Digital Trends
Steve has linked to a great paper from Edelman on digital trends. Well worth a read. The five trends are:
- Satisfaction Guaranteed – Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service. We are all over this at Dell – I believe Dell was the first F500 company to imbed a customer support team in its PR function.
- Media Reforestation – The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits. So is the PR profession.
- Less is the New More – Overload takes its toll. Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in.
- Corporate All-Stars – Workers flock to social media to build their personal brands, yet offer employers an effective and credible way to market in the downturn
- The Power of Pull – Where push once ruled, it’s now equally important to create digital content that people discover through search
The one trend I would add is:
6. Here is Everywhere — Mobility changes everything. From iPhones to Netbooks, always-on mobile devices are changing the way information is accessed and consumed.
Work Rate
Michael has ignited a debate about the work rate of Europe vs. Silicon Valley. I tend to agree with Michael – the success rate in the Valley has plenty to do with the work rate. This isn’t just about output… it’s about mastery.
I’m also in agreement with the comments over here that Japan also has a stunning work rate.
Looking at both Japan and Silicon Valley, start-ups in NZ and Europe could learn lots. Work rate matters – in terms of momentum, mastery and massive outcomes.
Kindle Zen…
I’m a big Kindle fan. But here is the rub. I hope that unlike Windows, my iTouch, my Dell XPS One … Unlike the thinking here… I hope that Amazon does absolutely nothing to the Kindle.
Its pure simplicity and lack of add-ons, apps or other geek bling enables us to embrace the simplicity of reading a great book, uninterrupted. And that is what is to love about it. The minimum of features delivering the maximum pleasure.
Ok – there are a couple of things… hire a great designer and make it prettier… get better Nav buttons… improve the speed of page transitions… do give us page numbers… But these are all basic things.
There is so much to love about the uninterupted Kindle experience!
the Internet makes us superficial
Definitely plan to write more on this… Nick points to A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.
Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: as journals begin publishing online, making it easier for researchers to find and search their contents, research tends to become more superficial.
Evans summarizes his findings in a new post on the Britannica Blog:
[My study] showed that as more journals and articles came online, the actual number of them cited in research decreased, and those that were cited tended to be of more recent vintage. This proved true for virtually all fields of science … Moreover, the easy online availability of sources has channeled researcher attention from the periphery to the core—to the most high-status journals. In short, searching online is more efficient, and hyperlinks quickly put researchers in touch with prevailing opinion, but they may also accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas grappled with by scholars.
If part of the Carr thesis [in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”] is that we are lazier online, and if efficiency is laziness (more results for less energy expended), then in professional science and scholarship, researchers yearn to be lazy…they want to produce more for less.
Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within journals—likely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.
twitter’s biz model
Some twittering today on Twitter’s business model, or the apparent lack thereof.
IMHO, business models follow subscribers in this new world. First build participation and subs, then monetize your new found community. Sounds crass, but that’s reality. Scale comes before dollars. Jason says it all really… as
does StoweSo, what would I do if I was Twitter… some initial thoughts…
- Don’t do applications… rather, continue to let people be drawn to the platform by plenty of cool apps – but develop a revenue share model with application builders
- Introduce some “in-stream” advertising – actually let users specify what kinds of ads we want to see along with contextual ads
- Introduce “out-of-stream” advertising. Ads that sit in or around the twitter page.
- Push SMS Twitters – where I can push an individual twitter to someone as an SMS, collect on every push. Intro SMS advertising.
- Take it pro – give us a professional version. Also, sell the professional version to Enterprises so that we can build our own communities on the platform. Include app like Snitter with pro sub fee.
- Intro file, photo and folder sharing for a small, Flickr like charge… as I am watching a stream of activity I can instantly share a file in the stream… that would be handy
Some initial thoughts…
