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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 9.2.08: Defining “social enterprise 2.0”

Enterprise 2.0: The Nature of the Firm

ReadWriteWeb says that the social web is destined to fundamentally restructure the way business is done--with consequences deep and wide for any for-profit or non-profit enterprise. A next generation of enterprises has emerged that is focusing on two main objectives: how to organize global scarcity into new, socially responsible markets; and how to organize business innovations into accessible solutions to today’s global social problems.

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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 September 2, 2008:

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise: McKinsey Global Survey Results

The McKinsey Quarterly reports on its second annual executive survey on the use of web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. While only 21 percent of executives polled were satisfied with their web 2.0 investments, respondents who did report high satisfaction stated that their organizations were leveraging these investments to change management practices, flatten organizational structures, involve customers in product development, and tap the external expertise of suppliers and partners.

Investor Advocates Creating Issue-Specific Networks

In a quest for greater effectiveness, the corporate social responsibility movement is starting to adopt the tools and strategies of the social web, says CSRwire. Investors, activists, trade associations, and NGOs are banding together into issue-specific social networks that share research, strategies, and best practices openly with each other and invite comment from all stakeholders. This “Open SRI” model is expected to lead to new online advocacy resources involving mashups of previously proprietary data sets.

Google ally T-Mobile looks poised to compete with Apple’s App Store

VentureBeat says that cellular phone carrier T-Mobile is adopting an open software model for its next generation mobile web phones. According to the post, this move will spur a new wave of VC investment in the mobile social web.

Cut your legal fees using Y Combinator’s funding documents

Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator has adopted an “open source” strategy of placing its library of standard deal documents into the public domain, writes VentureBeat. The firm believes that this step will increase the number of fundable startups overall, and will attract the best startups to itself.

Uh-oh, Where Did Those Newspaper Web Ads Go?

Although newspaper sites are expected to post double-digit advertising growth overall in 2008, some major publishers are experiencing online revenue declines for the first time, a worrying trend for an industry that is in transition from print from web. What separates winners from losers? According to Advertising Age, the strongest organizations are furthest along in an building online advertiser base independent from print, whereas the weakest organizations still rely heavily on upselling print customers to the web.

Yet Another Cool Digital Newspaper Product: The Wall Street Journal, For Free, On Your BlackBerry

Silicon Alley Insider enthuses over the new Wall Street Journal Mobile Reader for the BlackBerry device, suggesting that innovative applications like this, arriving even without a revenue model, represent the kind of thinking that could eventually put the newspaper industry back on track.

Social Networks Get Down to Business

Business-to-business ad spending on online social networks is starting to heat up, according to eMarketer. The market research firm announced a new report forecasting that b2b ad spending will rise from $15 million in 2007 to $210 million in 2012. According to the report, the audience for business social networks is exploding, including broad-based professional sites like LinkedIn, but also vertical sites geared toward IT professionals, lawyers, and other professional groups, as well as horizontal consumer sites like Facebook, which is experiencing big growth in usage by business executives.

What’s the Future of Brand Journalism? Collision Content

For companies focused on the social web, “brand journalism” (journalism-like content created by for-profit and non-profit enterprises) poses some special risks. Advertising Age offers a guide to risk mitigation in an environment where brand is decidedly not in control.

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 7.9.08: Social nets the new global battleground for civil rights

Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies

First Monday researcher Felix Stalder argues that social networks have spawned two conflicting phenomena that threaten to ignite a global battle over civil liberties: an expanding number of loosely organized, informal online groups in pursuit of social change, on one hand; and a heightened regime of covert surveillance by democratic governments around the world, on the other.

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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 9, 2008:

AOL offers services in 4 Latin American countries

Reuters reports that AOL has expanded its reach into Argentina, Chile, Columbia, and Venezuela, bringing to 25 the number of countries in which it currently operates.

Publicis Forms “Open Source” Ad Network

paidContent reports that French agency Publicis Groupe has formed an internal online ad network comprised of its four major global media partners--AOL, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft--with the goal of closely coordinating its campaigns across these platforms.

France To Tax Mobile, Internet And TV Revenues To Fund Public Broadcaster

paidContent reports that in 2009, France will begin taxing commercial Internet, mobile, and broadcast services, with revenues to go to the country's publicly supported media.

First English-Language Sunday Newspaper Launched in China

WARC reports on the launch of China's first English-language Sunday newspaper, to be published in Shanghai, that country's largest city, with a population of over 20 million.

The Wall Street Journalist

BusinessWeek reports on the WSJ's managing editor Robert Thomson and his ambitious strategy to turn the brand into a global online media power. A key element of strategy: micropayments.

Pew Research Center: Assessing Globalization

In this article for the Harvard International Review, Pew's Andrew Kohut reports that average citizens around the world embrace the concept of globalization, although it has greater currency in poorer nations versus wealthier ones.

media file 7.7.08: Social nets spawning a new era of global social enterprise

A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution

Havas Director Umair Haque writes in his Edge Economy blog that the next wave of business innovation will come from tapping the power of social networks to organize the world's main social and economic functions and thereby produce global social change.

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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 7, 2008::

The next step in open innovation

The McKinsey Quarterly discusses "distributed co-creation": a development paradigm in which partners, suppliers, and customers are directly involved in creating new products and services, and share in the rewards of those efforts.

Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web

ReadWriteWeb looks at how a philosophy pioneered by Amazon.com is shaping the social web. The "Wisdom of the Crowds" and the "Law of Large Numbers" are two core memes that make the social web decisively superior to any expert-driven media environment.

Creative Commons Launches Global Case Studies Project

Creative Commons announces the launch of the Case Studies Project, a global community wiki showcasing successful implementations of the organization's intellectual property licensing system by CC copyright holders worldwide.

Three Obstacles to a Truly Global Conversation

In MediaShift Idea Lab, Global Voices' David Sasaki reports on the Global Voices Summit, where over 200 media activists discussed the primary barriers to creating truly global online community. Top barrier: censorship.

Another "Chinese YouTube" Raises Monster Cash

Silicon Alley Insider reports on youku.com, a Chinese video sharing site that has raised more than $80 million in venture funds, mostly from US firms, and has somehow avoided the censorship death grip stifling other similar Chinese sites, such as 56.com.

In Iran, blogging web could get you killed

iafrica.com reports that a bill has been introduced into the Iranian parliament that extends the death penalty to the crime of "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy," as reportedly stated in the bill's text.

Bored With Web 2.0? Demand Change

ReadWriteWeb says that the developer community can beat "web 2.0 ennui" by building applications that harness the power of the social web to bring about social change.

ProPublica: a failure of imagination

It’s not nice to criticize a media reform effort, especially one launched with a lot of money and ambition. Media reform needs both. But we need media reform to succeed, and we definitely don’t need self-inflicted wounds from counterproductive efforts. ProPublica is well funded and ambitious, but also, unfortunately, counterproductive—and likely to be irrelevant, too.

The wrong problem and the wrong solution

paidContent and many others reported on ProPublica’s formal launch last week. It was news at a lot of different levels. Whereas most media reform projects are renegade efforts that survive only hand to mouth, ProPublica is very well funded and supported—over $30 million for three years, primarily from the Sandler Foundation, whose president, Herb Sandler, is chair of the ProPublica board. Other board members include Alberto Ibargüen, former publisher of the Miami Herald and president and CEO of the Knight Foundation; and Rebecca Rimel, president and CEO of Pew Charitable Trusts. That’s a lot of firepower, and suggests that ProPublica won’t flame out as long as the board thinks it’s getting results.

ProPublica intends to attack a perceived growing lack of deep reporting on matters of serious public interest in mainstream media, by producing original investigative reporting projects whose results it will license to media outlets at no charge. Led by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, the organization plans to employ close to 30 reporters who will focus on what it calls “truly important stories, stories with ‘moral force.’”

ProPublica plans to concentrate on placing those stories on an exclusive basis with traditional print and broadcast outlets, thus redressing what it sees as an imbalance between the few media organizations—primarily traditional news outlets—who devote the resources necessary to produce original investigative news, and find themselves under financial pressure to curtail these investments, versus the many—meaning the search engines, news aggregators, and bloggers—who feed parasitically off those efforts, and as a result undermine the capacity of our society to engage in deep reflection on serious public matters.

So far, so good. What’s wrong with beating back the vandal horde that is ransacking the media institutions upon which societal progress depends, leaving only a rubble of infotainment, unfounded rumor, and superficial re-reporting in its wake?

No charitable case

The problem is that this perspective on the health of the commons hardly comports with the truth about mainstream corporate media’s role in promoting the public interest. With very few exceptions—and those, few and far between—the transformative reporting of the contemporary era has come, not from mainstream corporate newsrooms, but from independent magazines and newspapers that have broken the serious news stories and raised the key moral issues that have then been re-reported by the same mainstream news outlets that ProPublica seeks to protect.

These independent outlets—ranging from The Nation and Mother Jones on the left to the National Review and The Weekly Standard on the right, with special-interest titles like Ms., E/The Environmental Magazine, The Chicago Reporter, and a bewildering array of others feathered in between—represent the substrate on which the entire modern mainstream media infrastructure has depended. And their imminent demise—make no mistake about it—threatens the future of public discourse in a far more ominous way than any newsroom layoff or budget cut that ProPublica can cite in defense of its media reform theory.

In a recent remembrance of the late William F. Buckley Jr. published in the New York Times Book Review, The Nation magazine’s former publisher, Victor Navasky, recalls how his sometime nemesis and full-time colleague framed the case for their money losing enterprises: “You don’t expect the church to make a profit, do you?” That’s a trenchant statement in support of independent, public-interest media. What’s ProPublica’s case?

In producing news and investigative reports for syndication to mainstream media, ProPublica bumps up directly against the global investigative news establishment—amply represented by the Associated Press, Reuters, and others—whose business it is to distribute news on a non-exclusive basis to mainstream and independent outlets alike. These are joined in the media marketplace by the Guardian, the BBC, the CBC, CNN, Dow Jones, The Economist, etc.... respected national reporting organizations that have expanded their audiences to truly global dimensions. Add to this the domestic public radio and broadcasting networks that are also expanding rapidly in audience share and in public support—that is, money coming directly out of the pockets of listeners and viewers. It’s hard to see in this environment anything except a healthy, dynamic, and competitive space where ProPublica represents nothing but a superfluous entrant.

ProPublica does nothing to attack the greatest problem that impedes the flow of thoughtful civic discourse in the US—the lack of resources available for investigative reporting at the local level. Here, as with independent magazines and journals, a media reform effort designed to put flooring underneath this critical part of the information ecosystem would dwarf anything ProPublica could do with its 30 reporters and essentially redundant strategy.

The price of failure

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with ProPublica is not that it will be blowing Herb Sandler’s money at clip that will undoubtedly make Bill Buckley spin in his grave. It’s the opportunity cost—the chance that ProPublica, with its unprecedented resources, could have taken—but isn’t—to revolutionize the public media space for decades to come.

Serious traditional independent media is under enormous pressure to effect a transition to the new world of the social web. As we see with corporate media outlets, this is no easy task—the audience is moving faster than the revenues, and the gap between the two threatens even the strongest corporate outlets. Independent national and local media are experiencing this gap as a yawning crack opening up beneath them, threatening to devour them whole. These organizations simply don’t have the necessary R&D resources to devote to digital transition, much less the profit margins to survive lean times during the shift. They need the practical help that ProPublica could be offering them—but won’t.

Rather than 30 journalists, why not hire 30 database experts, researchers, and programmers to create the infrastructure that independent outlets could leverage in their transition to the social web? The role models for such a transition are being born daily, and with much smaller investments than ProPublica enjoys.

Check out what the relatively small Surdna Foundation is doing with exemplary public-interest digital media projects like NetSquared, funder of Maplight, an innovative social web application that connects the dots between legislators’ voting records and the contributions they receive from corporations. That’s public interest media at its best, and a project far more meaningful, in the long view of the information landscape of the future, than anything that will come out of ProPublica’s offices. The fact that media reform’s biggest dollars will be going to Hearst, Gannett, McClatchy, and the Tribune Company—and not to the Maplights of world—is the price that we will all end up paying for ProPublica’s abject failure of imagination.