Gen C - Don’t live for work

Everyone likes to call them Gen Y - Why? as Y stands for nothing much - whereas GenC stands for the Community Generation. Anyway nitpicking over…

Teenagers and young adults - the so-called Generation Y - have watched with horror as their parents worked punishing hours in their scramble for money and status. Now, as this group go in search of jobs, they have different priorities. They care less about salaries, and more about flexible working, time to travel and a better work-life balance. And employers are having to meet their demands.

Is the opening para in They don’t live for work … they work to live

The previous generation saw work as a primary part of life,’ said Madalyn Brooks, HR director at Procter and Gamble. ‘When they left education, work was a dominant part of what they did and they were not looking for time out. Now we are seeing the growth of a different profile of candidate. They have grown up in relatively affluent families. They want to be sure that they can strike a balance between work and their personal life, and so the opportunity to take time off, to travel, to work for a company with a strong social responsibility record, these are all concerns that we increasingly hear when recruiting talent.’

A study in 2004 carried out by Common Purpose , an organisation that offers training for leaders and managers, found that those who were not getting satisfaction at work were hitting a ‘quarter-life crisis’. Searching for Something concluded that employers had to accommodate young workers’ wider ambitions or risk losing them by the age of 30.

‘We see young people that are searching for some sort of meaning in life and if you can’t align their values with the organisation they might leave,’ said Julia Middleton, the group’s chief executive. ‘I think life is cyclical - and there is a return to people searching for meaning and searching for values.’

Middleton agreed that economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y

The economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y is a key point here. A tale well told by Ronald Inglehart and Soshana Zuboff ( Why companies are from Mars and Customers are from Venus)

The values surveys of Ronald Inglehart indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today?s individual rejects organisational mediation seeking instead to have a direct impact upon matters that touch his or her life.

They shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

Young adults place a premium on the efficacy of small groups of people working together to effect change in tangible ways. And they showed strong preference for leadership ?that emphasises the collective participation of many individuals over the strong leadership of the few.?

This rejection of mediated influence also helps explain the growing interest in the concept of ?direct democracy? as a natural evolution of representative democracy.

The new individuals seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity based community because they are comfortable using their own experience as a basis for making judgements.

Worth checking out is the World Values Survey

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Gen C - Don’t live for work

Everyone likes to call them Gen Y - Why? as Y stands for nothing much - whereas GenC stands for the Community Generation. Anyway nitpicking over…

Teenagers and young adults - the so-called Generation Y - have watched with horror as their parents worked punishing hours in their scramble for money and status. Now, as this group go in search of jobs, they have different priorities. They care less about salaries, and more about flexible working, time to travel and a better work-life balance. And employers are having to meet their demands.

Is the opening para in They don’t live for work … they work to live

The previous generation saw work as a primary part of life,’ said Madalyn Brooks, HR director at Procter and Gamble. ‘When they left education, work was a dominant part of what they did and they were not looking for time out. Now we are seeing the growth of a different profile of candidate. They have grown up in relatively affluent families. They want to be sure that they can strike a balance between work and their personal life, and so the opportunity to take time off, to travel, to work for a company with a strong social responsibility record, these are all concerns that we increasingly hear when recruiting talent.’

A study in 2004 carried out by Common Purpose , an organisation that offers training for leaders and managers, found that those who were not getting satisfaction at work were hitting a ‘quarter-life crisis’. Searching for Something concluded that employers had to accommodate young workers’ wider ambitions or risk losing them by the age of 30.

‘We see young people that are searching for some sort of meaning in life and if you can’t align their values with the organisation they might leave,’ said Julia Middleton, the group’s chief executive. ‘I think life is cyclical - and there is a return to people searching for meaning and searching for values.’

Middleton agreed that economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y

The economic prosperity had fuelled the values of Generation Y is a key point here. A tale well told by Ronald Inglehart and Soshana Zuboff ( Why companies are from Mars and Customers are from Venus)

The values surveys of Ronald Inglehart indicate that the new postmaterialists demand true voice. Theirs is a psychological reformation that suggests some interesting parallels to the religious reformation of the sixteenth century. Today?s individual rejects organisational mediation seeking instead to have a direct impact upon matters that touch his or her life.

They shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

Young adults place a premium on the efficacy of small groups of people working together to effect change in tangible ways. And they showed strong preference for leadership ?that emphasises the collective participation of many individuals over the strong leadership of the few.?

This rejection of mediated influence also helps explain the growing interest in the concept of ?direct democracy? as a natural evolution of representative democracy.

The new individuals seek true voice; direct participation, unmediated influence and identity based community because they are comfortable using their own experience as a basis for making judgements.

Worth checking out is the World Values Survey

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The shock of the old

The leader in the Observer this weekend on the Hay-on-Wye book festival raised some pertinent points of interest for me.

Old technology has a noble history of refusing to die. For decades, vinyl has defied the march of the compact disc. Radio was not killed by television. Nearly every desk in every office in the land is piled with barricades of A4, resisting the proselytisers of paperlessness.

And

The world of publishing is far from untouched by technology. Computers have changed the way writers organise their words - and their thoughts. The internet changed the way books are traded. Blogs have changed the way they are reviewed. As a panoramic account in today’s Observer Review illustrates, the books industry has been transformed beyond recognition in the last 10 years. Far more are published. Far greater sums of money change hands.

And finally

New technology has also increased the sheer volume of work published. But a good story, like a good song, has a way of standing out from the crowd. The recipe for success, for creating a literary sensation, is still talent, fired by inspiration, delivered with conviction. A great book remains stubbornly, enigmatically, inimitably analogue.

I find myself agreeing with this sentiment - although I blog and lecture on digital communities and the theories on engagement - those that know me well - will often find me taking out of my bag laptop, iPod and a book I happen to be reading. With a pen inside which I use to underscore those bits I find interesting, useful, provoking.

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The economics of abundance and human behaviour

What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

Said the economist Herbert Simon who developed a theory called Attention Economics

Simon noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.

This came to mind whilst reading a story in the Guardian entitled Why we buy what we buy

Dan Ariely [is - sic] one of an increasingly influential group of behavioural economists, who analyse how people behave everywhere from supermarkets to stock markets - and they have found a chasm between what traditional economists and regulators presume we do, and what really happens. One of the most exciting areas of research, behavioural economics could overturn many of the assumptions and assertions that shape modern policy-making.

For the past century, economists have viewed the economy as an equilibrium system made up of perfectly rational agents with access to full information, who produce and consume goods and services in economies with optimally efficient markets and institutions

Eric Beinhocker in his book the Origin of Wealth adds to this new area of economics

Beinhocker argues that neoclassical economics is fundamentally flawed, has a poor record of empirical validation, and that the strong assumptions the theory requires serve to make economics of less relevance to real world issues than the field otherwise might be. Beinhocker claims that neoclassical theory is in the process of being supplanted by what he calls complexity economics - the view that the economy is a complex adaptive system made up of realistically rational agents who dynamically interact with each other in an evolutionary system . Complexity economics is in turn built on foundations of a long-standing tradition of heterodox economics that includes areas such as behavioral economics, institutional economics, Austrian economics, and evolutionary economics.

Back to the Guardian story

“Economists know all about choosing jam,” he says, ambling down an aisle with 73 varieties. He describes an experiment where academics set up a tasting booth in a store in California. On some days they put out six kinds of jam, on others 24. When the booth had 24 types, it was mobbed - “there was more colour, more excitement”. But it was the sales that were truly remarkable: with six jams on show, 30% of customers bought a jar; when 24 were out, only 3% did. “Jams are hardly complex things, but people saw 24 stacked together and thought: ‘I have no idea how to deal with this.’”

If that is how choosing between strawberry or plum makes us feel, imagine the toll looking at mortgage options takes on the nerves. What Ariely’s jam study suggests is that, contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.

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Punctuated Equilibrium for the Johnston Press

Its sad when you see entire industries under threat - its sad when those industries also have only themselves to blame. Sometimes however they just cant see it coming - Blindsided As Stephen Jay Gould wrote

Structural or mental inferiority did not drive the dinosaurs to extinction. They were doing well, and showing no sign of ceding domination, right until the extraterrestrial debacle unleashed a set of sudden consequences (as yet to be adequately specified, although the ‘nuclear winter’ scenario of a cold dark world has beem proposed for the same reasons). Some mammals weathered the storm; no dinosaurs did.

I refer to the regional press and the Johnston Press

Johnston Press, the regional newspaper group whose titles include The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, resorted to a ?212.3m emergency fund raising yesterday that will see the group’s founding family lose its place as the largest shareholder for the first time.

and

Under pressure from digital competitors and the slowing economy, the group’s ?692m debt was proving unsustainable against underlying earnings projections for the year of just ?185m

The problem in my humble view is that the Johnston Press failed to innovate at the time it really needed to do so in preparation for the challenges it faces today. Now that may be inevitable - but if you look at the Guardian it has grasped the digital challenge and really investigated the opportunities of social media, digital technology and global audiences.

Perhaps I am wrong. But as we all know - digital is not analogue - display advertising is furniture of the analogue era - we have the opportunity to recreate something very different more valuable and different as a currency to the end user : more valuable information.

Now I also know that we have a very backwards view of how to count media, which is currently undergoing review

Life is local say the Johnston Press and my consulting company SMLXL has been thinking about this space for some time yet that means taking that sentiment seriously. But JP is not taking this seriously.

Yesterday I mused on some of the discussions we had about TV at the conference in Monaco these were :

What is the new business model for TV advertising?

1). Brands have to be everywhere
2). Cross platform assets
3). Brands need to become part of the daily fabric of people?s lives
4). All content should be inspired by brands wishing to meaningfully engage with their audience

Frankly however I could see this working for local news platforms.

Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News excoriates the owners of newspapers (describing them as Grocers)because their interest is not about being local, its not about community, its not about quality journalism is about one thing and one thing only - MONEY - PROFIT AND SHAREHOLDER RETURN.

And thats all well and good until the quality of the product is so inferior it devalues itself.

This is life in a news factory says Davies whilst writing about one journalists experience of working for a local news paper.

These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism

This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it

In a major piece of research with Cardiff University on journalism and commerce

Professor Franklin found that hundreds of them (local papers) were simply killed off, their town-centre offices often sold for profit. In the ten years after Wapping, according to the Newspaper Society, 403 local titles were closed - 24% of the 1,687 which had been supplying news to their areas and to the nationals. Those tha survived saw their staffing cut to the bone with just over half of the 8,000 journalists working in the provinces losing their jobs between 1986 and 2000; some local newsrooms were replaced by regional hubs, cut off from their communities ; and senior reporters were replaced with low-paid trainees. With rare exceptions, these papers were reduced to mere churnalism of the kind described in the young reporters diary

And

In 2004 Johnston press which had been among the most destructive of the new owners, declared a profit of ?177 million, a profit margin of 35%

In the story about Johnston Press what I think is so sad is an inability to be prepared to move from the world of Gutenberg to the world of Google.

What I do know is that JP is selling digital advertising in the same way one sells analogue dispaly advertising. To do so is to be doomed. Today I went and had a look at the advertising inventory of a vertical community site. These are smart people having worked out an entirely different inventory = value for advertisers.

Are the Digital Vikings coming?
ITV Local could in fact cannibalise the entire regional display advertising market. The Future of news is: Grassroots, Mobile, Immediate, Visual, Participatory, Trusted. On top of that it creates an entirely new inventory and services for advertisers, and also gives new value to the JP’s readers. Delivered via the internet and mobile.

ITV local has the potential - it could create a richer user experience it - could be more participatory (People embrace what they create) and as a consequence they could truly embrace the concept of “life is local.”

We break down the division between community and commerce in a way that is relevant to both parties. This builds commerce and this builds community. It is not rocket science, but it is about looking at the world in a different way.

Markets form around 3 things
1). Commerce
2). Knowledge & information exchange
3). Entertainment

This is the glue of community and social cohesion and ITV local could really leverage this opportunity.

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The future of TV - Monaco

I have meet some interesting people in Monaco.

Thoughts : panel-based audience measurement - and counting for the digital age is madness…

Steam age technology in the digital age

People are still hung up on the furniture (formats) of commercial messaging…

We need new metrics!!!!!!!!!

No-one makes money from broadcast to mobile content.

The future is :

Cross-platform assets and multiple revenue streams - something SMLXL said in 2003

Transform operations to embrace the plethora of new digital content and distribution opportunities.

Delivering integrated, cross-platform advertising programmes tied to their advertising assets

Metrics & Kpi?s
1). Social Marketing Intelligence
2). Recount the audience - Cost Per Relevant Audience
3). Measure degree of engagement
4). Accurate reporting on campaign effectiveness
5). Targeted communications that are Timely - Relevant and Contextual
6). Viral effects of networked campaigns
7). Measure “currency” within target groups
8). Advertising is the content and the content is the advertising

What is the new business model for TV advertising?

1). Brands have to be everywhere
2). Cross platform assets
3). Brands need to become part of the daily fabric of people?s lives
4). All content should be inspired by brands wishing to meaningfully engage with their audience

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The advertising arms race in social networks

The Stampede For Social Network Dollars Intensifies writes Diane Mermigas

The race to monetize and leverage the power of social networks is turning into a stampede, as evidenced by Microsoft?s recently renewed efforts to acquire Facebook in the wake of its failed bid for Yahoo.Many of the biggest and most intriguing niche social networks are in play as a result of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger battle, which is fundamentally about potentially lucrative but unrealized advertising and e-commerce gains. Both companies have limited exposure to social networking?the most prominent being Microsoft?s 1.6% stake in Facebook, for which it paid $240 million.

And

The mighty Google has brought a new sense of urgency to the social-network mining game by leveraging the iGoogle home page into a convenient aggregation of user-selected links to social sites and friends? personal pages.

Think about this 25% of all media will be created by us in 2012. So will we have consumer created advertising too?

Consumer-created advertising will have all the appeal of anything crafted by the agencies, and will be ?co-opted? by the brands themselves.

Mermigas has a point of view on this

The lessons learned about how to make online social networks more constructive and profitable will have far-reaching ramifications for all digital media?s community-driven business?from the players of ?Grand Auto Theft IV? to the kids and families of Walt Disney to the Dow Jones business constituency. Eventually, the economics of most Web sites will be secured by social networking and community elements. If the business minds don?t crack the monetization codes, chances are that tech-empowered consumers will.

Ning, a do-it-yourself social network company already valued at $500 million, has aided the development of more than 100,000 social network sites. That?s the beauty of the digital interactive age: The answers lie within

So what does that mean for traditional media? and this debate hardly touches mobile yet and we did ask whether traditional TV advertising was moving the deck chairs on the Titanic and we did post about the data flow wars because when we leave digital footprints in the digital age, we can recount the audience, we can develop universal profiles and certain companies will transform advertising effectiveness by harnessing a refining digital shadows and that data flows that will reach 988 billion gb’s by 2010 from 161 gb’s in 2006. Social networks play a key role in this development and this is a battle between the experts and the amateurs?

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Hollywood goes gaming

‘Gaming is now a bigger industry than cinema’ said Bobbie Johnson

And now we find one of Hollywoods finest Steven Speilberg creating a game for the Wii

On May 6 Steven Spielberg will release his first collaboration with game publisher Electronic Arts a clever, innovative Wii game called Boom Blox.

Boom Blox does what so many Wii titles wish they could, by splitting the difference between casual players and lifelong gamers. You can pass the Wiimote to your grandma or a 5-year-old and they’ll have a ball with its clever mix of brainy puzzles and satisfying explosions. But hard-core players like me will find a surprising amount of depth to the gameplay and a satisfying, addictive challenge

.

we asked is Gaming the New Marketing?

Perhaps Guitar Hero fits into this camp too? I love the line unleash your inner Rock Legend.

On the Wiki page

The Guitar Hero series has made a significant cultural impact, becoming a “cultural phenomenon.” The series’ titles became very popular party games, which led to their being played in a variety of locales. Several bars in the United States are offering “Guitar Hero nights” as an alternative to karaoke; one New York City bar experienced triple the business on such nights

And then we have the intense interest around Grand Theft Auto 4

During Microsoft’s 2006 E3 press conference on 9 May 2006, it was announced that Rockstar Games will offer exclusive episodic content via Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 version of the game. Peter Moore, the then head of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business division announced that Rockstar Games is working on two GTA IV downloadable packs exclusively for the Xbox 360, which will be released after the full game.

Henry Jenkins on Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?

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Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community

Says Stephen A Marglin

Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state.

Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback–say the barn burned down–neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.

Writes the Harvard University Press

Interesting. A review of the book says that Marglin

sees in the behavioural approach a missed opportunity for a “trenchant critique” of the “assumptions about people that form the core of economics”.

Marglin argues that to think about people as always rationally calculating their self-interest is at odds with the way non-economists think about people. Non-economists know that people can sometimes be virtuously motivated to do things that benefit others. But mainstream economics applies what Hume, nearly 300 years ago, called the “knaves principle”, according to which “every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end in all his actions than private interest”. And you don’t have to agree with Marglin that the way of life of the Amish people of Pennsylvania is the best counter-example to that to think there’s something drastically wrong with it.

Eric Beinhocker also wrote an interesting book called the Origin of Wealth According to Beinhocker, economics is in the midst of a revolution ? its biggest in over a century ? and recent work by economists and other scientists provides us with a radically new perspective on the workings of the economy. ?Complexity Economics,? as Beinhocker calls the new paradigm, views the economy as a highly dynamic, constantly evolving system, more akin to the brain, the Internet, or an ecosystem than to the static, equilibrium picture presented by traditional theory.

And this is of importance when we consider we are in a world where communities dominate brands, where we are busy building the network society - I suggest we are having a big collective discussion about society, culture and economics.

Marglin asks

what is lost in … economic development … when markets become a sphere unto themselves

What we lose is community. Why? In large part, Marglin says, because economists and calculators have told us that greed is good. says the Times Higher Education Review

He realises, as many of his allies on the Left do not, that just now, in 2008, the ability of ordinary people (well, Chinese and Indian people, but there are quite a lot of those) to get the food and housing and education they want is increasing faster than at any time in world history. A few more decades like this and we all, from Mumbai to Manchester, will have gas barbecues and degrees in Eng Lit and life expectancies into the eighties.

But in the already rich countries, Marglin asserts, “we’ve had enough”

And I agree we have reached a crisis in consumerism - and our western industrialised world is exhausted in its mission.

Marglin’s belief that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle fits uneasily with his criticism of lack of community. When will we cease from strife? Marglin’s philosophical criticism of economists is that since Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and especially since Paul Samuelson (born in 1915) they have worshipped “algorithmic knowledge” such as the man Max U who populates economics. Strife rules.

But “experiential knowledge”, called “tacit knowledge” by Michael Polanyi - michael polanyi and tacit knowledge Marglin argues, bulks more in our lives.

And that’s true. It takes a community to raise a child to be more than a three-year-old, and it takes stories and metaphors told in communities to make a social science.

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus in the World of Participatory Culture

Clay Shirky writes a very philosophical piece about culture/media and participation

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Professor Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT articulates a world in which young people have a very different relationship with media consumption. This is the migration from consumption as an individual practice to consumption as a networked practice - which I might add is voluntary. Convergence Jenkins argues is also a culture phenomenon rather than a technological one

Culture Jenkins argues is today Participatory. We create, we share, we collaborate, we consume, we discuss. Henry Jenkins on Obama and the “We” Generation

When people consume and produce media together, when they pool their insights and information, mobilise to promote common interests, and function as grassroots intermediaries ? rather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media or social commerce that becomes part of our lives as members of communities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net.

This is an engaged, motivated and self-selected audience. If we accept Jenkins world view, this has profound implications on how we reach out and attract our customers, talk to our suppliers and how we create value. It was Jonathan Schwartz that said our 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done. This is participatory culture at the coalface. Or we could reference wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Pop Idol, the Matrix, citizen journalism or social commerce platforms like ebay, MyNuMo or Spreadshirt.

Shirky also observes

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

Shirky says we have been on a bit of a bender recently and are just waking up to the reality that we posses a cognitive surplus - Wikipedia represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

Back to Shirky’s 4 year old

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for

An ancient Chinese proverb says: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.? I like to say “People embrace what they create.”

If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Maybe the answer looks like this? or this or indeed this

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