Open & Free Business Model
Pay Walls On News Sites – Just Another Nail In The Coffin
This topic has been beaten to death, but news sites just don’t get it. Without naming which news site I’m referring to, well all of them actually, a paywall is just another nail in the coffin. I’m not saying these news site’s should earn revenue, what should do is, pull their heads out of their butts! The older generations who don’t have the patience to look for the news will pay now, but for how long, that has yet to be determined. We are now at a place on the Internet where you can’t really hide anything, it will be accessed. Why, because everything will generate a stream everywhere. Content will surface eventually, it’s like having a leak in your roof, you can see the water, but you can’t find the source, where it’s coming from.
Mainstream news sites are now asking social networks to shutdown accounts connected to news sources because it is in violation of trademark laws, not sure how, but I’m not a lawyer. If that’s true, we are in for a world of hurt in other situations similar to this case. The world is getting more and more uncomfortable with an open economy, the push back is amazing. Like it or not, an open & free economy will happen, corps / big business need to find a way to participate without trying to control the economy. The challenge is, they don’t know how, or maybe they do and it scares them.
There is the argument that journalists are the trusted reporters, anyone who is not credentialed as such can’t be trusted or does not have the means to verify facts in the same way they can. Most facts can be verified, the truth is, most facts can be found and verified, no one has locked the market on confirming stories.
Paywalls aren’t going to disappear, they will however become somewhat hidden, seamless, and hopefully, invisible. The problem isn’t really the paywall, the problem is how value is measured by the people formerly known as consumers. If value is found in the content, someone will pay for it, if not, they keep moving. It’s not about mechanics, what’s changed is how we value.
The news sites and or newspapers that force payment they will in the long run lose out. We now live in a world where everything is moving to free, or an access first model, and then maybe, people will pay. The commerce model is reversing, things that can’t be copied are the only real value, because they are scarce.
The other reality these news sites and or all news mediums have to come to grips with, they are too slow to break the news now, Twitter is the channel of choice for most when it comes to sharing major events and stories. The problem for these corps is, they can’t staff enough people to be everywhere all the time 24/7.
The Industrial Age of control is dead, wall street and major corporations are running around with their heads cut off trying to stop you and I from doing what we want to do. Net Neutrality, metered bandwidth and paywalls are all they know and all they know how to do, it’s about control and grabbing as much money as they can.
The Future of Business is the opposite of what they know, executives refuse to deal with the paradigm shift of an open & free business model. Having said that, I know some great people they should hire to help them maintain revenue levels they are used to, but they won’t, they don’t trust anyone.
The rest of the world hasn’t even come online yet, and when they do, they will push the paywalls down.
Will you pay for news you can get for free?
Olivier Blanchard’s New Book – Social Media ROI
It finally arrived, Olivier Blanchard’s book called Social Media ROI, Managing and Measuring Social Media Efforts in Your Organization. I am truly humbled and honored, I was not expecting to find my name in the book, thank you with all the appreciation I can muster.
I have never met Olivier, but I have had an online relationship with him for over 3 years, and I can tell you he knows what he is talking about. He is firm in his stand and he has always taken the time to try and explain why he takes the stand he does, a man on a mission, a man with Integrity, which you will read in his book.
Now, for some reason the world has missed a simple observation, Social Media (conversations)is not new, its just gone digital. What has been overlooked, is how to accurately translate these conversations into revenue, how these conversations become conversions, how they actually bring about a result worth measuring. No Olivier is not the only one to see that conversations can have a Return On Investment (ROI), he is however, the only one to date that can articulate it with clarity and passion. And now with this book, he is working with you side-by-side.
What caught my eye upon cracking the cover, is how Olivier walks you from beginning to end, from what a Social Media Program IS, what you need to think about, to what it should look like,and what you should get from such a program. It’s the first Social Media University TextBook in my humble opinion.
Right from the beginning you’ll read how to create a social company, all the way to analysis and reporting of your social media program.
This book is easy to read and yet it is serious heavy lifting at times, but if you take the time and follow Olivier’s thinking, the confusion simply goes away. If you do the work, you will have a solid foundation of how to not only leverage Social Media networks, you’ll know how to participate in them, how to plug Social Media into your business, how to listen, how to monitor. and as he says, ” Listening Before Talking”. You learn more from this book than sitting at your computer trying to figure it out. Olivier is your Social Media ROI Mentor, all for the price of a book.
One of my favorite chapters is, The Eleven Key Best Practices for Social Media Program Management.
I highly recommend reading this book many times, not just once, it is packed with so much, one reading would merely set you up to fail. You have in your hands a text book if you study it, you will increase your odds of success in all social networks. A MUST have on your book shelf. This book will protect you from those who consider themselves Social Media GURU’s, the so called Social Media Expert.
This book will play a huge role in my work, how I see the future of business, how this fits an open and free business model, and how an ROI can be achieved. I look forward to implementing many of the steps in this book, and you will too, it’s the best investment you’ll make for the future of your business.
Make sure you connect with Olivier on his blog and follow him on Twitter: @thebrandbuilder
The Future Of Business – Turn Your Business Into A Platform
This idea of platforms has been talked about for years now, new start-ups are popping up everywhere, many are trying to convert and become a useful platform. Why a platform? The business of the future needs to become a destination and useful, a place where people can come together and do something useful. People always return to things and places that are useful to them.
The best example of a platform to date is Google, they provide an environment where you can run your entire business. That in itself is very useful. Crisis mappers wasted no time responding: In under 2.5 hours Google launched its person finder application, which was also used when New Zealand’s 6.3 quake. A platform can be built upon and used, think of all the things you can do at Google, problems you can solve, and dare I say it, the time you can save. Today you can view your street via Google Maps, you can get images, videos, news, books, you can use Gmail for your primary email service, you can use Blogger to put your content on the NET, you can translate the language of a site. Google provides all these tools at no charge to you, an open & free business model to the extreme, it’s what the cloud is meant to be.
If you have a platform, you will need developers and other entrepreneurs to build on it, creating more functionality which brings more users. FaceBook did that. Networks are built upon platforms, the Internet is a platform, services like Flickr, WordPress, PayPal, self-publishing company LuLu.com, and business software Salesforce.com.
Google as I mentioned above is not just one platform but multiple platforms, multiple ways of using Google, multiple ways to build upon what Google has built and provides to you for free. What is a platform, platforms help users create products, businesses, communities, and networks of thier own. If it’s open and collaborative, those users may add value to platforms.
Questions to ask yourself: How can you or your business act as a platform? What can others build on top of it? How can you add value? How little value can you extract? How big can the network grow atop your platform? How can the platform get better learning from it’s users? How can you create an open standard so competitors will use and even contribute to the network and you get a share of thier value? It’s time to make your business a platform. It’s time to make your business mobile.
As you can see by the list of questions there is much to consider, pull together a team to begin the process of building you platform. If you are looking for help in creating ideas to adopt the future of business, stay here, I will be continually be posting concepts and ideas for you to build upon, or, just e-mail me.
If you had the opportunity to talk at TED, what would your speech be about and why?
In a group called TED Ideas Worth Spreading, a discussion on LinkedIn with Andrew Oduro Ayim, he asked an interesting question, If you had the opportunity to talk at TED, what would your speech be about and why?
I responded as short as I could:
I would share my passion as often as I can, for as long as I can, and I’m sharing that passion at The World Futurist Society Conference in July 2011 on The Future of Business – The Open & Free Business Model. It’s not what we do, it’s not a skill-set, it’s about how we think, it’s how business really is in our world. A world where Access trumps Ownership, a world where generations yet to come will and do not value ownership of home, ownership of car, they value life-style not a work-style.
Business owners still don’t even know what Social Media can do for them in my area, we are in for a world of hurt, the paradigm shift from closed to open is too painful.
What would you talk about?
The Future Of Business – Twitter And FaceBook Credits
The Internet has changed how we view our world, it has changed how we spend our time and our money, and it has most definitely changed the way we do business. The future of business is getting more and more sci-fi, it’s hard to compute (no pun intended), but we are headed to a world we used to watch in movies.
Get ready for Facebook‘s virtual currency, Facebook Credits, will become the official coin of the realm beginning July 1, 2011. Imagine that, being able to purchase products and services with Twitter and FaceBook Credits, next you will be able to pay your mortgage with those credits. I’m all for that. In fact, in November 2010 The Dallas Mavericks Basketball team offered Free FaceBook Credits for Twitter Followers. Soon you and I will be able to make direct deposits to our bank accounts without ever having to go there, you will do it on your mobile device anytime, anywhere. Payroll direct deposit is archaic compared to the swipe technology of today. You will also make most of your purchase with this swipe technology on your smart-phone, it is predict 60% of all commerce will be done in this fashion.
The real future of business will be Virtual Reality and Hologram technology, but that technology is still developing, we will shop in our homes and never have to go out into the masses of people. Imagine being able to try on clothes without ever actually having to try on clothes, say what! Social Networks will handle all the market research, the data will be staggering, there’s a business to start, organize all that data and sell it back to the business sector. eMarketer has a similar model, they are a great resource but, you better have some coin to get the real valuable data. As Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency says, Data is the New Oil.
We are moving to a place where you can’t hide, you can’t lie, and you can’t have a bad product or service if you want to survive in this new business landscape. The world is becoming more and more mobile and social, that’s a hot tip for you right there.
So how do you succeed in the future of business? At a high level it’s simple really, grow bigger ears, get very mobile and social, and above all else, engage with the people formerly known as consumers, it’s not business as usual kids, pay attention. The business landscape is getting more open & free, that’s the business model, Open & Free. It’s an access first society, people want access more than they ever want to be sold and forced to pay upfront. Figure out how to give people access, and you will find the revenue follows, the toll booth is no longer at the front gate, it should be almost invisible and seamless.
Would you make purchase with Twitter and FaceBook Credits?