A few days ago, I contributed a few comments to an io9 piece on the future of Facebook - read the whole thing here. Douglas Rushkoff is also quoted (and needless to say, he has a slightly different opinion on Facebook:)
Here are some of my quotes:
"Facebook has a bright future," as long as it can stay "human and open," contends Gerd Leonhard, founder of Green Futurist and author of The Future of Content. "Facebook is infrastructure now, like a highway, or water." He predicts Facebook will rival Google in terms of revenues within three years, and already rivals Google for importance. The main challenge Facebook will face is user fatigue, as it adds more and more services and forms of content...but Leonhard notes that real relationships will always be about the combination of offline and online encounters. And as "offline" and "online" converge, we will stop thinking of them so much as two separate places. People will also be more likely to start grooming their Facebook pages more carefully, and "personal branding will become more of an art form."
In addition, someone just emailed me this illustration below, on what the expect of the Facebook IPO - good fit. Enjoy and RT:)
Today is a very big day for me. My new Kindle book "The Future of Content" just went online at Amazon, and is already gaining a lot of traction. You can view a very short video greeting about the book on my GerdTube channel (Youtube:)
Of course I would be very happy if you would consider buying the book for yourself (only $3.90, Kindle-only) but beyond that it would be really great if you could help me spread the word via rating and / or 'liking' the book on the Amazon.com page, tweeting about it or just forwarding this mail to some friends that may be interested.
This review is from: The Future of Content (Kindle Edition)
"I challenge you to expand your brain and read this book. What Gerd Leonhard is always doing is informing the global brain (or the collective brain) in ways that help us all get where we're trying to go. He builds the buildings in front of us.
This collection points toward several compelling answers for content creators. As a writer who is already swimming in the changing currents of "content," I found it intensely informative. Leonhard shores up my courage to continue embracing a digital world without DRM, and ebook prices "for the masses." He makes the all-important concept of curation crystal clear. If you are providing any kind of content in print or on the web, it's relevant. If you want to stay on the front edge of content creation and publishing, it's basic. I'm making this book mandatory reading for my epublishing circles"
ABOUT "THE FUTURE OF CONTENT" Futurist Gerd Leonhard has been writing about the future of content i.e. music, film, TV, books, newspapers, games etc, since 1998. He has published 4 books on this topic, 2 of them on music (The Future of Music, with David Kusek, and Music 2.0). For the past 10 years Leonhard has been deeply involved with many clients in various sectors of the content industry, in something like 17 countries, and it’s been a great experience, he says. “I have learned a lot, I have listened a lot, I have talked even more (most likely:) and I think I have grown to really understand the issues that face the content industries - and the creators, themselves - in the switch from physical to digital media.”
This Kindle book is a highly curated collection of the most important essays and blog posts Leonhard has written on this topic, and even though some of it was written as far back as 2007 - “I believe it still holds water years later. I have tried to only include the pieces that have real teeth. Please note that the original date of each piece is shown here in order to allow for contextual orientation.” Leonhard’s intent to publish this via the amazing Amazon Kindle platform, exclusively, and at a very low price, is to make these ideas and concepts as widely available as possible while still trying to be an example of what digital, paperless distribution can look like, going forward.
RCR Wireless has collected some good snippets from my talk at the Mobile Marketing Association Forum in Sao Paulo, yesterday (download the 15MB high.res pdf here):
"Futurist and author Gerd Leonhard explained during a keynote address today at the Mobile Marketing Association Forum in São Paulo that customer trust was vital. “If we don’t trust Google, Twitter, Facebook, we leave them and they will die,” Leonard said. However, the key pillar to a solid strategy of mobile marketing is a focus on content. “Advertising is becoming content, marketing is curation, mobile is empowerment, brands are publishers, marketers become storytellers and consumers are participants,” explained Leonhard.
The future passes through the end of “mass-anything” and marketing has been dramatically impacted by the increased role of technology. “There is no difference between online and offline. Disconnected screens will be the exception, they will disappear,” said Leonhard. With all devices connected, network traffic will explode. All of this will culminate in changing how companies approach their mobile strategy. The point is how they will interact with customers. “If you want to succeed you have to give them control, as much as you can. Customers will love you,” Leonhard said, adding that empowerment, participation and engagement are the key points..."
See the Twitter buzz from the event, during my talk
Join me for this event next week - should be fun (and it’s free :)smarterplanet:
Join our next live, interactive virtual panel discussion on the IBM Global Business Services Video Channel on Livestream. SIGN UP HERE
Date: Thursday, September 8, 1230pm ESTTopic: Mobile commerce is poised to take a great leap forward over the next ten years. How will it change the digital landscape in the process?Panelists:Alon Kronenberg, Practice Lead, Mobile Applications Practice, IBM Global Business Services (Host)James Wester, Editor of Mobile Payments Today (@jameswester)Molly Garris - Director, Digital Strategy at Arc Worldwide (@girliefromthed)Gerd Leonhard - CEO and Founder, The Futures Agency (@gleonhard)Set a reminder to join IBM and our virtual panel of thought leaders to examine how mCommerce may reshape our lives over the next ten years.See all our past vPanel webcasts (as a bit.ly bundle), and subscribe to the vPanel Series.
From today's event in London, my latest slideshow on the future of 'monetizing' content - hopefully we will have a video soon, as well. In the meantime, check out my list of recommended videos in my last newsletter.
I just found a nice illustration of this global trend in a presentation by Softbank's Ted Matsumuto, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a few weeks ago (see all of the presentations, here, and Ted's PDF: Download 02_Ted Matsumoto ). Food for thought.
Source: AMEInfo (thanks!): 'Data is the new Oil' according to Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard who explains the concept to Phil Blizzard during a discussion on media innovations. The CEO of the Switzerland-based Futures Agency also talks about the need for creating networked societies, social engagement and creation of tribes in order to survive online. Note: this is where I found this powerful meme.
This is a good one - loads of information in here, and pretty well recorded. More details and PDF with all slides, here. Enjoy and spread the word. Subscribe to my video RSS feed, here, if you want (download all videos directly to iTunes, watch on your iPod etc).
"This guest post was written by media futurist Gerd Leonhard. Named "one of the leading Media Futurists in the World" by The Wall Street Journal, Gerd works as a futurist in the media, telecom, technology and communication industries. He is also an author, blogger, keynote speaker and strategist and is the CEO of TheFuturesAgency and a visiting professor at the Fundacao Dom Cabral in Sao Paulo / Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
With the explosive growth of the Internet, mobile devices and social networking, a connected world is indeed a very different world. Just witness the meteoric rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the demise of the recorded music industry as we knew it. I would go so far as to argue the only reason advertising in its pre-Web 2.0 form (a global business worth approx. $400 billion per year) ever existed was simply because we were not yet truly connected as today's mobile, social and real-time Internet did not yet exist.
Now that it exists, most of us will no longer tolerate interruptions, meaningless pitches, garish popups, Las Vegas-style skyscraper ads or junk email. We are looking for truly personalized offers, real meaning, solid relevance, timeliness, and yes, transparency and truthfulness. In other words, we will be looking for merit and values that are geared 100% towards us, not to everybody else, or someone else. Think micro-sprinkler systems, not fire hoses; droplets of expression, not spigots of noise exploding off empowered consumers (many of which in fact loath that very term).
Clearly, if brands and their marketers, ads and messages do not provide real value (remember: only time is a truly scarce value now), we will quickly lock them out of our lives and put them on the 'infinitely ignored' list. One might therefore argue that advertising is indeed becoming content (contvertising, anyone?), since relevant and desired, opted-in and followed content is usually quite valuable to us as we spend time on it, while irrelevant messages that encourage us to purchase items we don't even need are just noise. And the Internet has been so fabulously great at increasing the noise level that the time has come to turn that noise into meaning, to take the firehose of data and turn it into a clever sprinkler system.
The key question for marketers, as ever, is: how can you cut the noise, how can you be relevant, be truly wanted, make a better match, and benefit from meaningful connections? How can you turn the act of selling into content, into engagement, into mutual appreciation? Is that even possible? This is where we get to the enormous value of Data.
According to an April 2010 Wired.com post and a related IDC study, the total universe of information available to us already amounts to 800.000 petabytes of data. If you stored all of this data on DVDs the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back! By 2020 the digital universe will total 35 zettabytes, or 44 times more than in 2009, keeping in mind that an estimated 75% of all data is already generated by the users themselves.
This makes total sense when you think about it: forwarding a link, rating a site, commenting on a blog, twittering, sharing bookmarks, allowing cookies on your computer, sharing your location, logging into websites, liking something on Facebook -- everywhere we go, everything we do, every move we make around the Net (and soon, elsewhere, as well) -- creates click-trails, leaves digital breadcrumbs, produces data exhaust, and creates what I like to call meta-content, i.e. content around content.
Now, just imagine faster mobile Internet access at a much lower cost (or even free, courtesy of Google and O3B); much cheaper, yet more powerful and smart, mobile devices, connected devices that are not phones or computers but things, objects and products; BRIC+Africa coming online at a furious pace; and computing shifting from tethered computers and mouse clicking to tablets, touch-screens and finger-sweeping, and from downloading to cloud-tapping, which without a doubt will generate seriously more data than ever before, and at an increasing faster rate. The mind boggles (and possibly recoils) over the possibilities and over the huge challenges that these changes will pose, as well. But no matter what one's concerns may be, I think we can safely state that data is indeed the new oil, a metaphor that originated not with me but most likely with the ANA's Michael Palmer and Clive Humby.
Whoever gets to sift through this data, slice and dice it, move it around, make it useful, clear its legal and fair use, and just make sense of it all, is probably going to be more powerful than Shell, Exxon or Mobil have ever been (BigG and BigF emerge as distinct options here). This will, of course, require very careful and sensitive fine-tuning, with utmost attention to giving full control to the user, period. Regulation will be required but should, in my view, not be hastened; however, something that we must certainly come to grips with is that privacy will become something that we must act on to get back, rather than attain or retain by mere default. Those shiny new and very powerful tools of sharing and self-publishing do require that we accept and handle new responsibilities, as well - now that all of us can easily and constantly connect, we also need to learn new limits, new do's and don'ts - and the purveyors of this new power need to help us rather than merely seduce us.
The bottom line is that the data that all of us are increasingly generating and constantly spreading as most of us are switching to an always-on mode, will be at the core of all future success in marketing, branding and advertising -- and for that alone it's roughly worth $1 trillion, already (counting advertising spend, marketing and communication budgets, data-mining etc).
In a truly connected world, i.e. within the next few years, marketers will need constant and deep access to that data, in all its various forms and levels of permissions, because without this data their efforts will be utterly useless to the people formerly known as consumers ( today's users, followers, friends and participants). If the future TV does not know a fair bit about who we are, where we are, what we have watched, for how long, who we have shared shows with, what we have commented on, how we rate things; or if - worst case - we decide to just pay a bit more and keep our click-trails and our data off the grid (yes: Think The Matrix), then the marketers' job will become a lot harder, if not impossible. Matches can't be made, relationships can't be forced, brands can't be followed, connections are interrupted. Yelling is dead, and engagement needs permission - a tough but extremely rewarding challenge.
Getting too little or bad data -- or not understanding it-- will literally mean running out of gas in the middle of the desert. Therefore, the mission is to keep it all fueled up. And just like oil, there will be a myriad of issues (hopefully, not wars) that will arise with the responsible and fair practices of drilling, pumping, shipping, refining and dispensing of data. But without a doubt these issues will be solved in due course because this Data-Oil is very potent and because the responsible use of it will light up so many households that sufficient incentive for problem-solving exists. Telecom companies and mobile operators will want in on this game, as well - after all, it's their networks that make this all work (for now).
My prediction is that we will see a huge influx of companies dealing with the various aspects of data drilling, shipping, refining and remixing, and that the next Exxon or Mobil may well be a data-slicing company. Agencies, marketers and brands need to embrace the challenges and experiment: Get into the new Data-Oil ecosystem. "
Posted in Strategy on November 8, 2010 DDB BlogStrategyNovember 8, 2010
Finally, here is the video from the Google Insights event in Zurich, on June 10, 2010 (please go here for my previous post on this, as well as the PDF and the embedded slideshow). Download the M4V file (350MB)
Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist
Increases brain power for content creators, October 25, 2011
With the explosive growth of the Internet, mobile devices and social networking, a connected world is indeed a very different world. Just witness the meteoric rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the demise of the recorded music industry as we knew it. I would go so far as to argue the only reason advertising in its pre-Web 2.0 form (a global business worth approx. $400 billion per year) ever existed was simply because we were not yet truly connected as today's mobile, social and real-time Internet did not yet exist. 
DDB BlogStrategyNovember 8, 2010 
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