The Future Of Business – Meet Emilie Wapnick
Let me Introduce you to Emilie Wapnick, she is a prime example of what I have been sharing with you here on this blog, what the younger generation thinks, and how they are building the business of the future. Now Emilie is in her mid 20’s and is leading the way for young entrepreneurs, pay attention to what she say’s and how she say’s it.
I contacted Emilie and ask if I could introduce her to you and share something from her site, but mostly I want you listen to her and get to know her before I send you off to visit her site. I think you will be surprised by what she has to say, and you will be even more surprised when you hear about her background and education.
There are many young entrepreneurs out there who believe they can have a lifestyle instead of a work style, that they can experience more than one passion. And they don’t buy the big lie, that you can only do one thing in your life for a profession or vocation. I’m 53 and I believe it! The journey of life is way more interesting than locking into one career, one job, or one trade in my humble opinion. But we were taught by our parents, our schools, and by society, that we had to get a good education, then get that one good job; then everything will be ok. It’s just not true, because it doesn’t work for many, it does however work for some.
It’s not really about being an entrepreneur, but that’s the term we use to rationalize our gypsy like emotions, we want to follow our passions, we have and can have more than one. Society rejects this model because it lacks what many would call security and control, the truth is, it does provide those things, it’s just different, not wrong.
This is what the future of business landscape looks like, the rules are changing, and how we think about those rules and future matter more than ever. Today we are busting out, we are fighting back the conditioning the Industrial Age has forced us to endure. The Industrial Age is Dead, now lets embrace ambiguity, let’s grab those passions, start your journey, and don’t forget to enjoy the adventure.
Enough from me, let’s get to Emilie.
Here is a snippet from Emilie’s About page:
Hi I’m Emilie,
I’m just a confused 26-year-old from Montreal, Canada, who has decided to never commit to one career path– ever.
I want to travel and live in cute European cities. I want to write and produce a TV show or web series about 20-somethings who move to Berlin to be artists. I want to start a non-profit online art collective. I want to start businesses that are run on principles of permission marketing. I want to surround myself with smart, creative, passionate people. I want to inspire others to break free of the beliefs that limit them.
I believe we all have these false mythologies we have created in our heads about who we think we are. We should be challenging these beliefs and replacing them with more positive ones that reflect the person we choose to be.
Already you’re getting some insight of who she is and what she thinks about her future, but let’s hear it from in this video. This video is taken from her blog, she explains what her site is about.
Are you like Emilie? I am, what you are seeing is a glimpse into the future, what the business owner of the future feels, what they want, but what they don’t want, is what older generations are trying to force them into. As you can see, the future of business is not a skill set or technology, it’s about how we think. What big business is trying to hang onto, these fine young cannibals are pushing back, pushing the paywalls down, and they will rewrite the rules of business, all we older folks have to do is believe in them. What we really have to do is, get out of the way and let them show use a better way. Thanks Emilie for letting us see the future of business.
OK, go visit Emilie’s Blog, you will feel a fresh breeze on your face, not too mention she’s a cool cat. Just follow the link:
A Social Media Opportunity Missed
A few weeks ago I attended a session on Social Media, I was flabbergasted, no wait, I was shocked by the lack of knowledge in the business community, that most don’t understand how social networks will impact their business. A local bank put the event on, the event was just to drum up business of course, but they dropped the ball. They should have tried to connect with me during, if not immediately after the event, through a social network of some kind, after all the speakers were talking about social media and how to use it. I left the event empty handed, nothing in hand, no one approached me, I approached the speakers but they were eager to leave right after they finished. First real contact came two weeks later, I got an email. Now to be fair, I was invited by someone associated with the organization, I didn’t hear about the event at all, I heard nothing, he even sat with me (a good move), we have since met a few times to get to know each other better. The email’s primary purpose was to provide me with contact information, here’s a snippet:
<snipped to protect the quilty>
“Your XYZ small business advisor will work with you to identify realistic growth targets — and recommend the right financial products and solutions to help you get there. If you have any questions about managing your business, please call any time. I have attached a list of our Senior Account Manager, Business & Personal advisors with contact details.”
They thought they were helping business owners by having someone speak on social media, all it did was freak people out, why, because there was a huge gap as to why they should be paying attention to social networks. The speakers were awesome with how to use social media networks, some steps to take, some tactics and strategy, but they didn’t educate the crowd as to why they needed to do what they were selling. The WHY is more important than tactics and strategy, it’s not enough to say everyone is doing it, show your audience why, show them it’s working, give good examples. Take the time to show what’s going on around them, show them the future of business, and then try to help you create ideas to help adopt that future. Social networks are just one small part of an open economy. Explain in simple terms what the business of the future looks like, tell how its social and mobile, how a business need to become a platform, how we are seeing the tribalization of business, and what does all this mean to their business. Show the audience what is happening, then give them hope. And just what is happening, a paradigm shift.
I preach the future of business, an open economy, adopting the open & free business model, it means you think differently, it means you realize something has to change, and the need to change it quickly. We are moving into a world where 60% of all commerce is online, another 3 billion people are coming to the Internet in the 3 years, are you ready? Do you know what to do?
The bank collected names and contact information from everyone as they came in, so they had the details to communicate immediately. Posting a warm welcome on FaceBook with a picture of the crowd, a few shout outs on Twitter thanking people for coming, would have gone a long way to making the bank more human. Now in their defence, most of this community do not use Twitter, they all said they used FaceBook in a poll taken by the speakers.
I would have recommended they leverage FaceBook then, wherever the people are, that’s where your business should be! They could have held a contest on FaceBook and Twitter building up to the event, made the announcement on the social networks as to who won during the event. As you can see they could have made it a huge opportunity to connect with people and be more human, which in turn builds more trust. But that’s not what happened, they did what they always do, make the customer work too hard to make communication happen, and the communication that did happen was to make the customer work even more. The bank should have reached out and made it easy for those who attended to get information and have the option to let them sit down with them to talk about product and services. What they did, they sent a mailer telling the audience to contact them, backwards in the new day of business. You make it an opt-in and opt-out, you go to the people, not make the people come to you. If they come to you, it’s most likely going to be by digital means, they aren’t leaving their home to sit in your office. The bank should have invested more in social media, they should have set an example, it was a social media event for crying out loud. Enough said on that, as you can see they could have had a better plan in my humble opinion.
How could this Bank make it easier for the audience, what would you have done?
Shameless PLUG: If you’re looking for help to implement and understand Social Media, how the open & free business model works, how it can help your business make more money, then just signup for updates in the box to the right. You’ll get inside information to producst and services that solve real business problems, solutions you can’t get anywhere else. I’ll provide tips, new insights and how to’s, and you’ll know before anyone else when webinars and local workshops are being held. Thanks for coming to owengreaves.com, and for your support, just signup and I’ll see you on the otherside.
The End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
I’m up late every night trying to find new ways to teach you the ins and outs of where business going, the future of business. It’s my hope you are actually learning something here. You’re probably seeing it’s not business as usual, that things have been changing rapidly, and it’s painful too. I hope I’m making you think long and hard about what to do next in this new open economy. As I’ve mentioned many times, the future of business is not a skill set, it’s not mechanical, it’s not even about technology, it is however, about how you and I think.
Throughout this blog I have covered a variety of topics, I even share local events in my community, I do that for couple of reasons, to keep it interesting (I hope), and that I am a real living person practicing what I preach. The difference between you and I is, I see things you don’t, and I share that foresight with the intent of helping you take your first steps toward this new world of commerce. The Future of Business is a broad topic really, there are so many paths to go down but there isn’t enough time in a day to cover it all. So I tell you about what I find in my research, in my collaboration with other futurists, and then hopefully you can see the same patterns and trends being presented before us.
You probably find it difficult to implement strategies and tactics to an uncertain future, to something you can’t see clearly. That’s why I write about it, the best way to figure it out is to learn, find sources that can help you understand the paradigm shift we are going through. I pay attention to other futurists, 265 of them, I collaborate with some, and I do countless hours of research of my own, and I don’t get paid to do it! I’ll talk about that another time.
One of those 265 futurists I refer to is Gerd Leonhard, he lives Basil, Switzerland. He heads up The Futures Agency, The Futures Agency is structured as a virtual organization with global reach, deep knowledge and domain expertise, and extensive experience as strategic advisers. He is a digital mentor of mine, I respect his work, and he makes it interesting.
Now you may have noticed there’s push back from the corporate world, most Industrial Age businesses, they are throwing up paywalls everywhere, trying to control you, trying to prevent you from having information freely. Gerd talks about the end of control regularly, he even wrote a book on the topic a few years ago, so I’m not even going to try preaching it, I’ll let you read his book. You can get it here: End Of Control By Gerd Leonhard
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?
The Future Of Business – Access Trumps Ownership
As business re-invents itself, as it stumbles into the future, much of what we know to be tried and true is no longer working. As trust of big brands and certain industries continues to shrink, we need to consider newer ways of building that trust we took for granted. In 2006 Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine shared in his book, The Long Tail, Free is a business model. Jeff Jarvis writes about the model in his book called, What would Google Do? Gerd Leonhard talks about putting things out there, in the jungle, give much of your value away, where getting paid is a walk of faith, if you bring value, you will get paid. He has some interesting insight in his talk The Price of Freedom, he explains why ‘free’ content can still pay in the long term. I may be over simplifying the free model, but there is a bigger model to discuss, and it is related to the free model, it’s far bigger and a much more interesting model to consider.
People want something that allows them to participate, something of value that can’t be simply copied, something scarce that is worth paying for, but want to try it, taste it, smell it, before they hand over the cash. This is a faith walk because you don’t know where or if the money will come, it’s a YES / NO / MAYBE, complete ambiguity, complete faith in the consumer. Even if you are not giving it away outright, you may be letting them have access to it, to your product, your service or platform. The key word here is platform as I discussed in an blog post a few days ago.
We are entering a society that doesn’t value ownership, we would rather rent it or borrow it when shared, long before buying it. The longer you sit out here on the NET, the world gets smaller, you find like-mined people much quicker, and some are sharing the same message you may be sharing. That doesn’t matter, each of us has a voice, each of us has something of value to share, each of us sees things differently, our voice matters, so share your take on things. Give yourself away, let people rent you and your content. Build a platform that can’t be ignored, then share it.
I came across an interesting TED talk by Lisa Gansky called, The Future of Business is The MESH. In this talk she shares that access will trump ownership, that a brand is a voice, a product is a souvenir, we are in the pursuit of better things to easily share. The need for aligning value with the true cost. I love finding new people sharing the same message you find here on this blog, and I love sharing their work with you.
Here is Lisa’s talk, it’s a short 15 minutes, enjoy!