aol and Yahoo both jockeying for leadership in original content, the Content Graph could become an increasingly important metaphor for media brands looking for an opening in a newly promising digital content market. The big dollars in advertising, which are still locked up in traditional media, will start to flow to digital media brands that can demonstrate the distribution reach currently associated with search and social networks, combined with the strong brand equity that consumers still invest in traditional media.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 14, 2010:

How a digital-first strategy saved The Atlantic

The Folio site reports on 153-year-old The Atlantic magazine’s remarkable turnaround from a money-losing, declining traditional media enterprise to a growing, profitable digital brand. President Justin Smith cited five keys to its reinvention: creating a clear, compelling brand promise, which catalyzed organizational discipline around a set of specific goals; rallying around a digital-first product strategy, which unlocked resources that were otherwise tied up in the traditional business; launching a marketing services operation to drive digital revenues and differentiate the brand from low-margin ad networks; growing live events as a new profit center; and relentlessly focusing on hiring and retaining top talent. As a result of the overhaul, over $2 million in costs were driven out of the operation, while the organization is on track to sustainable profitability.

The ten keys to successful open innovation culture

The Innovation Tools blog summarizes the 10 essential elements of a successful open innovation culture, as described in a new book by Stefan Lindegaard, the leader of the LinkedIn Open Innovation Discussion Group. Among the key qualities cited: having people with the “soft skills” to effectively manage relationships with customers and partners; being willing to strike a balance between internal and external R&D; accepting the fact that open innovation creates intellectual property issues that the organization must work through internally before engaging with outside entities; and understanding that open innovation requires open communications with both staff and partners. The list grew out of a discussion among group members on the LinkedIn site.

The four types of organizational complexity

While corporate executives readily admit that complexity in the business environment makes it difficult to attain their strategic goals, they tend to think of the problem in terms of institutional complexity: the web of forces within the market that drive and disrupt business performance. Their employees, meanwhile, are likely to to think of the problem in terms of individual complexity: the internal norms and processes that make it hard for them to achieve their goals. McKinsey Quarterly examines the four types of organizational complexity: complexity intrinsic to the business or sector; complexity designed into one’s products or business model; complexity imposed by law, regulators, and NGOs; and unnecessary complexity that arises from misalignment between business goals and processes. Once they understand the kind of complexity they face, executives should eliminate any that doesn’t add value; and channel what’s left to staff with the professional skills to effectively manage it.

Closing the gap between vision and action in corporate sustainability

Has sustainability crossed the chasm from PR to strategy within US corporations? According to a recent Deloitte survey of 48 corporate executives, leaders are interested and involved in sustainability, and see a clear alignment with overall business strategy. But there remains a gap between their vision and the way that sustainability is enabled within their organizations. While many have broadly adopted the “triple bottom line” framework--pursuing performance in the economic, social, and environmental spheres--in practice, most are currently investing in environmental initiatives alone. For those companies taking an integrated approach to sustainability, four key success factors correlate to increased business value: aligning sustainability strategy with business strategy; integrating sustainability across the value chain; structuring non-traditional collaborations and extending existing collaborations; and establishing cross-disciplinary governance to drive performance.

What today’s CEOs can learn from history about socially responsible business

Although the concept of “triple bottom line” business is commonly considered an innovation of the 21st century, former AT&T CEO Leo Hindery, Jr. writes on Bloomberg Businessweek that its origins go back to the World War II era, when executives almost universally embraced the responsibility to balance the diverse interests of all stakeholders--shareholders, employees, partners, customers, and the nation as a whole. This model broke down in the 1980s, and in its place emerged the view that driving shareholder value was the only responsibility of the chief executive. As recent history amply demonstrates, it’s time for a corrective to this mistaken notion, but the business culture of the 1980s is now so fully entrenched in the boardroom that only government can provide the needed incentive for widespread behavioral change. A new tax and regulatory regime is needed to break the spell of “profits above all” and reintroduce the core concept of civic responsibility to the executive suite.

media file 6.7.10 | An environmental movement for the mind

An environmental movement for the mind

On the Adbusters site, environmentalist Bill McKibben turns his attention to an ecological danger that threatens to overtake carbon dioxide pollution or toxic oil spills as the number one environmental problem we face. In fact, it is the source of these problems: the poisoning of our culture by hyper commercialism and the extreme self-absorption it breeds. While throughout the centuries our mental environment has been polluted by church, state, and other institutions, this century presents the first moment in which almost the entirety of our personal and collective experience is mediated for us via for-profit media enterprises. The global consumer monoculture that is arising from this new form of mental pollution is threatening to place basic collective values--such as concern for the impact of one’s actions upon others--on the endangered ideas list.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for June 7, 2010:

How systems thinking can save your company

Corporate executives invariably give lip service to “systems thinking”--the management philosophy, originating in the early 20th century, that views the company as a complex social system and living community. But when push comes to shove, they fall back on even earlier thinking, from the 18th and 19th centuries--the company as a machine, which can be manipulated by optimizing discrete functions without awareness of how a change in one function might ripple through the whole. Such thinking locks in static solutions that can themselves become a source of destabilization, as the company confronts a complex and fast-changing business environment. Systems thinking, authentically applied, can invest a company with the insight to to adapt to unexpected developments, self-correct via trial-and-error learning and experimentation, and gain a detailed, intimate understanding of how the parts of the business fit together as a whole. Management guru Andrea Gabor writes for strategy+business.

The surprise leadership skill that CEOs value most

In a recent survey of 1500 CEOs conducted by the IBM Institute for Business Value, creativity was selected as the single most important leadership attribute required for the successful enterprise of the future--not operational effectiveness, discipline, or any other of the characteristics selected in previous studies. Why the surprising shift in attitude? Global complexity, the CEOs said, has changed everything. The interplay of global forces like climate change with international finance, political, and regulatory systems has added a new layer of complexity to such critical issues as supply chain management and even workforce competitiveness. To see this complexity as an opportunity and not a paralyzing threat, today’s new leaders need the capacity, which creativity supplies, to break with existing organizational attitudes and assumptions and instead embrace business models fueled by an ethic of continuous innovation. IBM’s Frank Kern writes for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Scale the impact, not the overhead

Social enterprises have historically focused their social-impact strategies on replication: extending their successful programs into new service areas in a linear fashion, thereby achieving increases in social impact that are tied directly to increases in available resources. Such approaches impose hard limitations on an organization’s ability to achieve its social impact potential, and in many cases simply prove unsustainable. There’s another way, writes Bridgespan Group managing partner Jeffrey Bradach for the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Social enterprises can look to the for-profit sector for scaling strategies that multiply social impact with minimal increases in resources and overhead. Among these strategies: extend program reach via digital networks; build networks of partner organizations; develop talent; and generate demand for new ideas via marketing.

B2B spending on social media set to explode

While business-to-business firms have been late to the party in social media marketing, that’s getting set to change, according to a new report by eMarketer. The reasons are straightforward: B2B marketing is typically much more information-intensive than consumer product marketing, and so therefore it lends itself perfectly to the long-form tools of social media: blogs, podcasts, webinars, online learning communities, etc. Spending is expected to quintuple in the next five years, according to Forrester Research numbers cited in the eMarketer report.

The new Yahoo starting to look like the new AOL

With its $100 million purchase of content aggregator Associated Content, Yahoo has taken a sharp turn in the direction of AOL, which recently underwent a wrenching transformation that turned it from an ailing Internet service provider into a leading digital content company. Similarly, with the Associated Content acquisition, Yahoo is staging itself to move from being an online portal primarily serving other people’s content to becoming the dominant producer of original content for the web. Already, Yahoo serves almost three times the page views of AOL, and 200 times the page views of The New York Times. Business Insider reports.

media file 5.17.10 | The five forces reshaping the global economy

The five forces reshaping the global economy

In the sixth annual McKinsey Global Survey, over 1400 corporate executives from around the world identified the top five forces shaping their organizations’ strategies: (1) the shift in global economic activity from developed to developing countries; (2) the rise of the consumer in emerging markets; (3) increasingly global labor markets; (4) the impact of global digital networks in facilitating the flow of goods, information, and capital; and (5) rising government and stakeholder expectations about the role of business in contributing to the public good. The McKinsey Quarterly reports.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for May 17, 2010:

America’s green innovation problem

It’s received wisdom in many business circles--and the thesis of some bestselling pop business texts--that America can retain its strategic edge in global markets by focusing on innovation, even while manufacturing, customer service, and other core business activities get outsourced to other countries. But if trends in green innovation are any measure, this view will ultimately prove bankrupt--both for the companies that bet on it, and for American society as a whole. Globalization is rapidly overtaking the field of innovation, particularly in green technology, where the Chinese government is exploiting the powerful feedback loops that can be created when innovation, manufacturing, and marketing are advanced in tandem. Left unchallenged, governments pursuing this strategy could end up locking in strategic advantage in key markets--and locking America out. Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

Goldman Sachs and Drucker’s law of innovation

What’s the link between mortgage-backed securities and ATMs? Easy--both are financial market innovations. What’s the difference? One followed the route all successful innovations follow--delivering a product or process that fundamentally improves customers’ lives--while the other exploited innovation solely to the innovator’s advantage. The resulting catastrophe was predictable, writes Drucker Institute Executive Director Rick Wartzman for Bloomberg Businessweek. Peter Drucker himself predicted such a mess in a 1999 essay, where he compared compared derivates and other such financial innovations to the “systems” invented by professional gamblers to beat the house. They almost never work, Drucker observed; but the collateral damage they produce to markets and reputations can be enormous, as Goldman Sachs and others have found out.

Should all corporations adopt the “precautionary principle”?

“First do no harm”--the so-called “precautionary principle” has been a shared human value virtually since the dawn of civilization, and yet contemporary business practice seems to regularly defy it. Is it possible to fundamentally shift this dynamic--to inject the precautionary principle into the DNA of every contemporary corporation, so that episodes like the financial meltdown and the Gulf oil disaster become a thing of the past? On CSRwire, attorney Sanford Lewis explores the new risk-management strategies and innovations in corporate law that promise to make the precautionary principle a bedrock of corporate governance, rather than an afterthought.

If corporations are people, then shouldn’t they act like it?

The recent Supreme Court campaign finance ruling in the Citizens United case effectively conferred the same political free-speech rights on corporations that had previously existed only for individuals. So shouldn’t corporations be held to the same standard of personal responsibility that individuals live by? On the Harvard Business site, corporate sustainability advocate Andrew Winston argues that businesses owe society nothing less--or more--than to live by the Golden Rule: to do unto others as they would have done unto them. This approach is the only one that can effectively balance the environmental, sociological, and stakeholder concerns that are shaping the nature of business in the 21st century. Businesses should adopt this new model for the most selfish of all possible reasons--because it’s the only possible path to corporate sustainability in an era in which all stakeholders have effectively found their voice and are projecting it over the social web.

What do you call the world?

There is a famous story from Zen literature that goes like this:

Teacher A asks Teacher B: “Where do you come from?” (Sometimes a trick question.)

Teacher B replies: “From the south.” (Ah, a safe answer.)

A asks: “How is Zen practice in the South these days?”

B responds: “There lots of discussion.”

A states: “How can all the discussion compare to planting the fields and cooking rice?”

B asks: “What can you do about the world?”

A replies: “What do you call the world?”

media file 1.25.10 | Could music labels make more by charging less?

Could music labels make more money online by charging less?

Major recording companies are in shock over declining revenues, which fell by more than 25 percent from 2006 to 2008--and executives privately blame Apple’s iTunes pricing strategy for much of this decline. But according to consumer pricing expert Raghuram Iyengar on the Knowledge@Wharton site, music executives should be asking Apple to revise its pricing strategy downward in order to reverse the industry’s financial trendline. At a retail price of 60 cents per music track, versus Apple’s standard price of 99 cents, Iyengar’s pricing model predicts that labels could see as much as a 50 percent increase in revenues, as consumers respond to lower prices by buying significantly more tracks.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for 25 January 2010:

Amazon shakes up book industry with 70 percent Kindle royalty plan

Silicon Alley Insider reports on Amazon’s new Kindle royalty and pricing option for participating book publishers--a remit rate of 70 percent of sales price under the plan, versus 35 percent under its standard agreement. The catch? There are several, including a price cap of $9.99 per book; and at least a 20 discount on the digital book versus the print version. While book publishers worry that low e-book prices will destroy their profit margins, SAI argues: “Hogwash.” Lower prices will unleash demand, and publishers will end up sitting pretty as higher sales volumes drive revenues up. Says SAI: “This is where the book industry is headed, whether traditional publishers want it to or not. Amazon’s new plan should help shorten the time it takes to get there.”

Loyalty programs migrate into media space

The magazine pro site Folio reports on media giant Hachette Filipacchi’s plan to launch “reader clubs” to build audience engagement and revenues for its US magazine brands, including Elle, Woman’s Day, and Car and Driver. Like affinity programs in the travel and financial services industries, Hachette’s clubs will provide retail discounts and priority access to entertainment events related to the magazines’ brand and key advertisers. Hachette has a customer database of over 22 million names and email addresses in the US.

For an uncertain future, imagination trumps measurement

Most managers would readily agree that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But according to “design thinking” advocate Roger Martin on the Harvard Business site, an uncritical faith in this approach has led to some of the most spectacular business failures of our time, from Motorola to GM. In an unpredictable business environment, metrics often provide little insight into the future of markets. Instead, imagination--which infers new possibilities from the present--can assist leaders to make creative leaps into new markets and new product categories. While Motorola was busy measuring the market potential for “feature phones,” Research in Motion leaders imagined an entirely new kind of handheld device, the demand for which could not be quantified--because the product category did not exist. It is from this kind of imaginative leap, Martin says, that the future is born. Managers who stick with a seemingly more predictable, measurement-based leadership style risk being left in the dust.

Successful innovations can be predicted

On the Advertising Age site, innovation strategist Phil Roos pokes a hole in one of the most persistent myths about breakthrough innovations: that they are the result of lucky accidents or brilliant flashes of insight. On the contrary, Roos says: Innovations follow a predictable pattern, in which first the potential breakthrough and its benefits are introduced into the market by insurgent startups, which lack the resources to take it to scale; then competing firms take up the innovation and experiment with variations on its basic theme; and finally the idea reaches a tipping point where product readiness and market awareness meet. Successful innovators recognize this pattern as it emerges and are therefore able to predict and capitalize on breakthroughs as they evolve into mainstream market successes.

What is “operations strategy”?

Is it the new black? Or is it a basic contradiction in terms? On the strategy+business site, operations strategist Tim Laseter squares the circle by pointing out that battles between strategy advocates on one side, and operations/performance excellence advocates on the other side, have largely missed the point: Both are needed together, in a way that amplifies the strengths of each perspective. Strategic choices must advance operational excellence; quality/performance initiatives must advance strategic goals. This integrated perspective is essential for success in such core activities as product innovation, customer service, value chain management, and long-range planning.

Three steps to social media mastery

Social media is about mastering the consideration phase of stakeholders’ decision-making process. There are three steps you can take to influence and shape this crucial phase: Understand stakeholders’ experience; create a presence that they find attractive; and collaborate with them to improve their experience. Dave Evans comments on ClickZ.

media file 11.16.09 | Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

Why all great digital firms will build or buy an ad network

On the Advertising Age site, ad network exec Todd Sacerdoti confidently forecasts the future for his profession. Just as all major digital firms have either built or bought some form of email, communications, or social networking technology to unify their customer base, so too will they build or buy an ad network to unify the commercial marketplace for these customers.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for November 16,2009:

Why “lean” is the future of innovation

Can innovation initiatives succeed in business environments that stress efficiency and effectiveness? Sure, write the editors of Knowledge@Wharton, because lean processes force innovators to size up opportunities quickly, and move on if there’s no clear path to success. Companies typically waste a lot of time and money on product development because standards and processes for accelerating the best ideas and killing marginal ones are often implicit or nonexistent. Lean innovation works because it subjects new ideas to feasibility and marketplace tests much earlier in the development cycle than is typical for more white-coat development efforts, with the result that the greenlighted innovation already has an existing following among staff and customers.

Why innovation efforts usually fail

On the Forbes site, growth strategist Peter Hartung explains why corporate innovation initiatives have such a dismal success rate. Easy, Hartung says: Innovation is an inherently inefficient, messy, and disruptive process; whereas most corporate innovation efforts strive for the efficient and effective use of capital to leverage and preserve existing revenue streams. Such wishful thinking leads to a predictable result: Not only does the innovation effort fail, but at the end of the process the organization often finds itself on a downward spiral, with no new growth opportunities in sight to offset declines in its core business.

Why innovation is the engine of green business

Innosight’s Strategy & Innovation site documents a discussion between Innosight partner Mark Johnson and sustainability consultants Andrew Shapiro and Lewis Perkins on how innovation is jump-starting and sustaining the green economy.

Will “augmented reality” change how we know our world?

On the Harvard Business site, management consultant John Sviokla argues that while “augmented reality”--the novel technique of layering digital content on top of ordinary reality--holds the potential to spark the next revolution in business creativity, further accelerating the digital transformation of traditional industries such as media, advertising, health care, and consumer services--it also has the power to ultimately reframe our relationship with such basic concepts as information, knowledge, learning, and memory.

media file 7.21.09 | Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon

Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon

On the Slate site, media gadfly Jack Shafer questions the seeming reluctance of the book industry to go along with Amazon’s $9.99 price point for books sold on its Kindle e-book platform. The argument resembles nothing so much as the music industry’s fight against electronic distribution of music tracks--a struggle that started in 1999, when Napster launched, and effectively ended in 2003, when Apple’s iTunes introduced a commercially viable platform for selling individual music tracks at $0.99 apiece. In the four years between those two events, a robust, underground, pirate music distribution system developed that has made across-the-board monetization of music content all but impossible. Will book publishers learn from the missteps of the music industry--or will they just repeat them?

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the emergence of social innovation as a driving force reshaping the process of creating value in global markets. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for July 21, 2009:

Publishers fret over e-book strategy

The New York Times reports on the collective hand-wringing in book publishing circles over whether and when to release their blockbuster titles in e-book form. Driving this question: Amazon.com has effectively set the e-book price ceiling at $9.99, versus $25 to $35 for a hardcover title. In reality, even at $9.99 e-books perform better financially for publishers than a hardcover book sold through a retail outlet, where publishers can expect to earn less than $1 on a book after point-of-sale discounts and manufacturing, distribution, and royalty costs. Nevertheless, publishers worry that the Internet will exert downward price pressure that will turn the whole enterprise into a painful route--particularly if Amazon succeeds in dominating distribution and thus gets to call the shots on pricing and margins.

“Chaos Scenario” in full swing

Almost five years ago, in early 2005, advertising guru Bob Garfield predicted the “Chaos Scenario”: a future in which brand advertising as we’ve traditionally known it is displaced by new, digital forms of customer engagement. Now, according to a Forrester report described on Internetnews.com, the Chaos Scenario has landed. According to the report, in the next five years, digitally based customer engagement spending will grow to over 20 percent of overall marketing expenditures--with almost all of that growth coming out of the hide of traditional brand advertising. Gone are the days when interactive marketing represents the experimental portion of the marketing budget, the report says. While brand advertising tanks, marketing budgets will shift toward IT infrastructure, customer service, and other forms of direct customer engagement.

Garfield’s”’Chaos Scenario” is now a book. Is that a good thing?

Advertising Age reviews media luminary Bob Garfield’s latest attack on the hand that feeds him: advertising. Garfield has published a new book, entitled “Chaos Scenario,” that forecasts the demise of the ancient art of persuasion, meanwhile using every lever that the new media affords to escape this fate for his new creation. For this, his third book, Garfield is skipping traditional book promotion channels in order to partner with an impressive network of next-generation social media marketing and distribution firms.

Google Wave is the new news

On the BuzzMachine blog, media pundit Jeff Jarvis argues that Google Wave represents more than just the next generation of email communications. It is nothing less than the future of news. Merging collaborative, live reporting and discussions with wikis and other kinds of content repositories, “waves” (versus “articles”) will epitomize the notion of information as process, not product.

Will Google Wave revitalize PR?

On Social Media Today, public relations specialist Valerie Maltoni explores the likely impact of Google Wave on the discipline of public relations. Wave is a sharp reminder that public relations is about “the public”--not “the media,” as much of contemporary PR practice has assumed. A wave will merge content, discussion, and live, real-time, shared judgment... reflecting the basic insight that “the truth” is not a fixed thing, but is instead an emergent reality that the public co-creates.

media file 3.9.09 | The coming end of old media

The end of tangible media is clearly in sight

On his Micro Persuasions blog, marketing guru Steve Rubel predicts that by 2014, almost all forms of tangible media--including newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games--will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. For proof, Rubel asks, “When was the last time you bought a CD? Exactly.” With green-aware millennials set to become the dominant demographic in the US by 2010, Rubel says that the US is fast becoming a society that consumes media entirely in digital format--and the global media market is only one or two steps behind.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports for business and non-profit executives, media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious.

more media file links for March 9, 2009:

Old media isn’t completely deaf: The Guardian offers full-text RSS feeds

Mashable reports on The Guardian UK’s decision to make the full text of its articles available to users via RSS. While conventionally thought to be a bad business move that leaves advertising dollars on the table, with this gambit The Guardian is banking on the fact that the growing global audience of RSS users vastly prefers to get full vs. partial feeds in their browsers. “The Guardian instantly gains an advantage on every other newspaper in the world,” Mashable states.

Newspapers pursue a content sharing consortium

Editor & Publisher reports on discussions among Northeast-based metro and regional newspapers to share content with each other, sidestepping their contractual arrangements with the Associated Press. Beyond their frustration with the financial strictures imposed by the AP, publishers expressed that they were motivated by a desire to access higher quality content from non-competitive sources.

Blueprint for the Next Newsroom

On MediaShift Idea Lab, 2007 Knight News Challenge winner Chris O’Brien reports on the Next Newsroom project’s proposal to design and build the ideal newsroom of the future. The proposal calls for a fully integrated multimedia news environment built on the principles of community, innovation, collaboration, transparency, and embracing all platforms. The report includes a link to the proposal, which is available via a public wiki.

Nonprofit news web sites rise as successors to traditional newspapers

The New York Times reports on a new breed of online journalism sites that is striving to fill the void left by the decline of traditional print newspapers. Offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists, their news coverage and investigative reporting stand out in an online news landscape dominated by opinion, gossip, and citizen journalism posted by unpaid amateurs. And to make ends meet, financially they mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are organized as nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, donors, and audience contributions.

Murdoch to “cynics”: Newspapers will survive

On the Editor & Publisher site, media magnate Rupert Murdoch slams doomsayers who are predicting that the Internet will kill off newspapers. These “misguided cynics” fail to grasp that the online world is potentially a huge new market of information-hungry consumers, The Wall Street Journal owner says. Among these misguided cynics: journalists “who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity.” To capitalize on online opportunities, Murdoch said the WSJ was planning to offer three tiers of content online: free news; a subscriber-level service; and a third premium service of reader-customizable “high-end financial news and analysis.”

Africans and their mobiles, part 1: Numbers and usage patterns

In the first of a two-part series, ReadWriteWeb summarizes the key statistics that make Africa an intriguing forerunner of an emerging global, mobile, digital marketplace. Left behind in the broadband build-out that developing countries experienced in the last decade, Africa has jumped ahead to a high-speed mobile digital environment bereft of walled gardens, proprietary service packages, and contractual restrictions. One result: Africa is home to the largest mobile payment network in the world.

Africans and their mobiles, part 2: Using mobile phones for social good

In this second of a two-part series on mobile technology usage on the African continent, ReadWriteWeb reports on how financial scarcity has spawned a wave of digitally based social innovation. Because most mobile phone users on the continent choose fixed-cost, prepaid, month-to-month plans versus variable-cost, postpaid, long-term contracts, users pay close attention to minutes used. In response, mobile providers offer “Please Call Me” (PCM) service that permits mobile phone users to send free text messages to friends, inviting them to call back. In South Africa, 30 million PCM messages are sent every day, in a country with a total population of 47 million. Jumping on this trend, social service agencies are embracing PCM for health care, political mobilization, and other cause-related purposes.

media file 8.11.08: “Press release 2.0”—corporate disclosure meets the social web

SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs as Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill the Press Release?

On Techcrunch, social media expert Brian Solis discusses the SEC’s decision to permit public companies to disclose material financial information via corporate blogs versus the traditional press release, and forecasts that this will lead to the rise of the “social media release”: corporate news announcements that are enriched by external links, commenting, bookmarking, and other media sharing tools--social media innovations that could bring a new level of transparency to corporate disclosure.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on Delicious, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on Delicious. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for August 11, 2008:

Mary Robinson: Human rights are good for business

INSEAD Knowledge interviews former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson about the link between a corporation’s commitment to human rights and its success in the global marketplace.

An Interview with Peter Senge

Pegasus Communications’ Leverage Points reviews Peter Senge’s newest book, “The Necessary Revolution,” and discusses its key insight with the organizational learning expert: Collaborative networks of organizations, not governments or individuals acting separately, will be responsible for the emergence of a sustainable global economy.

A Closer Look at Business Education: Ethical Globalization

The Aspen Institute’s Caseplace.org presents a case study in how organizations are engaging in leadership development initiatives to ensure that their commitments to ethical globalization are reflected successfully in their mission, strategies, and practices.

IBM Creates Volunteer Teams to Cultivate Emerging Markets

The Wall Street Journal reports on the launch of the IBM Corporate Service Corps program, which places rising stars within the organization on four-week volunteer stints in businesses and nonprofits located in emerging markets such as Romania, Turkey, Ghana, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Tanzania. IBM is the first US-based corporation to combine international community service and team leadership development in one program.

The business of positive change

Abu Dhabi-based INSEAD Knowledge discusses the potential of social enterprise to change global dynamics. “Social entrepreneurs identify opportunities for social profit where others see only problems.”

Put Your Game Face On And Plant Some Trees With SGN

TechCrunch reports that social gaming company Social Gaming Network has teamed up with the Arbor Day Foundation on a Facebook game that that the two organizations will co-promote. SGN will donate a portion of game revenues to the foundation.

Microsoft proves there are just six degrees of separation between us

The Guardian reports on a study by Microsoft researchers showing, on a global scale, that individuals are separated from personal acquaintance with each other only by a handful of other individuals. Researchers analyzed over 30 billion Microsoft Messenger instant messages sent among 180 million people around the globe, confirming that the “six degrees” theory of social separation is roughly accurate.

media file 7.24.08: Long Tail turns against content creators

Should You Invest in the Long Tail?

In the Harvard Business Review, marketing researcher Anita Elberse tests Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory alongside "blockbuster" theories of consumer behavior, and finds little good news for producers of niche content.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 24, 2008:

Wagging the Long Tail of Love

In The Technium, Kevin Kelly reviews Seth Godin's critique of Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory. The bottom line: The long tail is really only of benefit to content aggregators, not creators.

Twinkle: Location Aware Twitter Client

ReadWriteWeb reviews Twinkle, one of the first in a new generation of "location-aware" mobile applications. Twinkle is a Twitter client for Apple's iPhone.

Facebook, MySpace Ignore Location On iPhone At Their Peril

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wonders why the world's two largest social networks released iPhone applications that failed to implement mobile social networking's "killer feature": location awareness. The probable cause: privacy and litigation concerns.

Twitter Buys Micro-Blogging Search Site Summize; Reportedly $15M Cash+Stock

paidContent reports that Twitter has purchased Summize, a search service for micro blogging sites. Twitter intends to integrate the services and their APIs under its brand, strengthening its position as a platform for distributing micro blog content.

Twitter Buys Summize For About $15M: Gets Search - And Maybe A Business Model

Silicon Valley Insider analyses Twitter's purchase of micro blogging search service Summize, and the advertising potential of the combination.

NPR Launches API That Serves Up 13 Years Of Content

TechCrunch reports that NPR became one of the first major media organizations in the US to open its content repository via an API, beating the New York Times, which announced it will release an API later this year.

How Can a Game Make You Go Green?

On MediaShift Idea Lab, the cofounders of The Beanstockd Project describe their strategy to encourage environmentally friendly consumer behavior via a game-based social network that matches players in the same geographic region in a quest to go green.

Do Consumers Care that Sun Chips are Solar Powered? Apparently

Brandweek talks with Frito-Lay's marketing VP about how Sun Chips' values driven product development and marketing strategy has paid off in sales growth for the brand.

media file 7.8.08: At WSJ, content pays

WSJ.com Enjoying Significant Bump in Traffic...With Subs Intact

Mediaweek reports that the Wall Street Journal has virtually doubled its web site traffic in the last year, through a strategy of offering more individual articles for free while maintaining its paid content wall.

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media file is a repository of links to articles and research reports that shed light on the intersection between open media and global tribes, two phenomena that together are giving birth to a new kind of business: "social enterprise 2.0."

Hosted on del.icio.us, this repository is meant to be a resource for media professionals, marketers, and others interested in the impact of open media and social networks on global communications and business culture. You can search the media file database from this blog or directly on del.icio.us. We publish media file links as we discover them.

Please suggest links to include in the database, and please also send your comments on how to make this resource more useful for you.

more media file links for July 8, 2008:

What's Next For The NYTimes Online? Widgets, iPhone Apps, APIs, And More

Silicon Alley Insider reports on a discussion with The New York Times' chief technology officer about upcoming online tools and applications being developed by the company. The Times is spending roughly $10 million per year on web development talent.

CBS News Becomes Widget Factory

The New York Observer reports on a CBS digital initiative to create a viral advertising network via a set of widgets that bloggers can install on their sites. Blogs get a cut of revenue from ads served through the widgets.

A First Look Inside Peer39 & Its Semantic Advertising Technology

TechCrunch reports on "semantic advertising" network Peer39, which matches ads with appropriate user-generated content, addressing advertiser concerns about this medium and producing response rates up to four times better than previous targeting methods.

Mashery Raises $2 Million More For Web APIs

paidContent reports on the funding success of Mashery, a tools provider that assists firms to build APIs that allow them to open their content to third-party developers. Customers include Reuters.

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching

Businessweek reports on how media firms are using content recognition systems to monitor distribution of their work on the net. While most companies are using it to challenge copyright violators, others are using it to identify promising new distribution channels.

New-Media Focus Splits Associated Press Members

The Wall Street Journal reports on friction between the AP and its member newspaper organizations, which own the cooperative but account for only 27% of its revenues. The AP has tripled revenues in the last 20 years due mainly to Internet portals.

The “Crisis” in Venture Capital

TechCrunch says that things have not been this bad since 1978, the last time there was a quarter with no VC-backed IPOs. Sarbanes-Oxley is cited as a primary contributing factor by almost 60 percent of VCs surveyed.