Here’s a look at the pile of books at my bedside as 2008 winds down. Seems random now, but each was part of my marketing and business education this past year. Time to get some fiction into the mix. You’ll note Pride and Prejudice as the outlier. I read it out loud to my wife, much to her delight.
Here’s the list – top to bottom of stack:
The Myth of Innovation
Tribes
The Black Swan
Blue Ocean Strategy
Panic
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
A Thousand Hills
Pride and Prejudice
Harpo Speaks
Blink
Outliers
Warren Buffett Bio
Getting Things Done
Made to Stick
Groudswell
The Way We’ll Be
A Whole New Mind
Meatball Sundae
I’ll look up the authors later, or link them up. For now, I’m off to animate with my 11 year old. We’re making a claymation with his new Christmas modeling clay. Will post when we have it finished.
I just finished the book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologiesby Li and Bernoff. They dissect the social-media landscape for executives and corporate types and invent all sorts of metrics by which to drive home the point about social media…that it is changing everything.
Or is it?
Now, on their blog, Li and Bernoff publish this chart:
The good old newspaper still out ranks most social media outlets, including the information your own best friends put on their online profiles. And look at company blogs!
We are in a weird place in terms of our online “trustyness”. Other than emails and critics, we trust algorythms most. Robots are more trusted than your blog posts.
Gravity also helps the Trust-O-Meter. Tangible dead trees still carry a legacy of trust from two centuries of print information products. Oddly enough, the NYTimes.com site ranks sigificantly lower than it’s print-based counter part. Same information, different delivery. Yet the New York Times (the paper) is losing money. Weird?
If Forrester (the pollster) would have included “A Telephone Call from Someone You Know” on their list, I’d wager that would out-do email as the most trusted source of information. Or what if they added, “A One Hour Lunch Conversation with Someone You Know”?
Not fair to lump a lunch into the items on the above list? I think it is very relevant. I believe the reason email out-does all other forms of communication is because it is more likely to be an additional way stay connected with people you also connect with during lunch and telephone conversations. The trust is not inherent in the medium. That source (email) leverages previously developed offline trust.
But why trust me? I’m only good for about 18% “trustiness”, according to this survey. Or maybe, if you include lunches with me and the occasional phone call, I’d be up around 51% trusty. You’ve got to give me more than the robot!
We are about to see the various and sundry predictions about 2009 come our way in a few weeks. Some brave souls will tread out from 2009 and prognosticate about the coming decade. Then there are those not satisfied with tens of years…they will shoot for the whole 21st century. Just this week, I’ve seen at least half a dozen speech titles, mission statements, and slogans which have used the term 21st Century. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Burns’ Media Lab, Yale’s 21C educational program, and Sir Ken Robinson come to mind without having to do too much remembering. Heck, someone’s even written a brief History(!) of the 21st Century already.
I understand what they are going for, i.e. foreword thinking, big visioning, global proclamations, rewiring education for the future, etc. I don’t begrudge the aspirational futurity of those using it. It’s just that, well, “21st Century” is kind of losing it’s vibe as an impactful phrase. I’m sure the “toothpaste” of the 21st century is right around the corner.
In 1998, just nano-parsecs from the actual turn of the 21 century, I worked for Houghton Mifflin as a Creative Director in technology. Their “21st century” goal was to to be the web portal for educators, elementary school educators in particular. We went to the 2000 FECC conference in Florida, where educators meet new technology. A few booths downschool districts at FECC had their own websites, programmed by middleschoolers. I had a kind of out-of-body experience. I saw the future of our company’s technology strategy, THE 21st century initiative, being executed by 14 year olds.
I quit within one month. Ever since, I’ve been on my own, using technology to help major and minor companies, helping them adapt, respond, and retrofit to changes in communication technology. I have no idea what next year holds. Sometimes I’m flummoxed by next week’s innovation. I can guess what’s coming next, but chances are, I’ll be wrong. So to speak of the 21st Century is a bit dodgy.
On the side of those looking to predict, influence, or otherwise proclaim their place in the 21st Century, look at this list of predictions from the Ladies Home Journal 1900. I was gobsmacked the prescient ones. The second to the last has just now happened. Turns out sometimes our “century” predictions come close. But I’m still nervous about next week.
Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today.
Liquid-air refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.
Huge forts on wheels will dash across open spaces at the speed of express trains of today. They will make what is now known as cavalry charges.
Hot or cold air will be turned on from spigots to regulate the temperature of a house as we now turn on hot or cold water from spigots to regulate the temperature of a bath.
Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electronically with screens at the opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.
Electric currents applied to the soil will make valuable plants grow larger and faster, and will kill troublesome weeds. Rays of colored light will hasten the growth of many plants.
Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.
There will be no street cars in our large cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above the ground…These underground or overhead streets will teem with capacious automobile passenger coaches and freight wagons with cushioned wheels….Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.
Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance.
Not only will it be possible for a physician to see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it. This work will be done with rays of invisible light.
Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool [England} in two days.
There will be Air-Ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic.
Grand Opera will be telephoned to private homes, and will sound as harmonious as though enjoyed from a theater box.
Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
This interesting chart from one of our favorite sites, tubemogul.com, shows how we tend to hang in there when watching internet video. Tubemogul measured 23 million streams on six top online video sites over two weeks.
To see something through to the end, at least online, most of us peel our peepers for only about one minute. Remember, though, this doesn’t hold for everybody. If your viewers hang in there for a full five minutes, they may be your loyal followers. These are the ones you pay attention to most, because they honor you with the most priceless resource a viewer can give you, attention.
Though some of you think this chart is a tragic reflection of a global attention-span deficit, know that I don’t choose to share your dismay. Remember last year, Wagner’s opera THE RING sold out in every venue which performs the 17 hour production. Much of the audience was under 30. So attention was paid by viewers for eons and eras in Youtube time, by the same crowd who’d only give you a minute online.
If you make something for your online channel, this chart sings volumes.
Alert reader Andy just sent this fascinating marketing film made for JCPenny’s Jewelry Store. Retail is getting into the micro-channel new media biz. I’ve never been to the JCPenny Jewelry Store, nor would it be my first impulse if I had the need to buy a stone for my love.
But hats off to them for making a quality bit for the Youtube generation… See it here:
Each holiday season we, as a family, open up our fault and show animations we’ve created over the years. It’s already December, so here is our first installment for the season. There will be others…
This is for smart kids who need to know how Santa does what he does.
We are about to see the various and sundry predictions about 2009 come our way in a few weeks. Some brave souls will tread out from 2009 and prognosticate about the coming decade. Then there are those not satisfied with tens of years…they will shoot for the whole 21st century. Just this week, I’ve seen at least half a dozen speech titles, mission statements, and slogans which have used the term 21st Century. 
