Aug 25, 2010 | Change, Social Media
15 years ago the task most organisations were applying themselves to was “mass customisation”. How do we mix the cost benefits of mass production with the individual needs of the customer?
Dell redefined the PC market by finding ways, as retailer Zara transformed fashion retailing, and Toyota transformed manufacturing cars, and beyond.
The task now for many industries has changed a lot, it is now a question of how they deal with “mass amateurisation” a term coined by Clay Shirky in his great book “Here comes everybody“, of their services. As the communication tools available have removed the power previously held through communication and supply chains.
The obvious example is publishing, in all its forms, but it is also happening in almost all services businesses. Stock-brokers now compete with low cost/transaction providers, accounting software has removed the bread and butter of many accounting practices as any office worker could now do the accounts, the list is almost endless, but the process is just getting quicker and easier as storage and data services migrate to the “cloud” reducing the marginal costs of data storage and communication to almost zero.
The need to be differentiated in ways meaningful to specific customers has never been greater.
Aug 24, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Social Media
Conventional wisdom of the past decrees that copyright is essential to the well-being and motivation of the suppliers of the publishing stock in trade, authors.
This self serving position is contrary to mountains of evidence accumulating as the web goes into its teenage years of development beyond the geeks. There are thousands of new authors of everything from childrens fiction to scientific treatises on many subjects, and everything in between, things like this blog included.
In this Speigl article, the argument is made, convincingly so given the current evidence from the web, that copyright law is in fact an impediment to publication, and its benefits, rather than a protector.
Aug 18, 2010 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
A newspaper asks itself “why should I publish this??”
It costs to publish, time, management resources, labor, time on presses, ink, paper, and so on, so it is a key decision, with implications if you get it wrong. An individual by contrast can now ask themselves ‘Why not publish this?” There is no cost, just a bit of time, and the return is you can be a “published” journalist or Photographer or movie-maker, the downside is zero.
The removal, by the availability of the web, of the organizational and transaction costs required to assemble the physical materials to publish a newspaper has driven this reversal. It costs nothing to write a blog, put a photo on Flicker, so why not just do it?.
This simple reversal, “why, to why not” has changed the world.
Aug 17, 2010 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The word curator brings to mind an old bloke (mostly) running a museum, deciding what is displayed, and how, what gets bought or created, what gets thrown out, and what gets saved for another day.
The job of an editor in the one-way media (print, radio, TV) is effectively as a curator, making those same decisions. But the world has changed, now the web is a two way street, those decisions no longer have to be made, now everything can be published, by anyone, so in effect, the role of curator has lost most of its power. But there is a wrinkle, there is so much stuff out there, that a curating role is emerging to trawl the web for items of value, and to create and edit material that goes to a specific set of interests.
One of the best is the Eureka Report, run by a group of Australia’s most credible business journalists and commentators, who have created a conversation with the “tribe” whose interests are around business, politics, and wealth creation in Australia.
It is the newspaper of the future.
Aug 15, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
How do you compare prices in a range of stores when standing in the aisle of your local supermarket?
The easy answer now, is “on your iphone“. A crowd called Red Laser have an app that scans the code, compares the product/price to others scanned (presumably there is a data base somewhere out in the cloud) and using google maps is able to compare prices in your general location.
This development has the potential to re-write the equation between brands, the value of things like location and parking, and price in the retail space, and with effectively an FMCG retail duopoly in Australia, it will consume some headspace in Co-op castle in Melbourne, and the Taj in Sydney.
It is a “pity” we wasted millions on a “Grocery Watch” white elephant, a technology/populist bet in the early days of the Rudd government, when a couple of years down the track, a similar thing can be done better on your phone. We now have the same sort of thinking making a 45 billion dollar bet on the NBN, a bet that will impact on generations. Hope they get it right this time!
Aug 5, 2010 | Communication, Social Media, Strategy
Access to information before anyone else has it is Gold, access at the same time as everybody else is just staying in the game, essential, but it will never be a winning edge.
A small advantage at some point, can be built into a substantial advantage quickly as the value of the unique information enables leveraging before it becomes common, and the access/leverage equation scales up with use.
Information is only of value when it is used, pretty obvious, but often missed, and the more it is used, the greater the value, unlike physical assets that depreciate with use.
