This is what its all about:

Are YOU willing to de-school in straight line thinking & re-school in the new literacy of commerce & communication? (And it’s not Social Media.) In our networked society, you either move beyond thinking about marketing, media & business as either digital or non-digital, to have the competitive advantage or hemorrhage the bottom line.

Our interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product & service creation, mass media & marketing. It is about the massive flows of people, who are connecting, collaborating, organizing & creating in a manner that has nothing much to do with a linear approach.

Learn in an interactive Virtual MasterClass, premised upon No Straight Line principles:

-      How to transition into a “blended reality” business & marketing framework, creating meaningful customer experiences to power business success

-      How to harness the power of the networked society to “co-innovate” a customer-centered brand

-      How to align the untapped “hidden assets” in your company with Marketing & Communications to drive sales

You can register here

Also:

(1) Recording and slides are provided after MasterClass

(2) TWO attendees have the opportunity to be selected for HOTSEAT “No Straight Line” advice from me during the MasterClass. You are asked to submit a write-up of your “straight line” situation (less than 150 words) to support@authorsglobe.com by Friday, June 11, 5 pm EST.

Patrick Holden was brought up in London. He visited a dairy farm near Epping aged five and decided he wanted to milk cows. He studied biodynamic agriculture at Emerson College in 1972 and started a community farm in West Wales in 1973.

The 93 hectare mixed organic farm is now the longest established organic dairy farm in Wales, with a herd of 65 Ayrshire cows - the milk from which is being made into an unpasteurised cheese by his son Sam. Patrick still milks his cows at weekends.

He has worked for the Soil Association since 1988 and as Director since 1995. During that period income has risen from £200,000 to £10 million and sales of organic food from £50 million to £2 billion.

He is a regular broadcaster and speaker and was responsible for Tony and Pat Archer’s conversion in 1985 and still advises for the Archers on matters organic. He was awarded the CBE for services to organic farming in 2005.

More on the Do Lectures

This would be awesome even if it wasn't titled "I'm going to realign your chakras, mother******."

The caption to this piece reads, (Via My Love For You.)

And what has that got to do with anything? Nothin’ other than it came from the Urban Outfitters Crew

A really good customer engagement project

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16230215@N08/4066005402

WHY is Google winning? And what does it tell us about the future?A fortnight ago, Rupert Murdoch told Australian Sky that he would stop Google from indexing all of his content, preventing it from becoming a one-stop aggregator.  Murdoch has been saying for a while that he wants to stop his newspapers haemorrhaging cash by charging for online content. He is right to wage the paid content battle – but there is a bigger battleground.  Today everything in business is structured around networks. Everything which was linear is now network-oriented, and the winners are those companies who can align the economics with the ecosystem. That can be a start-up or an established player with vision. Google’s innovation was its business model – not its search technology. Alta Vista was the better search engine, and Yahoo the more dominant one, but Google developed the business model that home-grown Espotting had pioneered.

That twist of fate gave it a clever ruse to be in control without looking in control, to establish massive network effects not by organising the world’s information, as it claims, but by organising the economics of the world’s information.

Sharing drives commerce in the networked society

Writes Julie Meyer, and she continues

When the consumer wakes up and realises the value of the personal information they give away in the process of browsing and searching the internet, then Google could find itself in trouble. Consumers – like every other kind of content creator – will want a cut of the value of their personal information, and will shift to a new search engine that offers them one.

Something that I have been exploring over the last few years – the business model for the networked society is different to the business model of the industrial society. Something that enrages certain people – but it is inevitable.

The unknown, or the incomprehensible makes us naturally fearful, and so we instinctively withdraw. This is the time to replace our fear of the unknown with curiosity, to embrace the true possibilities of the networked society because in doing so will make you and your company commercially more successful.

You can't be nimble when you tool big 2ost Century business models are as redundant as the 35 acre Packard Plant in Detroit

The Packard Plant in Detroit, a 35-acre site, that once was considered to be state of the art engineering, lies derelict, its workers long gone. Today, Detroit and Flint Michigan are the equivalent of a third world country in a first world one. You cannot be nimble when you scale big. But it does not have to be this way, we need to discard the baggage of a linear way of doing things and embrace a No Straight Line approach to the networked society. Then we are ready to not only survive but, thrive in a non linear world. To do nothing means ultimately the costs of maintaining the status quo will inevitably exceed the cost to change – Detroit and Flint Michigan are testament to that.

SMLXL archives on the economics of sharing

Gränsfors make one the finest forged axes in the world. It has become more than just an axe. It is an icon for quality and a belief that there is another way of making things.

And I felt compelled to celebrate the Axeness of an Axe. Gabriel’s talk is well worth listening to, as he describes how he built the finest axe in the world, how he dealt with marketing and distribution, how he built trust into the very DNA of his products, and how he took away unnecessary and costly production processes and added a beautiful thing called knowledge. It was a masterclass in every way possible.

More views on Do here

Local Motors: the car the people built Online and Offline

Recently I wrote a series of posts called Commonwealth in the Networked Society. There was one on Big Pharma and open source, one on open source mobility run from the University of Rotterdam called c,mm,n, and one on a company called Local Motors. I picked up a story published in the Sunday Times this week on Local Motors.

And I felt I had to put a few things straight, as the article focus’s on the hysteria around twitter / social meeeedija without offering up some of the more particular insights that makes the Local Motors concept so important. Something that Lord Mandleson might want to consider?

The Local Motors story is enthralling from start to finish:

For example, the story of Jay Rogers whose Grandfather owned the Indian Motorcycle company, then as a consequence of being a Marine for nine years, and watching America’s addiction to oil, Jay felt compelled to find a more sustainable method of building cars and then pulling together a methodology that is a business and marketing model of our times.

These are some of the key points…

We slept like a common whore with the devil lusting for oil: Noam Chomsky

Local Motors fundamentally changes the relationship to supply and demand

Local Motors utilises a distributed knowledge network which is both Hyperlocal and Superglobal – a beautiful blend of online and offline. Something that the news article singularly fails to convey…

At Local Motors, Open Source and Creative Commons are not dirty words. In one year 44,000 designs were submitted to Local Motors, and 3600 innovators have shared their knowledge and insights.

Cars are developed 5x faster than traditional cars, and with more than 100x less capital. ‘You can’t be nimble,’ says Jay, ‘if you have to tool big’

The use of Micro-Factories which provide an engaged experience for customers to come together, learn about cars, build their own Local Motors car.

But Jay also makes the point that Micro factories redistribute wealth into communities around the country rather than building supertanker factories. This is very interesting, especially as in the next decade we need to be radical about power; realistic about money; and relentless on innovation without using the gargantuan sums of money previously spent in the past.

Ariel Ferreira, in an interview with the Sunday Times this week said, The experience is going to change the face of the auto industry, the process of building the car is going to become almost as important as the product itself.

Moreover it is this ability to allow knowledge and information to flow online and off, to co-create; meaning, deep context, and to share economically that are some of the clear pointers to what networked economics is all about. It was Kevin Kelly In his book Out of Control that described a world of co-evolved customers and here we are. So markets are conversations, business is a conversation, marketing is a conversation, these things bust silo mentality.

Compare that to the debacle of the NHS IT system, its gigantian cost and its epic failure, or the myopic focus on targets where hospitals have to fit people around systems that will ultimately fail. The flexible economics of networked co-creation far outweigh  the unwieldy nature of Too Big To Fail.

What we need is a better process. In Communities Dominate Brands I described a model that I described as the 4C’s:

[1] Commerce [2] Culture [3] Community [4] Connectivity.

It is when these four separate stands become tightly interwoven that interesting things happen. Again a blended reality, rather than a siloed one – surely Local Motors lives up to that idea. Moreover, I think it was Marshall McLuhan who wrote, that  a medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities.

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

Dave mentions Reed's Law – the law of group forming networks. Another thought that has crossed my mind is that there is a great deal of discussion around self-serving advertising engines, again this is the start of how the role of commercial messaging will evolve in this social interactive media ecology. In my view open api's and widgets, being used within the context of Reeds Law – defines a new paradigm of marketing, communication and commerce.

For example David asks

Who gets to create content?
Any and everyone
Who gets to distribute content?
Any and everyone
Who controls the user experience?
The user is the destination now, they control their ownA-to-anywhere journey

And, in (social) networks the broadcast message doesn’t arrive because are already looking at, and pointing to and, talking to each other.

Different model see to a captive audience – They aren’t your groups, they are theirs. They aren’t your messages, they are theirs. Marketing is not done to them, it is done by them.

And yet we are still trying to stuff the same old furniture of advertising into a completely different model of communication.

 It is often said that that what works in one country, does not work in another. Especially when it comes to mobile – an argument I wholeheartedly refute.The reason being that human beings as a race, are in fact more alike than we care to admit. We share the same gene pool for a start. This is important when we understand that we are programmed to be a "we species" – a social and networking species – with an innate need to connect and communicate.

And that is why we inevitabley move towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for life. Any piece of technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, get stuff done – will be adopted.I often muse on the reasons why sms is so universally adopted as a communication tool. It's because we as a species do in fact communicate via short messages – constantly. A behaviour that we learnt millennia ago.

The mobile society – is completely different to the industrial society, it requires a new logic and a new way of thinking of how to create business, civil governance, health care and education.

The Mobile Society already exists, dotted across the 4 corners of the globe – yet it does not exist in any one country. This is because we are in transition from one type of economy to another, the collapse of the banking system recently perhaps a painful symbol of that transition.

But also the reason why it is not universally adopted is because there are vested interests that do not want the mobile society to flourish – as it signifies [1] a re-ordering of business models, [2] flows of communication [3]  the appearance of new gate keepers in the information distribution wars. This is a natural pattern when society changes structurally.

So the way forward is to truly understand how the Mobile Society can benefit us all – business being but only one piece of this jigsaw. In my recent work I have come to the conclusion that we have separated commerce from community, we have lost sight that in fact the society of consumers is in fact us – people, who need more than shopping to give them richer lives. Again, the epic and sudden collapse of the banking system demonstrates how removed commerce has become from community and that ultimately leads to hubris – and ultimate demise. Curiously its the taxpayer that has been asked to foot the bill.

The Mobile Society can promise I think a richer life as in the same way that Gutenberg's 42 Line Bible released information from the church and brought us the Reformation, the Mobile Society will bring flows of communication unprecedented – and it is these very flows of information and communication that are the engines of innovation and commerce.

David mentions a Scott Karp post Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail On The Web

He should have said Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail On Any Digital Platform

… when people go online they know what they want and how to do it… This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

says Jakob Nielsen

and so all the rest is spam

says Dave. All the rest is crap in my opinion.

Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers

This is a huge beef for me how modern marketers have been so slow, how agencies are so reactive, how digital agencies so don’t understand social networks (direct experience of that one) this is the failure of substance over of style – for me its dead simple – commercial messages must be

1). Life enabling
2). Life Simplifying
3). Navigational

ie. they must become useful ? they must have a higher yield in terms of perceived currency. This can be the only way forward. But this is also a new form of inventory and, requires new metrics.

Brands are not in control and 25% of all media is made by us or will be by 2012. Which means that how brands are built, how marketing is done does not come from the straight line thinking of our analogue world.

This is what Glen Urban calls Trust based Marketing strategies and Trust is the most precious commodity any brand or business can possess when Push becomes Pull