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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 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 9.28.09 | Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

Collaboration 2.0: A new paradigm for sustainability

On the Harvard Business site, global outsourcing executive Vineet Nayar says that smart companies everywhere are recognizing the need to reinvent and realign their relationships with stakeholders along democratic lines, creating in the process a new ethic of shared vision, risk, and reward that will render obsolete traditional attitudes about competition. Nayar labels this new paradigm “collaboration 2.0.”

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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 September 28, 2009:

Four rules for constructive competition

Observing the current political scramble to avoid real innovation in health care, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque offers four rules he thinks will increasingly define the competitive environment of the 21st century. These include: Innovation over protectionism; “thick value” over “thin value”; awesome products and services over clever business models; and ethics over expedience as the foundation for strategy. Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog on the Harvard Business site.

Introducing “web squared”

On the Forbes site, web 2.0 promoter Tim O’Reilly reaches into the future and names it “web squared”: a just-dawning era in which the building blocks of web 2.0--open platforms and social networks--are married to new technologies that provide a sense of place and belonging to users currently overwhelmed by the Internet’s undifferentiated abundance. Among these new advancements: GPS, which turns every smart phone into a place-based directory of friends and potential experiences; and the “smart grid,” which makes it possible to update one’s current and emerging interests in real time. The combination of these advancements, plus others, will geometrically increase the importance of digital technology in our daily pursuit of a fulfilling life.

Inside P&G’s new values-based strategy

On the Harvard Business site, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter tears the wrapper off a new strategy that consumer giant Procter & Gamble has introduced to jump-start global growth. Taking a cue from the socially responsible business movement, P&G has adopted a “purpose-inspired growth strategy” with the goal of “touching and improving more consumers’ lives in more parts of the world... more completely.” As company insiders see it, the new strategy is not a departure from previous practice but an advancement of it, reflecting P&G’s 171-year effort to deliver superior customer value. What has changed? The company’s definition of “value.”

Change your mind, and the rest will follow

On Seth Godin’s blog, the marketing guru describes what comes first. Is it great execution, as so many business authorities have declaimed? No. It’s proper attitude, without which tactics and execution mean nothing. After attitude come approach, goals, and strategy. Then tactics and execution. Get the order of values right; you can make a lot of mistakes along the way and still come out smelling sweet. Start from the bottom of the hierarchy, and sooner or later your work will stink.

Emerging markets will surge post-crisis

Emerging markets will emerge from the global economic crisis in a position to put huge growth numbers on the board, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. While developed economies will still be recovering from the drop in global equities to almost 50 percent of their 2008 value, and the reduction in cross-border capital flows by almost 80 percent during the same period, emerging economies will have largely avoided the root causes of these problems, and as a result will be well positioned to gain share as markets rebound.

What both sides are missing in the pay wall debate

On MediaShift Idea Lab, Knight News Challenge winner Martin Moore pokes holes in the ideological barriers erected by both sides in the increasingly divisive “pay wall” debate. On one side, corporate media executives want to turn back the clock to a time when media profitability was driven by scarcity and control; on the other side, technologists, media activists, bloggers, and others seek to position information abundance as an emergent human right. Entrenched in their positions, neither side seems capable of recognizing the opportunities that exist to add value to both the customer experience and the public good by extending the findability and usefulness of content through enhanced metadata, mashups, and other readily deployable techniques.

More proof that the Long Tail exists... only in Chris Anderson’s mind

Knowledge@Wharton gives yet another drubbing to Wired editor Chris Anderson’s much trumpeted, but still completely unproven, Long Tail theory. For a $1 million prize offered by online movie distributor Netflix, Wharton researchers analyzed whether or not Netflix sales data--which Anderson used to justify the theory in his 2004 book--could actually support the claim that the virtually unlimited choice made possible via digital commerce would lead consumers to select niche products in greater numbers than they do in the offline world. Not true for Netflix, said the Wharton wonks. Instead, the Pareto Principle--aka, the 80/20 rule--applied with a vengeance to the Netflix data. The problem with Anderson’s theory, said the researchers, is that products get into the Long Tail for good reasons... nobody’s ever heard of them, and nobody cares. Recommendation engines can only reflect tastes, not fundamentally change them.

media file 7.1.09 | Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

Twitter’s rules for radical innovation

On the Harvard Business site, Havas Media Lab’s Umair Haque describes ten operating principles that make digital phenom Twitter one of the most radical management innovators of 21st century so far. Among these rules: Ideals beat strategies; open beats closed; connection beats transaction; public beats private; and good beats evil.

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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 1, 2009:

Nine tips for jumpstarting innovation

When companies go on the hunt for innovations to drive growth, they often waste time scouring the last place they are likely to find it: their own back yards. Rather than try to dredge up new ideas from the heart of the enterprise, look to its periphery, say researchers John Bessant, Kathrin Moslein, and Bettina von Stamm in this Wall Street Journal report. Among the techniques that organizations can use to spot the future before it emerges: Scenario building; open innovation; tapping expert users; “deep dive” consumer research; creating online learning communities; and more.

Innovation: It takes a village

For organizations struggling to survive, let alone advance, Knowledge@Wharton has some advice: Build an “innovation network.” By tapping the expertise and resources of outside R&D partners, Proctor & Gamble improved its innovation productivity by 60 percent, resulting in over $10 billion in revenues from 400 collaboratively developed new products. Performance like this requires organizations to build new internal capacity to cultivate and manage productive external relationships, while simultaneously strengthening their internal R&D capacity to evaluate and incorporate potentially promising innovations.

AOL: The future of digital content?!!!

You heard it here first: AOL represents the future of successful, sustainable digital content publishing, says Silicon Alley Insider. AOL’s coming divorce from Time Warner will free it to do what it does best: Build flashy, inexpensive content sites around special-interest topics, then plug them into AOL’s online traffic fire hose. It’s a model that represents the digital version of yesterday’s magazine launch--only much cheaper, easier to tweak, and less troubling to kill if things don’t quickly work out. AOL has more than 300 staff members producing such sites and contracts with about the same number of freelancers. In the past six months, the company has hired more than 50 journalists from places such as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and USA Today.

Sorry, there’s no way to save the TV business

On Advertising Age, Internet analyst Henry Blodget explains the coming demise of the TV business--broadcast, network, cable, and satellite--with brutal simplicity. TV execs are reliving the same delusion that newspaper execs held onto through most of the last decade, when revenues were holding up despite dire predictions to the contrary. And the same phenomenon that ultimately doomed the newspaper business is about to visit the TV business: the complete breakdown of every distribution barrier protecting historical margins and profits, and a surge in abundant, accessible, free TV across the global Internet.

It ain’t free--it’s a steal

Trendspotter Malcolm Gladwell takes Wired’s Chris Anderson to task in this New Yorker review of the latter’s book, Free. While Anderson asserts that digital technology inexorably drives all products “made of ideas” to a zero price point, Gladwell comes to a different conclusion: “Information wants to be free” is a useful meme for content distribution powerhouses like Google and Amazon, but it is neither an inevitable outcome nor one supported by trends in industries other than media that are being transformed by digital technology. Case in point: the drug industry, which is using digital technology to produce ever-more specific compounds for increasingly targeted markets, at ever higher price points. Meanwhile, YouTube--the avatar of Free--spends over $260 million annually to license commercial content, essentially to make a market that otherwise does not exist with its free, user-generated fare. In other words, the problem with Free is that consumers know exactly how to value it.

Why media brands stumble globally

Advertising Age explores the reasons why globalization has not yet swept the media market to the same degree as in other digital industries--computers or cell phones, for example. While consumer product firms have a natural disposition toward building consistent brand identities over time while simultaneously tweaking products and pitches to specific markets, media companies either give too little attention to branding (relying instead on a hits-driven marketing strategy) or bring a bias or agenda that doesn’t travel well across borders. To be successful globally, media brands need to develop a broad, international appeal that comes from focusing on shared human and social values; and combine that appeal with content fine-tuned to specific audiences. Among those doing it well: Bloomberg, CNN, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

It’s time for a “slow marketing” movement

Think “slow food”: ingredients grown organically and prepared with old-fashioned love, attention, and technique, resulting in undeniably superior appeal, taste, and value. Now think “slow marketing”: brand building that puts the customer first, strives for credibility, and sustains long-term relationships. It’s not a throwback to a time gone by; it’s an approach demanded for success in the digital markets of the future. So writes Nielsen’s Peter Blackshaw in this column for Advertising Age.

media file 6.22.09 | Why nonprofits rule social media

Why nonprofits rule social media

In this Conversation Starter on the Harvard Business site, social media consultant Alexandra Samuel argues that the notable success of nonprofit organizations like Kiva in implementing social media strategies is a natural outgrowth of what the sector does best: build deep and explicitly accountable relationships with stakeholders. Businesses can experience similar success by adopting some nonprofit best practices, including: (1) avoid gimmicks, and instead speak to stakeholders’ core concerns; (2) give clients a high degree of decision-making freedom and control; (3) offer a mix of tangible and social benefits; (4) embrace the stakeholder community’s emergent social values; and (5) innovate within the boundaries of one’s core mission.

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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 22, 2009:

Why social media gimmicks don’t work

A short, sharp reality smackdown from social media guru Andy Sernovitz: Whatever get-rich scheme you are cooking up, forget it. Instead of trying to trick or bribe people into engaging with your product or service, just build a better product and customer experience... and love will follow.

Kiva: When nonprofit is the best business model

Stanford Social Innovation Review profiles Kiva, the groundbreaking peer-to-peer microfinance exchange, to learn how it became one of the fastest growing nonprofits in history. Surprisingly, a great part of its success has to do with its nonprofit status itself: By adopting a business model that maximizes social value and leaves profit on the table, Kiva has managed to attract a range of support services that have lowered its cost of doing business and allowed it to scale rapidly. Likewise, it has dodged the legal and regulatory challenges that would have accompanied any attempt to organize as a for-profit lender. And finally, it has been able to establish a steady, growing stream of capital from a virtual community that supports it precisely because it operates purely from a socially constructive agenda.

Maximizing the (non) profit motive

BusinessWeek covers the emergence of new corporate legal structures designed to make it easier for organizations to blend for-profit business models with socially constructive aims. While the law typically holds that a corporation’s primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value, these new structures make it possible for a for-profit organization to incorporate a social-purpose agenda directly into its charter, and to behave in other ways that are more common to non-profits--raising money in the form of grants and charitable loans, for example. Likewise, they give non-profits new tools to raise capital and engage in for-profit activities, without having to construct elaborate workarounds.

Crowdsourcing: What it means for innovation

In BusinessWeek, innovation guru John Winsor explores the future of “crowdsourcing”--the practice of engaging individuals outside the traditional supply chain in the process of product and business system innovation. While some analysts fear that crowdsourcing will spell the end of the corporate design firm, and others worry that it will drive down the perceived value of new products and services, still others believe that customer participation and mass collaboration will usher in a new era in which customers become deeply invested in the success of the crowdsourced innovation and the enterprise that stands behind it.

Not all collaborations are created equal

On The Big Shift blog on the Harvard Business site, authors and management consultants John Hegel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison discuss “scalable collaboration”: a form of collaboration that moves beyond feel-good progressivity to a style of organizational behavior that delivers increasing returns over time. Three key traits distinguish collaborative styles that are scalable from those that are not: (1) They produce new knowledge and relationships versus specific solutions and results; (2) they are loosely organized in ways that easily admit new participants; and (3) they are designed to advance the group’s future capacity versus simply to leverage its existing strengths.

Got the old-media blues? There’s an app for that

Advertising Age reports on a new initiative by traditional print media firm Rodale to make digital content pay, via an iPhone app for its Men’s Health magazine brand. Users pay $1.99 for the app, which provides basic workout set instructions along with a system for tracking individual progress. Directly within the app, users can then buy additional workout sets to supplement the base set. This strategy opens up a source of revenue--paid subscriptions--that publishers have historically relied upon but has been hard to come by on the largely free Internet. The in-app purchase option is a feature of the new OS 3 for the iPhone.

media file 8.18.08: Don’t blame Google—newspaper wounds are self-inflicted

The Newspaper Doomsayers Still Can Be Proved Wrong

Advertising Age’s Jonah Bloom questions the widespread assumption that the decline of US newspapers is an inevitable by-product of the rise of the Internet. More people are reading newspaper content than ever before; newspapers around the world are thriving; and online newspaper challengers like The Huffington Post and Politico are putting up big audience and revenue numbers. The core problem is that newspaper execs are still timid and unimaginative when it comes to digital transition, and as a result still have the bulk of their resources tied up in non-performing assets: staff and equipment that don’t directly contribute to creating great content, which is what it takes to be a hit on the Net.

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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 18, 2008:

Is Google a Media Company?

Hello? It took Wikipedia knockoff Knol to do it, but finally some of the media industry’s brightest minds are waking up to the fact that Google is a competitor, says The New York Times.

US Online Ad Revenue To Grow 20 Percent in 2008

MediaPost reports on a forecast from Bernstein Research predicting 2008 online advertising revenue growth of 20 percent in the US and 22 percent internationally. Despite US recession fears, the forecaster says that 2009 US online ad revenue will grow between 17 and 20 percent. Growth is being led by the financial services sector.

Facebook: No. 1 Globally

BusinessWeek examines the rise of the global social networking leader, Facebook. Nearly 63 percent of Facebook’s 132 million users reside outside of the US. The site has been translated into almost 90 languages.

Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social Network, It is Also The Fastest Growing

TechCrunch analyzes June 2008 comScore numbers showing that Facebook is now not only the largest global online social network, with 132 million unique users, but also the fastest growing, with 153 percent annual growth overall, and an astounding 1055 percent growth in Latin America. Growth is being driven by Facebook’s strategy of translating its global site into multiple languages.

For ad agencies, the Asian prize is India

The International Herald Tribune tags India as the place to be if you are into the media and entertainment businesses. According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, growth in media spending, including advertising, is expected to reach 19 percent per year through 2012.

ReelChanges Aims to “Audience-Fund” Documentaries

On MediaShift Idea Lab, media strategist JD Lasica discusses the launch of ReelChanges, a nonprofit media venture created to fund independent documentary film productions through individual donations solicited via the organization’s web site.

The 3 Loops of Designing for Audience

On his dsp blog, entrepreneur and analyst Gregor Hochmuth explores the dynamic that is driving the stickiness of “lifestreaming” sites like Twitter and Friendfeed: their closed-loop design that creates a sense of being seen and heard--what Hochmuth calls “a sense of audience”--among those who post and consume content on these services.

Blogging Is Not A Crime

Or is it? Bloggers are getting tossed in the pokey at levels that are that are still the envy of more conventional evil doers. According to TechCrunch, 35 bloggers were confined in 2007, primarily in countries such as Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

media file 8.13.08: Don’t calculate; innovate!

None of Your Business Model

On MediaShift Idea Lab, MIT Media Lab researcher Christopher Csikszentmihalyi posits that the current rush to find a business model to support professional journalism may be missing the point. The most disruptive trend in the recent history of information technology--the free software movement--succeeded largely in the absence of anything resembling a conventional business model. Instead, it began by reformulating the basic notion of how software development is done, and the business models that subsequently emerged inherited the transformative efficiencies that came with free software’s movement-based approach. Media could evolve in much the same way.

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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 13, 2008:

The innovation imperative

KMWorld interviews innovation guru John Kao on the moral imperative to introduce the concept of innovation to all aspects of the US economy. Why? A focus on innovation puts all stakeholders on an equal footing--and thereby advances a more just, equitable, competitive, and prosperous society.

Managing Corporate Social Networks

Here’s the news you don’t want to hear, courtesy of Harvard Business Review: When left unmanaged, corporate social networks inhibit innovation, rather than enable it. Company executives shouldn’t expect informal, interdivisional networks to spontaneously produce innovations; they must consciously manage the structure of these networks to promote innovation at all its various stages.

Japan’s super-advanced mobile web: Too unique to serve as a global blueprint?

Why has the mobile web taken off like wildfire in Japan, while in the US it’s still mostly found in Powerpoint presentations? Techcrunch identifies the key conditions that have resulted in 70 percent penetration in that market: Superior mobile web technology; great content; and a tech-savvy, demanding consumer base.

CondeNet Positions to Better Compete With Ad Networks

Feeling the hot breath of niche advertising networks like Glam Media close behind it, Conde Nast is unifying its CondeNet web holdings under a set of content-specific buys, according to Advertising Age.

Censorship: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google Agree on Code of Conduct

In the aftermath of civil liberties scandals that have tarnished their reputations in the global marketplace, ReadWriteWeb reports that the world’s three largest Internet content providers have agreed on a global code of conduct that focuses on three core components: adherence to the principles of freedom of expression and privacy; a set of common implementation guidelines; and a shared governance and accountability framework.

Green business: Scandinavia’s lateral thinkers

The Guardian dissects Sweden’s knockout success in creating a green economy with a double-digit growth rate. The keys: a consensus society that includes all stakeholders; and a commitment to profit.

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 8.6.08: CNET founder adopts open media strategy for new content venture

Questions for Shelby Bonnie

ClickZ interviews CNET founder and former CEO Shelby Bonnie about Whisky Media, his new online media company that specializes in vertical content sites targeting young males. Whiskey Media uses open-source wiki software that allows small development teams to build community sites that can scale rapidly in size and reach by providing a structured framework for managing user-submitted 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 August 6, 2008:

P&G Changes Its Game

BusinessWeek reports on what it calls “one of the most intriguing change management efforts going on in Corporate America today”: The introduction of “design thinking” into Proctor & Gamble’s business strategy. Design thinking involves applying design principles to business problems, developing several creative approaches to a problem and testing and refining these approaches with stakeholders’ feedback.

It’s Time for a Revenue Revolution

MediaShift Idea Lab’s Dan Pacheco proposes that local newspapers look beyond advertising--which typically attracts less than half of a community’s businesses--to “business marketing,” which all businesses need and online media are well suited to deliver.

Helping the Almost-Journalists Do Journalism

The Center for Citizen Media’s Dan Gillmor discusses the renaissance of so-called “advocacy journalism”: journalism-quality reporting, done by non-profit advocacy groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, which is showing potential to fill the information gap created by the implosion of traditional journalism.

NAA: Newspaper Sites’ Q2 Traffic Up 12.2 Percent Over 2007; Numbers Are Flat Compared To Q1

paidContent reports on Q2 2008 newspaper web site audience statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper sites now reach more than 40 percent of all Internet users, but growth has cooled off in reach, page views, and advertising, a trend that is complicating efforts to transition online.

Newspapers Think Locally for Online Ads

The Wall Street Journal reports that newspapers’ struggles to replace declining print advertising revenue with online ads is being thwarted by competition from Google, Craigslist, and other pure Internet plays. Newspapers saw their share of the online market decline to 27 percent from 36 percent in 2006.

Craigslist CEO: Our Real Estate Listings Are Booming

Silicon Alley Insider talks with Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster about the state of the business. Top line: Worldwide, Craigslist now draws 50 million users and 12 billion page views per month; 2008 is the first year where compound annual growth has not exceeded 100 percent.

EBay Launches Dedicated International Ad Division

ClickZ reports that EBay has launched a London-based group to manage multinational advertising campaigns across the company’s international portfolio of sites, with a combined global reach of 80 million users.

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who’s Doing It?

ReadWriteWeb discusses “brandstreaming,” a new marketing methodology that takes advantage of so-called “lifestreaming” applications such as Friendfeed and Twitter to deliver what it calls “a consistent flow of content created by a brand.”

media file 7.29.08: NYT adopts open media strategy en route to global market

Leading in Turbulent Times

Advertising Age reports on how the New York Times web site is re-inventing itself as a web 2.0, open-media news environment, as part of a strategy to compete on a global scale with the Wall Street Journal and other leading news brands.

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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 29, 2008:

Announcing the Open Web Foundation

The Open Web Foundation announces its launch as an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

MySpace Aims to Win Developers' Hearts With OpenID and User Data Caching

ReadWriteWeb reports that social network MySpace has announced it will adopt the OpenID identity management platform, allowing sites that support the standard to tap users' MySpace profile data.

Women-focused media site Glam launches developer network

VentureBeat reports that Glam Media has launched a program to distribute open-source widgets that carry content and advertising from the Glam network.

Beyond the API: Why Companies Should Have a Presence on All Major Platforms

ReadWriteWeb discusses the trend among Internet firms to publish APIs that allow third-party developers to extend their services onto new platforms, and notes that this is no substitute for proprietary extensions that preserve a uniform brand experience.

The Changing Newsroom

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has issued a report on US newspapers. Despite the fact that more people than ever are reading content produced by newspapers, revenues are in a free fall, and professionals are unsure of what the future holds.

Why Newspapers Shouldn't Allow Comments

The blog Gawker says that online newspapers should face up to the fact that most user-generated content detracts from their core value. They should stick to what they do best--producing news for the blogosphere, among others, to consume.

Reforming a Mean World: Hero Reports

MediaShift Idea Lab profiles Hero Reports, a civic media project by an MIT Media Lab student that combines user-submitted reports of "everyday heroicism" with mapping tools that depict where in a city good acts are occurring.

Google Buys Russian Contextual Ad Firm From Rambler For $140 Million

paidContent reports that Google announced the purchase of Russian online advertising network Begun from parent company Rambler Media, owner of the Rambler.ru portal. Separately, they announced a search and ad deal between Google and the Rambler site.