FutureVisions - Servant of Chaos

The Future of Markets

Branding, Facts & Figures, FutureVisions, Measurement

A couple of times each year, about 4000 marketers at Fortune 1000 and Forbes Top 200 companies are surveyed about the future. This is the sixth in the series from CMOsurvey.org.

What’s encouraging to see is improvements in key business areas, including:

Overall optimism about the economy (while focused on the US economy, there are obvious flow-on effects for Australia and the rest of the world)
Customer interactions, including higher purchase volumes and better customer retention, are expected to improve
Broad financial and marketing KPIs are on the rise – indicating business confidence doesn’t just sit with marketing and brand
Marketers themselves will be in-demand with CMOs expecting to grow their teams by up to 50%

The report is very broad – which is great – but it means you will need to spend some time reading through and applying the data to your business. Think through your own strategic planning for 2011. Where are the correlations? Where are the differences? Why do they occur? Check, for example, slide 14 which investigates the top three reasons for growth strategy and see how closely they correspond to your own. Is there something you are missing? Is there something you can add to the execution of your marketing program this year? Can social media amplify this?

Most importantly, think about how your markets – your customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders – are moving. What are their futures. Use this information to make sure that those futures all intersect!

The cmo survey highlights and insights, feb 2011

View more presentations from christinemoorman.

The Words of a Visionary: Marshall McLuhan Speaks

FutureVisions, Media

Much of what we are living – in terms of digital technologies, connected social networks, information saturation and knowledge search was imagined by theorist Marshall McLuhan. His books like Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and The Medium is the Massage are the philosophic underpinnings of many media studies courses – and are must-reads for communications professionals the world over.

This year is the centenary of his birth and in his honour, the site Marshall McLuhan Speaks has been setup to share a collection of clips. It’s a great way to watch, hear and learn about McLuhan’s ideas as spoken during lectures, interviews and speeches. While it’s unclear who is behind this great media resources, it’s believed that McLuhan’s daughter, Stephanie, is involved.

The Consumer Expectations of the Business User

Flaneurs, FutureVisions, Innovation, Social Media, Web/Tech

There is a quiet revolution taking place in the enterprise. It’s not something you are going to notice at first. It doesn’t manifest in the kind of disruption that raises the eyebrows of management. It is quiet. Oh so quiet.

This revolution lives in the hearts and minds of the people who we loosely call the “business user”. And the business user is people like you and me. It’s the people who use business systems as part of their daily work. It may be that we use these systems for customer relationship management, timesheets or expenses or it may be that we use them for the heavy duty number crunching of forecasting, accounting, payroll or logistics. Many of us have been using these systems for years.

But at the end of the day, when we log out of these systems, abandon our cubes and head home, we open the door to a whole other world of digital experience.

Grabbing a beer with colleagues at a local bar we use our smartphones to check in on Foursquare. We text friends to let them know where we are, or put out a message on Twitter with the #tweetup hashtag. The more sophisticated will link FourSquare with Twitter and also with Facebook (or Facebook places) to reach different groups of friends with the same message.

Over the next hour there will be tweets, twitpics and Foursquare badges claimed. Photos snapped on our mobile devices will be published to our Posterous blogs or Tumblr sites, pushed to Flickr and tagged on Facebook. We’ll check for restaurant recommendations with our favourite foodies on Twitter, ask @garyvee for a recommendation on a nice bottle of red.

At home over the weekend, we will tag and categorise our pictures, linking people with the places and events of the last week. We will add commentary to our own photos and those of our friends. We will write reviews of restaurants, add tips to locations and “experiences” that we enjoyed and maybe even blog about it all. We are actively engaging, controlling and managing our digital experiences.

But the thing is – we CAN do this. Mobile devices – smartphones, iPads etc all give us access to enterprise grade computing systems framed in a way that links activity, purpose and lifestyle. The fast, powerful, platforms that manage the publishing, distribution and contextualisation of our content vastly outstrip the performance many of us experience in the office. We are increasingly living an on-demand, always-on, connected existence.

What does this look like from the outside? To be honest, it looks like a bunch of people, ignoring each other, sending email on their BlackBerrys or iPhones. But psychologically, you are witnessing a moment of flow. Of connectedness. Or what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi would call “flow” – a state of completely focused motivation. This, of course, is what every employer wants to see in their employees, right?

The problem comes when we take our consumer expectations into the office. Some of our business systems simply do not respond in the way that more “consumer” oriented systems have conditioned us to expect. They take us out of the state of flow. Sometimes this is to do with business rules but often it is simply down to responsiveness. If Facebook can give us an uninterrupted digital experience – keeping us engaged and in the moment – then why can’t our business systems?

As Jakob Nielsen explains, there are three important limits when it comes to response times:

The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same for thirty years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.

1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.

10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user's attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

So, when you are thinking about the business systems you use – or that you want others to use – make sure you are delivering to their expectations. After all, you want business users to achieve their objectives. You want to support them in their work. And this means removing those barriers to flow.

Venture Citizenship and the Future of Money

FutureVisions, Innovation

What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange?

This interesting piece from Vanessa Miemis draws upon the thinking and ideas of a global community – and scratches the surface on how social or people-powered innovation is impacting currency.

Basing credit on an individual’s potential rather than on their current capacity to repay the debt seems to be the starting point (or one of many). This would see banks and lending institutions acting more in the role of personal venture capitalists. But I wonder, how would this change if it was backed by a government? What would our economy look like if the government invested in innovation by investing in individuals? Would this venture-capital-backed citizenship change our role in society?

Right now, in Australia, individuals at least partly invest in their own future/earning capacity through HECS (higher education contribution scheme). But university is often just provides a basis or platform for individual innovation. It’s those crucial two or three years after university where innovators struggle with bringing their ideas to market.

Perhaps the rise of crowdsourced funding models such as Kickstarter or Fundbreak (closer to home) is being driven by this social demand. But what happens when this demand becomes contagious? How does it scale? Perhaps then we really will need to understand the future of money.

The Future of Money from KS12 on Vimeo.

Featuring (in order of appearance):
Edward Harran, Attention Philanthropist edwardharran.posterous.com
Caroline Woolard, Our Goods ourgoods.org
Alan Rosenblith, Director, The Money Fix themoneyfix.org
Hans Schoenburg, Founder, GiftFlow giftflow.org
Ashni Mohnot, Founder, Enzi enzi.org/index.html
Linus Olsson, Founder, Flattr flattr.com
Jerry Michalski, Founder, Relationship Economy Expedition therexpedition.com
Georg Zoche, Founder, Transnational Republic transnationalrepublic.org
Fernanda Ibarra, Advocate, Metacurrency Project metacurrency.org
Jessica Harris, One Blue Dot Share Networks onebluedot.org
Michel Bauwens, Founder, P2P Foundation p2pfoundation.net
Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Program or be Programmed rushkoff.com

OMO Knows Where You Live – in Brazil

Branding, FutureVisions, Web/Tech

We have been talking about the “smart home” for over a decade – where all your home appliances become devices, transmitting and connecting to each other to create a kind of home intelligence. For example, refrigerators could determine when your supplies are low and automatically place online orders for food and drink.

But what if the products that you buy were “connected” in this way? What if the manufacturers could track you back to your home, transmitting their locations via a hidden GPS?

This is being trialled for an OMO promotion in Brazil. According to Shun Ma, this OMO detergent promotion includes a GPS in a select number of boxes of washing powder. There are 35 teams across the country ready to swoop on your home, tracking down your “beeping box” of washing powder to offer you a prize. But there’s a catch. There will be cameras, photos and reportage. Your location will appear on the Experimento Algo Novo website – so like never before the phrase “we know where you live” could be both a promise and a threat.

And as location based services become more prevalent – and as platforms like Facebook bring geo-location data into your social graph – we will see more debate around the what it means to be "private".

While knowing "where your customers are" appears, on the surface, to be a kind of demographic nirvana, most businesses already have a great deal of customer data that is going unused. For many of us, just building a great product or creating a memorable experience/interaction is difficult enough – I wonder whether this is another layer that pushes an authentic experience further into mediation. In an age of transparency, the enforced intimacy of personal location may well be a step too far – or it could create a whole new mode of connection.

Early experiments with technologies like this always raise questions. It’s a risk – and it can backfire, or prove a huge success. But the last thing anyone wants is to see an OMO moment turn into an OMG moment.

#electionWIRE Hits Canberra on Polling Day

FutureVisions, Politics

Today Australians cast their vote in the federal election. Vibewire, an innovative non-profit youth organisation providing media, arts & entrepreneurial opportunities and events for young people have been covering the election via teams of young journalists spread across the country.

Here, Margaret Paul interviews ABC Political reporter Stephen Dziedzic to get the lowdown on what’s happening in the nation’s capital, Canberra. Later tonight, Margaret will also be filing reports from the Tally Room. And in an election that is expected to come down to the wire, it could well be the youth vote that makes all the difference.

Crowdsourcing the Election – Vibewire and YouTube Combine with electionWIRE to Show How it’s Done

Co-creation, Crowdsourcing, FutureVisions, Politics, Social Media, Strategy, Videos

The Australian Election for 2010 has, thus far, been a fairly lack lustre affair. The politicians have kept to tightly scripted, rehearsed announcements designed to appeal to minutely targeted swinging voters in marginal electorates. It’s policy without vision and politics without conviction. And it’s largely why non-issues such as the “real Julia Gillard” and the deposing of former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, have generated broad coverage.

Interestingly, given the success of the grass roots, social media activation of the David Cameron and Obama campaigns, the local strategists have largely ignored social media – and the web in almost all its incarnations. As Stephen Collins suggests, it’s not the social media election we were looking for.

But one of the more interesting efforts around the election is coming from an unexpected quarter. Vibewire, the innovative, non-profit youth organisation (disclaimer: I'm a board member) have teamed up with YouTube to cover, debate and shape the political conversation over the next four weeks. They have recruited and trained young, graduate reporters from across the country and are also crowd sourcing comment and commentary through a dedicated electionWIRE channel. Back at the “Vibewire Hub” an editorial team is managing, vetting and promoting the coverage as it comes to hand.

Anyone can get involved. You can submit a video or suggest a story. And judging by the quality of the coverage and perspective already coming through, it seems that Vibewire’s mandate to showcase the skills and expertise of young media professionals is more than delivering for reporters such as Megan Weymes and Elise Worthington, it’s providing insight and new perspectives on an otherwise dull election. Be sure to check it out!

Envisioning Your Future: Augmented Reality 2020

FutureVisions, Innovation, Optimism, Social Media

The idea of augmented reality is an interesting one. It is essentially looking at ways in which technology will be used to expose/overlay our digital connectedness moment to moment. Foursquare is a step in this direction. But how will this impact our lives in the future? What will our lives be like in 2020?

Tim Longhurst advises that to look forward 10 years you must look backwards 20 years and Mark Earls shows that it is BEHAVIOUR that drives thinking – not the other way around. So if we put these two together – we need to look at what behaviours were manifesting around technology in 1990 in order to imagine our lives in 2020.

For me, 1990 was an interesting year. I was just moving out of the safe confines of the university world and taking a job in publishing. It was all about digitalisation, automation and breaking down the silos that characterised the publishing production process. We had big, clunky PCs on our desks with disk drives. We had green screens, beige Commander phones and tweed lined cubicles. The control or ownership of technology was beginning to shift from those who dedicated their work life and knowledge to the mechanics of information to those who employed that knowledge as part of a business process – connecting the dots. This process it seems to me, continues.

Between 1986 when I first started working and 1990 the era of electronic banking had arrived, with my employers now electronically depositing my pay into my account. This meant I no longer needed to spend my Friday lunch hour queuing in the Westpac Bank on Martin Place to cash my meagre earnings. Of course, there was no online banking – in fact, there was hardly any “online” at all. That would not become part of my life for several more years – and when it did, it was all about 2400 baud modems and bulletin boards.

The clever team over at Frog Design have, however, done much of the heavy lifting for us. They ran workshops with Forbes magazine last year and have put together a series of visuals that bring to life a sense of what may be (you can see them above). They focused on key areas of our personal experiences – social, travel, commerce, healthcare and media. They talk of the “Bodynet” – to monitor our health and fitness, “Whuffie Meter” to measure our social worth/popularity and “Our Second Brain” to connect what we see with the vast sea of indexed knowledge available.

But given how far we have come since 1990, I wonder whether these go far enough. I wonder if 2020 is just too far beyond our horizon. For example, if i had known about the iPad in 2008 it would have changed the way I think about advertising, media and personal and business behaviour through to 2010. And that’s just a span of two years.

Having said that, visualising just what might be possible creates an interesting dialogue with the future – and this is one we need to have. Don’t forget to check out the Design Mind blog – there’s plenty more food for thought.