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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 2.1.10 | How Ford got social marketing right

How Ford got social marketing right

Marketing guru Grant McCracken drills into Ford Motor’s successful “Fiesta Movement” social marketing campaign to identify the strategic elements that made it click. To jumpstart its efforts to break back into the subcompact market--a space it abandoned in 1997--Ford gave 100 consumers each a Fiesta and asked them to complete a different “mission” every month, and document it in digital media. The campaign produced 6.5 million YouTube views, 50,000 requests for information, and 10,000 sales in its first six days. The secrets: (1) Ford selected “culturally creative” consumers--digital sophisticates with something to say and a track record for saying it well on the social web; (2) it offered a very attractive “fair trade”--a free car in exchange for content; and (3) it asked participants to document experiences where the car was used to advance a social cause or lifelong aspiration, thereby connecting the brand to deep, personal and social values. The Harvard Business site 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 1 February, 2010:

Cars--the next digital platform

Advertising Age blogger Craig Daitch reports on the most compelling spectacle from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show--the sharp elbows flashed by in-vehicle electronics product and service providers attempting to break into the digital media space. Leading the way: Ford Motors’ game-changer, Ford Sync, which the company credits as a major factor in its recent sales uptick.

Bored with your TV? There’s an app for that

The Wall Street Journal reports on the emergence of iPhone-like digital app marketplaces on cable and satellite TV services. Although experimental set-top services like Microsoft’s WebTV failed horribly in the 1990s, thanks to big improvements in the underlying technology, today’s consumers are snapping up digital media service packages that combine phone, Internet, and TV; and a wide array of hardware and software providers are integrating them into next-generation platforms that permit users to wander far beyond TV’s traditional walled gardens. The future portends an explosion of TV-based, free and paid set-top applications that rival anything happening on desktops or mobile phones.

Let your customers sell themselves on you

On the Harvard Business site, MIT research fellow and author Michael Schrage discusses the power of prototyping to advance the adoption of new ideas. Whereas most innovation-driven firms rely on demos, simulations and other kinds of marketing to elicit a “gee-whiz” reaction from customers to their inventions, others put a prototype of the actual product in the customer’s hands, and give them a chance to sell themselves on its merits. The Apple App Store is great example of this kind of prototype-based approach--customers get to play, risk-free, with thousands of different apps; they provide valuable feedback to their developers; and upgrade to the paid version when the value proposition is right. This “sell yourself” sensibility can easily transcend the digital market, finding a home in retail, consumer and professional services, and any other market where playful exploration can speed the adoption of an innovation.

Is your brand a beacon or a spotlight?

Euro RSCG strategic planner Rose Cameron asks this question on the Advertising Age site: Are you shining a spotlight on consumers’ current preoccupations and concerns, or are you projecting a beacon that leads them where they want to go? The difference is huge. Beacon brands take consumers into an emerging future that they desire to embrace. Given a choice, more than 3/4ths of consumers will choose beacon brands over spotlight brands, according to a study conducted by Euro RSCG for the Atlantic Monthly.

Motivation 3.0: Finding satisfaction in a digital age

Advertising Age interviews “A Whole New Mind” author Daniel Pink about his new work, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” It’s not external rewards and punishments--that is, money, promotions, or the fear of losing those things--that drive today’s key business leaders and employees, but instead the desire to learn, create, and improve our world... what Pink calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

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.

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< richmedium > | social innovation in the global marketplace explores the business, cultural, and technological forces that are reshaping the process of creating value in global markets, and giving rise to a new strategic framework for designing and scaling media and marketing organizations, nonprofits, and social enterprises.

media file 3.16.09 | In downturn, consumers choose green

Despite economic crisis, consumers value brands’ commitment to social purpose

Marketing communications firm Edelman announces the results of its second annual global study measuring consumer attitudes toward companies and brands that engage in social purpose marketing. According to the study, 68 percent of consumers stated they would remain loyal to a brand during a recession if it supports a good cause. Forty-two percent said that if two products are of the same quality and price, commitment to a social purpose trumps factors like design, innovation, and brand loyalty when choosing one brand over the other. Fifty-two percent stated they would be more likely to recommend a brand that supports a good cause over one that does not, and 54 percent said they would help a brand promote a product if there were a good cause behind it.

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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 16, 2009:

Social innovators can lead through economic crisis

On INSEAD Knowledge: While the international community galvanizes around the financial crisis at the expense of other pressing global concerns, socially innovative businesses have a unique opportunity to fill the gap via money-making enterprises and initiatives that advance the cause of human and environmental sustainability. Social innovators must make sure that the initiative is sustainable and will stand the test of time, even in the face of great economic upheaval, or risk taking a “trust hit” that could undermine its downstream chances for success.

Governing Facebook in an open and transparent way

On The Facebook Blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg announces the publication of two documents intended to shift the social networking site’s relationship with its users: “Facebook Principles,” an open policy framework that the company says will guide its business practices and decision-making; and “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” which will replace the site’s existing Terms of Use. Writes Zuckerberg: “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.”

Reinventing your business model

While fundamental business model innovations fueled the breakout success of Apple’s iPod and led to the market dominance of retail giants Wal-Mart and Target, less than ten percent of innovation investment at global companies is focused on developing new business models. Why? According to innovation specialist Mark Johnson on the Harvard Business site, the reason is that few organizations fully understand their current business model to begin with--the premise behind its development, its natural interdependencies, and its strengths and limitations. So they don’t know when they can leverage their core business and when success requires a new business model.

Assessing innovation metrics

While two-thirds of top executives consider innovation to be one of their top three strategic priorities, few take steps to effectively measure the impact of the overall innovation process on their organization’s value, according to a recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. Instead, executives focus on relatively simple output metrics, such as increases in revenue, rather than potentially more instructive indicators, such as ROI or net present value of the innovation portfolio.

The music business isn’t dying; the old business model is

TechCrunch covers a talk by Topspin Media CEO Ian Rogers on the future of the music industry. The old hits-driven business model is giving way to a new model that will permit a broad middle class of artists to support themselves by using the web to promote their music, shows, and merchandise. As an example, Rogers cites David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” which was distributed digitally by the artists and in less than two months earned the equivalent of a traditional music label advance.

Hey, magazines: Are you in or are you out?

Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco ponders the magazine industry’s seeming paralysis in the face of digital transition, and asks: Do its leaders have the guts to radically reinvent their business models, or have they given up on publishing, if its future doesn’t include the same high-flying revenues and salaries that defined its recent past?

Foundation starts health policy news service

The New York Times reports on the Kaiser Family Foundation’s launch of a new online health news service, designed to fill a gap in serious health policy news coverage left by the decline of mainstream news organizations. The launch underscores the emergence of so-called “advocacy journalism”: serious, professional journalistic efforts undertaken--mostly online--by nonprofit cause advocacy groups.

media file 1.5.09 | Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

Design thinking: A new strategic paradigm

To its proponents, it’s a new paradigm for product development and strategic marketing. To its detractors, it’s a pair of empty buzzwords. Either way, it’s called “design thinking”--a mashup of the strategic marketing and design disciplines that is being credited with bringing great new consumer products and services to market in record time, with startling success rates. Brandweek explores the phenomenon and asks: If designers are such great strategic thinkers, then why did it take them so long to land a punch on the marketing establishment?

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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 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 January 5, 2009:

The coming creativity boom

From the ashes of the financial crisis, what is likely to emerge? A new and sudden boom of entrepreneurial creativity and invention, writes Forbes author and futurist George Gilder, based on four intersecting technological developments: cloud computing, advanced graphics processing, nanotechnology, and green building materials. The rapid advancements that these breakthrough technologies will make in the near future will dwarf any losses incurred in the current market collapse--demonstrating that creativity is the ultimate source of freedom and power, the author asserts.

Using design to crack society’s problems

Fast Company profiles Participle, a London-based agency that specializes in applying design solutions to intractable social problems. One example: redesigning healthcare delivery for chronic disease sufferers, shifting the focus away from hospital-based care to community-based solutions. Another example: repackaging support services for seniors in collaboration with Britain’s Sky TV. According to the article, Participle represents a new wave of design firms that believe that many of the institutions and systems set up in the 20th century are failing, and that design can help to build new ones better suited to the demands of 21st century.

Agile programming: A good model for media innovation?

Can journalists learn something about creativity and innovation from the software community? MediaShift Idea Lab blogger Rich Gordon chronicles his experience mashing top-tier journalism and computer science students together to create next-generation media development teams. From the start, the computer science students set the tone and pace for the collaboration by introducing cutting-edge “agile programming” methodologies to the journalistic creative process. The experiment offers a potential role model for building successful media projects in the interactive age.

Obama’s seven lessons for radical innovators

As Barack Obama prepares to take the reins of the presidency, Havas Media Lab Director Umair Haque reflects on what got him there: a radically innovative approach to organizational management that caught all his competitors flat-footed. Writing on his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site, Haque lists seven qualities of the new kind of organization that such management innovation produced: self-organizing design; resilience in the face of threats; minimal attention to gamesmanship; maximum attention to authentic purpose; a unifying approach to the market; “thick power”--the power to inspire and lead; and an embrace of the world-changing power of ideals. In the business world, only a small handful of companies have yet to adopt anything quite like this kind of radically innovative management approach--Google, among these few--but its seven features represent the starting point for anyone wishing to build an institution suited for the 21st century.

Unintended consequences: Ten years under the DMCA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a review of its negative impact on free speech, scientific research, innovation, competition, privacy, and commerce. Did anything go right? Not really, the report concludes in exhaustive detail.

Evidence of a global super organism

Is Google an avatar of a global, super-intelligent organism that transcends anything we have seen or imagined on this earth? According to Kevin Kelly on The Technium, that’s exactly right. A planetary-wide super organism is emerging from the sum of the world’s digital infrastructure, with its own life, mind, intelligence, and consciousness. How far away are we from its birth? “Closer than you think,” Kelly writes.

media file 12.22.08 | Cause marketing’s black bottom line

Cause marketing can ignite sales, study shows

Communications agency Cone LLC and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business announce the results of a joint consumer behavior study demonstrating that cause-related marketing can boost sales by as much as 74 percent. According to the study, 83 percent of consumers stated that personal relevance is key in supporting a company’s cause-marketing efforts, and 84 percent said that they wanted the opportunity to choose which cause to support.

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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 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 December 22, 2008:

MAC Cosmetics: Tying the cause to the brand

Knowledge@Wharton profiles MAC Cosmetics and its Viva Glam brand, 100 percent of whose sales are donated to global AIDS causes. Since the fund’s inception in 1994, the company has given more than $128 million to various AIDS-related projects. The company attributes its 80 percent employee retention rate to the fund, in a sector where the average retention rate is 30 percent.

Google releases details on Android app revenue model

When Google starts selling Android mobile phone applications next year, what percentage of revenues will it keep for itself? (Hint: Apple keeps 30 percent from the iPhone App Store.) The answer: nothing. Developers will get to keep 70 percent of the take, while the rest will go to carriers. Writes mocoNews: “Over and over, people have pondered what a carrier’s incentive will be to adopt the Android platform. Well, folks, here’s your answer.” Google will earn revenue via advertising.

Why platforms are letting us down... and what they should do about it

ReadWriteWeb analyzes the apparent meltdown of Facebook’s application platform and stall-out of Google’s OpenSocial, and compares them to the raging success of Apple’s iPhone App Store. The key difference between Apple and the also-rans? Apple wired monetization into its platform from the start.

New York Times API goes live: Here’s why it matters

ReadWriteWeb reports on the launch of the New York Times’ application programming interface, a move that permits third-party developers to access the newspaper company’s data for use in new applications, interfaces, and mashups. Big media concerns will need to take similar steps in order to maintain their positions in the emerging digital media market, the report states.

Pearson ups its stake in South African publishing firm

Reuters reports that British publishing firm Pearson Plc has increased its holdings in South Africa’s Maskew Miller Longman from 50 percent to 85 percent, as part of a strategy to secure the pole position in educational publishing on the continent.

Sherman’s Travel: The website that launched a magazine

A red-hot travel site successfully spins off a bimonthly magazine. What does that say about the future of publishing? Advertising Age’s MediaWorks reports.

Why comic books are still alive and kicking

Fortune spies a bright spot in an otherwise dismal old-media landscape: comic books. In the last three years, Marvel Entertainment, the industry’s biggest player, has posted double-digit revenue increases while holding margins at about 40 percent. The key to this enviable performance: Most comic books are still distributed via specialty retail stores, and that constrained supply has helped to perpetuate the image of comic books and graphic novels as a cult phenomenon.