This is the complete (and non-dubbed) video of my presentation on the Future of Mobile & Apps: Futurist Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard in Moscow (ENGLISH) (by gleonhard) at the NextGreatApp event in Moscow, May 24, 2012; presented by Sberbank see http://digitaloctober.com/event/next_great_app for more details. Topics include the future of apps, commerce, mobile and social. The PDF with the slides can be downloaded here: http://db.tt/a4acS8D5 please enjoy and share:)
The Future of Business & Communications. Social. Local. Mobile. Cloud. And why Data is the New Oil. Futurist and CEO of TheFuturesAgency Gerd Leonhard was the keynote speaker at the Olavstoppen POL conference on May 3rd 2012 in Stavanger, Norway.
This Quickfire Storytelling session brings together some of the world's leading futurists (see below) to share bold ideas and conflicting predictions of how the world might look in 10 years' time. This video (which we shot ourselves using a Kodak HDCam and Sony bluetooth mic) shows the first 10 minutes i.e. Gerd's introduction, the 5 minute talk and brief discussion with the other speakers and the audience. Twitter buzz is here
You can download the 10MB PDF of my presentation (unfortunately, the slides are not visible in the video), here.
I just received the video of my talk on Social Media and The Future of Business at the Schwab Impact 2010 conference in Boston, and it came out quick well, 14 minutes or so, well worth it I think --- but you tell me! The Youtube version is here. PDF is on Slideshare.
It didn't take long for the TedX NewStreet (London) people to put the videos online at the TedX Youtube channel - great! Unfortunately my own talk got started while the wireless microphone was still on 'mute' so for the first minute or so (while I am doing my introduction) the audio recording was quite bad.
Therefore, I edited the video and scrubbed those 60 seconds; the result is below (using my own GerdTube / Blip.TV channel *you can get the iTunes podcast feed here). The original TedX Youtube version is below, as well, as is the slideshow, from my previous post. I think I really touched on some very important issues here, and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on them. Fire away via Twitter, or Facebook, or comment below. And spread the word. Thanks.
This nice-quality video was filmed on 10 am Sunday morning (ouch), January 24, 2010, at the annual Midem music conference, where I was giving a lecture on how I think record labels, publishers and artists can make money with music on the Internet, going forward. The slideshow was previously published here, but has been embedded below again, as well, so that you can click along with the video if you want. I really enjoyed the more intimate environment of the MidemNet Academy even though it meant that a lot of people that wanted to get in had to be turned away; maybe we can find a compromise for this, next year (150 people would be a good number of seats for this kind of thing, imho). This video is 55 minutes long and really packs in a ton of great "Music 2.0" stuff that I have accumulated throughout the year, so... dive in!
I will try to add this video to my YouTube channel as well but the 10-minute maximum rule really makes this a royal pain, so for now it's only available on my Blip.tv channel (you can subscribe to the free iTunes feed, here, in order to download all of my videos automatically) and as an audio-only version on my free iPhone and Android apps. Enjoy - and spread the word (use the options at the bottom of this post)
On March 1, 2010, I am starting with what I think is becoming an increasingly viable opportunity on the Net: online seminars, conferences, workshops, meetings and training sessions. I have done a few similar things (for various clients) in the past, using all kinds of platforms, and I believe the time is right to take the next steps, on my own turf, and... yes, indeed, even charge a few $ for it. You've had the Free / Feels Like Free, you've seen the Freemiums... so: I am wondering if you are ready for this idea.
If you have met me in 'meatspace' or are otherwise 'connected with me', or have been a reader of this blog for a while, you'll know that I have been publishing free slideshows, blog posts (and full-length feeds), PDFs, videos and essays for over 7 years.
Now I would like to investigate if maybe the next level above and beyond all that free content (and maybe to complement my 50+ paid speaking gigs and on-location think-tanks per year) could be to charge a small amount of money to make myself and some select colleagues available to a limited number of people that won't have to travel 1000s of miles to 'be there', using a fully interactive, online platform that allows for screen-sharing, chat, video and audio. After a lot of research I decided to try the DimDim web conferencing platform because of its ease of use and great features; in addition, I was dismayed by the fact that you apparently can't even sign up for Cisco's Webex service, online if you live outside the U.S.; to top that off, so far no-one has even bothered to get back to me via their contact form. Another time, then.
For this first session (and hopefully regularly) I am delighted to be joined by Alan Moore, Author (Communities Dominate Brands, with Tomi Ahonen), Blogger and fellow Keynote Speaker, for our very first no-entirely-free online seminar on March 1, 2010, at 1pm EST (NY) / 10 am PST (California), 6pm GMT (London), 7pm CET (Berlin) etc (you can figure out the timezones from here;).
"Alan Moore is the founder of the Engagement Communication Consultancy SMLXL. He is the author of several books including, Communities Dominate
Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century. He is recognized as a great distiller of complex arguments
into their most salient points, who can take concepts from many sources
and find the previously hidden relationship between them. He is currently working on his next project: No Straight Lines: An advanced living course for the networked society. As a well known writer, thinker and public speaker Alan has addressed, radio, television, and conference audiences globally. Reviews of his books and his articles have been published in many respected magazines, journals and newspapers..."
I have worked with Alan several times and he just totally rocks; it will be a real treat to have him co-present on this seminar. Alan and me will both present for about 30 minutes followed by a discussion with the participants (which, for now, are capped at 100).
We will charge $50 USD per person for this 90-minute event. If this experiment works out we will be offering more online seminars, together, individually, and with other great presenters from our various networks, as well. So go ahead... make our day!
Thriving commercially in social media and the networked society: An interactive seminar with Gerd Leonhard and Alan Moore (sign up page on Eventbrite)
The terms social media and social networking are terms we frequently fling around, and think about every single day, accompanied by the word “digital”. The digitalness of our world has been picked over in minute detail. One cannot deny that it is, networked digital communication tools that has brought significant social, cultural and commercial disruptive change to all our lives.
We are in a period of transition, our world of business, media, and communications is evolving from the straight-lines of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature. Any transitory process brings with it complications. In this instance, for many people and organizations they feel they are outsiders, struggling to make sense of a seemingly anarchic world. They become concussed observers to this new world that surrounds them. The problem is that this interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product and service creation, mass-production and mass media and marketing. It is about the massive flows of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organizing and creating in a manner that has nothing to do with a linear approach too much at all.
For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by a straight-line logic producing considerable economic success. However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of stuff done and creating wealth becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the networked- society is structural – challenging how markets and organizations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.
So, as we de-couple from the ‘Straight Lines’ of our industrialised world – which framed all aspects of our lives – we do need a new logic to understand this new one. It must be a logic which provides a framework for how we relate to each other, how we communicate, how we create more effective and flexible organisations and how we create wealth. Because we are still faced with the same challenges: how do we find our customers, how do we make our customers sticky, how can we increase trade with our customers and serve those customers whilst at the same time, reducing the cost to serve?
Regardless of whether you are in retailing, the automotive industry, FMCG, music etc., this seminar can help you understand how to commercially thrive in the networked society. This interactive seminar is based upon our combined and extensive experience of working with many companies in helping them make the transition from a linear mass media model to a networked one. We will provide via case histories, practical guidance of how to thrive commercially in the networked society.
Yesterday, the Net was buzzing with news from Warner Music Group's earnings call, with Edgar Bronfman announcing his intention to not license 'free' streaming services any longer. Rather than rant about this (as tempting as that may be), I thought I would just share some ideas with you, and with Edgar, on what else WMG could do to become.....well, WMG 2.0. Some of these ideas were initially presented to another major music company about 9 months ago, btw. I don't know where this ended up, though - stay tuned.
Gerd Leonhard’s unsolicited thoughts: Creating Warner Music Group 2.0
Dear Edgar, based on what I have learned of my 16 years in digital music, and distilled from the 2 music-specific books I (co)-wrote (“The Future of Music”, and “Music 2.0”) here are a few ideas on how I think WMG could reposition itself and achieve future growth:
1) Create and offer a complete, cutting-edge online platform for your artists, writers, labels etc. Let’s call this the ArtistOS. It should pretty much mirror what Google already does for Internet users, in general, i.e. provide free access to very powerful and inter-connected Web2.0 tools that used to cost 100s of 1000s of $ to build but are now provided free of charge. These tools could include things such as music widgets and embeddable flash players for audio and video, twitter-API based marketing and communication tools, connecting tools based on Facebook- & Google-Buzz/Connect, multi-site upload and updating tools (similar to TubeMogul for videos), text/video/audio RSS feeds and syndication tools, ad-insertion tools and production technologies (for widgets and web pages), mobile phone applications for quick-launching artist and label apps (see MobileRoadie!), general content syndication and CMS tools, Google Buzz, Tumblr- and Friendfeed-like services for artists, Google-analytics-like tools for tracking and analyzing web traffic, and much more. Building (or licensing!) these tools would require some dedicated resources but this would not be a huge undertaking in terms of budget since most of these solutions are based on existing APIs, feeds and various open source offerings. Having the ArtistOS available to anyone that works with WMG would be huge strategic advantage, and would greatly simplify marketing and promotion tasks, as well.
2) Define, publish and promote a Collective, Global and Open Licensing Platform. The biggest obstacle for strong growth in the Music 2.0 era is the utter lack of global licensing standards for the legal use of music on the Net, and apart from the admirable Jim Griffin - led Choruss initiative WMG seems to still be following the old-school path of ‘ignore & deny’, here. Not good. The current licensing procedures are causing severe friction in the digital content ecosystem, and represent a significant hurdle to innovation - and thus to creating and nurturing new revenue streams. WMG 2.0 could solve this problem by pioneering a standardized and collective licensing platform that is open to everyone, transparent, flexible, and revenue-share based rather than fixed-fee based, therefore allowing for liquidity in the new digital market place. Providing a public, standardized yet flexible and open license to all streaming-on-demand services would be a very good way to start this process - and the time to do this is now. Yes, I know, advertising revenue splits are not bringing in much money, now - but they are dead-certain to do so within 18-24 months, when up to 25% of all advertising budgets will be shifting to digital, interactive, mobile and social platforms. Have some imagination. Build the Future (don't keep asking for it to be delivered to you).
3) Vigorously pursue flat-rate and bundling scenarios for the licensing of your entire catalog in return for flat fee payments, RAND-based revenue shares and fair splits of advertising and other revenue streams (similar to what Google has done in China, TDC in Denmark etc). Licensing access to music, rather than (just) copies, is the only way forward in a connected, always-on world that already equals listening with owning. Switch from relying on scarcity to monetizing ubiquity and abundance, and invent new models that fit this. Generate new revenues by engaging with ISPs, telecoms, ICT companies. mobile operators and search engines. Drastically reduce friction. Embrace ‘free’ models as long as somebody will pay somewhere.
4) Develop (or license) and deploy your own mobile music applications, on all platforms (iPhone, Android, Symbian, Windows etc); make mobile applications the center piece of all marketing and selling efforts, worldwide - the future of music is mobile, period. Think of mobile applications as the new CD; and therefore of music as....software. Roll out applications for all new releases, and for all your labels and brand. Make the basic apps free, but offer very attractive ways to upgrade, in all territories. It’s all about the packaging!
5) In terms of future sales, think Freemium, and think access not (just) copy. Offer things that used to cost money (such as listening to a song, on demand), for what I like to call feels-like-free (i.e. in return for the users’ attention); just be sure to find ways to convert 20-50% of those users (aka the friends, fans and followers) to all kinds of new premium services, such as high-definition versions, concert recordings and web-casts, special products, digital compilations etc. In addition, dramatically lower the price for physical products while providing all kinds of premium products - again, focus on selling access to music not just products.
6) Investigate the concept of crowd-sourcing new talent. Use the web’s increasingly useful collaborative powers to discover new artists, and draw bloggers and pro-sumers into the A&R process, worldwide. Bloggers, in particular, are the new Radio DJs! Combine some of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ with your own professional A&R people. Do what P&G has done with Innocentive and their own ‘Connect and Develop’, and what DELL has done with Ideastorm, and what Kodak is doing in Social Media. The benefits seriously outweigh the risks!
7) Drop most if not all of the on-going law-suits, and switch your legal strategy to a 100% solution-oriented process. Compensation not Control is where the money is; all else is just posturing. The IFPI and RIAA-led efforts of enforcing control in an exponentially consumer-empowering media ecosystem have all failed miserably, and will not produce any monetary results in the future (except for enriching the lawyers). Here is a tough one for you: do you still need these lobbyists? Rather than spending most of the time preventing what the ‘people formerly known as consumers’ really want to do, all available energy should be put into exploring, building and co-developing those ‘new generatives’ for digital content, i.e. next generation advertising and branded content, packaging, bundling, flat rates etc.
8) Pursue drastic and large-scale innovation within - and on the fringes of - WMG. Bring the smartest possible people into the company; apart from content and talent (of course), focus on technology, mobile and next generation advertising and marketing. Invest in start-ups that can invigorate WMG 2.0 and provide significant strategic advantages.
9) Start to really talk to the music users, and have actual conversations with your customers. Engage on public conversation platforms, switch your PR and corporate communications from push to pull. Launch a WMG executive blog, start using Twitter; turn push into pull across the board. Do a Kodak - and go beyond! Create more transparency which creates trust which creates new business opportunities. Win back the trust of the consumer (better: the users) and the artists.
10) Offer profit-sharing arrangements with your artists: from a fixed pool of profit shares, each artist that is affiliated with WMG could receive a bonus payment that is proportional to their significance, every year. Do something similar with your staff.
11) Decentralize your distribution efforts, syndicate the music as wide as possible. Youtube gets 60% of its traffic from people embedding video players into their own websites - do something similar for your catalog. Instead of (or at least, along with) building or supporting central destinations, allow the users & fans to do the marketing for you, and syndicate your assets around the web. Think RSS, feeds, XML, API, not MTV.
12) Data is the new Gold - mine it! Making money around the music (not just from or with the music) is where the future is going. Investigate new business models that are based on data-mining, next-generation advertising and branded content, and behavioral targeting.
Note: once you’re ready.... there are a few good companies already working in most of these areas, and you could team up with them: just ask me.
Here is my presentation from the ACTE09 event in Prague, today, where I also had the great pleasure of meeting a very interesting fellow speaker and like-minded 'change agent', Michael Jackson, from South Africa, who served as MC for the whole event.
The topics of my presentation: how mobile and social media trends impact business,
in general, and the corporate travel industry, in particular; how the
social media and mobile Internet explosion is resulting in
unprecedented changes in communications and commerce. The need to
reduce CONTROL to get more SHARE is evident... but how can this be done
within large organizations? How can social media add value, and what
are the risks?
I was delighted to work with Nokia Siemens Networks once again, for their 2009 Marketing Forum in Munich. I actually learned a lot during this event, myself, listening to some really good fellow-speakers which included the fabulous Jonathan MacDonald (yes... we did have a few beers at the Otoberfest afterwards), the hard-hitting and enlightening Dan Gardner (Author of 'Risk'... next on my reading list), telco2.0 innovator Simon Torrance from STL Partners and many more. Some heavy lifting for people's brains - great stuff, all around. Below is an edited version of my slideshow; you can download the PDF via Slideshare. Enjoy & Share. Hopefully we'll have video clips soon, too. Stay tuned.
Don Tapscott - the Wikinomics guy - is just a great speaker, with seemingly endless knowledge, and one of the people that constantly inspire me in my own work (check out the new Futerati.com for all the others...) This video has so many great pieces of wisdom in it that you'll just need to watch the entire 62 minutes! Thanks to Sander Duivestein at VINT / SOGETI for sending this my way. From the Vimeo site:
"The global economic crisis is a wakeup call to the world: we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, but now have come to the end of their life cycle. The financial services industry, for example, does not just need fresh infusion of capital or some new regulations; it needs a whole new operating model — one based on transparency, sharing of intellectual property and global governance.
As the crisis has spread to other sectors in the economy and even other sectors of society, it is exposing structural weaknesses and modes of operation that no longer nurture social and economic growth. The recent collapse of many newspapers is just one storm-warning of more to come: conventional wisdom isn’t going to cut it for success in this century. We need to reinvent our institutions..."
As you may have guessed from my travel schedule (see sidebar) I get a constant stream of new people and companies, conference organizers, existing clients and all kinds of organizations that want me to go somewhere and make a presentation, hold a keynote speech or run a think-tank event; from all over the world, and on many different topics. If I actually accepted each invitation I am quite certain I could literally travel from one speaking engagement to the next, for pretty much the entire year. That would certainly get me Red Carpet status with most of the 8 airlines that I usually travel with, I guess.
There have always been a good many logistical challenges in organizing think-tanks and other events; however, the current financial crisis has definitely resulted in much tighter budgets, pretty much everywhere. Increasing concerns for the environment are also palpable - making countless long-distance trips for the sole purpose of a 90-minute speech and subsequent panel discussion is probably not the best example for the efficient use of energy.
Therefore I have been busy exploring new ways how I can present to - and have real conversations with - interested clients from anywhere on the globe without continuously enriching the likes of Lufthansa, Swiss and Singapore Airlines. Again, I do believe that nothing beats the live performance, the face-to-face meetings and the actual experience in what people have started to call the 'meat-space' (as opposed to cyber-space I guess), but maybe some new ways can be explored that offer a similar, and less costly experience.
I recently found a very interesting platform in the new Present.io offering (a new service by Drop.io), which (for anyone with a browser and good Internet access, no additional software is needed) allows for remote presenting, commenting and chats, as well as sporting integrated conference calling, too; all in-one place, and for free. Well, at least for the basic version - they are banking on the Feels-Like-Free / Freemiummodel, too, and it's working with me already. Good stuff.
The combination of services like Present.io with a live phone call, or Skype / iChat Video, has worked out really well, already, and so going forward, I will start to accept more requests for virtual / remote presentations (some people use the term 'webinars' btw).
I look forward to experimenting with you on what the best formats for this may be; if you have any other ideas for better technical solutions please use the comment box or below or contact me via Twitter or eMail; the same goes for anyone interested in booking a virtual presentation.
Lastly, here is an example of the Present.io / Drop.io widgets:
It feels like things are moving increasingly fast now - the global economic crisis has either really catalyzed people and companies into action, or it has completely paralyzed them; but there is no way to stay neutral. On my end, I am certainly seeing a lot more demand for the development of immediate (2-3 years) future scenarios than ever before - guess that's a good thing!
A new kind of currency is developing, and it's based on how connected, appreciated, vetted & verified and available you are. This can be expressed in a myriad of ways, including via the number of links that you are getting, the amount of followers and retweets you are getting (however superficial that may seem, at this early stage), the number of people that subscribe to your blog feed, and if you run a network, how many companies are building your business on-top of yours (i.e. via the use of APIs). Of course, beyond that rather primitive approach of pure volume and easily trackable stats lurks the much tougher question of real meaning, context, merit and quality, i.e. it is really the quality of every single node in your network is what matters, not just their sheer number.
While this Link Economy (see Jeff Jarvis) is, of course, not new, it is certainly getting a real boost from the likes of Twitter and Friendfeed where it appears that good links do matter a lot, and some Twitter search results now often trump good old Google search results. This "you are what you share" mantra is, of course, just one expression of the Web'whatever.0' principle of "success is the result of adding value not extracting value"; and clearly those that add the most value now get the most mentions i.e. links or retweets etc.
If this feels a bit like some kind of race to you I can definitely sympathise but would venture to say that we will see the normalization of this process within the next 9-12 months, just like we did with SEO which is now a pretty well-established routine and feels less like a constant race.
Another important point has been raised by Umair Hague several times in the last few months (and yes, I have been busy applying the 'Proudly Found Elsewhere' principles to his blog posts;), and that is the fact that we seem to be moving into an Interdependent Ecosystem, and away from what I like call the traditional EGOsystem.
In the Content & Media and TIME sectors it will simply no longer work to focus on driving revenues and profits just for oneself, and based only on one's own assets and capabilities. Instead, in the future, revenue streams will need to be discovered, invented, generated, nurtured and maintained in collaboration with other key players in the Ecosystem. This is a key point for me: we won't have recurring and scalable new generatives in the content business unless we all help to build them, in the first place. There IS no model we can apply, yet, there is no set way to cook this dish, there are no charts to play off - t
Keynote Speaker, Think-Tank Leader, Futurist, Author & Strategist, Idea Curator, some say Iconoclast | Heretic, CEO TheFuturesAgency, Visiting Prof FDC Brazil, Green Futurist
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