next09

Audio: Chris Anderson reading Free (for free!)

2009-07-10T09:13:44Z

Currently I'm listening to Chris Anderson reading his new book called Free. And as you would expect, the audio book is free (as in beer). Funny enough, there is another, abridged (!) version available at audible.com that sells for $7.49. Why?

Because, as the Audible.com listing explains,"Get the point in half the time! In this abridged edition, the author handpicked the most important and engaging chapters and points, cutting three hours from the length without losing key concepts. Time is money!"

In another attempt to do what he preaches, Chris has also released the complete ebook on Scribd (embedded below) and Google Books (the latter only in the US). Now there are no excuses left for not reading (or listening to) his latest book. If you prefer a shorter introduction to the topic, you may want to start with Chris' Wired essay published last year. Chris Anderson, for those who don't know the man, is editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail.

Video: Can Creativity be Crowdsourced?

2009-06-17T16:10:10Z

Crowdsourcing Creativity seems to be an irritating issue, at least for agencies whose traditional value promise is based on their own creative staff that cannot easily be replaced by a crowd of creatives from the outside. So the typical question that always comes to mind is who can be trusted. Katarina Skoberne from OpenAd and Ross Kimbarovsky of crowdSPRING both sat on a panel at next09, presenting their different approaches to the same problem.

And while OpenAd and crowdSPRING didn't chose the same route to solve the problem of trust, they share the conviction to trust the network. Typically, their clients get to chose from a lot of creative work done by many different people, giving them the chance to pick what they like and think works best for their needs. So it's not the question whether they trust the notorious design student or not, but the networks, processes and platforms Katarina and Ross have built.

Crowdsourcing Creativity has the disruptive potential to be a game changer for the agency business. So if you happen to be a creative or agency worker, you better watch this video, check out both sites and prepare for the inevitable future.

Three More Rules for the Chief Meaning Officer

2009-06-16T15:52:50Z

Tim Leberecht of frog design just came up with three more rules for the chief meaning officer, bringing their number to a total of ten. As he spoke at next09 some weeks ago, he had just seven rules. Watch the video here.

Seriously, Tim wrote an extensive and thoughtful essay on his topic. Clearly a must-read for everyone in this space of (social media) marketing.

We live in times of major uncertainty. The doom and gloom of the economic crisis, the deterioration of mass markets, the pervasiveness of the digital lifestyle, and the fragmentation of traditional societal institutions are not only inducing anxiety but also inspiring a search for simplicity and noneconomic value systems. Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute to -- or to experience -- something "meaningful" rather than to acquire more things. Trust and reputation are no longer enablers for the exchange of goods, services, and information, they are replacements for them. Values are the new value. Meaning is succeeding customer satisfaction. "The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It's to make meaning," writes management consultant John Hagel.

This new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement -- as we learned from Barack Obama's presidential campaign. A "meaning surplus" will become imperative: Only businesses that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty. Out: bottom-line pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers, ethicists, and social entrepreneurs.

Although all corporate functions are affected by this path-finding moment, marketing is best positioned to lead the transformation. Effort is required to move beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal of facilitating transactions. Marketing must now create "meaning" through actions and interactions. What is needed is the marketer as chief meaning officer -- someone who negotiates a "New Deal," a new social contract between brands, their stakeholders, and society at large.

Video: Lee Bryant and User-Driven Companies

2009-06-15T13:39:55Z

The interactive age has brought us a bunch of new organisational trends and hot topics for discussion. So these days, everybody is talking about ideas like user-centric design, crowdsourcing, user-driven companies or even the wisdom of crowds. While CRM is getting tired, VRM strives to be the next cool interactive thing.

This changes the perspective from traditional company-focused to consumer-focused. In his talk at next09, Lee Bryant from Headshift walked us through the implications of this shift. Axel Bruns summed it up like this:

Perhaps there's a need to return to the idea of corporate organisations with a social mission - restoring an understanding of social responsibility which has all but disappeared from the corporate world in recent decades, in favour of plundering available resources. The current financial crisis is caused in good part by the failure to balance profit motives and social responsibilities, of course.

So, for a company to be user-driven, it must also be people-driven - and this needs to be represented not least also in the company's internal organisational structure. A company cannot just be soft on the outside, and hard on the inside; change for the better must start with the company's own employees - they must be allowed to be human, too, and to engage with customers. There must be consistant values throughout the business.

What, then, will the successful companies of the future look like? They'll need to be very keenly aware of the ecosystem within which they operate; they need to create a shared meaning and purpose; and they need to trust their network to be able to support them. Some of this is starting to happen externally, around companies - but crucially, it must also happen within them.

So what should companies do? In the words of Ton Zijlstra:

Companies need to ask themselves whether their goal is pure profit maximisation in the short-term, leading to pillage and plunder attitudes, or sustainable income by real value creation over the long term. If the latter, companies need to find balance between respect, social status and profit. If you opt for profit in the short-term it will cost you your respect and social status, which in turn will come back to hurt the company itself. Large companies as Unilever started out with social and profit goals. Banking was a respected profession serving communities until they descended to plunder (I think it started with the introduction of financial derivatives in the mid 1980's, when financial investment products became completely disconnected from underlying companies and their value/values). Bankers may be rich now, but not respected or with highly regarded social status.

The slides of Lee's talk can be found at SlideShare.

Video: Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer

2009-06-08T12:55:54Z

Tim Leberecht of frog design was supposed to speak about "The Shrinking Brand - Marketing in a Small World". In fact, this is what it still reads on the official conference programme.

But after listening to Jeff Jarvis' keynote on "The Great Restructuring," Umair Haque's pledge for "Constructive Capitalism," and Andrew Keen's rebuttal of both, he felt the need to change the focus of his talk and approach it from a broader view. So he came up with the "Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer". His key points, in a nutshell:

As brands face an unprecedented level of competition, transparency, and consumer empowerment on the social web, 'meaning' is becoming the new powerful currency that connects brands with their brandholders in the 'share economy.'

The new marketing leader, the Chief Meaning Officer, is a strategic activist, social media entrepreneur, constant innovator, and integrator. The Chief Meaning Officer has the potential to transform business through meaningful marketing - marketing that consistently creates added social value, not as an afterthought but a sine qua non.

While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and activating the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good - and for profit. Brands that have a reason to exist, an argument to win, will be more appealing than ever.

The Seven Rules:
1. Listen and converse (and converge)
2. Atomize your brand
3. Activate your customers
4. Think and act like a media company
5. Give more than you take
6. Be the change
7. Be yourself

In the spirit of transparency he preaches, Tim put the slides for his talk on SlideShare. Please don't forget to rate his talk at SpeakerRate.

Video: Itay Talgam and Sharing Creativity

2009-06-03T13:05:16Z

I was really looking forward to post this amazing video. It covers the closing keynote Itay Talgam gave at this year's next conference. He is a conductor from Israel, and he showed us a beautiful and subtle lesson in leadership.

Who is responsible for the music experience? The conductor? The orchestra? The audience? All of them? And what exactly does the conductor do? Itay shows different styles of conducting, corresponding with different management attitudes. If you were a conductor, what sort of conductor would you be?

Please rate his keynote at SpeakerRate.

Update: Spiegel Online has a kind of transcript (in German) of Itay's speech with some video examples embedded.

Video: Brian Solis and the Social Economy

2009-05-29T09:21:17Z

Brian Solis opened the Main Conference Day of next09 with his keynote on the Social Economy. I don't think he refers to a third sector in economies between the private and the public sector. His topic is the Human Network.

The real story is the human network and the Social Economy that fosters the conversations that serve as its currency - on and offline.

But it's not just about the tools...it's about the emotional and psychological connection between people and our investment in the personal traits that others find irresistible.

Relationships....RELATIONSHIPS...count for everything here, and they're measured by the mutually beneficial rewards that all parties experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection.

While Jeff Jarvis, Umair Haque and their critic Andrew Keen focused more or less on the economical part of the Share Economy, Brian Solis emphasised the importance of sharing, culminating in a much-cited phrase: We are what we share.

Please rate Brian's keynote at SpeakerRate.

Video: Larry Lessig and the Hybrid Economy

2009-05-27T16:21:14Z

In his latest book titled Remix, Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig outlined the potential he sees in a new Hybrid Economy -- one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies.

That future will benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate.

What Lessig calls "sharing economy" is more or less what we call Share Economy. Two weeks ago, Lessig gave a talk at Trendtag where he explained his vision for a remix culture no longer restricted by outdated copyright law. Definitely worth watching.

Is the Share Economy the New New Economy?

2009-05-25T12:28:52Z

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, wrote an intriguing piece dubbed The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity for the latest issue of Wired. Which brings me to the question: Is what we call Share Economy more or less the same animal as Anderson's New New Economy?

As you may remember, Kevin Kelly published his best-selling book New Rules for the New Economy back in 1998. While some believed this book belonged to the trash bin after the 2000-2001 burst of the dot-com bubble, it brings in fact a lot of still valid insights. Kevin Kelly now goes a lot further when he writes about The New Socialism, as he did for Wired.

At next09, there have been a lot of post-marxist reminiscences, one observer noted. Anderson and Kelly now provide us with the background story.

This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it's the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

Take Detroit. The only way for the Big Three to survive, Charles C. Mann writes in "Beyond Detroit", is to harness the innovation of the myriad startups working on automotive technology.

Or take Google. As Steven Levy explores in "The Secrets of Googlenomics", the company deploys a bottom-up model for ad sales, dictated not by firm handshakes but by hard math.

Or even society at large. A century ago, mass collective action could be organized only by the state. Now we have the Web. Kevin Kelly resurrects socialism--without the state--in "The New Socialism".

To all the usual reasons why small companies have an advantage, from nimbleness to risk-taking, add these new ones: The rise of cloud computing means that young firms no longer have to buy their own IT equipment, which helps them avoid having to raise money or take on debt. Likewise, the webification of the supply chain in many industries, from electronics to apparel, means that even the tiniest companies can now order globally, just like the giants.

Chris Anderson: The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity
Kevin Kelly: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

A different perspective on next09

2009-05-18T15:39:11Z

Our media partner My-MIKI.com has updated the conference MIKI for the next09. A MIKI, remember, is a kind of mashup between magazine and wiki. It combines the look & feel of a print magazine with the easy editing of a wiki. You can embed it like a YouTube video or a SlideShare presentation. But it works best in full-screen mode.

The MIKI includes tons of photos and even the conference videos produced and hosted by sevenload. It provides you with a different perspective on the very same content. It's definitely worth a look!

Reactions to next09 from around the Web

2009-05-15T15:46:54Z

Over the last several days, I've read tons of blog posts and articles from around the Web about this tiny conference we had the pleasure to host on May 5 and 6 in beautiful but then rainy Hamburg. Now I'm ready to share this stuff with you, in no particular order.

Tim Leberecht from frog design, who himself gave a talk about "The Seven Rules of the Chief Meaning Officer", wrote a post in which he calls next09

one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums that stands out in the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international attendees, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees comprised of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

He then continues:

In talking to many German attendees, my impression was that the German creative community shows no signs of a downturn. The German start-up scene in particular, if that is any indicator, is alive and kicking. There are many new promising web 2.0 firms run by smart entrepreneurs (many of them funded by entrepreneurs who made a fortune during the dot com heyday), and there is a lot of money to go around.

A few days later, Tim wrote another post well worth reading, in which he states:

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government - you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy - transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing - and you have a winner.

Axel Bruns, who also happens to be a speaker, did a lot of liveblogging from the conference. Kudos to him!

Maria Sipka from Linqia gave a talk (do I smell a pattern here?) about Collaborative Communities. She writes:

Our team attended the Next09 conference in Hamburg this week and rate this event as amongst the best in Europe. With over 1,300 participants, 100+ speakers and moderators and a host of innovative sponsors and partners, the event exceeded our expectations.

Brian Solis opened the Main Conference Day with his well-rated keynote on the Social Economy. He has a lengthy piece up on his blog, titled "Significant" and dealing with the stuff he presented on stage. See also this post with some beautiful pictures (more on flickr).

Ian Forrester from BBC who had covered for David Brain from Edelman (thanks again for that, Ian!) explains what happened to him on stage at next09.

Andrea Vascellari, one of the official conference bloggers, posted interviews with Brian Solis, Steve Rubel and Stowe Boyd, videotaped some sessions and also reported on episode #447 of FIR (For Immediate Release - twice weekly podcast of Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz on public relations and technology).

Another must-read is the series of posts Dennis Howlett wrote on ZDNet. Dennis states:

NEXT09 is one of Europe's most important conferences. It brings together some of the edgiest thinkers from around the world, people who challenge accepted norms and put some of the big issues into sharp relief.

And:

Attending NEXT09 was a breath of fresh air for me. As seems to be the way, there's always a good showing by controversial polemicists. You won't for example get two more strident and different speakers than Jeff Jarvis and Andrew Keen.

Elmine Wijnia did a really moving video, embedded below, but doesn't seem to be happy with her conference experience.

Ton Zylstra covered the sessions by Jan Schmidt, Lee Bryant and, of course, Jeff Jarvis.

Robin Wauters of TechCrunch interviewed Jeff Jarvis, Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström. Obviously he also had fun with the twittering coffee machine at next09.

Viktoria Trosien from Tiburon-TV did tons of video interviews at next09. So far, she has posted three of them: with Laurent Burdin of SinnerSchrader, Darius Miranda from Wells Fargo and Jeff Jarvis.

I'm sure I've missed a lot of stuff, but that's all for now. I'll prepare another post in German on the Fischmarkt blog. What striked me while sifting through all this was that some of the Germans seemed to have visited another conference than the english-speaking crowd. Will have to think about what this means.

Video: Andrew Keen and the Digital Vertigo

2009-05-13T12:24:05Z

After the first two opening keynotes by Jeff Jarvis and Umair Haque and a short break, Andrew Keen entered the stage to talk about the Digital Vertigo. Dubbed the Antichrist of Silicon Valley by some, he surely knows how to provoke opposition by the true believers in the audience.

In his keynote, which he delivered without any slides or stuff like that, he cited John McCain (without naming him) by admitting he doesn't know how to use a computer. Funny, but I have proof this is plain wrong. The photo below shows Andrew Keen sitting in the first row on May 5, playing with his MacBook Pro.

Gary Hoff from Sapient who spoke on day two obviously liked Andrew's keynote:

One of those great speeches where it smacks you in the face and says wake up. Like the credit crunch someone has to pay for the free binge of content.

Please go ahead and tell us what you think about it.

Video: Umair Haque and Capitalism 2.0

2009-05-12T08:41:33Z

The second opening keynote was delivered by Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab and a strong advocate of a radical changed capitalism. Like Tim O'Reilly did with the web, he calls this Capitalism 2.0. Maybe we'll see Capitalism 2.0 Conferences soon?

Haque's diagnosis is brilliant, but not easy to grasp for hardcore capitalists. According to Haque, capitalism is fundamentally broken. But he has some ideas on how to fix it. In a recent blog post he writes:

It is no coincidence that so many industries are in trouble simultaneously and so fast. The growth of the Zombieconomy is a Jupiter-sized wake-up call to today's leaders.

Here's the real problem.

Capitalism 1.0 is built on an obsolete set of ideals. What the 21st century needs are better ideals, to build a better kind of business on.

Fundamentally, we need organizations that can behave very differently. Telcos are a great example — they've been fighting tomorrow for decades. And the bill is now coming due.

That's a tough set of lessons to internalize. Recently, I gave a talk on Constructive Capitalism to a bunch of senior guys at a major international organization. They debated with me for close to an hour whether a better kind of capitalism was really necessary.

Frankly, I thought it was a bit funny that the debate was necessary at all. Hey, look — it's the simultaneous collapse of significant portions of the manufacturing and service sectors. Convinced yet?

Please don't forget to rate Umair Haque's keynote on SpeakerRate.

Video: Jeff Jarvis and The Great Restructuring

2009-05-07T20:08:41Z

Today is day one after the next conference 2009, and our partner sevenload already has the first couple of videos online. Chapeau! We start with the first keynote on the pre-conference day, held by Jeff Jarvis. His topic is The Great Restructuring of our times, caused by the Internet and now accelerated by the financial and economic crisis. His deck is available on SlideShare. Please go and rate his speech on SpeakerRate.

Beautiful Pictures from an Inspiring Conference

2009-05-07T13:19:29Z

While we are waiting for the conference videos to show up, it may be a nice pastime to watch this collection of beautiful event photos, taken by our official conference photographer. The best conference photos I've ever seen!