On the future of newspapers

Outside of books, I have not read from any physical source in years with the sole exception of my local newspaper. There are certainly many reasons for this, too many to go into here.

The Internet provides me with a wealth of content not available via print (unless I subscribe to hundreds of newspapers). More importantly to me, the Internet also provides a venue for anyone to publish through blogs, etc. Over time I have setup my online subscriptions to various content providers and bloggers so I get a richer experience by reading a diverse set of views on any topic of interest to me.

I admit that much of what is on the internet has little value to me (though perhaps to others), but will some work I have achieved close to what I wanted, though I am always fine tuning along the way.

Some will argue that the user experience can’t be replicated in an online source, or newspapers enable mobility or that online sources are inherently untrustworthy. Though I would agree that there is a simple pleasure that can be derived from reading a physical newspaper, I would disagree with the other points.

Online newspapers are certainly equal to, if not better than print with respect to mobility. The choices of platforms are expanding, functionality has increased and the cost is decreasing.

Ultimately mobile phones will become the most pervasive platform of choice. The primary value of a mobile phone is no longer for voice calls, but for text and internet. This will evolve quickly into the mobile device as an aggregator for rich content, content that is interactive and not available via print.

In developing countries you will find that most people will never have a traditional PC, but will have a mobile phone. In 3 years this will evolve into the primary delivery method of news for this market and something that will grow virally over the next 5 years driving print into extinction in developing markets.

The question of trust of content has always been an issue on the Internet. Trust is a relative concept when it comes to sources of information. Most people have the same method of developing trust in all aspects of life with time and experience being the most common metrics, with context being almost equally important.

It’s the same in trusting information sources.

Over time Reuters has earned a well deserved reputation on the quality of content and the ability to deliver fast, accurate and relevant information. One thing to note is that while stories from Reuters have an enviable level of trust, Reuters is not the prime source of the stories. Reuters journalists research their pieces from a variety of sources, sources where they have established the right level of trust.

This dynamic is rapidly changing, much of which can be attributed (directly or indirectly) to the Internet. The Internet has brought massive scale to the distribution to what can be loosely termed as content. But the most disruptive part of this scale is not in reaching the masses, but in fact is in the ability to economically deliver a more personalized experience in content consumption.

With economical distribution of niche content being feasible the challenge has become how to generate trusted content. One response to this challenge would be crowd sourcing via blogs for in-depth content and Twitter for headlines. The issue of trust comes in play yet again.

We are in the early stages of this phenomena and I would argue that the movement to a model that has crowd sourcing as a component is sustainable and will be the norm in the not so distance future. What that model will look like is uncertain, though I would say that it will dramatically evolve in the next 3 years and will not resemble the models that exist today.

One possible model that I developed in a past life about 10 years ago was the concept of a Knowledge Broker. The concept would be for content creators and content distributors/consumers to be connected in a pseudo community/exchange where content could be traded and/or bought with standardized agreements for redistribution, etc.

Over time, communities can enable an environment where trust can be built between parties and distributors/consumers can connect with subject matter experts to receive the level of granularity they require. Trust will not happen quickly, but remember the Reuters reputation didn’t happen overnight either.

Comments and questions are always welcome.

R4N Conceptual

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R4N Conceptual

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Strength of Vision or Strength of Leader

Recently I was asked about leadership and which was more important, the vision or the leader. The debate was centered on if success comes from having a strong leader that brings a team together to execute more effectively, or is a strong vision can inspire a team to in effect come together through self-motivation.

In reality both are useful in obtaining success, however most people are not strong leaders so I proposed a different approach. My response was as follows:

I have found that the strength of the message comes from listening. In my experience my vision has been greatly enhanced by listening to others and my role is to create a seamless vision that has pieces from the entire team.

This not only creates a better vision, but allows others to contribute their ideas and see results from their contributions.

Having that credibility with my team allows me to then provide (and receive) mentoring and coaching leading to a continuous cycle of improvement for all.

Of course being a good listener is certainly a key trait for great leadership. I would go further and say that listening and being able to orchestrate diverse recommendations from the team to a cohesive plan is among the top 3 traits of great leadership.

In my next blog I will discuss the importance of a leader to be willing to become a follower.

Comments and questions are always welcome.

Should managers apologize when they are wrong?

There is no question in my mind that managers need to apologize when wrong and look to learn from the experience.

Leaders need to exhibit a high degree of transparency in their actions and take accountablity for these actions. By not doing so, it erodes trust with the team and only serves as a demotivator, particularly if the leader holds the members of their team accountable.

On the other hand, a leader who is willing to take accountability provides a great example to their team and will inspire the team to be more accountable in their actions.

I've provided a link to a blog post I previously wrote on empathy in leaders which is related to this subject.


Comments and questions are always welcome.

Is Twitter a risk to business?

Twitter is no more of a risk to business than any other forms of communication, in theory.

Twitter has scale and is an enabler for information to become viral, with a certain level of anonymity. The anonymity aspect will (in some cases) change behavior, making people more likely to disclose proprietary information, information that someone would not necessarily disclose in a face to face discussion. Additionally, the risk of successful phishing is a higher on Twitter.

There is a very important point about the upside of Twitter. If managed properly, tools such as Twitter can benefit a company more than harm.

Yes there are official spokespeople, but we live in an age where we must accept the fact that people are more transparent with their lives and work. In reality, companies can mitigate risk of social media by embracing the fact that every person in the company should be trained to be an advocate for the company. Naturally this would be need to be adapted to specific roles, but if a company does not harness the potential benefit, the risk will only grow greater as social media evolves.

Comments and questions are always welcome.

Empathy in Leaders

Recently I was asked about kindness and the perception of weakness in leaders. I wasn't overly surpised to hear stories about leaders in the workplace who feared being labled a weak leader if the show more kindness and understanding to their employees.

I have to admit this is very prevalent in our society, at least in the United States, where at times the most agressive, take charge person moves up the ranks. We see this in politics as well. Here was my response.

To me empathy is the single most important trait of a leader. A leader needs to make others feel good about themselves, about their company and about the importance of their contributions to the good of the company.

The reality is that no one is immune to bad days or even a longer stretch of challenges at work and/or in our personal lives. A great leader will recognize this and respond appropriately to ensure that the people working for them feel a sense of strength and hope.

This is essentially providing strength to others through kindness.

A question came about around respecting other peoples privacy while still looking to support them in challenging times. I was asked about how I would respond to someone on my team who was clearly having issues but did not want to open up. My response was as follows.

It all begins before a team member has a bad day. From day one a leader needs to take every opportunity to show they are good listeners. It does not need to be related to challenges, but could be seeking opinions of their group as well.

When I have a team I let them know they can come to me, but more importantly I go to them, share my thoughts and listen to theirs. I regularly point out when decisions are made or plans are formulated, the amount of influence each of them have on those decisions and plans.

When projects go well I give all the credit to the team and I go to senior management and ask them to talk to my team individually to thank them for a good job.

When projects go poorly I take accountablity and shelter the team from negatvitiy from a customer or from senior management. Then I do a post-mortem to see how we can improve and discuss with the team. If I need to discuss something with an individual, I like to take them for a walk outside and talk about how we can improve things.

I find that this builds trust and when someone is struggling they will share this with me and we figure out how to balance things during that tough period. I find that people do not necessarily share the granular details all the time, but I let them know that is ok and we will still support them through a tough period.

So respecting privacy is inherently there. They can share as much or as little as they feel comfortable and I give them the trust that there is a temporary challenge they need to overcome and I am there if they need it.

Comments and questions are always welcome.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO GUAGE CUSTOMER SENTIMENT

Almost 9 years ago I was involved in a startup that was building a community of college age people in England. Our plan was to virally market this and do what we called a “land grab” of consumers with the thought that at some point we would figure out how to make money mining the data from blogs, chatrooms, etc. We never did get funding for the venture, but kept the idea in my intellectual property (IP) toolbox.

Fast forward to about 2 years ago when I got back into this area by joining the virtual world called Second Life (SL). I spend a good year observing and interacting in SL looking for ideas on how to extract useful knowledge out of a chaos of information. In SL I was introduced to many other social media forums and eventually stumbled on Twitter.

I’ve been on Twitter now for a while and again looking for ways to experiment with the platform. During that time several world events were covered by micro-bloggers on Twitter which got me thinking (yes again). A world event will trigger a mass pool of observers posting tweets, and an even larger pool of carriers, virally re-tweeting these observations.

About 3 weeks prior to the day retailers in the US call Black Friday, I decided that it might be interesting to see if I can trigger such an event by asking my 500 or so followers to encourage their followers to tweet their Black Friday observations about crowds, spending, discounts and retailers with hot deals. By doing so I could mine the data and predict in real-time how the day was going.

So I enlisted several people I follow, including fellow blogger Brandon Mendelson who helped spread the word. I began to receive accounts from micro-bloggers beginning mid-day on Thanksgiving. This shocked me, but these were from people who camp out every year to be among the first in line for deals. A side note was that some of these people have the equivalent of a tail-gate party going each year so the wait is just one big party.

By 1AM my army of micro-bloggers said their goodnights and set the alarm for early Friday morning. Most stores opened at 5AM; however I didn’t begin receiving much in the way of information until 6 or so. The in store special deals appeared to be good, though certain stores had little or no inventory for these special items. Standard “bait and switch” Black Friday tactics were underway.

When the early deals were done, many items were still discounted though the competitive advantage went to stores who managed their inventories well and had good anticipation of product demand. Stores like Wal-Mart and Target were among the highest frequency in tweets all day.

I continuously posted tweets during the day with a summary of observations as I mined the data coming through. Several trends became apparent throughout the day:

The advantage went to stores with well managed inventories

Most people left without buying if they didn’t find the items they were looking for at one store. This was counter to previous years where people looked for alternatives even at higher prices.

People were willing to compromise selection at a lower price, but not if it was higher.

It became apparent that Black Friday 2008 would have higher gross sales for some retailers, but at significantly reduced margins due to consumers looking to stretch the money and only buying sale items.

Many high end items sat on the shelves even discounted with consumers waiting for better deals on Cyber Monday for the more expensive items.

Consumers were well disciplined, avoiding the careful marketing strategies of retailers that encourage impulse buying.

Early results from the traditional news agencies indicated a significant slowdown of sales on Black Friday. They determined this by the traditional method of interviewing people exiting the stores. When the real sales numbers came out late last week, many retailers showed an uptick in sales over last year, though at the cost of margins.

I believe the traditional method of interviewing people to project sales is no longer useful. Tools like Twitter can provide us with a more interesting view in that each person who Tweets can be an active observer and when Tweets are mined and correlated a more accurate picture is the result. Our experiment seems to prove this, though methods of mining the data are lacking at this point to do large scale consumer sentiment research.

Now we all know that the economy is suffering and most of us are looking to get more for our dollars. However I do see that in 5 to 7 years we will look back and see 2008 as the year that caused a disruption in the value chain of the retail industry.

I believe that going forward we will see a significant change in the way consumers shop and the Black Friday will become a term of endearment rather than that one day blow out sale. Make no mistake that retailers will continue to forecast their yearly profits based on a similar concept but that too will evolve.

I also see that Cyber Monday will morph as well. On-Line retailers will begin to use more intelligence in their special offers as well. Repeat customers will likely be aggressively pursued by e-tailers with similar promotions to their in-store competition (i.e. Friends and Family, etc.).

For the rest of the year I believe we will see retailers looking to clear out inventories by keeping discounts through the season and likely to offer a post-New Year’s sale.

Happy Holidays to all and good luck in getting those bargains!