Influencer lists should be taken with considerable caution, however they can be useful general indicators of those who are shaping conversations in a particular domain.
Atos Netherlands recently shared an analysis taken from Right Relevance of the top influencers in the future of work, shown below.
Let’s turn wants into wows. Let’s make the desire of individuals and companies to stand out and change the world a reality. Let’s prepare now for an extraordinary future.
These themes were explored by leading futurist Ross Dawson in his keynote at the 2016 Ericsson Services Forum in Mumbai. Dawson’s talk related to the event theme of “Turning Wants into Wows” by discussing how organizations can create value in a connected world through harnessing the power of networks, consumer expectations, integrated systems, and unique branding. The full keynote is shown in the video below.
Here are four key insights drawn from Dawson’s keynote at the forum.
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We have just launched a Futurist Influence Rankings tracker, you can see the original here and an embed of the app below.
It is certainly not intended to be rigorous, but simply to give an indication of how influential futurists are on social media and the web by combining a few key indicators such as Klout, web traffic and Twitter followers, using a simple algorithm.
No doubt we are missing quite a few futurists who should be included on the list. Just let us know if there’s anyone we should add to the list.
Feel free to embed it on your site if you wish.
Enjoy, and be sure not to take it too seriously! :-)
Last week I visited Melbourne Spring Fashion Week as a guest of IBM and the City of Melbourne.
City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.
In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.
Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.
Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.
Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.
The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.
While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.
All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.
Image credit: Eva Rinaldi
Advanced Human Technologies Group has just launched Creating the Future of PR, a publication that looks at how the Public Relations industry can create an exceptional future for itself and its clients in a fast-changing world.
In my article Join Us in Creating the Future of PR I frame the context for the launch of the publication:
The fundamental capabilities of PR professionals are more relevant than ever in our intensely networked world. Arguably, PR should be at the center of the marketing universe, since it is better able than any other discipline to deal with a world driven by relationships, fueled by connectivity, social, mobile, and power shifting to the individual.
The big question is: will the PR industry seize the immense opportunity before it?
The latest results from IBM’s annual Smarter Consumer Study provide interesting insights.
If consumers are smarter, they are expressing it with not just increased expectations, but an increasingly active expression of their displeasure if expectations are not met.
The following chart, provided to me by IBM in response to a request for more detailed information, shows that in all major countries advocates – those who actively advocate for their primary retailer – have decreased, while antagonists – those who would actively discredit their retailer – have increased.
Source: IBM
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We have just launched a keynote speaker influence ranking page, giving an indication of the social and online reach of people who work primarily as keynote speakers. The widget is embedded below (and you can embed it in your own website if you want), though it is better viewed on the main rankings page.
There are and have been many influence ranking systems around. This one focuses on a particular group – keynote speakers – for whom online influence is particularly important, and brings together three measures: Klout, website traffic, and Twitter followers.
It is of course very easy to criticise any influence rankings mechanism, and we do not pretend this is by any means ‘accurate’, it is intended to be indicative and interesting. We have provided complete transparency by publishing the algorithm we use. The intention is to tweak and develop the algorithm over time. Let us know if you have suggestions on how to improve it!
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This morning was the launch of the Safeguarding the Future of Digital Australia 2025 that I wrote and compiled for McAfee, part of Intel Security.
There has been a very strong response to the report, with so far good articles in The Australian, Dynamic Business, WA Today, and many others, and the Federal Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull saying “Intel Security’s report makes a major contribution to our understanding of how to safeguard Australians online and into the future.”
Parliamentary Secretary for Communications Paul Fletcher spoke at the report’s launch at Parliament House, drawing particular attention to the tagline we created for the Future of Social section:
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A while back we released our Map of the ExaTrends of the Decade.
We are now releasing a series of short videos delving into the ExaTrends, starting with Reputation Economy.
Some of the issues covered in the video include:
* The amount of data we have now is enabling the measurement of reputation
* Influence and Reputation are different
* Klout, PeerIndex and their peers do not measure reputation, they are trying to measure influence.
* Other players in the emerging reputation space include LinkedIn, Honestly.com and CubeDuel
* Service marketplaces such as Freelancer.com, oDesk and Elance have internal reputation measures
* There is immense value to reputation measures, across many aspects of business
* Reputation is becoming central to business and society
You can download the full Map of the Decade including descriptions of each ExaTrend by clicking on the image:
In a world of instantaneous information flows, managing company reputation is ever more fraught.
An interesting article in Techworld titled How to manage your online reputation goes into the issue, describing how pharma firm GlaxoSmithKline had one of its trademarks hijacked by a dodgy company. The piece goes on:
“Reputations are more visible – and more vulnerable – than ever before,” says futurist Ross Dawson, who cites reputation as one of the key themes for 2012. So what can you do to ensure that your organisation is remembered for the right reasons?
The article then suggests some strategies, including this quote from me:
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