Measure your change-readiness; find your leaders

The core competency of any business today is its readiness to adapt to the networked world.
How much is your business, not just preparing for change, but change-ready?

Measuring your level of change-readiness is the first step. Acting on what you learn from this excercise is the next. So, quite simply measure, the percentage of your people who are living in the network.

They are already adapting to survive. Follow them, encourage them, incentivize them and JOIN them.

What does that mean in real terms?

How many are active users of social networks (score higher for members of total communities - in which to take part you have to create part. Examples include facebook, myspace, bebo, twitter where the minimum requirement for involvement is that you create a profile).

They are learning the simple and powerful disruption of self-forming adhoc communities of purpose - the business units of the 21st century).

How many are creating blogs; with words, pictures, video or audio?
They are learning all about the disruption that we are all publishers now, all advertisers and all marketers now. They are learning how content connects people and people connect content. They are learning how to pool and share and create new value in value webs they control. They are creating networks of trust superceding anything the mass-focused centre can muster. And they are doing it inspite of, despite of, audience and for and with community.

How many have built and deployed their own widget? They have learned the user is the destination now, that it is more important to be taken with the user on their journey than to lead their horse to your chosen water.

Those who make widgets understand the content isn't theirs it is owned by the person who adopts it, who adapts it, who will pass it on with the same understanding to the next adhoc community of purpose they converse with.

So score your business for your social networkers, your bloggers and your widget makers.
You need to be beating the global averages - around 8% of internet users blog, more than 40% use social networks. The number of widgetisers can be lower - at present. We'll let you off with 5%.

Anything less and you need to take urgent action. Organise workshops, call in the experts but critically - listen to the people who are already doing it within your organisation. They are your keys to indiginous change - the most powerful kind. Listen and learn. This is an an important element of the next step: identifying your leaders.

So now get your venn diagram out.

Where those who blog, those who use social networks, and those who create widgets intersect, there you'll find those refusing to sheepwalk. They will be challenging your status quo and beating a path to success in the networked world.

These are the heretics. These are the people ready and willing to create and to be the eighth mass media. They understand WE are the distribution, the content, the 'user journey', how messages are transmitted... WE are the medium and the media carried within it.

We are the connections. We are also how the connections are made.

Support them, encourage them, incentivize them. They get the disruption - and what to do about it.

Be led by them.




As always, this is a work in progress, some thoughts in beta. Your adaptions welcome.

The eighth mass media: live and in person

I'm speaking at Widget Web Expo in London next week (Oct 6-7) on: The User is the Destination Now - Widgets Role in the Eighth Mass Media.
It's the first time I'll have rolled out the whole Eighth Mass Media thing to a live, in-your-face audience. So that'll be interesting.
Ivan Pope has organised a great line-up of speakers, so I hope you'll join me there. If it's anywhere near as good as Widget Web Expo New York it'll be a cracker.

That's next week. Today I'm in London to meet and interview Clay Shirky (with my copy of Here Comes Everybody in hand for him to sign!)

A big thank you to those of you who contributed questions here and on twitter. You'll see the results - thanks the Flip Mino I'm testing, on this blog later this week

Guest Post: Khris Loux on the threat of free widgets

I met Khris Loux at Widget Web Expo (having heard him speak at Widgety Goodness). Khris is making the widget revolution happen on a daily basis at his company JS-Kit. He has a POV about how free widgets carry a threat to publishers' own business models and proposes greater transparency as the way ahead.


I'm delighted to host the following guest post from him.

Every first year economics student learns that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” However, a growing number of widget providers would have publishers believe otherwise, promising powerful services at zero cost.  But these services require teams of developers, real data centers, and serious bandwidth. No economy-of-scale can change the fact that these inputs aren’t cheap.  So how do all these “free” services get paid for, much less provide the return that entrepreneurs and investors expect?
In some respects, the silence from most service providers on this question is completely understandable.  Business models are still “under construction” in this space and companies have no incentive to share with rivals.

On the other hand, there exists the strong possibility that some providers keep mum on such details not to protect competitive information, or because they don’t have an answer, but because they know their publisher & visitors won’t like that answer - that they plan to monetize the publishers’ content, visitors, traffic, SEO, ad space, or some combination thereof, once they’ve become embedded in publishers’ sites.  Breaking this news too early stifles adoption -- better to wait and grow.

While this strategy is understandable, I wholeheartedly disagree because “teaser services” are ultimately self-defeating.  The conflicting interests they usually conceal always come to the surface eventually and, when they do, trust suffers. The JS-Kit strategy is one of openness, rapid innovation, and great services and support while keeping focused on creating, not controlling.  This strategy is not without its own risks.  It requires open communication about our business model [50/50 ad revenue sharing] and straight answers to questions about control over data, users, traffic and SEO.

As you well know “free widgets!” talk is cheap, which means that we have to demonstrate our commitments by building openness into our services themselves. We have a long way to go, but here’s a summary of our commitment to publishers and how we’re making it real.
I'd appreciate your feedback on our direction.


You control your data - Data Portability

We think publishers should not only have access to the content generated on their site [via RSS, APIs] but the ability to change providers as seamlessly as possible.  That’s why we where the first third-party comment service to release “Sync” which automatically updates all new comment data directly into the blog platform in real time [Blogger, WordPress, more soon]. This gives publishers the flexibility to revert, or opt-out, at any time without loss of data or risky and time-consuming conversions.  We see Sync as a powerful feature in itself and as a signal that we are willing to compete purely on the basis of innovation.

You keep your Visitors – OpenID

While mobility and choice are important to publishers, they are valued by end-users as well. The era of “walled gardens” is ending and open standards for cross-domain user identification and content portability are gaining momentum.  We believe that this is a good thing for sites and visitors alike.  As a first step, we have chosen to back OpenID as the only solution for all JS-Kit services.  Of course, we support publishers’ existing login systems, but we will not trap publishers into our services by offering an alternative proprietary login.  Proprietary logins only benefit the service provider by capturing publisher visitors.  These logins cannot be re-used by the publisher with other services and are next to impossible to convert to a new system.


You keep 100% of SEO

Another area where publishers are rightly concerned about service providers’ motives is control over traffic and SEO.  Many “free” service providers use the publishers very own content to entice traffic to their “community” site.  These community sites offer the promise of increased return traffic yet in reality they are just vehicles to show ads or, more audaciously, offer to sell the traffic back to the original site as a lead!  In each case, the publisher has traded their creative content and hard-earned traffic without receiving a penny in compensation.

You keep your traffic - No JS-Kit Destination Site

Our public commitment is that JS-Kit does not provide a destination site and, if we did in future, it would be opt-in for our publishers.
Our philosophy is that the “point” of aggregation should be where the visitor is, not yet another destination competing for finite traffic.  JS-Kit’s newly launched Visitor Profile lets users follow whatever threads interest them, but it’s designed to bring tools and information to the community on publishers’ sites rather than siphon this traffic to a JS-Kit hosted domain.  On the in-bound side of the traffic equation, publishers shouldn’t have to worry about SEO for the content that originates on their sites.  JS-Kit recently launched an upgraded SEO solution that gives every publisher full SEO for the comments on their site– 100% to the publisher.


Distributed services are revolutionizing the way web sites are deployed. 

They drive down the cost, risk and time required to launch rich, interactive websites and enable new, cross-site and social networking applications that benefit both visitors and publishers.  And there’s much more to come.  Different providers have different understandings of the opportunity and of the role they should play.  JS-Kit believes that the greatest opportunity lies in the role of a “trusted third party” that enables and defends the interests of both publishers and visitors. 

To do this, we build new services, features, business models, etc. - that avoid possible conflicts of interest and address these conflicts openly when they do arise.  We’ll continue to push for respectful dialogue about issues of control and ownership and will continue to deliver technologies that win through openness, innovation, and world-class support vs. lock-in.


Khris Loux, CEO  JS-Kit
khris@js-kit.com
http://js-kit.com

How to adapt to survive the 21st century

I believe in evolution. That is, I believe in complex adaptive systems which use relatively simple rules to create immensely complex outcomes - such as the weather, the economy, ideas, messages, the internet, ourselves, and life on Earth. They do this by a process of iteration, selection and amplification.

I have discussed (The Perfect Storm: A Fourth Element) how I believe it is no coincidence that the fastest growing company in history (google) exists at the same time as the internet: two complex adaptive systems are coming together (the economy and the internet) to fan the flames.
We are looking ahead into a golden age. And you will be part of it; If you adapt to survive.

One outcome of evolution is that there are always casualties - things that get dampened out of existence rather than amplified to success. Don't be a diplodocus. (image shared via flickr by cpurrin1)

I have a handful of simple rules for success for individuals driven by the idea that in order to adapt to survive in any given environment the first and primary requisite is that you are living in that environment (told you these rules were simple...)

So I always suggest:

Write a blog: Discover how easy it is to be a publisher, how easy it is to create and share content, how easy it is to form groups of shared purpose in networks of trust, how easy it is to find relevant content and for relevant people to find you. More.

Build a widget: You have to start by trying to guess who might choose to share your widget or be enthused or impressed enough to pass it on - which raises a whole bag of questions. More. Discover not only that we are all publishers now, we all distributors, too - and all of us are advertisers.

To which I'll add:
Join a social network: Discover the easy-to-use tools that are making group-forming ubiquitous (more on why this is so critical here).

What tips do you have? What other advice for individuals and groups do you have to help them adapt to survive in the networked world as it comes to dominate the 21st century?

Portability is the new pointworthy: Why links won't matter

I often advise teams creating content to focus on doing what is worth pointing at - the pointworthy.What I mean by this is that the web is awash with repeated press releases.

They don't stand out so you're less likely to have your half-heartedly re-written and rushed-out version pointed at by the fickle citizens of the web than something they find genuinely, stand-out, useful (and relevant).

Do loads of what everyone is doing and you're lost in the blur. Do the right stuff and other people will point you out.

But, with the shift towards portability in rss, widgets, gadgets, apps (etc) distribution becomes more complex; less about a central destination from which to broadcast (and to which to be pointed) and more about networks of people looking at and sharing among each other.

In the world of user as destination we have to think about a web in which links don't matter.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Links perform a fantastic task in extending networks of trust. They point people who are interested in one piece of content, or one person's view, at another they might find useful.

They did a great job at discovering people through content.

But we're entering a world in which content is discovered through people.

Here being pointed at is less important than being taken with.

Of course you still have to have something useful and relevant for someone to choose to take your service or content with them.

And your service or message should be adaptable by the receiver so they can better shape it to be relevant to the community of purpose they are currently interacting with.

The rules that make something pointworthy remain true. You can't just make your press releases into an rss, for example.

But portability is the new linking.

It's how we share stuff with each other, through our connections with and to each other.Users are off on their own journeys and if you aren't ready or useful enough to be taken with them and shared among them, you'll be left on your own.

By the way, you can take FasterFuture with you (latest posts and tweets) in the widget you'll find at the bottom of the left column.