A colleague forwarded me a recent SmartBrief poll regarding the NY Times decision to erect a paywall for portions of it’s content.  The respondents were fragmented, the highest proportion (31%) saying the NY Times can do what they want.  Though a good percentage said they would simply go elsewhere if the NY Times wasn’t easily accessible.

What the newspaper industry has not yet realized (or refuses to come to grips with), is content is no longer king.  I bet we’ll see more media houses  focus on a freemium model.  Basic content (e.g. breaking news, sports scores, etc) are free.  Those are the tickets to ride the Google train.

That freemium model will be subsidized partly by advertising (today’s model) and partly as a cross-subsidy from products they try to upsell.  Want to read Thomas’ Freidman’s blog? That’ll be a $1.50 a month.  Want a commerative book of the best NY Times stories of the year?  How about an electronic edition delivered straight to your Kindle/iPad/gadget every morning?  They’ll sell premium content and convenience.

The content focus of these places will narrow as well.  Things like the stock prices in the WSJ will be eliminated. Why go to the WSJ when Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, or even my online broker has up to the minute pricing?  If it isn’t core to their offering, then it won’t be provided.

On reflection, it may be too sweeping a generalization to say all the media houses will all shift the way I suggest above.  However, I would bet that is the model for any new entrants into this space – especially with a focus on social media.  Topically focused blog networks (e.g. SBNation.com) are going to be an interesting contender in the media space.  They naturally aggregate a particular demographic on a topic (more attractive to advertisers) and build communities (due to participatory nature) that are more engaged and possibly more likely to consume an upsell.

Four-square is neat, but a little flat.  The depth of game-play is lacking right now.  The next step is scavenger hunts on a city-wide basis.  Imagine the game starting to drive users to places outside of their usual patterns – going across town to check-in and receive that last “item” to complete a set.

Regardless of the evolution of the game play (and scavenger hunts might not be it), the cool angle for location based games is driving foot traffic to retail locations.  Imagine the gap deciding to sponsor one part of a Four Square game.  All players that check in at a gap store receive a $5 coupon (or an in-game reward…).  In retail foot traffic is a huge driver of sales – that’s why mega malls first sprang up.  If a location based game can find the right game play that pushes players to go to places outside their usual patterns, watch retailers line up to shower them with cash.

The building block of a great team is trust. Everyone knows it – that’s why there are ropes courses, executive retreats, and hundreds of books about building trust amongst co-workers.  In my MBA Leadership class, my teacher shared an amazingly simple and effective technique for building trust on a new team.

We have broken out into teams for a class project. She asked us as a team to go off and answer three simple questions:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have and where are you in the birth order?
3. What was the most difficult thing you had to deal with as a child?

The increasing personal nature of the questions astounded me – I went into the exercise skeptical.  Would anyone really share anything personal for question 3?  My group (and I) surprised ourselves.  We spoke about issues about dealing with our parents, to self-image problems as a young child, and even someone shared how a serious childhood illness affected their personality to this day.  I was blown away. (You’ll have to ask me in person about my story .)

Since then the results have been remarkable.  Our team meetings are more efficient and we trust each other more.  We move quickly from debate to decision, and move on.  I feel closer to these people, these “strangers” that I barely know, than I do some of the people I have worked with for years.

Try the exercise with your team.  I bet you’ll be surprised by the results.

Image Credit: notsogoodphotography, Creative Commons

In advance of a half-day brainstorming session on all things digital, I have spent some time thinking about what the future holds the average consumer of data.

I want to know now: Real-time Data
The expectation for most people going forward will be that data is free (as in beer).  Between the open source movement, citizen journalism, and the NY Times paywall coming down, consumers have learned to expect their information for free.  Rightly or wrongly, the perception is here to stay.

Look to the rise of BNO (Breaking News Online) and their new iPhone app to foreshadow at least one future revenue model.  For $1 a month, one may receive push updates of breaking news from the BNO network. Reuters, but on meth.  Trading firms have long been willing to pay for up-to-the-minute news feeds (the best known example is Bloomberg), and we’ll see the same pattern filter into consumer and business information services. Though, surely at prices well below the average Bloomberg terminal. Technology advances like Pubsubhub and Gnip are only going to accelerate this pattern.

Help me cut through all the noise: Human powered filtering, aggregation & analysis
More data = more noise. People have been struggling with this since fifteen minutes after the first email was sent. As we have all noticed over the past year, the exponential growth of noise has only gotten worse.  Unfortunately, the technology tools to manage the noise are still in their infancy and out of the reach of most casual information consumers.  To be clear – the technology tools and habits still have too steep a learning curve for most casual consumers.

Most people are willing to pay for other people to do difficult (or unpleasant) tasks for them.  The two minute nightly news segment is just waiting to be reborn for the latest generation of information consumers.  The best pieces of content will be the short, impactful ones that summarize and analyze a broad breadth of real-time data.  The biggest difference between traditional information produces and modern day content will be the 1) expected speed to production and 2) the delivery formats.

Neither of these ideas is all that contrarian. Each is simply a pattern repeated from prior advances information processing.  The telegraph, the radio, and the television all gave rise to similar products based on these patterns.  The trick to figure out for this latest round of technological advancement is the packaging.

MTV is filming the Real World right now in Dupont Circle in DC.  There is an unoffical twitter feed, a google maps mashup by a local magazine, a few hashtags to track the real-time-verse (#rwdc and #rwwatch), and even a blog that rants against the local real world cast.  But where is MTV?

I’m sure a lot goes into producing a show like the Real World, since it takes about a year for the show to make it to TV.  But that’s WAY too long.  Imagine if MTV was able shoot, produce, and publish in the span of a day (or two) straight to Hulu.  Or even provided live unedited (and most likely pretty boring…) streaming via Ustream?

How long do you think before an enterprising young film student starts shooting the Real-time World in NYC? Complete with twitter feeds, community blog participation, the whole nine yards.  That would be a show to capture the attention of the next generation.

Guardian Media Group purchases Paid Content for $30 million.

Interesting piece of news, especially the paragraph that talks about The Guardian’s B2B publishing arm that organizes conferences & publishes business research articles. Granted, most of that is in trade magazines. However, I’m convinced the next 20 years will not be about fighting for dollars, but rather fighting for attention. We have to worry about the people stealing sales dollars out of our wallets & people stealing our audience’s attention. Watch for someone clever to coin a term like “audience ADD” that lays out the conundrum of an audience with too much information to pay attention to, let alone spend money for a premium product. Media Content producers will end up fighting each other for this attention, rather than dollars.

Traditionally, content producers saw their competitors as those that produce in the same niche, i.e. B2B, News, Entertainment, etc. In the future, regardless of content niche, all producers will end up competing with each other, rather than just those in their niche.

It’s going to get ugly fast for all content produces vying for attention. I’m not convinced that traditional media will “die” by any means. The next generation of media companies will most likely be a blend of traditional (broadcast, static) media and new media (conversation, dynamic). These will be ones that can blend the cost structure of new media (offset by user generated content) and the stable revenue generating models (advertising, subscription).

What do you think? How is the content industry going to shake out in the next few years?

James Surowiecki’s book, the Wisdom of Crowds lays out an interesting study of how large groups of diverse and independent individuals make better collective decisions than the “smartest” individual in the group. A crowd can accurately determine the number of jelly beans in a jar or estimate the value of a company. As James lays out in his book, a crowd produces a remarkably accurate depiction of “now,” the aggregation of all information and opinion on a given topic at a precise moment in time.

However, that aggregated picture will prevent true innovations arising from the aggregation of a crowd. An innovation represents a shift, a fundamentally new way of looking at the world and solving a problem. Innovations take people by surprise—they are unexpected and arise from a minority viewpoint of the world. Given the aggregative nature of a crowd, the collective picture of now will skew towards the majority opinion. Innovation does not happen in the majority; innovation happens in the fringes and upsets the majority viewpoint, altering the group’s aggregated viewpoint. A crowd can certainly seize upon a new idea and quickly assimilate it into the collective view, but don’t mistake assimilation for actual creation.

A woman on the metro ride home the other day collapsed in her seat. The entire train stared until a young man stepped up to help her. All of a sudden a few more people stepped over to lend a hand; someone called the train operator – in a brief moment a community had galvanized around a need and stepped in to offer assistance.

Two factors were at work in that instance, 1) a galvanizing external event and 2) social permission to act.

1) Galvanizing Actions

A community needs a rallying point; a purpose for existence. In the 1930’s, Friends of the National Zoo (FONZ) formed to promote Zoo safety after a child was bitten. That community still exists today and has extended their mission to fund raising, Zoo volunteering, and promotion of the National Zoo. In the online world, the same impetus to form a group is still needed. The transition to an online community changes nothing inherent in social psychology or the human impetus to form groups. As Clay Shirky points out [link to video], the internet makes it “ridiculously easy” to form groups. Now any external event reported online (blog, newspaper, home rolled website, etc.) can form the focal point for group formation.

2) Social Permission

As social creatures, people often look to others for social cues on how to act (permission). An online community presents unique challenge in that social cues need to be quite overt. Individuals that contribute need to be celebrated, poor behavior moderated and removed. An online community that does not provide overt social cues will suffer from poorly coordinated group actions and a lower level of group cohesion.

All communities need these two factors. The galvanizing action provides the impetus for group forming. Without it, no group will form. We see this in the executive space; the Corporate Executive Board [note I work here] saw quite a few groups form in response to FIN 48 and Sarbanes-Oxley. The social permission factor builds as the group grows. As more individuals contribute, more individuals feel comfortable contributing and therefore contribute. The Executive demographic is no different than other demographics in terms of why they form groups.

Jeremiah Owyang of the Web Strategist discusses a few of the implications of the copious amounts of personal information that Generation Y publicly shares through social networks. Any open (as in anyone may join) community that serves business executives will face a major challenge managing these implications and the surrounding privacy issues. Most business executives need to be very careful about what information they share and who they share it with.

A community that services business executives will have more success as private community. Conventional wisdom says that bigger is better, especially when it comes to social networks and communities. A greater number of users, a higher the rate of utilization and a larger amount of user-generated content are all advantages of a large, freely accessibly community.

While there are certainly large advantages to an open community, a closed network has two advantages that will trump free networks for executives:

Safety

A closed network of executives is a safe zone for members to learn and share. No need to worry about members of the press or vendors that may act inappropriately with shared information. Executives may share related experience, comment on past projects, and even review the ideas of peers without worrying about misappropriation or misinterpretation of their comments.

True Peers

Restricting a community to qualified members ensures a set of true peers that share similar backgrounds, experiences, and challenges. Responses from true peers will be more relevant and reliable given shared experiences. True peers have been there before and can provide more accurate feedback. Additionally, the commonality of experience shared across the participants will establish mutual trust and stronger peer groups than may otherwise be possible with executives.

Management consulting information media firms (e.g. Gartner, Forrester, Corporate Executive Board) are uniquely positioned to deliver both of these factors. They’ve already built the subscriber base of qualified users—their clients. Simply by closing off access to the outside world, they can create a safe environment to exchange information beyond the walls of an executive’s firm.

Better Decisions, One Peer at a Time

Sally, a senior executive, paces outside the conference room fidgeting with her BlackBerry. Inside sit eight displeased board members and a CEO under fire. Three hours prior the CEO handed a bombshell to Sally and told her to have recommendations to the board after lunch. The decision would impact a good chunk of the firm’s revenue. Every employee would feel the reverberation of a misstep. Ten years ago how would Sally have responded to that challenge? How will Sally respond in two years time? The decreasing costs of communication and the emergence of online only peer networks provide a hint as to the possibilities.

Quite a bit of attention has been paid to how companies interact with their customers. The rise of social networks has spawned new ways for businesses to solicit customer feedback (IdeaStorm) or find prospects (Hoover’s Connect). However, no one model has yet managed to fundamentally change the way the average executive interacts with their peers. The precipitous decline in communication costs, the rise of “social networks” and the validation of a commons based peer production models (e.g. Wikipedia), all point to a shift in how our society processes and produces information. In this I see the potential to shift how an executive makes decisions.

This blog will explore that potential. It will propose hypothesis, test them in the real world and share the findings here. I invite you to do the same, through your comments here and on your own blogs.

But first, let’s back up to examine a bit of the “why now?” aspect.

Provenance: Less Time, More Information

1. Compressed Decision-Making Cycles
Compared to five years ago, the average time to decision for an executive has compressed significantly. The “always on” power of Email, Blackberry, and global operations has institutionalized a reactive decision-making mode. Traditional methods of supporting executive decision making, specifically traditional management consulting, no longer provide timely support. Executives need information faster.

2. Needles in the Haystack
The cost of discrete information is near free thanks to Google. Never before in the history of humankind could we find the exact make and model of a carburetor in a 1967 Chevy Impala and four stores to buy it in less than thirty seconds. However, that doesn’t help us solve ambiguous, ill-defined, experience-based problems.

3. Peer Review
Peer review has always been a component of decision making. Sultans, Presidents, even Tony Soprano have all had a grand vizier, a cabinet, or a consigliere. However, too often these peers are too close to the issue and bring their inherent biases to bear in their feedback. The expansion of the Internet and asynchronous communication tools will enable executives to tap the collective wisdom of peers from across the globe.

A Wikipedia model for business executives is preposterous. I do not see a world in which marketing plans, financial statements, or advertising copy is produced via a Wikipedia analog. Those types of information products do not lend themselves to a commons production method due to their nature – in other words not modular and requiring a fair bit of effort to produce. However, a global network of executives that share common experiences could provide input on common set of challenges and advise the best way forward. We know that model works. Companies like the Corporate Executive Board [note – this is where I work], Gartner, and Forrester all make their bread and butter talking to senior executives about their challenges

What We Believe

Ten years ago, Sally would have walked in to that conference room with little more than her own experience and the thoughts of her close personal network. Not much to gamble a career on.

In our vision of the future, Sally walks into that Boardroom with six solid recommendations from executives that had similar experience and succinctly shared feedback on Sally’s proposed plan. Sally receives reliable feedback at the right time in order to inform the right decision.

How do we bring our vision to fruition? Where do we go from here? This blog will explore the roadmap to building a community that supports decision making. Your input and feedback will be critical. It may be that this hasn’t happened before simply because it cannot. Reach out, share your thoughts, and hopefully together we’ll build an idea that can increase the effectiveness of executives and their enterprises.

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