Posts Tagged ‘Gerd Leonhard’
Give Away Content & Create Attention
This is a Blog Post is in part about my new book I’m currently writing called, ” The Open & Free Business Model – The Future of Business”. This Blog Posts is also a bit longer than my usual blog posts : )
In fact, I held a workshop for some local business owners and walked them through the process of figuring out what this model might look like for them and their business. One of the harder exercises was looking at their current business and asking a simple question, what is your CORE business about? If I was to ask you, what does your business do, you would most likely tell me the the easiest answer, I’m a…. the highest level snap shot what YOU do, not your business. I’m a technology company might be my answer, that doesn’t really say anything other than I’m into technology. I might ask what that means, I would volunteer a more descriptive answer but still not touching on the core. By the third or fourth time of asking what your business does, I might get to the core of what your business really is about, and what it does day in and day out.
Once I uncovered what your core business is, I might ask what your vision is for your business, and then I most likely would want to know what your mission statement is, and does your staff know it. Much of this is traditional in nature, but it is still important to your online presence as well. The next step most likely would be to ask for the results of a S.W.O.T. Analysis, I think that’s useful information. At this point we could start talking about what kind of content your Blog should consider, after all we know what your core business is now, we can start to build on something here.
Once we’ve gotten this far, we can start listening. Listening for what you might ask, well, we want to know who is talking about your business, if they are talking about your business, and what exactly are they saying. I would recommend spending a considerable amount of time here if your getting alot results in your searches. I would be listening in multiple Social Media Networks, other search engines and so on, you’ll be amazed what you find out.
Another fun project is determining revenue streams, pick the highest-margin, low-investment streams (the low hanging fruit). Then advertise your chosen stream to your captive audience, it’s important to have a captive audience, you want generate much revenue without one. In the end you’ll collect money, deliver the goods, and keep your customers happy. Advertising not @vertising, did you catch that? This topic has many levels and many more choices, but you will have to choose more than one to get attention amongst all the noise.
Distribution is key but has already been taken care of by the Internet, what about mobile apps, iPads, iPhones as a way to get your content out there. iTunes Connect is an option, apply and hold your breath, it takes awhile to get approved.
One of the stumbling blocks is, determining what content should be paid for and what should be free to download or read. I too wrestled with this question, but I found giving away good content created readership and eventually revenue and the bigger more important currency, attention. The world isn’t ready for this shift, in fact, the world hasn’t really arrived online yet! The world we know is willing to pay upfront for the most part, but the world yet to come will not be forced into paying upfront for most information and even some products. I’ve said it here on this blog many times, people will keep looking until they can find what you offer for free. If they don’t find it, then maybe they’ll come back and buy it, but they look first before making that purchase. The term PFE, Proudly Found Elsewhere, coined by Gerd Leonhard, is as real as the nose on your face, so get ready.
Another looming problem is the plethora of bad content, we will have to find better ways of filtering before the bad stuff gets out of the way. Eventually, someone will come up with a great way to filter and even curate your social network meta data, then we’ll have something to really sell. There are a couple of websites that take your Twitter stream and make a daily newspaper out of the hot stuff or trends within your stream. One is called Paper.li and another is The Twitter Tim.es, they look neat but you still can’t do much with it once it’s completed. It would be good if we could customize these newspapers a bit and make them work for us in a commerce kind of way.
The primary purpose of giving away content should be to get attention, build relationships, build trust, and then maybe you can sell something. But be careful, you might get what you wish for, it might not be the kind of attention you were hoping for. The truth is, we all want to be recognized, affirmed and we all want to generate revenue, we want to make money here online so we can do the things our hearts desire keeps searching for. We want to have freedom of choice in a more relevant way, where we get to choose, not what the industrial age has conditioned us into responding to.
The Open & Free Business Model is misunderstood for the most part, it is the future of business, most business owners are not ready for it. Being Open instead of closed is scary for business owners and people in general, we just need more practice before fully embracing it. Using Open Systems like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on are just the beginning to being open, it’s not a place or a thing, it’s a mindset. Being open also means being transparent, willing to let users see and hear more than you have been willing to share in the past. It’s really how you view Open, it’s how you view Free, it’s about how you see what an Open & Free Business Model might look like for you and your business. You may or may not need help with it, there are many around that can help, but very few truly understand what Open & Free Business Model is.
Create compelling content, give some of it away, then look for ways to monetize around that free content. It sounds simple but it’s not, because you have to deliver the goods in such a way it’s brain dead easy for your visitors to get and or buy. If not already, in the future when the other 3 billion people get here, you’ll want to already be in a position of having they’re attention, then it will be a little easier, but just a little. That’s enough for now, go practice, give yourself away and watch your world change before you, eventually it will click with you and you will see a future you haven’t seen before, ever!
If you are doing it, I would love to chat with you and maybe even use your business as an example in my book. You can be a part of my book, go here.
Will You Embrace an Open Economy?
You will read much about this a great deal here, and you will hear about it in many other circles, the world has yet to arrive, but when they do, an Open Economy will emerge and swarm the Internet like never before. An open economy will bring about a new way of thinking, a new way of planning, and a new way of generating revenue. Much will change and then some things will remain the same, out of fear and creativity.
One thing that will change, regardless of you or your businesses participation, customers will take charge in this open business model, they’ve already started if you haven’t noticed. In fact, you probably are seeing a shift to where the middle-man is dead, small is the new big, it’s happening because we used to succeed by controlling, and businesses are no longer in control in this open economy. Good companies will have to find things users can do in order to keep them, open things, give users more control.
Jeff Jarvis, author of , What Would Google Do?
In the new model, attention will be the new currency, getting attention will be central to your success. In fact, if you want to be found, you will have to be in “the public”, in the open, the model will demand it. You will place value on different indicators, you will learn the value of being involved in the conversation, with your customers, do what they are asking you to do, will you listen to them?
Here are a number shifts that are going take place, some have already begun. Taken from Gerd Leonhard’s Slide presentation:
1.) A Web-Native Business Model – the Internet (Web) will be the primary way of doing business. It’s no longer just an add-on.
2.) Shift from the Network to Networked
3.) Mobile & Social 1st
4.) Open Platforms (Google)
5.) From Control to Trust
6.) From Egosystem to Ecosystem (Collaboration will be everything for survival)
7.) From walled gardens to the Jungle (You can’t keep things behind walls and generate new money)
8.) Everything will shift to the Cloud
9.) Friction to Engagement
10.) GUI (Graphical User Interface) to NUI (Natural User Interface)
11.) Linear to Fuzzy Logic
12.) New Qualifications
13.) A Shift from Denial to Foresights
14.) Yes / No to Maybe
The world is coming, and it bringing a new way of doing business, it’s called an Open Economy, an Open & Free Business Model, will you learn it, will you embrace it?
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.
Where To Put The Toll Booth
The question of where to put the Toll Booth is being asked of me more and more lately, it’s a big subject and really can’t be covered in a Blog Post well, I’ll just share some thoughts for you to ponder. With the shift to an Open & Free Business Model, the confusion of the concept, the fear of losing control, and how to make new money from it are the biggest reasons to take your time and consider where the Toll Booth should be. Let’s consider some facts.
Today we have 1.7 Billion people on the Internet, in the next 3 – 5 years there will be 5 Billion people here online. Also consider that Advertising dollars are shifting to the digital marketplace, traditional advertising is dropping and digital is increasing. Print is down 18.7%, T.V. is down 10.1%, Radio is down 11.7% and magazine’s are down 14.8% in the USA alone. On the other-hand, Digital is up, HandHelds are up 18.1% and general Internet (Computer) is up 9.2% overall in the USA. These numbers are changing everyday, and these are taken from November 2009 statistics. With over 65,000 iPhone Apps on the market and more are being released daily, these apps are revenue generators that play a huge role in the Open & Free Business Model. A Toll Booth if you will.
The term Open & Free Business Model means a great many things, it’s access first before money, in a way it’s like the old GPL of Shareware model, you got to try it for 30 days and then you had to buy it. But today there is a difference, today people won’t tolerate paying for content in any of the traditional terms. Newspapers are trying get you to pay for content for access, how do you think that will go, I think they will rethink that if they want to generate new revenues.
The biggest issue I’m coming across is a thing called creativity, there is a mental block on how Open & Free is going to make money. Personally I think it’s not that difficult to figure out, but that’s what I do, I help businesses come up with new ideas on how to do that, to build something that can be implemented for the purposes of being ready for the new 3.3 Billion people coming in the next few years. The problem isn’t that it can’t be done, the problem is we have to unlearn and make a paradigm shift in how we view the world of business. I’ve quoted Gerd Leonhard many times, he once said, “the Internet is a giant copy machine, we now have to sell things that can’t be copied. Sell things around the content. Sell the packaging, sell the experience.” I’ve always believed that the experience I have in dealing with you determines the success of your brand. Business is not transactions, it’s interactions with people, and those people determine whether your brand is good or not based on the experience of dealing with you and your business.
If we must stop the model of copy to something that can’t be copied, we must look at a bigger picture, and that means changing the way we see the world. The Open & Free Business Model has nothing to do with technology, it is rethinking the placement of the digital marketplace Toll Booth. Some Bloggers have proven this model in part, offering good if not great content for free that you normally would have paid for upfront. That scares the day lights out of the business world, letting you decide before you buy means mainstream business has give up some control. It means they can’t guide you through the typical sales process of making say yes to a string of mini closes. They have to change how they think and ensure what they want you to purchase brings value and fills a real perceived need. They struggle now with where they make the money and how to ask for it. I’m generalizing of course, some understand but most don’t.
The bigger issues coming, what happens when we go to a single currency in North America, what happens if Net Neutrality comes to fruition, there will be another shift but not nearly as big as the Open & Free Business Model. This is not the same as Open Source but we can learn much from the GPL (General Public License) model.
The placement of the Toll Booth will most likely determine the amount of money you generate in the digital marketplace, but you need to understand how to determine that placement. You may not like the idea of an Open & Free Business Model, but what you may not see is that free gets you to a place where can ask to be paid. It will be quality over quantity, and it will also mean you are solving a problem and or filling a perceived need.
I have probably introduced you to, maybe for the first time, the thought of giving your content away for free and then figuring out how to make new money from that thought. There is far too much to cover for this post but you can read more about it here on my Blog by doing a search on the topic.
Owen Greaves Consulting is currently planning a 2 day workshop on the Open & Free Business Model, to help you learn how and where to put the toll booth in your Open & Free Business Model. If you are interested in this workshop please send me an e-mail or leave a comment for more information.
Control Is Dead!
The old business model of a closed / control is failing us here online, we truly believe that if we are in control, put things behind walls, force people to pay first, we will create new money and all will be well. Not true. The new open & free model is somewhat the opposite of that model, your product & services are out in the open for people to try and use, then they will buy. Recently, media futurist Gerd Leonhard put his products out there for you to freely download and use, and announcing the payment model for his new iPhone & Android mobile apps: pay what you think it’s worth. Would you do this, you will in the future.
I can tell you first hand that most business owners are scared to death of this model, but what they don’t realize is, they will create more new money with this open & free business model than they believe they will. Now I am not saying there isn’t a need for controlled models, I am however saying, here online it can’t be maintained and have it survive. Gerd Leonhard stated in a presentation he made March 2nd, 2009, “Rights-holders / Content-Owners have the choice: Control + Declining Revenues or ‘Open’ and New Revenues “.
This is only one example of someone embracing the new open & free business model, he is trusting his marketplace, his following and current strategic business alignments to provide revenues. Social Currency (trust) is the key here, your brand must be trusted for this open & free business model to succeed. It’s not that simple, you must be open, transparent, and have integrity at all times. This sounds great but is a lot of work, maintaining this kind of model can’t be done with the current closed business model. The current model relies on control, fear and you not pushing back. We are moving to this model, it’s going to happen, why? You won’t tolerate the old control model, you want access first, you want to try before you buy, you will dictate how business is done. Eventually.
If you write a book or make a product and try to position yourself under the old model, you have to jump through all the control mechanism hoops. In the open & free business model you just make it available, you may not make money from the book immediately in terms of sales. You will however realize revenues by monetizing around the book, consulting, coaching, teaching and or maybe even get hired because of your insights and know how. Your book must be good of course, you must bring quality in order to get the attention you need to realize the levels of revenue you desire. Attention is another form of currency.
Chris Brogan is all about making business human again, he also knows you will help him drive that process. You may not know it, but you want business to be human, not a system making you a number. You want to feel human, be viewed as human, and most of all, you want to feel important. Chris knows we are all after the same thing really, he is helping you see it, we want to make a difference, and make the world a better place, we all want to feel important. The problem has never been the desire, it was the how do we do it. Social Media has opened the door for you to exercise what you didn’t know how to do, you now have a way to express yourself and make it happen. You will and are shaping the future of business, the open & free model even if you can’t see the bigger picture right now.
Eventually you will make it happen, Control Is Dead!