YouTube: the global TV channel

Posted on January 31, 2012 at 7:22 am UK

I caught a few minutes of President Obama’s Google+ Hangout last night as it was streamed on YouTube.

If you’ve done a Google+ Hangout video chat before, you’ll be familiar with the format and this was no different. Except, of course, it was the President of the United States plus five lucky citizens chosen by +The White House to hang out live with the Pres in a carefully-controlled setting. Plus the millions of people worldwide who tuned in, as it were, to YouTube to watch and add text comments. Plus those doing the same on Google+, Facebook, Twitter… wherever they were online.

‘Tuned in’ is an apt descriptor as the immediate thought I had when I did just that on Google+ was “This is TV.”

If last year’s Royal Wedding that was broadcast live on YouTube was a demo of YouTube as a TV channel – a global one at that – that captures imaginations with a compelling event (content, in a word), then yesterday’s presidential Hangout is surely a clear sign that the channel just changed.

Why watch TV on a TV any more when you can immerse yourself, interact on the net, share your experiences and the recorded content itself, via any capable device that connects online?

Talk about disruption! No wonder the US entertainment industry – and that includes mainstream media like TV – likes things like #SOPA and #PIPA, to which +Clay Shirky‘s call to “pick up the pitchforks” is so compelling.

Reshared post from +The White House

Missed the Hangout with President Obama? Check out the full video here and let us know what you thought.

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Social Business – a history defined

Posted on January 20, 2012 at 10:23 am UK

It seems that everyone is talking about social business. Whether it’s IBM launching its SmartCloud for social business, or marketers developing their social business strategies for 2012, the term ‘social business’ means different things to different people. So what does social business actually mean? Guest author Andy Hewitt of Global Dawn offers some perspectives.

We define social business as the creation of shared value for everybody in a business value chain, including the customer and the communities they live in, online or offline. For someone in technology, social business may mean free software, platform businesses or games. For a marketer, it could mean loyalty programmes or social network marketplaces. There is also a CSR angle – social business might apply to an ethical, value-driven business.

Social business isn’t new – it has in fact been around for the past thirty years and continues to evolve. Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction.

My company Global Dawn has produced an explanatory infographic to niftily sum up social business over the past three decades, showing all the routes that business has travelled to become more social. More than just being about social media, it’s also about values, customers, collaboration, involvement and engagement.

From the development of micro-finance to crowdsourcing to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centred business environment.

The Technology Stream

A strong tradition running through social business and dating back to the free software movement and then open source is the idea of contribution, specifically making a contribution to the ecosystem you work within. This tradition has helped build the web as we know it today into a giant, free collaborative resource.

The Marketing Stream

Another strong tradition begins with multi-level marketing and loyalty programs. The web has enhanced the capacity of smart firms to build loyalty by engaging more deeply with customers and by interacting in more equal terms, creating a two-way conversation between marketers and customers.

The Social Stream

Finally, there is the tradition of social itself, beginning with the micro-finance initiatives that were designed to replace development aid in what used to be called the third world. That tradition has informed open innovation, the large mobile ecosystems that flourished first in Kenya, and then crowdsourcing.

As we can see, social business is no buzzword but rather a long tradition that has evolved through the decades. However, we can expect to see many more organisations coming forward, claiming to be social business over the coming 12 months.

Social business is about more than just engagement across social channels such as Twitter and Facebook. A true social business will create shared value for everyone, empowering the people it reaches in a valuable way.

Andy Hewitt is Global Dawn’s Director of Customer Propositions. Global Dawn works with brands to offer bespoke software-as-a-service (SaaS) social business platform packages which enable brands to optimise customer marketing engagement. Andy is responsible for defining the Global Dawn proposition for customers as well as the functionality of its Social Business Engine. Contact: andrew.hewitt@globaldawn.co.

Ebooks: the next online battleground

Posted on January 2, 2012 at 7:57 am UK

Isn’t this just like the music industry was a decade ago?:

New medium captures imaginations of content creators and consumers.
For publishers, literally zero distribution costs.
Publishers succumb to temptation to charge an arm and a leg for the product, sensing easy profits.
Meanwhile, devices to consume new digital content take off like rockets among consumers, fueling demand for content.
Inevitable rise of alternate methods to acquire content outside publisher control and at significantly less cost, or free.
Publishers fall back on historical protections (legal based) that always worked in the “analogue past.”
…

What’s next?

Embedded Link

Online pirates threaten Kindle profits as thousands turn to sites to download free eBooks
Just as websites such as Napster undermined the music industry by putting tunes on the internet for free, the same is now happening with eBooks for electronic devices such as the Kindle (pictured).

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A golden milestone to mark a decade

Posted on December 29, 2011 at 6:58 pm UK

The Golden Age of tech blogging is over, says Jeremiah Owyang in his post on December 27.

[...] Like the film industry, the Golden Era is the emergence period, when fresh innovation in a new medium is born. New techniques, revolutionary content, and different business models emerge as innovators pioneer a new medium.

He cites four trends to support his view:

Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation – reference in particular to AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch in 2010, shoe-horning TechCrunch into Huffington Post control following AOL’s acquisition of that publisher earlier this year, and the nuclear fallout between them all in recent months.
Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover – reference to exoduses at ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and TechCrunch.
The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social – the attention crunch (as defined by Steve Rubel) combined with Ben Metcalfe‘s take (that resonates strongly with me): “There are just so many blogs/news websites/sources vying for your attention that you can’t read them all and build up the kind of relationship that you once could when the size of the universe was degrees of magnitude smaller.”
As space matures, business models solidify, giving room for new disruptors – the blogosphere continues to evolve.

Jeremiah’s fourth trend speaks specifically to his assertion of the passing of a moment: the Golden Age is over, a point he makes pretty clearly in the opening paragraphs in his post.

I agree with that assertion and the overall sentiment of Jeremiah’s post, considering it as defining a milestone period following the emergence of accessible technology tools in the early 2000s that enabled anyone with an opinion, a means to type, an internet connection to express that opinion and a public place on the web to publish it – you have Pyra Labs to thank for that kick start – which led to the Golden Age of which he speaks.

However, I would extend it way beyond tech blogging to embrace all blogging. Indeed, trends three and four unquestionably apply to other areas of online written expression in business and commerce as well as hint at new means of communicating and sharing opinion on the social web

So where does this milestone, this marker on the road, place us today a decade (roughly) on from that kick start I mentioned?

Some, like Brian Solis – Jeremiah’s colleague at Altimeter Group – think that what’s changing is the players, not the game. Marshall Kirkpatrick – one of the social web’s most authoritative voices – offers credible opinion on three things that could help make the new era of tech blogging even better than the last one. Bernie Goldbach speaks of a big distinction between the era of blogging and the era of social media.

These and others are all terrific opinions, offering great perspectives on disruptive change that continues and will evolve in ways we can’t accurately predict.

We’ve just passed one milestone, one marker. At the moment, it’s hard to tell where the next one is.

In the meantime, keep talking, articulating your opinions, sharing your content, good or bad (as perceived by others). You’ll be a key part of defining what comes next.

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Make of Twitter what you will

Posted on December 11, 2011 at 5:00 pm UK

A few days ago, on December 7, I began my sixth year on Twitter. As with many things on the social web, there’s a free service that told me of the anniversary, and another one that sent me a ‘birthday card’.

Over 47,000 tweets later, what have I learned about this short-form thought-sharing medium? Well, the over-riding feeling I have is a simple one – there is no single way to use Twitter.

You’re a marketer? Then Twitter can be a marketing channel. A student? A chat tool for your friends. A politician? A medium for your sound bites. Selling something? A notification method of good deals. An activist? Quick connections. And so on.

I don’t fit any of those labels, yet I often use Twitter in ways such as those I mentioned along with others like tweet chats and live-tweeting events. Overall, though, I regard Twitter more as an informal communication method – much as the sentiment describing it when it first appeared – that complements other methods such as blogs (and indeed, can serve a valuable purpose of alerting your community to news and events), and I tend to use it as such: connecting with people as the moment presents itself, thinking out loud, note-taking, whatever suits. I write my own tweets and use the service manually, ie, no automated tweeting method nor any pseudo-scientific approach of alarm-clock tweeting.

Luckily, we’re all different and the Twitterverse is enriched – largely – by the myriad different ways people think about Twitter, what it is to them and their communities and how they use it, wherever they are in the world.

A few months ago, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the service has 100 million monthly active users worldwide; out of that group, 50 million people log in every day. And the latest metric a couple of weeks ago – English, Japanese and Portuguese may be the top three languages for tweeting, but the fastest-growing language is Arabic by a factor of over 2,000 percent. Social upheaval in the Arab world this year is undoubtedly a driving force for that.

Twitter’s growth over the past five years has been spectacular. It’s a poster child for the social web and something that captures imaginations to become an icon of popular culture.

Today, Twitter undoubtedly is mainstream in terms of public consciousness if not universal use.

And the latest moves during the past week involve a new look and some new functionality for the Twitter website, updated apps for the desktop and mobile devices, as well as business-focused features like brand pages.

Yes, there are plenty of different ways to to think about and use Twitter no matter how you approach it.

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