Open & Free Business Model
Open & Free Business Model Workshop – May 21st, 2010
COME EXPLORE YOUR BUSINESSES FUTURE On The WEB!
We will look at three main topics:
TRENDS
We’ll look at trends and what’s happening around the world, and how these trends will impact your business online & off. Today there are 1.7 Billion people on the Internet, in the next 3 – 5 years that number will be 5 Billion. How will you get their attention?
THE OPEN & FREE BUSINESS MODEL
This is not a skill set, it’s a paradigm shift and this shift is painful, I’ll layout why and what this model might look like for your business, I’ll also show examples of how businesses are using this model.
BREAKOUT SESSION
By the time we get to this section, you’ll already have some new creative ideas, and ways to increase revenue. We’ll work through how you can build & implement your ideas with your staff.
When the workshop is over you will have a much better view of what’s coming, a framework to help you adapt, plus you will have a simple step by step approach for implementing new revenue streams.
Until May 20th the workshop is affordable at just $90, the price will go up on Friday May 21st to $100
Book now and reserve your seat, only 20 seats available!
For more details and to book your seat, just e-mail me at workshop@owengreaves.com
I look forward to working with you,
Owen Greaves Consulting
The Safety Net Of Control Is Broken
There is this feeling that nothing is going to change much, that business as we know it is going to carry on, and the online commerce world will just be like someone who sits on the bench. Someone who comes in adds a few extra dollars during the low points in the game of business. The truth is, the opposite is happening, advancements and innovation is growing faster than any one person can keep up with. Online commerce is and has become the de facto standard for generating revenue, the ugly works still needs to be done, but it’s more likely to be automated for the most part.
Business owners are struggling big time with letting the customer have some of the control, letting the customer tell the business owner what they want and they had better deliver. If they don’t deliver, people will look for what they want elsewhere. Gerd Leonhard coined it, “Proudly Found Elsewhere”. The safety net of control is broken, you see it everywhere, but big business is fighting tooth and nail to maintain that control. The future of doing business online is about reducing control, we will have to reduce control to get more share in the marketplace. Those who resist will find themselves wondering what happened and how did they miss it, people will get fired for not seeing the shift.
The music industry is not willing to reduce control, major TV networks don’t want to reduce control, and the Net Neutrality movement is all about controlling what you can do and what you watch. As brilliant as man is, we are very short-sighted when it comes to money and people.
The message of an Open & Free Business Model where I believe everyone wins, needs to be embraced. There is a need for more people like Gerd Leonhard, Glen Hiemstra and the extreme futurists like Ray Kurzweil to help you embrace the future of an ever changing world. To help you see something bigger than yourself, something bigger than your business, it’s happening all around you whether you like it or not. There is a tidal wave of people coming, and most business owners (small to medium sized business mostly) are looking the other way.
The world is more connected than it has ever been before, a connected and networked audience is dramatically different from what you’re used to. You cannot control a connected audience. They re-group on the fly, they will go someplace else if it’s too hard to get what they want from you, they will find it elsewhere. The experience this connected world has with you, determines your worth, you’ll either gain there trust or you won’t, but making things as easy as possible to do business with you will take you a long way to gaining that trust. The world is EPIC, Experiential, Participatory, Image Driven and Connected.
Resist the notion that being in control will make money,embrace a more open & free business model and turn your attraction into transactions. Create new ways of doing business, make the paradigm shift to an open business model and build a new safety net,by trusting your customers. If you don’t accept the new world of business online, you will learn very quickly, that your safety net of control is broken.
What Content Should Be Free?
I wrestled with this question for some time, I mean the whole idea of charging for my content was foreign to me when I started running my first site. In studying the trends of online commerce, and the Open & Free Business Model, it was clear that many people were asking the same question, what should I be writing about and what content should I be charging for.
In working with local business owners, they aren’t even paying attention to what’s really going on, online commerce is just a nice to have rather than a strong component of their business. Meaning, they think it won’t get much bigger than another advertising medium or to just make a few extra dollars. They still practice the price & item approach, the control business model is what they know and trust. My goal is to help as many local businesses understand a different way, and to see the tidal wave that is coming, to pay attention and change the way they think.
A simple exercise is to walk through following:
1.) What is your CORE business about? The first question I usually ask is, what does your business do? Normally, the answer coming back is a description of what the person does or a very high level answer. I would say I am a Technology Strategist, that really doesn’t tell you much does it? You have to ask that question differently two or three times before you get to an answer that gives you a much better understanding. Keeping asking yourself until you get to the real thing that you do.
Knowing what your CORE business is about, helps you with your content, it will help you focus on what the free part might be over the paid part. This seems overly simplistic but it’s not, working through this is much tougher than I’m writing it.
2.) What’s your vision? This is the WHY, why are you doing what your doing and where are you going. That’s pretty simple isn’t it, not really, there is a process to working through what your vision might be.
3.) What is your Mission? Again, something that seems simple but really isn’t. What’s your mantra, your war cry? You want everyone to know it and to be shouting it throughout your organization, even if it’s just you.
You might ask these questions in reverse, whatever makes sense to you. Someone once said recently, keep it simple, simple is hard enough, I try to keep it simple by asking simple questions to tough problems.
These three questions can help you, and it can help you determine what will be free and what will be paid. Keep in mind, there are only three ways to get paid…I pay, you pay, they pay.
This is one way of figuring out what should be free, if you are a writer, write! But write about the thing you are passionate about. Write short stories for free and offer paid for lessons on how to write short stories properly, or writing construct, get creative. Hold writing workshops that are paid for and offer writing tips for free on your blog or newsletter, help your community get what they want, and they will help you get what you want.
This is just one small part of the Open & Free Business Model, the framework is actually straight forward but the details are much harder to figure out. The sooner you start, the better your Blogging experience, and knowing what content should be free makes your blogging life alittle easier.
Change is hard – Not Changing will be Much Harder
The world we live in is always changing, as much as we try, it keeps on changing and shifting whether we like it or not. The truth is we can’t control change, we hang on to it with all our strength but still the change takes place. The world of commerce and how we interact changed years ago but we keep trying to hold it back, keep trying to stay in our comfort zones, it feels better that way. I am change agent for the most part, but if someone moves the forks in my silverware tray I get this disturbed feeling like I was just violated. That shows just how easy it is to get stuck in a rut, there is a saying, the difference between a rut and a grave is the dirt on your face. Are you stuck? Do you like change or does it make uneasy?
I talk frequently about the future and the change we have yet to experience, technology is growing at an exponential rate that we can’t prevent or control. If you look close enough and you are being completely honest with yourself, we are in for a very painful shift in the next 3 – 5 years. How we do business, how we interact with each other, how connected everything is and will be, is going to turn our comfort zones upside down.
Change is hard, change to an Open Business is even harder. Open is scary because it will feel like we are all out of control, it means KAOS! The part that scares most business owners is, the customer is taking some of the control away from them, the customer is now making decisions differently and that makes the world of commerce a very different environment. People are re-grouping on the fly, they are swarming into Tribes, they are reshaping what it means to be a trusted brand, and business is struggling with this shift.
Being open means you as a business owner have to talk to your customers, you must give them more access than you are currently comfortable with today. The world is coming, no the world is not here yet, but when they do arrive they will force you to do business in a very uncomfortable way.
The world is broken up into many many incubators that communicate and act in a way that is acceptable for each incubator. These incubators eventually will all be connected and will reshape how they act and communicate, bringing about change and innovation. This can’t be stopped or prevented, because you can’t stop a connected audience, they move to quickly and resist control, especially on the Internet.
The Internet is THE Platform that has changed the way we think, the way we communicate, and it is allowing for the reshaping of commerce, not too mention bring new meaning to Copyright and Sharing. Social Media is a bad name for the future we are entering, today we think having an account on Twitter makes us an authority on Social Media. The fact is, Media goes much deeper than using these Social Networks, they are tools, they allow us to connect and share, but that’s primarily it. The Media part is what we need to pay attention to, how we get paid for what we do through being in media, is a shift that is still unclear.
We are all becoming the Media, we are going more and more mobile, getting paid will be based on getting Attention, bringing value, and making your value feel like free, that is the secret. How you view the world matters in this new paradigm shift called Open & Free, where you put the toll booth will be even more important. Pay attention to what’s happening to the world of business, what technology is allowing us to do, and pay special attention to who is connecting with you and your business.
Change is hard, the change or shift to an open & free marketplace is coming, and not changing will be much harder in the future.
Make Your Content Free – The Money Will Follow
This has been the topic of discussion for a very long time, the argument of making people pay for content over giving it away. The landscape is changing rapidly, the world is and will not tolerate being forced to buy content whether it be music, files or the written word, you can’t enforce control when you need trust! It used to be that he who had control made the money, today, the good news is, that is changing, he who has less control makes more money. The bottom-line is the bottom-line, we will always try to monetize anything and everything. It seems we are very short-sighted though, we are still trying to make people do things they don’t want to do. Trying to control what people can access is not the way to go about building trust, in fact, it puts the guard up and raises questions as to motive.
One of the bigger challenges I see with making money online is, it’s not seamless enough yet, people still have to jump through far too many hoops. You would think with all the advancement in technology this would have been solved long ago. As mobile technology improves, the more and more we become mobile, the more transactions and advertising will be come seamless, it has to because we won’t tolerate what is cumbersome. Mobile advertising is where you should be developing your content, convert your free content into an app for iPad, iTunes or mobile phones and what have you. Advertising (At-vertising) is now Appvertising. The world will almost be 100% mobile in the next 5 – 7 years, focus your distribution through Appvertising. Feed your Blog content through an app, distribution is not the problem anymore, the Internet solved that for us years ago.
The easier you make it for your audience to come in, the greater return on your investment. Attention is the new currency, and in that currency there is an underlying trust osmosis component. The equation of tomorrow is:
EXPOSURE -> DISCOVERY -> COMMUNITY -> REVENUE
We are moving from selling products & services, to selling our attention, Google is doing it all the time.
The power of the future is in sharing, sharing music, sharing content, and sharing means doing it freely, not being forced to pay for that sharing. The problem is we are in the midst of a copyright gridlock (coined by Gerd Leonhard), there is much to be figured out here. Making the money happens around all that sharing, your primary content is distributed freely, this paradigm shift of Free & Open will change behaviour. The revenue change will come after the behaviour, habit & culture changes first.
Being connected scares companies and business owners, because we are going through a fundamental shift, from Closed to Open. The fear of loss is far greater than the desire for gain in this shift. It means not controlling how the money is made, the open & free marketplace means you & I are in control, we get to decide, big business doesn’t want that. So think of ideas that will allow you to maximize the Open & Free Business Model, that will allow you to attract the right kind of attention.
We have to change our beliefs in how the world really is. Today only 25.6% of the world is here online, what will the world look like in the next 3 – 5 years when that number is over 60%? What would 5 Billion people online change in your online presence and brand? Think about that for just a moment, should you be doing things differently?
We have a Global Trust Crisis, Copyright Gridlock where the value of money needs to be re-determined, and there is so much to unlearn, but that’s what makes all this fun, the future is perfect because we haven’t screwed it up yet!
Give your audience access first before paying, Collaborate instead of Dominate, Coordinate & Cultivate instead of Command & Control, Control is Dead. We are becoming a broadband culture, we click to get before we ever pay. Access first, pay later.
I would love to hear your thoughts, my goal is to make you think, nothing more nothing less.
What do you think?