Not too long ago, consumers had one screen in front of them at a time, and it was either a PC, or a standard television set. Now, consumers are surrounded by a “swarm of devices” that are increasingly interacting and overlapping one another. Lately, tablets have been the device of choice serving as the second screen of choice, and the race is on to capture big pieces of this vast new real estate.
I want my social TV: 'The old mode — watching the plain vanilla standalone TV, and perhaps talking with others actually in the room — is dead.'
That’s the gist of a new report by Stowe Boyd of Work Talk Research. He refers to the trend as “second screening,” but it means a lot more than simply having another screen present while watching television. It opens up a new era of interaction — the rise of “Social TV.” This Internet-TV convergence now taking place has implications for a range of industries, from broadcasting to content delivery to advertising.
As Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency describes it in the foreword of the report: “Social TV and second screen business models… will bring up all of the tough issues inherent in any kind of convergence: who is allowed to do this or that, when and where, how will new revenue streams be invented and realized (as traditional revenues may decline or at least fragment), who will be the gatekeepers, when and where, and so on. Food-chain conflicts, galore,” Leonhard relates. “To me, it looks like we are moving towards an era of utter interdependence rather than continued or increased independence.”
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.
I am happy to anounce the release of a special report that my colleague Stowe Boyd has recently written, Social TV and The Second Screen, developed cooperatively by his company 'Work Talk Research' and The Futures Agency, as part of an ongoing series on the future of media. You can download the whole thing (yes, for free) here, via Stowe's site.
I wrote the foreword (excerpt):
The overlap of social media and TV represents a huge opportunity for those that truly understand and internalize, embrace and partake in these changes, and that welcome this dawning networked, interdependent and many-to-many society.
I will be working with Stowe Boyd to produce quite a few more reports and white papers in 2012. In addition, we will be doing a lot more work together offering Media Futures events, workshops and seminars.
What countries have the highest Facebook penetration rate, meaning the largest percentage of their population on the social network? The top 10 list is as follows: Cyprus, Hong Kong, Chile, Singapore, Norway, Denmark, the US, Canada, the UK, and Sweden.
This is the complete (approx 80 minutes) video of my keynote at the HBR Poland conference in Warszawa March 16 2012. The slides are sometimes a bit hard to see as the video zooms back and forth so if desired you can download the complete PDF (high-res, 26MB) with my slides via http://db.tt/JmKiJyQh (creative commons non-commercial attribiution licensed, as always).
Topic: "The future of business: how to benefit from the global shift to a networked society" The Internet, or to be more precise, the mobile and social 'Internet 2.0' that has exploded in the past 2 years, is dramatically changing the way we find and are found, how we relate to our customers (and vice versa), and by extension how we buy and sell. In a networked society, the-people-formerly-known-as-consumers are becoming more powerful by the minute; transparency rules and more often than not, interaction comes before transaction and attention is the currency. In this digital world, data is indeed the new oil, brands are publishers, and ecommerce almost entirely becomes mobile and social - and this has significant impact on B2B sectors, as well. Gerd will share his foresights on where things are headed in the next 3 years, provide examples of best practices and illustrate the biggest opportunities and how to prepare for them. The future of business is interdependent, real-time, social, local and mobile - get ready.
From a new eMarketer post (and related report), here are some interesting snippets:
"In a sign of how important online streaming and subscription music services have become to the recording industry, trade publication Billboard recently updated its weekly Hot 100 song chart to include data from Spotify, Slacker, Rhapsody, Cricket/Muve, Rdio and MOG. The revamped methodology went live in March 2012, after several months of testing that showed a rising curve for audio streams, from 320.5 million in the first week of 2012 to 494 million during the week of March 4, 2012. By comparison, digital track sales during that period decreased from 46.4 million to 27.1 million, according to Nielsen..."
This is, of course, totally obvious: as good as it is, iTunes is essentially an inadvertent punishment for being interested in more music, since every desire to listen to aka 'consume' new music results in having to spend another dollar on downloading the track. Cloud-based services don't have that problem - and clearly I won't pay $ 20.000 to fill up my iPod with Apple's music, while I have no problem saving 2000 Spotify tracks on my iPhone anytime I want to (and for $10 / month). I have been talking about this for the past 10 years, but here it is again: access is replacing ownership, like it or not (and I don't see a reason not to like it, as user or as creator). We can wish for this to be different, but it's not. End of story. Participate or become insignificant.
"Another indicator of the popularity of cloud-based streaming was a 50.5% increase in online music listening hours in 2011. According to a February 2012 report from AccuStream Research, US consumers spent 1.3 billion hours listening to music through internet radio and other streaming services in 2011, up from 865 million hours in 2010. The media spend associated with US internet radio and on-demand streaming services amounted to $293.7 million in 2011, according to AccuStream Research. This compares with $171.7 million spent on subscriptions to those services. AccuStream forecast that the total market would grow by 78% in 2012... Ad monetization is expected to grow at a healthy clip on the mobile side as well. eMarketer expects US mobile music advertising revenues to hit $591.5 million in 2015, more than doubling 2012’s total of $264.5 million. According to eMarketer estimates, the advertising component of mobile revenue is much higher with music than with gaming or video, largely because of the popularity of Pandora and Spotify on mobile devices..."
Yes, of course, streaming music currently makes much less money for the content owners and rights holders than downloading does - but the key to making this work is to get EVERYONE involved in streaming legally via one of the existing or future services and platforms, just like radio, i.e. starting with a more or less free / feels-like-free or freemium offering. The math is simple: if 200 Million people use Spotify or Simfy or Rdio - whether they pay 'with attention' aka advertising, via telco bundles, or with their own cash - then the rightsholders will see some serious money coming their way. If they can't allow this market to grow, then it won't be created (at least not in a legal way)
The bottom line is: the music industry has to monetize AROUND the music, not just WITH the music. Think advertising, bundling, added values... new generatives. There is no sense whatsoever in fighting the obvious trend of access replacing ownership.
"Data is exploding all around us: every 'like,' check-in, tweet, click, and play is being logged and mined. Many data-centric companies such as Google are already paying us for our data by providing more or less free services. Is data the new oil? TFA CEO Gerd Leonhard leads fellow thinkers Stowe Boyd, Jamais Cascio, and Andreas Weigend in an exchange on where data is going, and how we are going along with it. Data will become a key currency, as it is a virtually limitless, non-rival, and exponentially growing good. Do we need regulations or trust frameworks to deal with it? Can data really be safeguarded in an entirely free-market system governed by commercial interests? What will Generation AO (always-on) share with whom, when, where, and how? And if data is the new oil, how do we avoid wars and global conflicts fought over it...?"
Writes John Battelle: "In seminars, writings, conferences, and speaking gigs around the world over the past couple of years, I’ve started using a phrase when asked my opinion of what a brand’s social strategy might be, in particular when it comes to Facebook. The context is nuanced (I’m a fan of integrating Facebook into your brand efforts), but the point is simple: If you are a brand, publisher, or independent voice, don’t put your taproot into the soils of Facebook. Plant it in the independent web. (A bit more on this can be found here).
Now, that doesn’t mean “don’t use Facebook,” not at all. I think Facebook is an extraordinarily important part of the Internet ecosystem, and having a robust presence there is a critical part of any brand (or company’s) strategy.
But Facebook is a for profit, advertising and data-driven company. If you seat mission critical portions of your business inside its walls, you are driving value to Facebook – and you are presuming the trade, in terms of traffic and virality, will come out on balance favoring you. I wouldn’t count on that. Facebook will always have more data than you do about how consumers use the Facebook platform, and will always be able to leverage that data more effectively...."
John is making some important points here: yes, use Facebook to socialize and contextualize your brand, but don't just plant your trees in Facebook's increasingly walled garden.
This nice video just went up on my Youtube channel: my entire keynote speech (67 minutes) from the Future with High Speed Broadband Conference in Auckland, New Zealand on February 23, 2012. Topics: Transformational Technologies and Creating new demand for ICT services - The Future of Broadband and ICT -, in detail: the coming telemedia convergence, the future of content in a hyper-connected society, social networks are cable TV without the cable, why open standards are crucial, why and how data is the new oil, how Control is being replaced by engagement and involvement, why sustainability becomes even more important, the shift from egosystems versus ecosystems, the new drivers of Innovation. The slides are embedded below, as well.
Gigaom has some good comments on this topic, see below. I personally believe that curation is content, as well, and that meta-content ie content about content will become extremely valuable going forward. What do you think?
"Traditional media critics attack the Huffington Post for its aggregation, but as Nieman fellow David Skok pointed out recently at the Nieman Lab blog, aggregation is deeply embedded in the DNA of the media industry, and always has been. And as we’ve tried to point out before at GigaOM, aggregation and particularly curation are two of the skills that modern media companies need the most — or readers overwhelmed by information will go elsewhere, whether to apps like Flipboard and Zite or to new services that give them the tools they need to filter that growing ocean of content..."
A few days ago, I did a fairly lengthy and deep skype interview with Toronto-based Marie Germain from Branding 2.0 (see her Twitter channel here), touching on many issues including the future of commerce, selling, marketing and branding, so-called social media (I much prefer the term Social OS), current issues in technology and the Internet (such as SOPA - the deeply disturbing but nevertheless impending U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act), and media / content trends.
There are some quite juicy snippets in this interview, such as:
"In an truly digital society we probably don't need marketing as we know it"
"We are moving from a society, and an economy, based on EGOsystems to a society that is based on ECOsystems (i.e. INTERDEPENDENCE)"
"The old days of commerce were based on handcuffing consumers, now it's all about attraction, engagement and conversations (being a magnet rather than using handcuffs)"
This video uses an interesting format in that it is based on an audio track that was recorded on the phone, and superimposes some related images over it. Interesting. If you just want the audio track, here it is:
From the TribeRadio Youtube post: "World-renown futurist, Gerd Leonhard, in this interview speaks of the very serious challenges businesses and brands face; he offers solutions. On a more sombre note he exposes the ploys of controllers on internet freedom, SOPA to be clear. The Wall Street Journal acknowledges Gerd as one of the leading media futurists in the world. Powerful! Incisive! Gerd is simply delicious to the ears. Keynote Speaker, Founder of The Futures Agency, Advisor to top corporations and governments, author of five books, "The Future of Music", "Music 2.0", "The End of Control", "Friction is Fiction" and "The Future of Content". Gerd's background is in music; however, today he is a top game-changer, inspiring entrepreneurship and guiding us into a prodigious digital world. To reach the Host of Tribe Radio, Marie Germain: at her blog, http://Branding20.wordpress.com or her biz site, http://MarieGermain.com..."
Be sure to check out the other audio / video interviews on here channel as well, including Jeffrey Hayzlett ('Running the Gauntlet' book, former CMO of Kodak).
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:)
Here is a new video with my keynote at the BDigital Apps Conference, November 16, 2011, in Barcelona (my part starts at 02:04). You can download the PDF with my slides here.
The topic: "SoLoMoVi": apps and the future of content, business and communication" Wireless broadband, mobile applications, smart mobile devices, social networks and over-the-top video are exploding and will dramatically change how we communicate, how we buy and sell, how we create and consume content, and how we do business or run our governments. Pre-mobile & social, the Internet was just in its infancy, now it's a rebellious teenager testing the limits and pushing relentlessly. Where will the mobile Internet - and apps in particular - take us, in the next 3-5 years, what opportunities will emerge, what will happen in sectors such as education, media, politics and culture, and what can we learn from how this is already unfolding in the developing countries?
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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