‹ richmedium › | social innovation in the global marketplace

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

Advice to the book industry: Take it up the Amazon

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

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

more media file links for July 21, 2009:

Publishers fret over e-book strategy

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

“Chaos Scenario” in full swing

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

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

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

Google Wave is the new news

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

Will Google Wave revitalize PR?

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

media file 7.6.09 | Rethinking global innovation

Rethinking global innovation

On the Harvard Business site, innovation specialist Scott Anthony argues that success in emerging markets doesn’t depend on coming up with dumbed-down versions of products and services that have made it in more developed markets. Instead, the challenge is to come up with complete products that fit the wallets of individuals in these new, exciting market spaces. “Companies need to create satisfying meals that customers in emerging markets consider delectable.” Case in point: India’s Tata Group, which has fundamentally reinvented the concept of the budget automobile.

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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 6, 2009:

Want to be an innovator? Think outside your (cultural) box

According to this study produced by Singapore Management University, the road to breakthrough innovation lies in experiencing truly foreign ideas--stuff you just won’t run across at the Starbucks on Page Mill Road. At its root, creativity derives from the collision of seemingly irrelevant concepts with one’s accepted world view. Creativity flourishes in the presence of foreign, and even outlandish ideas. The more one experiences such encounters, the better one is able to integrate them into an entirely novel and productive world view. And from that new world view, innovation follows.

Want to get creative? Get lost

People who live abroad are more creative; and the more time they spend away from home, the more creative they become. That’s according to a study published on Knowledge@INSEAD. Tourism doesn’t count; personal transformation is an immersive process, spurred in particular by adaptation to foreign languages and cultures.

“Living brands” for real life

On Creativity Online, Pearlfisher creative director Sophie Maxwell discusses the emergence of “living brands” as a major corrective to the concept of “lifestyle branding,” which promotes a consumer aesthetic built around the idealized lifestyle of a celebrity designer or personality, such as Ralph Lauren or Martha Stewart. Living brands tap into the growing, global consumer impulse to integrate influences drawn from personal life experience into an aesthetic that reflects one’s individual values and priorities, versus a carefully cultivated image that exists only on the advertising page.

Think global, go local

Advertising Age reports on an emerging vision for the global advertising agency: Open one office in every major time zone, and service clients everywhere from there. This represents a major shift from the empire-building game plan of firms like Havas, which have been gobbling up small shops around the globe in an effort to build an always-on network. The thought leaders in this movement are tossing a few surprises into the mix, including picking out-of-the-way spots to set up shop. Think Belarus vs. Beijing.

ESPN bets that sports fanatics will pay for it

BusinessWeek reports on a bold gamble by sports powerhouse ESPN to bring all its online assets under the ESPN Insider paid site umbrella. Starting in June 2009, users will have to cough up $7 per month or $40 per year to access ESPN’s brand of extreme sports-fanatic content. Under its former, less restrictive rules, ESPN Insider already racked up 350,000 paying customers, say company representatives.

ASCAP to cell phone users: Pay me

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that ASCAP, the music performance rights organization, has filed a brief in a lawsuit against AT&T arguing that consumers who play musical ringtones in public are violating the copyrights covering the songs on which the ringtones are based. According the brief, playing the ringtone in public constitutes a “public performance” of the work--a theory the EFF derides as legal nonsense. The post includes a link to the filed brief.

Life is brutish, nasty, and short (and it’s okay to admit it)

On the Harvard Business site, scholar Ruth McGrath explores the seemingly fruitless exercise of creating “sustainable competitive advantage.” The problem is that there is actually no such thing; In the current digital environment, sustainability is a mirage. Contemporary competition is a game of letting go and moving on... getting out of declining businesses and refocusing the organization on new opportunities as they emerge.

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.

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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 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.