The transcribed interview appears as an extended article Platforms are the Future of Media, which goes into depth on some of the issues I see in the future of media. Below are a few brief excerpts, but read the full article for more detail.

Platforms are the future of media. One could argue that a newspaper in the past had its own platform, which was its distribution of paper, primarily. There, it aggregated news, advertising, classifieds and so on. So it was a platform in terms of being able to pull all that content together and distribute it to all of its readers.

But now, in a connected world, we’re starting to see just how many other platforms there are, and single participants are finding it very challenging to be able to play successfully in this world. Most prominently of course we’re seeing the social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and now the messaging platforms as being places where people go for all of their media. The way in which we interact with people on social is an entirely valid form of media, along with the more traditional news, entertainment and education from established publishers.
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In the future we can start to see more and more fluid platforms for news professionals. I think that starts to become a more apt term than journalist. They’re news professionals who are working with crowds, who are working with algorithms and who are working with each other, not necessarily in terms of just being an employee of the news organizations. In order to be able to collaborate with other news professionals around the world and bring together content, sometimes they will work independently and sometimes ad hoc for the right news, event or content. News professionals are supported by a platform where consumers, individuals or organizations around the world can access their content, and where a fair value exchange can happen.
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If we look at how you participate in other platforms, I think there are four key elements in that:

1. Analyze those platforms effectively; map them. Identify what the costs are of participating in the platform. What are the trade-offs between them? Explore some of the potential paths forward, the different scenarios and how they may play out.

2. Engage with select platforms because you can’t engage across all of them; but you do need to make a commitment. Then establish contingencies that determine in what situations you are going to pull out, and what the trigger will be that moves you into a different space. If you end up choosing to engage with a platform, promote it and then get and understand the data from that.

3. Strengthen your position, given the fact that you are going inside a relationship. Ensure that at all points you are accumulating as much data as possible. You are using platforms to entice readers into a direct relationship, which The New York Times and others have done successfully on Facebook. Yes, promote on Facebook, but always use that to try and create direct relationships with audiences.

4. Apply influence as we saw recently where the editor of Aftenposten essentially changed the policies of Facebook. It was partly through, I suppose, being right, but it was also being able to take a stand prominently, drawing others’ opinions out. It is critical that if you are participating in other platforms, then you need to be able to say, “How can we collaborate with other participants, not as an individual player, but as collaborators and share our data and influence in order to make sure that we can shape that platform as effectively as possible?”

If you’re participating in a platform, you need to monitor the shifts in the landscape, engage with new platforms that are emerging and potentially develop/add onto platforms that are complementary. Once you’ve made the choice to engage with others’ platforms, which is essential in today’s distribution world, you do need to have effective strategies to participate in those platforms in a highly dynamic way, where you can respond to changes as they emerge.

Passing the threshold of blogging

Which in itself comes to the nub of the experience of blogging, all the thresholds you have to cross to actually start and finish a blog post. What is compelling enough to say that you take the time to write it? How long or polished should pieces be? If I get started writing a post, how much time is it going to take to say what it is I want to say? When do I cut off a blog post and save the rest for the next post?

In a way, the more you have to say, the harder it is to say it, because a book is a more appropriate format than a blog post. Any blog post risks becoming a book. Any topic you choose to blog about, however narrow, deserves deeper inspection.

For the last few years the majority of my blog posts have shared thoughts from my keynotes and media coverage. The preparation for each of my keynotes develops my thinking further each time, and I want to do a blog post to share just a little of what I covered.

However since I have barely blogged for over a year, I have a backlog of 50 or more keynotes from which I want to share thoughts, and other streams of content I am developing. In short despite developing a great deal of content, this has been the year I’ve produced the least content for many years. It is time to get back to sharing.

Finding your blogging voice and behaviours

The standard advice to anyone starting a blog is that you need to find your voice, and the only way to find your voice is to blog. As you write, you find what works for you.

For ages I have wanted to try to catch fragments of thoughts as they happening, capturing them as a brief snapshot, quickly written. I have a tendency to want to keep on going when I write a blog post, and almost every post refers to other posts I intend to write that will go into more detail, that almost invariably I never get around to writing.

I was always trying to change my blogging habits, to tend to capture these very brief ideas rather than feel I had to go into detail. So now I am relaunching my blog, this is an opportunity to change my behaviours, to try to blog more.

However one reason that I have blogged less over the last years is that I am simply so busy, I take on a crazy amount and blogging is never top of the priority list when you have client deadlines and many projects being launched. But I just need to prioritise blogging, as a way of letting my thoughts flow more, be more visible rather than it only coming out in more structured work such as frameworks. I am launching an ambitious new set of ventures (more on that later) so the pace is not letting up, but I want some kind of content to consistently spin off what I do.

The rise and retreat of blogging

As I write this post I realise it has been 14 years since I launched my blog. Since then I have written 1,793 blog posts. Those were fairly early days in blogging, well before any significant social media platforms had emerged. While it took a few years before I really got going with it, for quite a few years my blog was central to my identity and visibility, core to building my global work.

I resisted Twitter until mid-2008, believing that it would take away time from my blogging, but as soon as I started I realised how complementary blogging and Twitter are. However over the last few years Twitter has become by far my dominant social channel.

A number of years ago my New Year’s resolution was to spend more time on Facebook. Over the last year or two I finally am doing that. However Twitter is certainly my primary home, with still all my tweets being funneled through into my Facebook stream, just adding an occasional post directly on Facebook.

Of course other blogging channels have arisen, notably LinkedIn and Medium. There is a strong case to just blog on those channels than your own blog, as there is the potential for far wider distribution. But other than reposting a few posts on LinkedIn, I haven’t used those channels yet, I prefer posting on my own blog.

With the rise of a multiplicity of other social and content-sharing channels including Instagam, Snapchat, YouTube and many others, it seems far fewer people are blogging than back in blogging’s heyday. But a blog still has power today.

back to blogging?

I have been able to easily write this blog post as a stream of consciousness (section headers added later) as I sit in the airport lounge, seizing the opportunity of fractional space in my schedule. I hope that I will get my blog going properly again, sharing in new and easy ways, seizing the opportunity of relaunching my blog to reframe how I use it, what new blogging behaviors I can take on. Among other things, I want to try to make it more conversational, as in this post.

I wouldn’t hold your breath given my record over the last few years, but perhaps I will find my blogging voice again. :-)

Image: Jacqui 1686

I set up my blog Trends in the Living Networks in 2002 to accompany the launch of my book Living Networks. A bit later I set up rossdawson.com as my speaker website, and kept the blog on a separate domain, running the two sites in parallel for many years.

Time for a refresh

However this year I have blogged the least I have for well over a decade. My blog virtually ground to a halt. One reason was that I have simply been too busy to take the time to blog. But to be frank I was also embarrassed by my out-of-date blog website, I didn’t really want people to see it.

My speaker website – where I also put some posts and research from my team members – was also well overdue for a refresh. So I decided to redesign and relaunch both my personal site and blog into one site, in hindsight something I should have done a long time ago.

For the last year I have been wanting to write many blog posts, but I kept waiting until my new site was done, which of course took longer than expected.

Back to blogging

So now I have a big backlog of posts I want to write, including sharing snippets from some of the many interesting client engagements I have been doing this year. I’m still flat out, but now that I have a nicer-looking website, I am far more highly motivated to write the posts and get them up.

Of course, please let me know if you see any issues or have any suggestions on the new website – I know it’s not quite there and still needs a bit of tweaking. :-)

So hopefully back to blogging with some more posts up here before long!

Image: Epic Fireworks

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! :-)

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

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?

Both in my own work and that of my companies we work extensively with PR agencies.

I have personally worked with a number of major PR globally agencies in framing the future of media. I am also frequently engaged by PR agencies on behalf of their clients to deliver keynotes at customer events and to act as a spokesperson for media campaigns.

Among the many services that our companies work with PR agencies on, notably Future Exploration Network creates compelling futurist content to support media and B2B marketing campaigns, Advanced Human Technologies does organisational and influence network analysis for designing high-performance organisations and campaigns, and MemeStreme (to be launched soon) will offer world-class interactive information visualizations.

However beyond these direct engagement points, it is clear that in a networked world marketing is being completely transformed. I believe that leading PR professionals – whose business is relationships – are probably best equipped to truly understand a world of distributed relationships, and find successful pathways to the future.

Please have look at Creating the Future of PR, join the conversations in our Creating the Future of PR Facebook Group, and let us know if you would like to contribute to the publication.

We will also be running a Creating the Future of PR Forum in Sydney this October, and will collaborate with local partners to run events in other major cities around the world.

Please do participate and pass on word to those who would be interested in this, our intention is over time to build something that will be truly valuable for the industry.

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

In fact from 2012 to 2014, advocacy rates in Australia have declined from 34% to 10%, while antagonism has increased from 12% to 37%. Sobering statistics for retailers.

Increased expectations are supported by the shift to online and mobile buying. The pace of the shift to online buying is highest for the most expensive goods.

Where there is trust, customers are more willing to share information with retailers than before. However this is happening in conjunction with heightened expectations, meaning that they will only continue to do so if that information is used to create clear value for them.

And it is clear that consumers are want to be in control. They understand the issues and while they will share information if there is trust, their expectations include personal control.

In summary, people are less likely to actively support retailers and more likely to attack them in increasingly public forums such as social media.

However trust can still grow, but it will only create value for retailers if it first creates real value for their customers.

The article opens:

Virtual firms, legal outsourcing. It’s the future, and it’s coming to your firm now. Futurist and author Ross Dawson shares his thoughts on where the legal industry is heading.

The impact of connectivity, particularly through artificial intelligence and globalisation, has meant greater choice and control in deciding how legal services are carried out. Future changes will go further – influencing the traditional model of how a firm’s services are structured and delivered, according to Ross Dawson, futurist and author of The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services.

The article later continues by describing :

Dawson offers a range of future scenarios for the traditional law firm faced with increasing competition from this offshore legal process outsourcing (LPO). First, they can wave their business goodbye as their competitors, who offer this cheap and efficient alternative, undercut their service.

“If you are a large firm with high overheads, you can’t compete on price,” he says.

Or firms can make the most of the opportunity to specialise in their chosen area of law, leaving the process-oriented work to their competitors and the LPO service providers. The final option is to embrace this external service and offer clients ‘the lot’. Law firms can choose to draw on this cheaper LPO resource to complement the firm’s full service, one-stop shop. Firms then manage both the client’s complex and mundane work – setting the firm’s best lawyers onto the complex work and outsourcing the rest.

It goes on to delve into the issue of where and how the most talented lawyers want to work:

The element that’s critical to this amalgam is the talent. Understandably, the traditional staff model is also facing a shaky future. Young lawyers have classically accepted terrible hours and a high-pressure work environment in the hierarchical firm structure in exchange for the gains of reaching partner status. In law, it’s seen as the price you pay. The problem with the traditional model is that partner profits are dwindling due to margins being squeezed, as well as the impact of globalisation and competition.

“We are seeing an increasing flow of lawyers who don’t want to work under the traditional legal model.”

Dawson predicts that the best lawyers will increasingly choose to leave behind the hostile working environment – and join emerging virtual law firms.

That means in future, firms will need to work to fulfil both the needs of more demanding and price-driven clients, as well as appeal to a talent pool of lawyers who have more options than ever before. It augurs the end of the traditional staff model.

“There is a cycle where you need to attract the best people to charge the highest fees and attract the best clients. If you’re not able to attract people with the right pay and conditions, that cycle starts to break down. Although they have the big clients, the capabilities and the solid foundation, large law firms also have the legacy of the partnership structure, staff practices and overheads.

New industry structures will emerge including changing relationships between large and niche firms:

Dawson predicts that clients will start to shift how they purchase legal services, not necessarily depending on the large law firms as they have in the past. But he sees it as unlikely that large firms will crumble, at least in Australia.

“What we are beginning to see here is that big firms are managing to transform themselves. But we’re also seeing the rise of smaller niche legal firms that are very well positioned.”

Increasingly it’s these nimble firms that are better placed to adapt to the new paradigm. “For the clients, they’re able to provide a quality service at an attractive price.”

Social media-driven reputation will allow networks of legal expertise to emerge:

Looking further into the crystal ball, Dawson confirms the role of social media in the legal landscape.

“All professional work will be determined by personal brands and presence that are significantly driven by social media, so these are critical capabilities for any lawyer in any firm.”

Finally, the big change for lawyers will be in how legal information is accessed. Dawson says that in the future he can see clients engaging an expert or broker to complement their online search for legal information.

“You’re not hiring a lawyer, per se. You need an expert as opposed to a search engine to say, ‘This is the most relevant reference. This is the info you need to consider.’ There is now also an opportunity for access to network experts who can engage clients in conversations and communities from which lawyers and their clients can discover the best information – a fundamental shift from the database aspect that has been so much of the legal information industry to date.”

My keynote on Embracing the Future looked at the broad trends shaping our world, and how they were shaping the world of education in particular. Peer learning is a fundamentally important trend today, describing how people learn increasingly from their peers rather than formal teachers. Indeed, the leading edge of any domain of study is driven by peers who share what they discover on the edges of their discipline.

One of the stories I told in my keynote was how a young Mexican man has been amply rewarded for his talent and his propensity to share, rather than formal education.

Image: Jordi Muñoz, Chris Anderson and Jon Callaghan of 3D Robotics Credit: Christopher Michel

The detailed story has been written up in Business Insider and other publications, but in short Wired magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson set up an online community DIY Drones to explore his passion, attracting over 60,00 enthusiasts.

One of the first participants was Jordi Muñoz, a 21 year-old Mexican in Tijuana, who was passionate – and extremely knowledgeable – about drones, helping push out the boundaries of what was possible.

“He was just ahead of us all,” Anderson recalls. “Nobody had grokked the whole picture the way he had.”

Without knowing anything about Muñoz other than his expertise, Anderson sent him money to develop his designs, and before long asked him to be his co-founder of his company 3D Robotics before he had met him. Formal qualifications were irrelevant. What mattered was his knowledge, and making that visible by sharing with others.

3D Robotics has recently raised an additional $64 million for a total of $99 million in funding.

While formal qualifications will still be of value for some time, those who are looking for the most talented will always know where to look: the open spaces where the best in the world are learning and sharing with their peers.

Zuckerman began by running through the severe challenges for the news industry, going on to highlight branded content as the next source of growth for the industry. Below are a few slides from his excellent presenatation.

BCG sees branded content growing at a 21% rate over the next 5 years. I believe it is likely to grow faster than this.
Source: Boston Consulting Group

A study across four countries showed some variation between countries, but overall a strongly favorable reception from consumers. Overall they identified a 21% net increase in likelihood to purchase due to branded content, and a 20% net increase in affinity for a brand. However if consumers already have a negative perception of a brand, branded content will accentuate that perception.

I was very interested by BCG’s taxonomy of branded content, in particular identifying native advertising as a distinct subset of branded content. There is much confusion over the language used in this domain, with ‘content marketing’ being commonly used, as well as ‘sponsored content’, ‘corporate publishing’, and of course still ‘advertorials’.

As made clear in this framework, one of the key distinctions is in the platform used. Many news publishers focus on creating content for their own platforms, yet they also have the capability to create outstanding content for use on other platforms, and indeed even the brand’s dedicated platforms. The intent of the content, from product-specific marketing through to emotion-based branding, implies very different types of content.

There is no question that branded content will be a massive part of the future of media. Its scope is far beyond traditional media boundaries. Brands are rapidly developing their own capabilities in both content creation and platform development. However established media companies have exceptional capabilities to play extremely successfully in this rapidly growing space.